The book has several epigraphs. One is an inscription at a German naval officers’ school: “Say not ‘This is the truth’ / but ‘So it seems to me to be as I now see / the things I think I see.’ ” Another is from Niels Bohr: “A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.”

One day, I went to talk with Haysom, who is now fifty-one, at Fluvanna. She entered the white cinder-block visitors’ room with amused self-consciousness. She wore baggy jeans, a pale denim shirt, and a pair of small, oval tortoiseshell glasses. Her hair, still dirty blond, was bobbed above the ears and neatly parted on one side.

“This whole thing with Jens feels like a public divorce,” she told me when we sat. “I’ve chosen to do my time and to deal with it my way, and he’s dealing with it in his.” She hoped that Soering would be repatriated: “I want him to go back to Germany so bad. Please, go back to Germany.”

Haysom told me that her love for Soering had been so true at the start that it had taken her weeks to figure out how to deal with it. “When your mother is your lover,” she said wryly, “you get confused by affection.” Her boarding-school accent is gone now, replaced with a faintly Southern one; only certain word choices, such as “disorientated,” hinted at her far-flung past. When I brought up the man who wrote the letters, she appeared confused. “I don’t know what to say,” she told me. “We were lovers for a week?” They’d had a fling on a ski trip. In a letter she sent me later, she described him as her “last breath of freedom.”

“I dated some really nice guys, but it was always out of the shell—I performed,” she said. With Soering, things had been different. “I thought he was my soul mate, my life partner, my creative partner,” she said. “He opened this door for me which some people might say it would be good to keep closed.” Haysom told me that she and Soering began having sex only on the night of her parents’ funeral: he’d had hangups about intercourse until that moment, and her own sexual avidity ran in odd channels because of her mother. (Soering says their sexual encounters began months earlier.) When I asked her about some erotic letters she had sent Soering long before then—“my lips pressed into you, and my tongue licking your lips, your teeth, sucking on your tongue, holding it, biting it, sucking your breath away”—she told me that she was simply trying to entice him. She took a good deal of responsibility for the murders, calling them “my crime,” but denied being at her parents’ house that night.

One of the prison staffers came in to bring Haysom lunch. She didn’t want the food but took a couple of the beverages: “fake apple juice,” as she called it, and milk, both sealed in plastic sacks. She tried to tear them open with her teeth, apologizing all the while—prison, she says, wreaks havoc on manners—and, when that failed, stuck her head out the door and asked the guard, “Do you have a pen or something I could stab this with?”

Haysom told me that she’d had a great shrink a few years ago who helped her come to terms with her mother’s abuse. Soering’s account of her entanglement with heroin was a fabrication, she said; the only drug she’d ever used in the United States was marijuana. Her court testimonies about drug use had been efforts to explain away her emotional disequilibrium and thus avoid coming clean about the incest. Her half brother Veryan says that he now finds her genuinely remorseful: “I have forgiven her.” Julian resumed contact some years ago. Haysom wrote to Howard, but never heard back. She said, “I think the happiest part of my life was when I was living on the streets of Europe—and I was lost.”

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Haysom’s style contrasted with that of Soering, who lays out arguments in his defense at every turn. She was defending herself, too, but her approach was oblique. I was puzzled that she kept talking about her awful driving—she was a menace, she said, always dinging up rental cars—until I realized she was trying to tell me that she couldn’t have driven the Chevette to Loose Chippings. (Soering says her driving was fine; he told me that he couldn’t have driven there, because he’d been there only twice and couldn’t have managed the route in the dark.)

I asked Haysom about the tennis-shoe print in blood, too small for Soering’s foot. She said that it was a mystery to her, but that her mother—unlike her—had dainty feet: “I believe my mother walked in her own blood.” (Nancy Haysom was not wearing tennis shoes.)

In talking, Haysom consistently looked past the murders with a kind of long view, as if they had been a mysterious event, like a horrific bout of food poisoning. She seemed to see Loose Chippings as the history of a man and a woman who came together by buying into each other’s stories and then came apart, distrustfully, holding tight to accounts that had become inviolably their own—in other words, a love affair that ended.

“I have just one thing to say about Lady Macbeth, because apparently there’s no one who’s read the play,” she said suddenly. “It was Lady Macbeth who died of remorse and grief and killed herself. It was Macbeth who discovered his true nature.”

The crimes of which Haysom and Soering were convicted, it has become increasingly probable, weren’t the murders that occurred. While Soering could have killed Derek and Nancy Haysom alone, as he confessed, it would have been impossible for him to leave prints smaller than his foot in the blood. It is likewise hard to imagine Haysom single-handedly knife-murdering two adults, one of them a large man. Were the verdicts, even if arrived at through selective evidence and legal error, actually unjust? Dave Watson, the private detective, told me he thought that the police had focussed on “the right people.” The question wasn’t whether Haysom and Soering were involved, he said, but to what extent.

Could Soering and Haysom have operated as a team? Nobody is known to have seen either of them in Georgetown on that Saturday night. The murders, for that matter, may not have taken place on Saturday evening at all. Forensic analysts speak of a “window of death”: the period from the last time the victim was known to be alive to the latest moment when biological indicators would allow death to have occurred. The window for the Haysoms comprised the entire weekend, and Haysom and Soering’s movements during that period were in large part unconfirmed. Soering could have planned to confess to the crime, to protect Haysom. If he was convicted, he would get a few years’ imprisonment in Germany, after which he and Haysom could reunite. The plan would have collapsed when Soering learned that he didn’t have diplomatic immunity and Haysom broke off their relationship. They’d accuse each other, because the truth would implicate them both more deeply. His coverup would have a troublesomely literary quality, its contours taken from Dickens, the Bible, and Hollywood cliché—the drug run (one last job, and I’m out), the femme fatale (I’ve got myself in a real bad fix)—because he is a researcher; he draws on texts. Haysom’s version would have a fantastical air, because that was how her own mind worked. Loose Chippings would be a tale about two storytellers who aroused each other’s imaginations and composed a vast creative project not on paper but in life.