Along with happy anticipation at the prospect of soon walking out into a world he hadn’t seen in 16 years, Greg was also clear on what he wanted to do there. “I want to work with young people,” he said. “I want to use my life as an example of what can go wrong, of how important it is when you’re that age to get help if you feel things closing in on you.” He recognized the cliché and gave a knowing laugh. “Yeah, I know, me and every other guy in here, right? But in my case, it’s true.” He grew more thoughtful. “It comes down to hope. That’s what I didn’t have at 14. I learned it in here. That’s what I can teach them.”

Since Freud, it has been generally assumed that the only way to unlock the mysteries of the psyche is to dissect your childhood, especially the formative influence of your parents. In Greg’s case, that process can quickly sound like the ultimate blame-the-victim excuse. It might also complicate one of his greatest goals, which is to reconcile with his extended family. As a result, he tends to intersperse negative anecdotes about his parents with statements like, “But that doesn’t mean they deserved what I did to them,” or with accounts of better times. He likes to talk about an essay he had to write in the fifth grade, on the person he most admired, and how he chose his mother.

“When I was little, she was just the greatest mom around,” he told me, “always playing with me, going to all my sports events. She was just so much fun.”

He had a far more distant relationship with his father. Greg says Jobie could go days without uttering a single word and can recall only one occasion when he told Greg that he loved him — and this, Greg says, occurred when Jobie was quite drunk. Chancy Schmucker, the friend Greg visited on the night of the murders, used the phrase “good ol’ boy” to describe Jobie. “He’d always be out in that workshed they had there, sitting in his old, ratty armchair, a cigarette in one hand, a can of beer in the other, listening to country music. If Greg and I came in, it was, ‘Hey boys, how’s it going?’ and that was about it.”

Although they first met in Indiana, Jobie and Bonnie were transplants from the same impoverished corner of southeastern Kentucky coal country, late travelers on the so-called Hillbilly Highway that, beginning after World War II, saw the mass exodus of poor whites out of Appalachia for the industrial cities of the Midwest. In Kosciusko County, a pleasant stretch of rolling farmland and lakes in northeastern Indiana, they prospered. With Jobie working as a press operator for R. R. Donnelley, a commercial printer in Warsaw, and Bonnie as a packer for Kimble Glass, they were able to provide a comfortable middle-class home for the three children who came along in the 1970s: Angie, Tammy and Greg. Around 1980, they moved into a three-bedroom ranch on a five-acre parcel of farmland two miles south of Pierceton, later adding a large deck in back and an aboveground pool.

Greg remembers his early childhood being a content one — long afternoons spent tramping through the surrounding woods with his friends, family vacations to the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan and to visit the extended Ousley clan back in Kentucky. It was neither a materially deprived existence nor a physically abusive one. Like most other kids growing up in rural Indiana, Greg got the occasional spanking, administered by his father, but rarely anything more severe than that. Yet even at a young age, he was aware of the profoundly circumscribed orbit in which his family moved. Sociologists have long noted a tendency among many of the Appalachian transplants to the Midwest to remain separate from the larger community. The Ousleys appear to have been an extreme example of this, rarely socializing with anyone other than three sets of relatives, all first cousins of Jobie’s, and all of whom lived nearby. If easy and familiar in some ways, such tight social compacts can lead to a kind of pressure-cooker environment in times of family discord, and by the late 1980s, the Ousleys were living in constant discord.

Sometimes the arguments were between Greg’s parents — usually centered on Jobie’s drinking — but more frequently they were between Bonnie and her two teenage daughters, squabbles that occasionally escalated to slapping and hair-pulling. Much of the family strife may have had roots in the sad conditions of Bonnie’s own childhood. Abandoned by her father at a young age, she was barely a teenager when her mother died. Essentially orphaned, she and her two siblings — a sister, one year older, and a brother, a couple of years younger — were sent north to Indiana to live with an aunt. The sorrows didn’t end there. In the early ’70s, her brother was killed in a motorcycle accident. As her own two daughters came of age and prepared to escape the fractious family home, Bonnie’s history of loss seemed to manifest itself in rages at her daughters, interspersed with accusations of abandonment.