Lisa Belkin, GENEALOGY OF A MURDER: Four Generations, Three Families, One Fateful Night
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[1:03]Lisa Falcon is the author of Genealogy of a Murder, four generations, three families, one
[1:08]fateful night.
[1:09]Lisa is also an award-winning journalist and the author of Narrative Nonfiction Books, her
[1:14]career at The New York Times included stints as a national correspondent, medical reporter
[1:19]and contributing writer for The New York Times magazine.
[1:21]She lives in Westchester, New York.
[1:23]Welcome, Lisa.
[1:24]Thank you so much for coming.
[1:25]On mom's starting to have time to read books to discuss your new book Genealogy of
[1:30]a Murder, four generations, three families, one fateful night.
[1:33]Zippy, I've been looking forward to this for years.
[1:37]It's for years.
[1:39]You're so funny.
[1:40]Okay.
[1:41]This has a very interesting origin story.
[1:44]Tell listeners about how you came upon this story and then we're going to dive into some
[1:49]of the ways these families intersected and how this is really a story of multiple cultures
[1:54]and so much other stuff.
[1:57]So much other stuff.
[1:58]That's true.
[1:59]It's so much other stuff.
[2:00]Yeah, at its heart, it is a family story in many ways.
[2:06]It was the story about a lot of families, but one of the families is mine.
[2:10]It started when my mother remarried late in life to a man who I didn't know well was
[2:16]getting to know one day when I was visiting them and he started to tell me a story.
[2:22]And it was a very long story and I tend to interrupt and show that I know stuff.
[2:30]And I just this time listened because he was trying to get to know me and have me get to
[2:39]know him.
[2:40]And in the end, the story was the heart of this book.
[2:43]So he told me a tale about when he was 30 years old, he was a young doctor.
[2:47]He was not stationed in a military zone, he was stationed at a prison at the Stateville
[2:54]Penitentiary in Chicago, Illinois.
[2:57]And the shortest version of this long epic tale is that he befriended a prisoner who was
[3:05]working for him.
[3:07]My stepfather was working in a lab set up at the Stateville Penitentiary to test malaria
[3:14]drugs on prisoners.
[3:16]An entire other topic of conversation, it would not be allowed today.
[3:21]But at the time it was considered the army's best hope because malaria was devastating
[3:26]troops in any war zone.
[3:28]It went into World War II, South Korea, Vietnam was looming.
[3:34]And so Al was there to find a cure for malaria.
[3:37]He was also there to help rehabilitate prisoners by training them to be lab texts.
[3:42]By working side by side, he got to know one, he thought very well.
[3:48]The man, his name was Joe DeSalvo, asked for his help in securing parole and talking
[3:54]to the parole board.
[3:56]Al did in fact help, helped him quite substantially.
[3:59]He was paroled, Joe did very well, then things went very badly and a police officer
[4:05]was killed.
[4:07]And he told me this story.
[4:10]And I looked at him and said, you know, I have to write about this, don't you?
[4:14]Well, if you must.
[4:17]And that nine and a half years later became this book.
[4:21]Oh my gosh, that's crazy.
[4:24]Well, what you do so well, well, there are many things.
[4:26]But you have us get to know the families all the way back, like as far as you know.
[4:32]So that by the time Joe DeSalvo is working with your stepfather, I feel like I've known
[4:37]him so long.
[4:38]He was parents.
[4:39]And his grandparents.
[4:40]Well, let's start with him because his back story is so interesting.
[4:46]And I did not know anything about the motorcycle culture and how it was like the, I don't
[4:52]even a formula one of its day essentially.
[4:55]It meets like the Roman policy and how his uncle and his dad had been in that world.
[5:01]And you raise so many interesting questions, but talk a little bit about the craziness of
[5:05]that culture.
[5:07]I didn't mean to go back a hundred years.
[5:11]It just happened.
[5:12]Sorry, I meant to write a book about what happened to these men in 1960.
[5:18]And then I was really struck by the fact that they'd all started at the same starting
[5:22]line, right?
[5:23]They all had grandparents who came at about the same time in the late 1880s, early 1900s.
[5:30]And they came for the same reasons.
[5:32]The reasons we're still arguing about today essentially to give these kids a better life.
[5:39]And these kids were now 30 years old.
[5:41]And how did all of them start in essentially the same place?
[5:47]And one became the cop, one became his killer, one became my stepfather.
[5:52]So you can now do this research in your pajamas.
[5:58]I at least got the scaffolding of the story, the basics of the story.
[6:05]And Joe's story led me to these newspaper clips about a guy with the same name who turned
[6:13]out, in fact, to be his father, who was a, you know, I could have been a contender.
[6:21]He was a contender.
[6:22]He was an almost made it.
[6:24]He, the brass ring was in sight in this world of motorcycle racing, and who knew?
[6:32]And from 1908 to 1911, motorcycle racing was apparently the most popular sport in the United
[6:38]States.
[6:39]It was far bigger than baseball.
[6:41]It was bigger than football, which had not, you know, been incorporated yet.
[6:45]There was no NFL.
[6:47]Huge arenas were built.
[6:49]And yeah, your Roman Colosseum analogy is absolutely spot on.
[6:55]These men went to die, or many of them did die, for the possibility of that brass ring
[7:03]of this future in America.
[7:06]And his father, you could argue, I do, had a spectacular one particularly spectacular
[7:13]crash that made it into all the newspapers, where I passed it past forensic pathologists
[7:19]nowadays.
[7:20]And I said, here's what I know about this.
[7:22]What likely happened to him?
[7:24]And they all said traumatic brain injury.
[7:27]And it would explain the huge personality change that you can find in the record.
[7:34]It would explain why he, you know, went through the rest of his life, basically bullying
[7:40]everyone around him, depressed and angry, and his children paid a price for that.
[7:47]And one of his children was this young man, Joe, who would grow up to come to know my
[7:52]stepfather, who tried to help, who tried to redeem him, and it was arguably too late.
[8:00]So you kind of, you have to go back a hundred years to truly understand the whole of any
[8:08]of us.
[8:09]And I had the luxury or, I don't know, the stupidity of doing it.
[8:15]And it took me almost a decade.
[8:17]But I too really feel like I know these people at this point, down to their DNA.
[8:22]Yeah.
[8:23]Well, you present them so completely.
[8:26]And even the questions that you raise, Joe and Charles, his twin brother were five minutes
[8:31]apart.
[8:32]And yet, their lives went in completely different directions.
[8:34]And you raise a question, when does it start changing all future generations?
[8:39]Is it in that moment?
[8:40]Is it which decision?
[8:41]Can one decision really affect all the DNA of the people who come later, which is fascinating
[8:48]to contemplate?
[8:49]Right?
[8:50]Well, there is the idea of epigenetics that you can, in fact, inherit trauma, for instance,
[8:55]as well established.
[8:56]And in many cases, this was trauma, what happened to the father traumatized the son.
[9:03]And yes, they were twins, they were not identical, but still, they were twins.
[9:09]They started to talk about the same starting line.
[9:11]I mean, we're talking about two boys born at the same time.
[9:15]And now you have this metaphor of a starting line in their racing.
[9:20]They both raced one slightly ahead of the other all the time.
[9:26]And yes, at what point was it nurture?
[9:31]The older son was always treated as slight as the older son.
[9:37]He was always a bit more of the golden boy.
[9:40]He, where did that become established fact?
[9:45]Where if you, if you do this often enough, how does this become established fact?
[9:49]And by the time they started racing, the older brother was known as the winner and the
[9:55]younger brother was already seen somewhat as the loser and trying.
[10:00]trying to catch up and trying to prove himself and being more reckless as a result.
[10:05]And this went on to literally affect three men in 1960.
[10:13]Well, you also go through all the other men and another big storyline that you have, which
[10:18]I feel like I feel like a theme of the whole book is what can we do with prisoners in
[10:23]terms of reformation, you know, there are all these different approaches and you detail
[10:28]one really well with the warden and his wife and the horrible fire and all these
[10:33]different theories on how prisons should play a role in society.
[10:38]And of course, you start by saying something like how you treat your prisoners as a major
[10:42]reflection on the state of the country as a whole.
[10:45]But there were some real pioneers in prison life and prison, I'm not saying the right words
[10:49]reformation or rest it, um, rehabilitation, yeah.
[10:55]The word is pinology, which utterly, you know, amuses friends of mine, for reasons,
[11:00]I mean, you know, it's, you know, reform people.
[11:04]But yes, so so in in pinology circles and carceral circles, there's, you know, there's
[11:09]a lot of philosophy that I tried to make much more human because we're talking about individual
[11:15]lives and how do we change the trajectory of individual lives as a society?
[11:20]What is our philosophy?
[11:23]There's the pendulum that's always there in pretty much everything policy wise.
[11:29]We always react to what we've been doing by replacing it with something else that we then
[11:34]replace with usually a version of the thing we just abandoned.
[11:39]And that is true of prison reform.
[11:41]And that pendulum people can't see me, but my hand is going back and forth.
[11:46]But pendulum is particularly profound when it comes to prisons, because depending
[11:52]on the state of the country, depending on how secure we as a population feel, we take
[11:59]that out on our prisons.
[12:01]So when we are feeling anxious or, or unmoored, we are very much about punishment.
[12:08]And when we are feeling expansive and optimistic, we are all about reform.
[12:15]In the 1950s, which is right before my stepfather arrived at this penitentiary, was the
[12:21]latest in the optimistic.
[12:24]We can help them.
[12:25]We can fix them.
[12:26]We can make the world a better place philosophy.
[12:30]So he walked into that.
[12:32]But by that point, this prisoner who he'd interacted with had been through several swings,
[12:37]and he'd been very punished.
[12:39]And he'd been very, you know, rehabilitated.
[12:43]But it all, yeah, it all started.
[12:45]I couldn't just start in 1960, because, you know, what's the fun of that?
[12:49]So we went back to 1911 with one of the first deeply reformative wardens who made a difference,
[12:57]who proved that trust actually creates men who internalized that trust.
[13:05]And when released didn't come back.
[13:08]And as it happened, there was an accident on his watch.
[13:12]And his, he lived within the prison walls.
[13:16]And his wife was burned to death in a fire in that prison.
[13:21]And the result of that act was the end of rehabilitation that was getting legs, that was
[13:28]was getting traction in the press.
[13:32]She might not have died in the fire.
[13:34]She might have died by blunt force drama.
[13:37]She died during a fire.
[13:40]It is unclear how, yes.
[13:42]And it is unclear by whom.
[13:45]And it's still very debated in small but passionate circles in Illinois as to who killed her.
[13:54]And I don't believe it's the man that was evicted for it, neither did the warden.
[13:59]Yeah, that was also very interesting.
[14:02]But then you also have, you know, Irish immigrants.
[14:05]And then you have, you take us all around the world and what, well, from the world
[14:11]and steer it on boats.
[14:13]And I mean, it's amazing.
[14:14]I feel like I've just watched like a Martin Scorsese movie or something, like gangs of
[14:17]New Yorker.
[14:18]I don't know if something.
[14:19]But the, the one thing that like kept going through all of this, I felt was how much these
[14:25]random small things change lives.
[14:28]The little thing on the train, which affects where you sit on the train, whether you're
[14:34]sleeping with your head on your jacket or you're sitting up or you're getting a cigar,
[14:39]whether you're in the fire, like in that place or you're not or you're, I mean, everything
[14:45]is so, it just hinges on the smallest details and then makes it, I don't know.
[14:51]It's almost overwhelming because it's like every little thing you do then you can have
[14:55]such massive ripple effects, you know.
[14:58]I'm hardly the first person to have come up with this, right?
[15:01]It's something that fascinates all of us.
[15:03]And how many first, you know, couple dates, you go out to dinner and the first conversation
[15:08]you have with the other couples, how do you meet?
[15:11]And there's always some coincidence in there.
[15:14]And this coincidence changed everything and we all have these moments in our lives and
[15:19]we're all very, very aware of them.
[15:21]And we watch movies like Sliding Doors and we know about the butterfly effect.
[15:25]And we are aware that there is this web of stuff that led us to who we are.
[15:34]But we don't sit down always and map it out.
[15:39]And you know those crazy people with the murder boards, you know, with the yarn that goes
[15:45]connecting all of these things that don't see, oh yeah, I became the crazy person with
[15:49]the murder board.
[15:51]And there was it, but it was larger, even though one of these stories was my stepfather,
[15:56]it was not my family's story.
[15:59]So I now know far more about my stepfather's family than my own, which is a bit of a point
[16:04]of contention in some family, you know, really there wasn't a book in us, but that feeling
[16:13]of this is all of us.
[16:15]This is true of all of us.
[16:17]I could write a book about you and I and how we ended up on this podcast.
[16:24]And there would be a book, there would be the same book.
[16:25]I hope there wouldn't be a murder, but there might be.
[16:28]And right, any random three people on the street have all these connections.
[16:34]And what is the point other than, you know, a parlor game?
[16:38]I think the point is it's helpful, it behooves us to use a word that no one ever actually
[16:44]uses in the world to remember this, to remember that the decisions we're making now
[16:51]are in fact a map for future generations that they're going to have to follow.
[16:57]So why is this relevant to us to a current generation?
[17:02]Because every decision we make is in fact setting a scene for someone down the line.
[17:08]So individually it is important to at least be aware of that.
[17:14]And on a policy level at a 30,000 feet level as a society, this book is full of the GI Bill
[17:22]saved to that one, this prison policy saved or destroyed to that one.
[17:28]These are not just policies and philosophical debates, these are actual individual lives.
[17:36]And even if you can't save all of them or even if everything doesn't work all the time,
[17:44]it made me far more conscious of the fact that there's a responsibility to deal with public
[17:51]policy and social norms with an understanding that this is just someone's, this is truly
[18:01]someone's life.
[18:03]Another thing I learned from the book aside from all of reinforcing what I know about life
[18:08]in general and learning about all these different subcultures and different pockets of time and places
[18:14]is how tremendous a journalist you are.
[18:18]I mean, do have all this information, there is so much information in here.
[18:22]I can't even believe that it's not like two feet high of a book.
[18:26]You woven so many facts that you couldn't have known before into this like seamless narrative.
[18:34]And that I mean, there must be a lot you didn't include.
[18:36]There must be, I mean, how did you go about this massive undertaking?
[18:41]Well, first of all, thank you.
[18:43]And secondly, oh, you didn't see the first draft.
[18:46]I caught 70,000 words from the first draft and I knew it was too long while I was writing it.
[18:59]And I came to see the first draft as the directors cut if I can get, you know, self-important here.
[19:06]But not less about my ego and, you know, me as the director, this is the whole story,
[19:12]as I started to feel very responsible for the families I was writing about.
[19:18]I was finding out these things and it was not my story.
[19:22]I was telling it was their story.
[19:25]So the first cut was basically everything I knew, everything here.
[19:30]And I gave it to them.
[19:31]Here is everything I know.
[19:34]And then I went back and I cut with an idea of, okay, what does everyone else not need to know?
[19:40]And it's wonderful that they do, but the rest of us, the average reader doesn't need it.
[19:45]And so I started with, I mean, 70,000 words is a book.
[19:50]I cut a book out of my book.
[19:53]And I tried to slip a lot of it into the end notes, by the way.
[19:57]So if you read the end notes, there are all these.
[19:58]Those are like 50.
[20:00]Yeah. Those little stories that I stuck in like, no, this was really a good story. It doesn't actually
[20:06]in my story, but this was a great story. So that's how I did it. I wrote it and then I rewrote it
[20:13]because that's the only way to deal with that much information. And that's why it took almost 10 years
[20:21]because yes, I learned a lot. I went down a lot of rabbit holes and then I had to figure out which ones
[20:29]were actually interesting or which ones were just interesting to me because I found it.
[20:35]And that probably took two of the 10 years. Oh my gosh. So how do you feel now that this is out there and done?
[20:44]Like, I've been a journalist now for a lot of years. Let's just say lots of years. And this is the single most
[20:51]ambitious thing I've ever done. And it's gratifying. It was a deeply gratifying work, gratifying
[20:59]on a process level just to exercise muscles. I hadn't used before gratifying in that,
[21:08]particularly from the police officers family whose children are now in their 60s, but who were
[21:15]three, four, and six months when their father died, they experienced it as getting their father back.
[21:23]So it was deeply gratifying that way. And it was a change for me in my view of the world. And I
[21:36]was a journalist and it was all about what happened yesterday. What happened now? This was going
[21:43]very far back. And archival research, which I had never gotten to do. And an understanding of
[21:51]we think this is the first time this has ever happened. But really, you can look at almost anything,
[21:59]including the past four years. And there are examples of how this experience is universal.
[22:07]I mean, I was writing about 1918 in 2020. And 1918 was was a horrific year. I mean, more people
[22:17]died of the flu in 1918, then died from World War I. And World War I killed a lot of people.
[22:25]And so I'm sitting there writing about this ghastly plague in 1918. As it's coming in 2020,
[22:34]and I looked at my husband and I said, I want to go back to 1918 because I know how that ends.
[22:40]So I guess I've become a bit of a historian in addition to being a journalist. So that was also
[22:48]the personal sort of takeaway from this is that I am deeply invested in history in a way that I
[22:54]wasn't before. So it changed me. This book changed me. Amazing. Wow. So great. So does this mean
[23:03]you want to delve into new giant history projects? I have one that's kind of caught, you know,
[23:10]you know how ideas work. They grab you and they don't let go. And so I have one that seems to not
[23:16]be letting go. I've tried to shake her off and she is there. It is very much a book about
[23:26]women in a way that this is, well, this one is technically you would describe it as a book about
[23:33]three men. And yet the women kept coming front and center. It was also very much about
[23:40]these women who have much less agency than we do far fewer active choices. And yet paid the price
[23:50]for what their men did. So the women were kind of in the background waving at me in this book.
[23:57]And the next one I think will probably be front and center and giving at least one particular
[24:03]woman her say. But yes, I'm going back to the past again. I think this is a good spot for me.
[24:10]Well, you're really great at it. And you bring the reader in. Some history books can be hard
[24:17]to keep your interest. You know, I mean, but this is engrossing the way to write narrative
[24:22]nonfiction is, again, it's anyway, you're, I'm not trying to just to blow smoke or whatever,
[24:28]but it's really it's all the adjectives you want. It is different. It is different. I have
[24:36]huge respect for people who write fiction because my imagination just isn't deep enough.
[24:41]Can't do it. If you know, put a person in front of me and I can find a story in them, but tell me
[24:47]to find one in my own head. I can't memoir. That is personal. I need the screen, the journalistic
[24:55]screen. So yes, they're all, they're all different genres. But this is the one that's sort of my
[25:00]my natural group. But you said in the book or somewhere what you're, you have a title picked
[25:06]out for your memoir. What is it? There's a story in this somewhere. But again, that's that's very
[25:13]journalistic. It's like, there's a story in this somewhere. And which is what I find myself,
[25:19]it's one of my tics. It's something I say all the time while going through pretty much anything
[25:24]is, yeah, there's a story in a somewhere. I haven't say that should be a book. That should be a
[25:30]book. That could be a book title. I think I'd like to have obsessed with book titles right now.
[25:33]That's a great title too. Oh, I guess once you have a lens, it's like, that's what you see on you,
[25:40]you have an editor's lens. I mean, you see book titles. I see stories, right? We are all
[25:49]diluted and hallucinating through. This is such a handy skill. Do you ever miss like the mother
[25:59]load, which is how I first met you with new edited essay that I thought was like my biggest accomplishment
[26:04]and then I got like a billion terrible Congress. I miss your editor. That was a delight.
[26:10]No, I miss it. I mean, it's an interesting question right now in the the aftermath of Heather
[26:17]Armstrong's staff where there's been so much reminiscing, evaluating of where the internet was at
[26:27]the moment we met, right? At a moment where blogs were coming into their own, women were finding
[26:34]their voice in a way that they had not had an outlet for in quite the same way. They didn't
[26:40]need traditional publishers. They didn't need actual journalism. They could just sit down at their
[26:45]kitchen table, although I don't know how many actually were at their kitchen table in a way.
[26:50]That's an insult. But they could sit down and write and then without a filter, get it out
[26:57]to the world. And that was spectacular for a short period of time. And then it got very toxic.
[27:07]And I had that short period of time, right? Mother load in the life store column before it,
[27:13]when I was at the time doing both, that was the moment where it was the best conversation on the
[27:23]planet, where people came to the comments to truly talk where, you know, it hadn't yet gotten
[27:30]out of control. So do I miss that? Yes, I missed that. But do I want to go back to writing online
[27:39]and subjecting myself to that? No, no, that was a chapter and that chapter is done. And it's
[27:46]interesting how quickly that moment in both our lives became history because it doesn't seem like
[27:52]that long ago, but there's definitely history at this point. It's an interesting lens as well.
[27:58]See, it's a story in that. What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
[28:03]So I am teaching at Columbia Journalism School. And that is the question on every journalist's
[28:13]mind. So in terms of nonfiction journalism, nonfiction writing, which is what I know,
[28:18]they want to know why, you know, am I crazy to be here? What is the future of this profession
[28:24]that you are training before? And the only answer I have is there will always be a need for
[28:32]journalism. There will always be a need. People will want to read other people who are trained to
[28:41]find facts to express those facts in a compelling and understandable way. And the big question
[28:51]is where is that going to be? And I don't know. They are going to invent it. These students that I
[28:55]am teaching now are going to invent it. All I can do is give them sort of the fundamentals
[29:01]of what worked for me in the world in which I lived. And then that I hope I teach them well
[29:09]because we're counting on them. So if you want to write, my advice is probably the same as
[29:17]everybody else who comes on your podcast, all the other millions of people, right? If you want to
[29:26]write, right, it will find a home. It will find a home that is appropriate to the moment when
[29:33]you're writing. But you can't find the home until you've written, just sit down and write.
[29:40]Love it. Well, Lisa, congratulations. This is like a triumph of a book. I really want it to be a
[29:46]movie. I think it would be amazing. I don't know. Has it been optional? Working on it. Working.
[29:51]Okay. Well, it's an even better book already. So congratulations. And thank you for the chat.
[29:56]Thank you so much. Okay. Take care. Talk soon. Bye bye.
[30:00]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[30:05]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram, at Zebi Owens, and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[30:10]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[30:17]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing.
[30:21]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.