Welcome back to SOURCE NOTES! Chances are you’re familiar with Lisa Belkin from her days at The New York Times Magazine, or HuffPost, or Yahoo! News, or from the HBO series Show Me a Hero, based on her book of the same name. Now Lisa’s making the rounds to promote her latest book, GENEALOGY OF A MURDER, which Robert Kolker called a “knotty yet exhilarating, intimate study of fate, chance and the wildly meaningful intersections of disparate lives.” Astute readers of this newsletter may recall that Lisa and I were on a panel together in May at the Montclair Literary Festival. We had lots more to talk about when we caught up last week…
A young prison doctor vouches for an inmate. The inmate gets paroled. Then the inmate kills a cop, which is the moment when the lives of these three men become inextricably intertwined. Your book is the story of how these characters ended up, over decades, on a fateful collision course.
The story happens in 1960, but the book spans almost a hundred years. It is very much the story of what happened one night with the murder of a cop. But it's also the antecedent to a murder: what were all the things that had to happen in order for this thing to happen?
And this began with a chance conversation with your late-in-life stepfather?
My mom met the man who became my stepfather in 2005. They married in 2011, but I never got to know him well, because they lived in Arizona. The short version is, I went to visit them, and my fairly new stepfather told me a story. This was 2014, and HBO had just green-lit Show Me a Hero. And so in getting to know me, he read the book, and he started this conversation by saying, you know, I just finished your book and it reminds me of a story.
We should clarify here that your stepfather, Alvin Tarlov, was the aforementioned prison doctor.
Yes. He was thirty years old. He was an Army doctor, but he was stationed at the Stateville Penitentiary in Chicago, where the Army was running experiments on prisoners. The Army desperately needed a cure, or at least some sort of treatment, for malaria. Part of the rehabilitation program in that prison at that time was training prisoners to be lab technicians.
Which brings us to the prisoner in this story.
Joseph DeSalvo. They saw each other every day, and they worked in this small enclosed space, and they filled their time talking—two autodidacts, both measurably brilliant, talking about literature and science and politics and poetry and history. And they became some version of friends. Joe asked Al for help getting parole, and Al went above and beyond. He not only wrote a letter to the parole board, but found him a job in Norwalk, Connecticut.
And this is where he kills—remind me the name of the police officer?
David Troy. DeSalvo held up a tavern in neighboring Stamford one night, the reasons for which are complicated and you can read about all of them in the book, and he killed Officer Troy, who responded to the call.
You went and traced the histories of these three obscure families. How did you approach the research?
What struck me from the minute Al started telling me about this was that all three of these men were thirty years old. All three of them were the children and grandchildren of immigrants, all of whom had come to the country to give their children a better life. So I just automatically started going backwards. The first thing I did was, I checked Al's facts using the easy databases, newspaper archives mostly. I found the shooting, and I had, for the first time, the feeling that I had over and over and over again for the nine years I worked on this, which was, Oh my God, they were real. These were real people right there in the microfiche of the Stamford library. I just printed out every article that was written about the shooting. And then with that, I went and tracked down the officer's children, who were four, three and six months when their father was killed. I wrote a message which sort of said, this may be the strangest DM you've ever gotten, but I'm writing this book about the night your father died, and how your family and mine intersected briefly, but importantly, on that night, and I would like to tell you more, and they answered. If they hadn't answered, I wouldn't have a book.
The same research must have come easier in the case of your stepfather’s family.
Right. I had him and his brothers and, you know, I went back and expanded the whole family. And with the police officer, I had a lot of official records and newspaper clippings—although I still curse the person at the Stamford Police Department who decided in the 1970s to throw away all of their files. The hard one was the killer, Joe DeSalvo.
Why was he hard?
Different families leave different footprints. All we are, really, are the stories that we tell and the memories people have of us. How else do you reconstruct someone's childhood if nobody has any stories of their childhood? DeSalvo died young. His only brother died basically months before he did. His parents died within a year of both of them. The brother had two daughters who died in their fifties, and they were by then fairly estranged from their surviving children, who had no interest in talking to me. So there were no stories. He was an enigma.
How did you pierce the enigma?
His prison file. Thank you to the Committee for Freedom of the Press in Illinois, because it took me years of filing FOIA requests. I couldn't get his juvenile file because that was privileged, but it was alluded to often in his adult file. That's mostly how I knew about his strained relationship with his parents. That’s how I knew about his motivations for the various robberies. That’s where I got the transcripts of his parole hearings. And that's how I knew about what he read from the prison library. All of this was in there. That is when I knew I had Joe. Until then, I was really gonna have to write around him, and make him this purposeful enigma who just crashed through the lives of these people. It became about the three of them when I got that file.
You went back to their parents and grandparents. You were at the mercy of the historical record.
Ancestry.com and newspapers.com, and also some very talented professional genealogists who know how to do this better than I do. I went to them to do the really deep—you know, to get the records that were still in Ireland and still in Poland and Italy.
What sort of stuff did they dig up?
They found David Troy's mother. I couldn't find her anywhere. I knew she was working in Stamford in the 1920s, but I could not for the life of me find where she came from. She had a very common name, and I couldn't find Bridget Reilly anywhere. One of the things [the genealogists] knew is that the common nickname at the time for Bridget was Delia, and they started looking for a Delia. This would not have occurred to me. They found Delia in the census, and they watched Delia get on a ship, and they watched Delia get off the ship, and they knew who sponsored Delia. And then from that, we knew her Uncle William could not possibly have housed her because he was living in a one-room boarding house in what is now Westchester, but was then called Country Club, New York. And so she had to take care of herself. She was sixteen and she was basically put on a ship, and here is the ship, and these were the kind of horrible circumstances that she endured on that ship. And then she came to her Uncle William, who was supposed to take care of her, but couldn't.
Aside from the police file, what other sorts of archives did you end up spending time with?
Well, first of all, God bless old-time newspaper reporters. There used to be a whole lot more of them, and they used to be a whole lot more local. The book starts with a train crash in 1906. And it very purposely starts with that, because if not for that train crash, then a whole lot of other dominoes would not have fallen. Max Tarlov was killed in that train crash. The family got together as a result and decided that they were going to fulfill what would've been Max's last wish, which was to send one of them to college, and the best candidate was one-year-old Isadore. Isadore went on to become a renowned neurologist, and Al Tarlov's mentor. Al was his nephew, the child of one of the other ten children that were left without a father after the train crash. So, had the train not crashed, Isadore may well never have gone to college. Then Isadore would never have become Al's mentor, and had he not become Al's mentor, Al would probably never have gone to medical school, because he credits Isadore for changing his life. Had Al not gone to medical school, he wouldn't have been a doctor stationed at the Stateville Penitentiary who met Joseph DeSalvo.
So back to the crash. I knew from the news accounts what seat Max was sitting in. That his head was still on his jacket, which he had been using as a pillow when he fell asleep. That he had the newspaper with the news of the earthquake in San Francisco next to him. I know who knocked the window in to get to his body. I mean, those details do not exist in news coverage anymore. They were all done by the local reporter who was on the scene.
Also, the articles were so long back then. They would just put everything in there.
Right. We've lost all of that. What we've gained is Instagram and Facebook. I would've known every single thing, you know, that Max ate for breakfast and what he was wearing. The details that remain of us now are astounding compared to the ones that we've lost to history over the centuries. What's the tradeoff? It will be different writing books about the past a hundred years from now.
In addition to the family histories, what other historical topics did you have to become an expert in?
Many. The McCarthy era. I learned a lot about motorcycle racing. Did you know it was the biggest sport in the United States in 1908?
I didn’t know that.
I got there by accident because I happened on a newspaper clipping that had the names of my shooter's father and his twin brother. They kept coming up in news clippings about motorcycle races, and so now I'm in a world where my shooter's father is a motorcycle racing almost-star. He nearly made it, and the not making it made him into a fairly abusive human who probably destroyed his son enough that his son arguably never had a chance.
You also went down rabbit holes with the Spanish Flu, Leopold and Loeb…
Yes! Leopold and Loeb showed up in my book. Nathan Leopold was sentenced to ninety-nine years to life. He had a lot of time on his hands in the Stateville Penitentiary, the same prison we've been talking about all along. He and Loeb would make these bets as to who was going to stay out once paroled and who was going to end up coming back. And they were right a huge percentage of the time. So then they started to codify why they placed these bets. They ended up writing for sociological journals under pseudonyms because murderers probably shouldn't be writing for sociological journals. Leopold ended up creating this parole prediction instrument that was used by the State of Illinois, and eventually other states, as the way to determine who would make good on parole. And that is what Al used, in part, to decide that Joseph DeSalvo was a good bet.
Fascinating.
So if not for Nathan Leopold, it is likely that Joe DeSalvo would not have been released when he was. If Nathan Leopold had not committed murder in 1924, it is arguably likely that Joseph DeSalvo would not have been paroled in 1960.
We're both longtime reporters who ended up doing research-driven historical non-fiction books. I don't know about you, but I find that I prefer the historical research.
I am now firmly committed to the past. In March of 2020, I was in the middle of the 1918 chapter. It was just a year of death. And I looked at my husband at dinner one night in the early days of the pandemic, and I said, I'd rather be back in 1918. I know how that ends. When you write about the past, you know the end.
If you're firmly committed to writing about the past now, does that mean you have another book in the works about something from long ago?
Well, it's kind of like asking someone who's just given birth when they’ll have their next child. But the fact is, yes, I do. I already have a next idea and it is something else that grabbed me from the past. This one starts in the 1920s.
I’m gonna turn the recorder off now so you can tell me what it is.
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That's really sold me on the book, and on following Lisa Belkin's future work ('Show Me A Hero's theme makes it far too close to the work I do to for me to want to read it). Nice interview with a really thoughtful writer!