My mother had never shielded me from the truth, yet somehow she still painted my father in a positive light. She prefaced her version with reminders that he was young … that he carried wounds from his time in Vietnam, and what he saw there forever altered the way in which he viewed life and his own mortality.

My grandmother spoke of her son, her baby, with an unwavering belief that it had all been some terrible mistake. Her son hung the moon. The newspapers were wrong. When the edges of his story told by others left me raw, I went to my grandmother and she sat with me and spoke of my father until those edges were polished smooth.

These stories, pieced together, gave me his story.

My father (Photo courtesy of Nichole Beaudry)

I was raised in a town that relied just as much upon the local newspaper as on stories passed through the community, from one person to another in the glaring light of the grocery store, musty church basements and small, local diners.

We often joke about there being seven degrees of separation in any situation, but in Waterville, Maine, in 1973 (perhaps even still today), that number was more like two. If you didn’t know my father, you knew his mother or his cousin or his sister.

And while I knew his story from the bits I gathered and hoarded, I came to wonder just how many specifics were omitted from the story. So I decided to find out.

On a bitterly cold day in January of 1991, in the dimly lit basement at the local college, I waded through years of microfiche, from his murder through the trial, through the subsequent appeal. I was then 19 years old and I’m still not certain if I was on a quest to fill in any gaps in my father’s story or if I was looking for inconsistencies in the versions that had been told to me over the years. What I do know is I spent hours there in the dark that day, illuminated by the screen, loading microfiche and devouring everything I could find about his life and death until my eyes grew tired and my heart heavy.

Young and impetuous, my father abandoned my mother and me for his best friend’s wife. My mother, ever certain that he would ultimately realize the mistake he made, waited for him to come home. Before she could know if he ever would, his best friend, overwhelmed with grief over watching his family fall apart, abruptly ended my father’s life. A crime of passion, his attorney insisted.

Although I knew he had been shot, my mind never lingered over the graphic nature of gunshot wounds. Rather, I always saw him, in my mind, lying peacefully on the ground, just gone.

It was there in the basement that I read that after being shot in the chest, my father raised his hands and plead for his life. I read, too, that his pleas fell on deaf ears as his murderer rose from his own chair, approached my father, stood over him and shot him directly in the face.