Some months later, I finally reached Margaret Rose, Philip’s sister, by phone. She had given a teary victim-impact statement at the sentencing.

What I heard instead were rumors that she used to turn Philip in. She denied having ever received any reward money, but admitted to me that she had called police on Christmas Eve in 1995, or 1996. Philip was on the run robbing homes. She confronted Philip and sat him down. “You know what?” she said. “I called the cops. The house is surrounded.”

“You know what, Margaret Rose? I was tired anyway.”

When the Mounties took him away, she said, “I love you. Merry Christmas.”

This was not a moral failing, she said, but rather something too few others had done: She had stepped in to help a deeply troubled man. “People were laughing it off and helping him out. Some people, they didn’t have the balls to do anything,” she said. “Come on, wake up! If you see someone beating someone to death, what are you going to do, stand there and laugh it off? Come on! You got to do something about the situation.”

She went on: “We had our share of problems with Philip, but he was still my brother. He was still a good person. If he didn’t have that bipolar he would’ve been an awesome, awesome, awesome, person. The only thing that screwed him over was his mental illness. He was sick."

In all the stories about the “murder for lobster,” only one seems to have reported that Philip had an alleged mental illness. In the Globe and Mail, Silver Donald Cameron, an author who lives on Isle Madame, wrote that Philip had been “diagnosed as bipolar.” Cameron told me that he had gotten the information from Margaret Rose. She told me Philip had been diagnosed during another one of his stays in prison, when he was 17.

Canadian privacy laws seal criminal records for 20 years after a person’s death. There was no mention of mental illness during the trial. Few islanders seemed to know about a diagnosis, or, if they did, their attitudes about it were complicated at best. Perhaps their actions best betrayed their attitudes: People knew Philip had a difficult upbringing. That he was tough. That when he had no work and no money and nonetheless found a way to survive. James Landry, the man convicted in his death, allegedly bought lobster from him for an out-of-season feast. Others paid him to watch their crab boats. Some islanders had helped him evade manhunts. Many close neighbors passed off routine threats of violence as innocuous. Perhaps it is indifference that minimized and normalized these deeper, more serious problems.

Margaret Rose made the point that everybody knew not to take Philip's threats seriously. “Philip, how many times did he threaten people? ‘I’m going to burn your house down.’ And, ‘I’m going to smash your window.’ He’s never, ever done anything like that. He’s told he’d kill us.” She laughed. “We knew he didn’t mean that.” She said, “If we wanted him dead, we would have killed him a long time ago.” She laughed again. “Not literally. That was Philip. We’d been living like that all our lives. We knew it was a mental disease that he had. Take the good with bad. You can’t kill everybody that’s sick. He got failed all his life.”

For Isle Madame, an island that appeared almost like a fantasy of small-town life — the Acadians that time forgot, fishing on the far fringe of the continent — but the ways that everyone knotted together had become a sort of trap. In a way, it snared everyone, all of whom, in the end, failed to come to the aid of a drowning man. It wasn’t just a body that floated away. It was that everyone refused to step in and help, and, perhaps for good reason, they’d obfuscated efforts by authorities. In a way, he’d been struggling to stay afloat for 43 years.