The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

As a child I never thought about my sister's having had a body. I never wondered where she was buried. She wasn't a baby to me. She was absence...But in Ricky's story, I started to see her everywhere. In Cole's growing up in Jeremy's absence. In the trunk Bessie kept in her closet. In the photograph of Oscar that Ricky carried, making the boy into his imaginary friend. Oscar wasn't imaginary. He has a grave. The fact of a body. But where? I decided I had to ask.

The subtitle of The Fact of a Body is “A Murder and a Memoir”, and that's exactly what this is: Two very different types of books, filtered and tied together through the author's own body; her own memories, thoughts, and physical reactions. Growing up the daughter of two lawyers, author Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich embraced a staunch anti-death penalty stance, but when, as an interning law student, she watched the videotaped confession of pedophile/murderer Ricky Langley, every cell in her body yearned for this man's death; how was she to reconcile her body's physical rejection of what she thought were her core beliefs? After getting her law degree, Marzano-Lesnevich pursued a writing career, and after ten years of research – which included travel, interviews, and the scouring of thirty thousand pages of documents – she produced this book; a highly personal account of how delving into one criminal case forced the author to confront the ghosts in her own past. This isn't quite a True Crime narrative – there are so many conflicting accounts of the central murder that Marzano-Lesnevich never lands on the “truth” – and it isn't quite a proper Memoir – Marzano-Lesnevich bravely exposes the family secrets that have shaped her, but much feels missing and unexamined – and by mashing the two genres together, the author creates a strange hybrid; something less (I can't find an antonym for “synergy”, but that's what I'm aiming for). This book feels like it should be interesting and important, but Marzano-Lesnevich just misses the mark.

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.

This idea of story and truth is central to The Fact of a Body: We are told right away that in 1992, Ricky Langley murdered six-year-old neighbour Jeremy Guillroy; Langley confesses several times to the murder, and his guilt is never disputed. In a death penalty state like Louisiana, that's enough to earn Langley a ticket to death row, and that's where his first trial concludes. Ten years later, anti-death penalty crusader Clive Stafford Smith takes up Langley's cause (and it is with this advocacy group that Marzano-Lesnevich gets involved as a student), and after a new trial is ordered, Langley's sentence is commuted to life in prison. While at first Marzano-Lesnevich is vexed by the idea of this particular offender escaping the death penalty, by researching his troubled past and moving back the date at which his story begins (even Langley's conception and birth is a wild tale), the author begins to identify with elements of his story (not necessarily with Langley himself, but as in that opening quote I used, she sees details of his story within her own family and within the families of everyone else tied to the case; it's complicated.) Marzano-Lesnevich is forced to recognise that her visceral reaction to watching Langley's confession is tied to events from her own life, and she uses this book to expose those secrets that her family has long refused to talk about (and there are many secrets). And there's a nugget of something interesting here that should have been the focus of this book: Marzano-Lesnevich had always thought herself as anti-death penalty, but if she had been on Langley's jury, she could well have surprised herself by voting for his death. As it turns out, the foreman of the second jury that eventually sentenced Langley to life said in a later conference, “I knew as soon as I saw him I wasn't gonna let them kill that boy”: Marzano-Lesnevich attended that conference, but if she hadn't, this wouldn't be a part of the record at all; neither would this foreman's comments about his own schizophrenic brother-in-law and how Langley reminded him of his own family's struggle. This idea of truth and justice being filtered through individual human experience – that the law is not an impersonal, immutable monolith – would have tied together everything Marzano-Lesnevich seems to be saying, but it's really not the focus here; the foreman's statement is a throwaway line amongst innumerable others. But my bigger complaint would be that we never seem to arrive at the truth of anything:

Maybe now Ricky touches him; maybe now he can admit to himself what he's wanted since seeing Jeremy in the bath. Maybe he doesn't. In all that will come from this moment, the three different trials and the three different videotaped confessions and the DNA testing and the serology reports and the bodily fluid reports and the psychiatric testimony and all the sworn sworn sworn truths, no one but Ricky will ever know for certain.

Right from the start, Marzano-Lesnevich admits that there are conflicting reports for every detail of the case; it can't even be claimed for certain that Langley had molested Jeremy before killing him. The author must choose between accounts for every aspect of the narrative, which she admits to doing, but she also decides to add drama to the storytelling by imagining what was in people's minds; fictionalising what they might have been wearing or doing with their hands. I get that as a technique in “non-fiction novels” – Truman Capote used it in In Cold Blood; Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song – but that's not what The Fact of a Body is; this never follows a straight-lined plot that begs to be filled in. At one point, Marzano-Lesnevich writes that she imagines the videographer who followed Langley and the detectives up the stairs to where Jeremy's body was hidden was probably a rookie; a newbie given an unwanted task in the big investigation. In the endnotes she writes that the “deputy who did the videotaping was not new to the job” but “I have retained my initial imagining of it and flagged it as imagined in the text”. To what purpose? I can only assume that Marzano-Lesnevich's intent was to filter everything she learned about the crime through her own senses and experiences – through the facts of her own body – and that leads to some confusing connections, some out-of-place flowery language, some left-field conclusions. Ultimately, this book doesn't feel well-written, and in a way, it feels gratuitous: as though Marzano-Lesnevich is using the sensationalism of a little boy's murder to explore and reveal her own interior life. I didn't get it and I didn't like it; rounding down to two stars because I just can't give it three.