In their 2017 hybrid of memoir and true crime, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich invites readers to consider whether the stories that define us can ever contain the whole truth.
What I fell in love with about the law so many years ago was the way that in making a story, in making a neat narrative of events, it finds a beginning, and therefore cause. But I didn’t understand then that the law doesn’t find the beginning any more than it finds the truth. It creates a story. That story has a beginning. That story simplifies, and we call it truth. —Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body
Earlier this year, one of our partners reminded us in a Q&A for our blog that criminal justice proceedings often rely on an oversimplistic distinction between victim and perpetrator. While the binary is useful for adjudicating violent crimes where there is a definitive power imbalance, and an obvious aggressor, it can obscure the reality that many perpetrators of violence are also survivors of it who come from desperate circumstances.
It’s a challenging gray area to contemplate but doing so can open our eyes to the cyclical nature of violence—a concept we constantly emphasize in our education programming. It can also illustrate another difficult truth to contend with: None of us can be objective and, for all its sophistication and procedure, neither can the law. Facts are organized to create a story. To every story, we bring our own beliefs and, perhaps even more consequentially, our own lived experiences. Because it’s practiced and interpreted by our fellow human beings, the law will always share this element of human mutability.
It’s possible to encounter the grisliest crime that strains comprehension and still find some humanity in the perpetrator when we learn something of their background—maybe even something we can deeply identify with. On the other side of the spectrum, we may believe to our core that nobody should be reduced to the worst things they’ve ever done, but our capacity for compassion may crumble completely when we learn of somebody who’s committed a violent crime that hits extremely close to home. The moment that a crime feels personal, even those of us who consider due process and equal treatment under the law sacrosanct may struggle to find a shred of justice in how we handle violent offenders, or how difficult it is to charge somebody capable of killing—seemingly without compunction—with first-degree murder. These are conundrums that Alex Marzano-Lesnevich navigates in The Fact of a Body, their 2017 hybrid of memoir and true crime.
In 2003, Marzano-Lesnevich travels to Louisiana to intern at a law firm dedicated to defending men accused of murder. While there, they’re introduced to a case involving one of the firm’s clients, who in 1992 murdered a six-year-old boy in Louisiana by strangulation. After reviewing tapes of the defendant describing the murder as well as records of his previous crimes, Marzano-Lesnevich—then 25 and an avowed opponent of capital punishment—is overcome with the feeling of wanting him to die.
At the time he killed Jeremy Guillory, 26-year-old Ricky Langley was living in Louisiana in violation of his parole conditions after serving time in Georgia for molesting a young girl. Langley’s prior arrests for molesting children leave Marzano-Lesnevich flashing back to their own childhood—indelibly marked by a visiting grandparent who molested them and their sisters for years in their own home, and parents devoted to a strict code of silence and secrecy.
Digging into Langley’s case and family history, the author finds echoes of their own family’s story—first in the horrific facts of the violence, then unexpectedly in the shadows left by defining family tragedies. Although they did not pursue a career in law after their 2003 internship, the details of the 1992 murder of Jeremy Guillory and the man responsible for it haunted them for years. It ultimately inspired them to contend with their own past and question whether the stories we tell—in courtrooms or in our families—can ever contain the whole truth.
The result of Marzano-Lesnevich’s inquiry, an effort 10 years in the making, resists anything resembling a conclusion. Instead, they invite readers to consider how our own experiences color our view of those who seem reprehensible, maybe even unforgivable, and those whose cruelty we’re willing to excuse or forgive. As they write in some of the closing pages of The Fact of a Body:
What you see in Ricky killing Jeremy, I have come to believe, depends as much on who you are and the life you have had as on what he did. But the legal narrative erases that step. It erases where it came from.
…
The law—with each side’s relentless pursuit of one story—has never known what to do with this complicated middle ground. But life is full of it.
At The Friendship Center, our work with our clients is victim-centered and always will be. Preventing future instances of violence, however, challenges us all to understand the behavior of perpetrators and the conditions that give rise to their predilection for violence, and their need to control others. After all, the perception that victims/survivors bear responsibility for any violence they’ve experienced is misguided and something we work hard to dispel. Rehashing what a victim could’ve done to prevent an assault or fatality is counterproductive. Putting a perpetrator’s actions into context, by contrast, can be more informative in prevention efforts. Even so, this does not mean violent behavior is easily explained.
Trying to understand perpetrators is often frustrating and, as Marzano-Lesnevich finds, can be re-traumatizing for those forced to relive their own violent experiences as they learn of other crimes. The stories can be messy, with actions eluding any simple “hurt people hurt people” notion of cause and effect. Violence, like the law, is wielded by people, and we all exist in an inexhaustibly “complicated middle ground” that’s worth exploring.
Our response to abhorrent actions and the context around them can never reveal unabridged truth. To think so would be hubris of the highest order. However, wading into the heavy and sometimes horrifying realities of violent crime can be a Rorschach test that reveals an awful lot about the narratives we hold onto, or want to believe.
True crime as a genre gets a justifiably bad rap for voyeurism, exploitation, and a failure to do right by victims and families at the center of shocking stories. When told with care and introspection, though, these astonishing incidents can prompt us to question our own defining stories, and help us face the nightmare scenarios we all wish to prevent. The Fact of a Body reminds us that while we’re not likely to find truth or redemption in the haunting shadows of violence, we serve nobody—least of all victims and survivors—by ignoring them.
If you want to get your own copy of The Fact of a Body, you can support our local bookstore here in Helena by ordering your paperback or Libro.fm audiobook through Montana Book Company! If you're reading for a book club, add "TFC Book Club" in the area for customer comments during online checkout to get 10% off your purchase. If you’re out in Townsend, you can support your local bookstore by ordering from Reading Leaves.
The Fact of a Body contains quotes from police reports, news stories, interviews, court documents, and transcripts from multiple trials and sentencing hearings for crimes involving murder and sexual abuse of children, as well as Marzano-Lesnevich’s own memories of being assaulted by their grandfather as a child. While it’s powerful and important to engage with survivors’ stories, we encourage everyone to read with care.
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