Mary, Mary

Chapter 106

THE MORE I HEARD, the more I doubted that Mary Wagner could have invented these three children entirely And I had a bad feeling about what might have happened to them.

I spent the afternoon trying to track the children down.

The Uniform Crime Report came back with a long list of child victims matched to female killers in recent decades. I've heard and read somewhere that shoplifting and the killing of one's own children are the only two crimes that American women commit in equal numbers to men.

If that was true, then this thick, voluminous report only represented half of the child murders on record.

I gritted my teeth, literally and figuratively and did an other run through the disturbing database.

This time, I searched for multiple homicides only With that list compiled, I started wading through.

A few of the more famous names jumped out right away: Susan Smith, who had drowned both her sons in 1994; Andrea Yates, who killed all five of her children after several years of struggling with psychosis and profound postpartum depression.

The list went on and on. None of these female perpetrators could be considered the victims in their cases, but the dominance of severe mental-health issues was clear.

Smith and Yates were both diagnosed with personality and clinical disorders. It was easy to imagine the same could be true of Mary Wagner, but a reliable diagnosis would take more time than we were likely to have together.

That particular question was sidelined a few hours into my research.

I clicked onto a new page and, sadly, found exactly what I was looking for.

A triple homicide in Derby Line, Vermont, on August 2, 1983. All three victims were siblings: Beaulac, Brendan, 8 Beaulac, Ashley, 5 Constantine, Adam, 11 months.

The killer, their mother, was a twenty-six-year-old woman, with the last name Constantine.

First name, Mary.

I cross-referenced the homicide report for local media coverage.

It brought me to an article from a 1983 Caledonian-Record in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

There was also a grainy black-and-white trial photo of Mary Constantine, seated at a defendant's table. Her face was thinner and younger, but the detached, stony expression was unmistakable, that look she had when she didn't want to feel something, or had felt too much. Jesus.

The woman I knew as Mary Wagner had killed her own children more than twenty years ago, and as far as she was concerned, it had never happened.

I pushed back my chair and took a deep breath.

Here I was, finally, at the center of the labyrinth. Now it was time to start finding my way back out.