Murder Strikes Home

After a morning at my desk I like to turn on the radio to the midday newscast while I am having lunch, for five minutes of national and international affairs. The local news that follows is scarcely worth listening to. “Westwood realtor and his wife found murdered,” said the local announcer on this particular October morning before I could switch him off. One more of those incidents, grim banalities like car smash-ups. But Westwood? That was where my cousin Anne Bradley and her husband, John, lived. And he had a real-estate business. Of course it couldn’t be. But I turned on the set again. The voice droned, stage-solemn, “John Bradley and his wife were found murdered late yesterday in their Westwood home. Police are holding their 24-year-old son John Bradley Jr.”

Anne, my dearest cousin in a not too intimate family; John, three classes below me at the Roxbury Latin School; murdered? This was the sort of thing that happened to other people, that one skimmed in the fugitive headlines. I ran out into the trance-like autumn sunshine and drove up and down the streets of our Cape Cod village looking for my wife, Sari, not knowing why or where. Two days later, with John and Anne’s two older sons, I attended the double funeral in the church where I was married, my daughter baptized, and from which my mother was buried.

FR

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Francis Russell

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After a morning at my desk I like to turn on the radio to the midday newscast while I am having lunch, for five minutes of national and international affairs. The local news that follows is scarcely worth listening to. “Westwood realtor and his wife found murdered,” said the local announcer on this particular October morning before I could switch him off. One more of those incidents, grim banalities like car smash-ups. But Westwood? That was where my cousin Anne Bradley and her husband, John, lived. And he had a real-estate business. Of course it couldn’t be. But I turned on the set again. The voice droned, stage-solemn, “John Bradley and his wife were found murdered late yesterday in their Westwood home. Police are holding their 24-year-old son John Bradley Jr.”

Anne, my dearest cousin in a not too intimate family; John, three classes below me at the Roxbury Latin School; murdered? This was the sort of thing that happened to other people, that one skimmed in the fugitive headlines. I ran out into the trance-like autumn sunshine and drove up and down the streets of our Cape Cod village looking for my wife, Sari, not knowing why or where. Two days later, with John and Anne’s two older sons, I attended the double funeral in the church where I was married, my daughter baptized, and from which my mother was buried.