Jessica Lester’s friends persuaded her to date Matthew Boynton, a boy in the eleventh grade, by saying, “If you don’t like him, you can always break up.” He was the grandson of the sheriff of Spalding County, where they lived, an hour south of Atlanta, and his friends were football players and cheerleaders. Jessica thought that Matthew, who was baby-faced but muscular, looked rich; he wore Ralph Lauren boots and collared shirts from Hollister. Jessica, who was in tenth grade, was less popular. She wore hand-me-downs and liked to take nature photographs. Her parents had abandoned her when she was three, along with her sister and brother, and she grew up on a farm with her mother’s adoptive parents. “I guess she felt like ‘Matthew could have picked anybody, and for some reason he picked me,’ ” her sister, Dusty, said.

Jessica had pale-green eyes, a melodic voice, and blond hair that hung down her back like a slab of wood. In the spring of 2013, when she was sixteen and had dated Matthew for a year, she took her grandparents into the kitchen, closed the door, and told them, apologizing, that she was pregnant. Jessica’s grandparents, who are Baptist, were willing to help her bring up the child, but Jessica decided to settle down with Matthew, her first boyfriend. Her aunt Kathy, who lives on the farm, said, “With Jessica’s family background, there was probably just a feeling of ‘Oh, I’ve finally found someone who loves me.’ ”

Jessica and Matthew moved into a house across the street from the sheriff, Wendell Beam, and his wife. Jessica was the kind of intuitive mother who predicts a baby’s danger—a fall, a spilled drink, a choking hazard—a few seconds before it happens. But she felt isolated. She finished her high-school coursework online, and almost never saw her friends or family. She said that Matthew told her she wasn’t related to them by blood.

For their son’s first Christmas, Matthew took Jessica to her grandparents’ house—the first time she’d seen them in months—but before she opened her presents he told her that they had to leave. When Jessica graduated from high school, her grandparents held a party for her and projected a movie on the side of their barn. Shortly after the movie started, Matthew said that it was time to go. “The rest of us enjoyed her graduation party,” Martha, her grandmother, said.

Matthew’s childhood dream was to work in law enforcement—a career inspired by his grandfather, who had helped bring him up following his parents’ divorce. After high school, he worked as a jailer at the Pike County sheriff’s office before being hired as a patrol officer in Griffin, the largest city in Spalding County. In his personnel file there, a supervisor described him as “fiercely loyal” but “stiff and unwilling to bend.” Another officer described him as “the type who wants to make ten arrests a day if he could.” A senior officer privately advised Matthew, “Lighten up a little bit, man.”

That mentality spilled into his home life. Twice, Matthew called the police on Jessica, for yelling or cursing or poking his chest. According to a police report, Jessica was “very reserved and appeared to be upset.” She said that the officers recommended that she not yell at Matthew.

In December, 2014, Jessica had a brief affair and got pregnant again. Her family wondered if this was her way of escaping the relationship. But Matthew said that he’d raise the child as his own. They decided to get married. Jessica could never quite explain why—there was no proposal, just an understanding that there was too much momentum to break up. Martha worried that Jessica had “lost her feistiness. It was almost like her personality got squished out of her.”

Her aunt Denise, a public-school teacher, said that, at the wedding, “there was just this sadness in her eyes, like, ‘I’m done.’ ” She had the demeanor of a child who had promised herself not to cause trouble or draw attention to her own feelings. Jessica and Matthew left their wedding reception, which her family hosted, after less than an hour. Matthew wore a titanium wedding ring with a blue stripe, to signify that he was in law enforcement.

They rented an apartment in Griffin, in a complex of beige two-story buildings surrounding a swimming pool. But the sheriff still loomed large in their relationship. Matthew asked Beam to phone him in the morning to wake him up. Jessica didn’t have her own credit card or car, so if she needed something from the supermarket she texted Matthew, who either took her to the store himself or asked Beam or his wife to deliver the item. When Matthew drove his patrol car, he would often take the keys to his truck, a Chevrolet Avalanche, so that Jessica couldn’t use it.

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Shopping Cartoon by Roz Chast

Denise was on a science-curriculum committee with Matthew’s stepmother, Amy, a teacher in the same district. A few months after the wedding, Denise and Amy went out for lunch. Denise said that Amy confided that Matthew had once hit her and that their relationship was strained. “She became dead serious—I’d never seen her so serious,” Denise said. “She said we needed to know what kind of kid he was. She said, ‘Do me a favor. I want you to make sure that Jessica is going to be O.K., because he’s going to hurt her.’ ”

In the spring of 2016, less than six months after the wedding, Jessica discovered that Matthew was having an affair with Courtney Callaway, a dispatcher at the Spalding County sheriff’s office, a mile away from the Griffin Police Department.

“If you don’t want to be with me anymore,” Jessica texted him, “I’m not going to stay here and play house.” Matthew, who had begun spending his free days with Callaway, told her, “It’s not gonna work for us. I already know it won’t.”

Jessica’s grandmother made an appointment with a lawyer who could help her file for divorce. In a composition note­­book, Jessica documented the times she assumed Matthew had been with his girlfriend, and she jotted down notes for the lawyer. “Difference between non-­contested & adultery divorce?” she wrote. “Most important to me. Custody (full?).” She and the boys planned to move into her sister Dusty’s house on Friday, April 15th, and the next week she would begin working at a chiropractor’s office. “She had both of the boys packed and ready to go,” Dusty said.

Jessica had to wean her baby before starting the job, so on Thursday night she and Matthew drove to Walmart, to buy formula. At the store, they got into a fight, and when they left Jessica said she didn’t want to get into the car. Matthew called a Griffin police lieutenant for advice. “She’s a grown lady,” the lieutenant told him. “You can’t force her into the truck.” (Matthew refused to comment for this story.)

From her porch, Jessica’s neighbor Megan Browning saw Jessica and Matthew return home. A half hour or so later, Browning was lying in bed when she heard a gunshot. Unnerved, she went out to the porch, where she heard another. Not long afterward, she saw Matthew walk briskly to his truck.