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

8 Fault Lines

159 8 FAULT LINES 1 In her role as student government president, Simone Lutz had spoken at the vigil outside the chapel on the night of October 18. She remembers saying, “‘This is a time for hugging and crying and mourning.’ Because at the end of the day, two people had lost their lives, and both of them had friends and family who cared very much about them.” There is no arguing with this truth. But in its subsuming embrace, other truths were temporarily lost or elided. More complex truths and more troubling responses erupted almost immediately. The force of collective , unifying shock and grief could not efface the fissures appearing across the campus. Necessary comfort had to make terms with equally necessary discomfort. Like other small college communities, Kalamazoo College folks talk incessantly about community. When such colleges were staffed by married , middle-class white American men and attended by middle- and upper-class white American children, community probably wasn’t discussed so often; it didn’t need to be. Homogeneity makes it relatively easy to form and sustain community. Nowadays at K, we tend to hold CHAPTER 8 160 it up as an elusive ideal and talk about it as if it equates to harmony—as if community were an end rather than an informing principle, static rather than dynamic. The months after Maggie’s murder and Neenef’s death challenged this notion of community and forced us to at least consider that it might be more useful to view community as a living, evolving organism, one in which struggle and conflict are the norm rather than violations of the code. There were some, perhaps many, who just wanted it all to go away—wanted to “put it behind us,” as they say, in keeping with the touted “return to normalcy.” Others yearned for the simple grief that would allow mourning without anger, clarity instead of confusion. But for most of us, I think, belonging to the Kalamazoo College community that year spelled out a much tougher story. The fissures across the quad traced to two insistent underlying questions . The first was about gender: Was gender relevant to what happened on October 18? Did Maggie’s death belong under the heading of so-called “domestic” violence or violence against women? The second question was about the perpetrator: Who was Neenef, and how were we going to talk—or not talk—about him? But those two questions seemed inevitably to bleed into each other. You couldn’t approach one without eventually getting to the other. In retrospect it’s clear that those two questions were actually one, and it was about Neenef. 2 Caitlin Gilmet calls Amy Elman, then associate professor of political science, “an icon: venerable, fascinating, intelligent, and fearsome.” At least outwardly incapable of being intimidated, she has one of those diamond -sharp intellects that have no patience for ambivalence. An EastCoast emigreé, she is uninterested in that timeless midwestern tradition, making nice, and she is not noted for taking care of others’ feelings, including those of her students. She is a formidable and transformative teacher, but her reputation does not rest on “supportiveness.” Students who admire her hold her in that reverence that is one degree away from terror, which lies one degree shy of loathing, especially in the case of a woman, so she is also often demonized. On the evening of Tuesday, October 19—the Day After—she met her senior political science seminar, the one for which Simone had been FAULT LINES 161 up writing the paper on Sunday night. Along with four or five of the women in the seminar, Elman took on Maggie’s death as femicide, the extreme point on the spectrum of male violence against women. When confronted with the assertion that two people died, not just one, she concurred: both had died from male violence. In other words, the issue was not only the gender of the victim; it was the gender of the perpetrator . A volatile discussion ensued. Simone remembers it as centering on the pervasive fear of male violence that circumscribes women’s lives. “It was too much anger,” says Simone. “And it was too much hate. And I remember going at it with her. I think I held my tongue for as long as I could, which was not common in her class because most of the time I opened my mouth quite...