Family Murders: A Thriller by Henry Carver Read Free Book Online Page B

officers refused or were unable to approach Eric on the porch in his condition. Some threw up.
    Eric was sent to the hospital, riding in an ambulance along with his sister's body. He started talking during the ride, insisting that he be taken to the police station so he could tell them who killed his sister. Officers met him at the hospital's front door, then took him to the station. Despite their strong advice that Eric wait until they got there to tell his story, both patrolmen heard it twice during the car ride. Eric was starting in on a third telling as they arrived. Once in an interview room he repeated the same story again and again—for detectives, for lawyers, into microphones, to anyone who asked, for anyone who would listen. He would repeat it for the last time at his trial.
    The evidence against him was strong. A cursory search of the house turned up the murder weapon, a filet knife sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter. It was part of a set that belonged to the house, and the blood on it was Gabby's. Two fingerprints were recovered, and they corresponded to Eric's right index finger and thumb. As far as detectives could tell, she had been assaulted and killed in her own room, then dragged down the stairs and out onto the porch. Some of the wounds were deep and violent enough to suggest the strength of a larger male. But if Eric had the power to carry the body then he could have inflicted the damage too. He had access to the knife and he had touched it, and he had been all alone in the house with his sister. It was clear means and opportunity.
    As far as motive was concerned, semen recovered during the autopsy told detectives all they needed to know. Once it was typed and found to be the same blood type as the victim's brother, most of the police working the case started closing up shop, calling it a day. In the span of twelve hours Eric Fallows moved from potential witness to suspect to certain murderer.
    As it turned out, there were no witnesses. The Fallows lived on a farm. The whole area was rural, but their piece of land particularly so, with a half-mile gravel drive and a house shielded on all sides by poplar and birch. Only Eric's word stood against the damning facts of the case: the blood; the murder weapon; the body. Besides, he was the only suspect. There was some speculation about why then he would call 911 on himself, but the average response from both government officials and the writers of editorials amounted to this: if you're crazy enough to rape and murder your own sister, then you're crazy enough to do a lot of things.
    There was rampant speculation at trial about psychopathy and sociopathy and many other pathologies, including the influence of the horror genre and movies like John Carpenter's Halloween, which had come out only two years ago at the time. Whatever the spin, everyone agreed he was crazy. No one would say it in court—people were hoping for an execution—but there seemed no other explanation.
    Two things counted toward a conclusion of sanity.
    One, a lot of people had know Eric Fallows for a long time. He had always been considered a shy boy, but upstanding. By all accounts he had been devoted to his sister. The father was a lush, the mother long gone, and in many ways Gabby was the only family the boy had ever had. Though there seemed no other explanation for her death, most God-fearing local people prided themselves on being able to recognize evil, and resented the idea of being hoodwinked all these years by one of their own. Some flat-out refused to believe it.
    And two, Eric Fallows never once wavered in his story. In all the tellings he gave of it—and between the cops and the lawyers and the press there may have been hundreds—details, small details, were always the same. Perhaps he had spent his supposed catatonia constructing a tale that would exonerate him, but to be unhinged enough to commit the crime and yet collected enough to fabricate the story seemed almost