“The Events of October”: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus

2 Millennium Girl

9 2 MILLENNIUM GIRL 1 I have blond hair, green eyes, My favorit amnils are dog and cats, I like to roller-skate, I have a brother, my favorit season is spring, and I like swimming. This is Maggie Wardle in third grade, as seen through those same green eyes. The words are printed carefully in pencil on soft, buff-colored paper lined in blue. The letters are shaped beautifully, even if the mysteries of commas and capital letters still elude her. She stays assiduously between the lines. Maggie produced this self-assessment at Cooper Elementary, a small school halfway between Kalamazoo and Plainwell. Maggie’s family had moved to Plainwell a year earlier from Portage, the burgeoning southern suburb of Kalamazoo where Maggie was born in August of 1980. Her mother, Martha, was a psychiatric nurse at the Kalamazoo State Hospital , the imposing old structure riding one of Kalamazoo’s high hills, its massive cone-topped tower visible all over town, its primary claim to fame that Malcolm X’s mother was hospitalized there. Maggie’s father, CHAPTER 2 10 Robert Wardle, a brilliant engineer, was the scion of a wealthy eastcoast family. Maggie followed their first child, Rob, nineteen months later. By the time she was two, her parents had divorced, and her mother had married Rick Omilian, director of special education in the Plainwell school system. When Maggie was seven, they moved from Portage up to Plainwell, ten miles north of Kalamazoo, into a light-filled octagonal house on a lot enclosed in trees. Martha surrounded the house with lush gardens. The move took the family across lines of class and local culture. A white offshoot of a midsize, multiracial midwestern city, Portage is where Kalamazooans head to do their serious shopping; “Por-TAHGE,” it’s sometimes sardonically called. Plainwell, originally a farming town in the rich fruit belt of western Michigan, still strikes one as the definitive Village, with small shops, a renowned ice-cream parlor, and neat clapboard houses on shady streets. There is nothing hip about it. With some set dressing, it could serve as the location for a TV series set in the fifties. The schoolyards and backyards of such a place were perhaps as idyllic as America got in the eighties, at least for little kids. A happy, gregarious child, Maggie “seemed to instinctively know how to share and play with others . . . rarely choosing solitary activities,” Rick recalls. The only shadow on Maggie’s life was her brother’s struggle with Asperger’s Syndrome. He had been diagnosed early, when Asperger’s was still little understood; in fact, when Martha took him to an autism specialist at Western Michigan University, she was advised to institutionalize him. In Rob, the obsessiveness, egocentrism, distractibility, and inability to master tasks that often mark the autistic spectrum combined with the ingeniousness that is also so often part of the package: Rob came to be able to fix anything—but he learned to do it by taking things apart. “It was a little bit rough at times,” Martha recalls, with the understatement characteristic of one who accepted long ago that life would be difficult. Rob was “a handful,” and Maggie was devoted to him, “always covering for him, pulling him along and out of things.” He quickly manifested his father’s engineering proclivities, and the two children spent hours in the backyard sandbox creating land- and cityscapes. “He says there’s many things buried under the yard,” Rick laughs. Rob ran with the rest of the neighborhood kids, but his behavior often ignited conflicts . “Just send him home,” Martha would tell the neighbors. “We’ll MILLENNIUM GIRL 11 take care of it.” Rob’s inability to master simple tasks baffled his sister. “Why doesn’t he just get it?” she’d ask. But she also became his teacher, watching Martha and Rick interact with him and then repeating their lessons. Little sister became big brother’s caretaker. Rob was undoubtedly Maggie’s most profound early lesson in nurturance , the centerpiece of the female role, as much so in 1989 as in 1959. Maggie Wardle was born at a highly charged moment in American women’s history. It might be seen as the instant before feminism’s Second Wave crested and crashed on the sands of so-called post-feminism . The girls of her generation came to womanhood with conflicting voices buzzing in their heads: the...