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

11 The Why of Everything

225 11 THE WHY OF EVERYTHING 1 “Odah shot Wardle and then shot himself.” This is the simplest version, the Public Safety Report version. Maybe it’s the best version, or at any rate the safest. If only we could live with simplicity. Simone Lutz says that in retrospect, she took “a very large life lesson ” from the events of October 1999: “that some things will just simply never have answers.” Yet she keeps wondering: “How can there be no answer to the Why? Maybe some people spend the rest of their lives trying to answer the Why of everything.” Digging for the Why, we try to exert power over an event that flattens us, deracinates us, blows us wide open. It’s a quest based in the illusion that we have some kind of control over the universe. But just as frequently we refuse that quest, claiming, as Jimmy Jones initially did, that we’ll never “make any sense of this endless night.” We sometimes want to keep horrific events distanced as mystery or abomination. If I understand the horror perpetrated by a fellow human being, am I sympathizing with the devil? Will I lose my moral bearings? And must CHAPTER 11 226 I acknowledge that I can see myself in his eyes? Could I be the young woman turning to run to the bathroom? Could I be the young man with his finger on the trigger? Trying to answer the Why, we negotiate the fear of our own potential. Finally, if we resort to mystery to explain our “endless nights,” we learn nothing from them and certainly make no headway toward preventing them. We need to understand. We burn to understand. The trouble is that as we seek out a plausible story to explain what happened , we find not one but many. The truth is, indeed, out there—but it lies in the warp and woof of stories woven together. 2 The readiest versions, which proliferated on the Kalamazoo campus: (1) Neenef was a nice guy who suddenly snapped. (2) Neenef was a nice guy driven to the breaking point by (a) losing the woman he loved or (b) being betrayed by the woman he loved. The first version won’t hold. Sudden snapping does not exist in the repertoire of the human organism; there is only what a tree does: bending and bending and bending and cracking and bending farther and then, maybe, when the storm moves in, snapping. One cannot know Neenef’s history without seeing him bend and bend in the months and weeks before October 18. The second version, both variations, was especially popular. One reason might be that it is so available, endorsed by innumerable songs, by folklore and film. The fact that this version puts the blame squarely on the victim remains one of the most intransigent obstacles to women’s safety in this world of ours. Version 2b is particularly volatile. In my research, I sensed anxiety bubbling like lava under the question of Maggie’s social and sexual behavior in the fall of 1999. I learned again an old, old lesson: that when women are hurt or killed by present or past intimate partners, their own behavior will somehow be called into question. People who loved Maggie are still clearly afraid that somehow her terrible death will be attributed to her own actions. It is time to ask the question directly: If we imagine, for the sake of argument, that Maggie had been cheating on Neenef—all through their relationship, let’s say, for the sake of argument —would that “explain” her death? Legitimate it? Mitigate the THE WHY OF EVERYTHING 227 responsibility of the person who bought the gun and pulled the trigger? Is it “normal” or “understandable” for a man to kill a woman who has been unfaithful to him? So much of our collective cultural lore says it is. Are we prepared to endorse it? If so, what price are we putting on women’s sexual autonomy? And what are we saying about men—that they are all killers waiting for the wrong woman to push them over the edge? All the evidence indicates that Maggie withdrew herself from the relationship with Neenef and began to see other people. It’s what college students do and what they should be doing, in the pursuit of that crucial social education that runs alongside the academic one...