This much is certain: The Zimmermans rarely venture out of that small house in central Florida. They are isolated and bored. They pass the time caring for Gladys’s mom and watching Spanish-language telenovelas and Duck Dynasty and Real Housewives and Fox News. George, unbelievably, seems to be back in neighborhood-watchman mode; this summer the police found him sitting in his truck outside a friend’s motorcycle shop in the middle of the night. For a few concentrated months, the Zimmermans were a twenty-four-seven cable-news fascination, which can be intoxicating and terrifying all at once. But that’s over now. The country has mostly moved on, to Ferguson, to Michael Brown, to the next shooting death of a teenage kid, the next Trayvon Martin, the next George Zimmerman.

Maybe George’s relatives are right about the risk to their lives—maybe it still exists as much as it ever did. Or maybe it’s just a way for the Zimmermans to feel as if they still matter. Maybe their paranoia, and all the rules and routines that it requires, just gives them something to do.

Eventually, Bob and Gladys agree to meet me in person at the Westin in Lake Mary, Florida, which I’m told is not too far from their secret home. We meet for dinner, and before they scoot into the booth, they both check over the seatbacks to make sure no one is eavesdropping.

Gladys is darker-skinned than she appeared on TV during the trial, beautiful and indigenously featured. She wears a little white cardigan over her shoulders, like a country-club matron, but in conversation she is fierce and brassy and speaks heavily accented English. It infuriates her that George is often described as a white man, which she considers an affront to her Peruvian heritage. She can be startlingly callous about Trayvon Martin’s family, about the help they’ve received, financial and otherwise, which she feels her family has been unfairly denied. It often seems as if she believes the Zimmermans have suffered equally, as if they have lost a son as well.

Bob is more sorrowful, more measured, but just as tin-eared regarding the Martins, albeit more benevolently. Shortly after the incident, he heard that Trayvon was chronically truant in high school. "So I thought, well, maybe at some point we can get with his parents," he told me, "and have some kind of thing where we reward kids that improve their attendance."

One of Bob’s sayings is an old military line: "Stop bleeding, keep marching." It’s the story of his life. His singular goal was not to be like his own father, a vicious drunk who used to beat him ruthlessly. By age 14, Bob was a ward of the state of California; he spent the next decade incarcerated or homeless. He turned his life around by joining the Army. He got his college degree at 50 and had a long military career that ended at the Pentagon. Because of his job, he always owned a gun, but he taught all his kids to stay away from firearms. "If we ever touched or handled a gun," Robert told me at one point, "Dad was gonna beat the shit out of us. Period. He made it absolutely clear, like bare bottoms, you’re gonna get the shit beaten out of you. He was always saying, ’Guns will get you into more trouble than they will ever get you out of.’ "

But now, sitting across from me, picking at a burger and sipping iced tea, Bob talks as if the cycle of violence has become an inescapable fact of life. His face is a ringer for Bryan Cranston’s on Breaking Bad—the early seasons, when Walter White has the defeated look of a man kicked in the teeth by life. "I am sure there are people, you know, some young kid that has nothing going for him, but he’s able to get a pistol, wants to make a name for himself. ’Maybe I’ll kill one of the Zimmermans. Maybe George, maybe one of his family members. I’ll be famous.’ You know? That happens," he says. "And that’s what worries me."