Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter

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I MEET JESSICA FOR THE FIRST TIME on Sunday, April 20, 2008, at the Olive Garden restaurant in Champaign. I wait in the lobby for a while, listening to the music of idealized Italy. I’m wondering whether Jessica is going to show. If I were her, I wouldn’t. You can never trust someone who wants to tell a story. But then she walks in. It’s like seeing a celebrity, after watching her on CNN. Her pale, open face, an oval of confusion and guilt and loss. Impossible to know what she was like before. She’s a kind of ghost now, walking carefully, and she’s brought a friend. “This is my friend Josh,” she says. “He’s here for moral support.” It’s a new Josh, not the one Steve knew, this one smaller, dark hair, quiet, mild as milk. I wonder whether he’s the new boyfriend. I’m guessing I won’t find out.

We’re shown to a table, and I’m talking, trying to ease the tension, wondering how to put her at ease. So as we sit down, I talk about my father, about suicide bereavement, about how sorry I am she’s having to go through all this. And all of this is true. I feel tremendously sorry for anyone heading down the early part of that long road. You can’t see the end in sight. It’s terrifying. And I see similarities between Steve and my father, especially the relentless feeling they both had, deep down, that they weren’t good, that they were ultimately just pieces of shit.

“It’s been an intense couple of weeks,” I tell Jessica, “because I’ve had to reevaluate my father and look at him more generously in some ways. After twenty-eight years of suicide bereavement, you sort of feel like you’re through with it, but it’s amazing, even after years, there are new stages that come up as you learn new things. It’s made me more sympathetic to that struggle he had, seeing it in someone else.”

I offer Jessica the chance to write something herself for the Esquire article, her own voice presented directly. She could tell the story of how she first met Steve. “It’s pretty awful,” I tell her, “in the media and vigils and such, how he’s been erased, and demonized by the media, and I think there’s something valuable in trying to recover who he was and what everyone loved about him.”

At this point, I don’t yet know his story. I’m still thinking he was that sweet grad student who just inexplicably snapped, because I’ve spent two weeks with his friends and professors, all the people who loved him, all the people he hid his past from. It won’t be until the next evening that I go bowling and am offered that first contact with one of his high school girlfriends, Julie Creamer.

So I feel sorry for Jessica at this dinner, and she gets teary-eyed several times. When I first mention the victims, for instance, and when I mention his cutting his arms, though I don’t yet have any context for that. She’s especially upset when I mention that Steve’s memorial cross on campus was burned by someone. I thought she already knew this. She cries, and I feel awful for bringing it up.

But mostly, at this dinner, Jessica lies to me. She realizes I just don’t know much yet, and so she lies about everything she possibly can. I ask, for instance, whether Steve was ever with a man, because one of the grad students mentioned that Steve had confessed having several encounters in high school, but Jessica tells me that’s absolutely not true. She’s so upset she’s not eating her meal. It just sits there in front of her for a full three hours of conversation, and her friend Josh doesn’t eat, either. Jessica has ordered a peach iced tea with slices of peaches in it, and she swirls these around with the straw. I believe her about everything, have no idea she’s lying to me. I was feeling manipulative, bringing in my father and my own suicide bereavement, but Jessica is even better at this game than I am. Her tears are real, she tells a few real memories of Steve, she confirms just enough to make the lies and evasions invisible.