In History on Trial, her account of being sued by the Holocaust denier and quack historian David Irving, one of the points that Deborah Lipstadt got across very well was that in history, there is no ‘smoking gun’. We don’t have a written order saying ‘Kill 6 million Jews. Signed, A. Hitler’. What we have is photographs, testimonies, ruins, letters, journals, fragments – that, put together, make something horrifying.
Perhaps the legal version of this historiography is the example of proximate cause that Alexandria Marzono-Lesnevich gives at the beginning of her riveting memoir. A young man, a package wedged under one arm, sprints along a crowded platform to catch a departing train. He has to jump to make it. A conductor pulls him onto the train from the carriage: a porter shoves him onto the train from the platform. But here’s the thing – the young man was carrying fireworks. The package hits the platform and explodes. Who bears responsibility for the mess – the young man, the porter, the conductor, the railroad, the firework manufacturer? It is the classic tort problem, Marzano-Lesnevich says.
The case she writes about in The Fact of a Body is not as complex. In fact the crime appears depressingly simple. One day in rural Louisiana in 1992, a little boy named Jeremy Guillory visits the house of two childhood friends. No one is at home but the lodger, a gas station worker named Ricky Langley. Langley is also a parolee who has done four years for child molestation: he has a thing for kids as young as six. Langley lures Jeremy into the house, strangles the child to death and then simply wedges the boy’s body into a closet, where it stays for three days. A police-led search of the nearby forests widens out until it occurs to somebody that they should really check out the local man with the history of predatory sex offences. When questioned, Langley admits his guilt and is sentenced to death… then to life.
Langley’s life was the sad, sordid tale of many violent convicts. He was conceived after a car crash that killed his brother and left his mother in a body cast. Doctors couldn’t understand how Bessie Langley could have fallen pregnant, on a panoply of hardcore hospital drugs and in such intensive care. Bessie insisted she wanted to keep the child, and Ricky Langley was raised in the make-do-and-mend style of poor towns and large families. His short years of adulthood out in the world were marked by suicide attempts, social isolation, and, Marzano-Lesnevich says, struggles with his attraction to small children.
As well as piecing together Langley’s backtrail, Marzano-Lesnevich draws heavily on her own past – in its way, just as fraught and troubled as that of the killer. She grew up in a family of lawyers. Her parents had a mom-and-pop practice in town, and money was tight. The father is particularly well-realised in this book, a reasonable and loving man who at the same time was impulsive and hard to live with. Frequently he’d go on drinking jags and threaten to kill himself, or to leave the family for parts unknown. Marzano comes across as a man trying for contentment, but perpetually haunted by lost possibility.
The Marzano-Lesneviches were a close family. Alexandria had a sister and a brother. The grandfather came round often, and regularly molested both young girls. Before doing this, he would take out his teeth and warn: ‘I’m a witch. Don’t forget. If you tell I’ll always come find you. Always. Even after I’m dead.’ Years of this elapsed before Alexandria felt able to report the abuse (and what a coy, euphemistic word ‘abuse’ is, when you think of what actually happens in such cases!) When she told her parents, the molesting stopped – but the grandfather’s visits continued. In college Marzano-Lesnevich suffered eating disorders, and difficulties with intimacy. As an adult, she confronted her grandfather directly about the crimes. The grandfather dismisses her. ‘Besides, what happened to you is not such a big thing,’ the old man says. ‘When I was a child, it happened to me.’
The Fact of a Body is written careful and measured, like a very highbrow psychological thriller. While reading the book I had to keep reminding myself that Marzano-Lesnevich is a writer and a lawyer and not a federal agent or behavioural scientist. She comes across as a character from Harlot’s Ghost – the FBI gothic. She worked on the appeal against Langley’s death penalty conviction, a case that seems to have permanently scarred everyone who came into contact with it. The mother of Jeremy Guillory – a fascinating person, who we don’t see enough of in the book – pleads that Langley should be spared execution. The judge involved repeatedly broke off proceedings to testify to the effect that this difficult and distressing case had on his state of mind. One detail that stayed with me is that the jurors at Langley’s original trial took a Bible into their decision room and actually prayed before deciding for execution.
There is an appearance from the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. Stafford Smith is an admirable figure in the text. He has spent his adult life defending convicts from the death penalty, winning the majority of his cases. During Langley’s trial Stafford Smith chose to stay in New Orleans’s dangerous urban Ninth Ward rather than the city suburbs. Yet he strikes the only dead note here. He argues not just that Langley should be saved from the needle, but that the killer should be let off entirely, due to mental illness. Stafford Smith’s father suffered from mental health problems and it seems to have made an impression. ‘Ricky is not plain mean, Ricky is mentally ill, like my dad. Far worse than my dad.’ The theory in the book is that Ricky was haunted by the ghost of his dead baby brother, Oscar – that Oscar, somehow, made him do it.
But the deeper truth of Marzano-Lesnevich’s compelling story is that there are some things the law can’t go into… and that we all have our own ghosts.
