THE MURDERS

Beloved reader, I have a story to tell you. it is a story of change, of seeds being planted and growing, of wind blowing away debris and changing the landscape, of the impossible becoming possible.

The story is born of tragedy, of the evil, senseless taking of human lives I held most dear. My first response to that tragedy was to seal a stone over my heart, to take a rock in my hand to throw at the perpetrator, guilty as he was.

This is the story of how God rolled away that stone, loosened the fingers that gripped that rock, till it thudded in the dirt — and grew in its stead the green shoots of transformation and new life, renewal and change.

It is my story, but it is also yours, because God who loves us all and wrought this miracle in my life has the power to transform yours as well, to lead you into places you never dreamed you would go.

The story begins with a family straight out of an American fairy tale: A happy house on a tree-lined street with two parents and three girls, Jennifer, Jeanne, and Nancy. Jennifer was the oldest, I was the middle, and Nancy was the youngest. She was the bright, sunny one, the girl who loved to joke and dance and sing and tease. She was the girly one, the one who loved to cook and decorate and make crafty things. She was adored — by our parents, her sisters, her friends — because she was adorable. When Nancy was a senior at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, a school known for its theater and music programs, she landed the role of Maria in West Side Story. She was barely acting when she sang, "I feel charming! Oh, so charming! It's alarming how charming I feel!" She was right, after all: she was charming, and funny, and loving, and often deeply wise.

One of the people Nancy charmed was a Catholic boy from the South Side of Chicago, Richard Langert, the youngest of four boys. They had caught each other's eye when Richard was working for a company associated with my father's business. They ended up working together at the same company, Gloria Jean's Coffee Beans, Rich managing the warehouse and Nancy working in the office.

Richard courted and married her when she was young. They fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. He was a jock, a six-foot-three, 230-pound baseball and football player, the Gentle Giant, as he was nicknamed. She was the music and theater geek whose skin was as soft and pale as his was hard and tanned. He was strong and silent; she was the comedienne. He basked in the radiant glow she cast; she leaned on him for support.

They reveled in each other's company. Richard often had to work weekend nights at the warehouse, so Nancy made sure that Sunday mornings were always sacred — their time together. If you walked by their bedroom on a Sunday morning, as I happened to do one day when they were staying at my parents' home, you would hear the sound of their laughter floating through the door. Laughter was a familiar sound around them.

On the Friday nights when Richard was away at work, I would take the train from downtown Chicago to Nancy and Richard's cozy apartment on Tower Road in Winnetka, a few blocks from the Hubbard Woods train stop. Nancy and I would put on sweats and climb under a blanket on their couch, our backs resting on either end and our feet meeting in the middle, sharing a bowl of popcorn and a Hitchcock movie.

Their set point was happy. Their tastes were simple. I got to travel with them once, on a trip to Scotland not long before they were killed. The theaters and sights and restaurants of Edinburgh were fun, but what Nancy and Richard truly loved was small and quiet: the tiny northern town of Pitlochry. The stone walls and rosebushes, the churches nestled in the hills — a bit of Nancy's and Richard's hearts stayed there when we left. When we returned home, she showed me a photo she had taken of the town: "This is what heaven will look like," she said.

Nancy had no lofty career goals; what she wanted more than anything was to be a wife and a mom. She wanted a house with a white picket fence, literally. After their wedding, Nancy and Richard set out right away to have a baby.

She devoted herself to the project: she shunned junk food, avoided cigarette smoke, took vitamins, wished and prayed. When Nancy found out she was pregnant, she was over the moon. She rushed out to buy baby bottles, arranging them in a neat row on a kitchen shelf. She was twenty-five years old.

To celebrate the pregnancy, I gathered with Nancy, Richard, and my mother and father on the night before Palm Sunday in 1990 at a cozy Italian restaurant on Chicago's North Side. It was the perfect place — warm and fragrant; a big table set with candlelight; pasta, wine, and laughter. Nancy joked happily about gaining baby weight. My parents beamed contentedly; the grandchild they had longed for was at last to come. I gave Nancy a baby gift, a soft, hand-knitted baby sweater I had picked up on a recent trip. As we hugged our good-byes in the parking lot in back of the restaurant, I talked with Nancy about coming over the next day, after church. "See you tomorrow," I said as we parted. It is a phrase I have never spoken since: those words now seem to me a tempter of fate, a foretelling of doom. I had no idea as I said them to her, hugging her warm body and smelling the perfume she loved to wear, that it was her last night on earth.

After we left the restaurant, I returned alone to my apartment near the Chicago lakefront. My parents went back to their large suburban home. Nancy and Richard drove back to the townhouse they were staying in, owned by my parents, in one of the safest and most affluent communities in America, the North Shore enclave of Winnetka.

At that same moment, an intruder was using a glass cutter to break through the sliding glass back door of Nancy and Richard's home. Dressed in black and wearing gloves, he silently stacked the pieces of glass he had shorn away on the ground; he knew that smashing the glass would alert the neighbors, who might call the police. He entered the townhouse and looked around. He positioned a chair in the middle of the living room so that he could see every entrance to the townhouse: the front door, the side door, the back.

Then he sat down and waited.

When Nancy and Richard returned to the townhouse, their killer had a loaded gun in his hand: a .357 Magnum revolver he had stolen just two days earlier. Richard immediately began bargaining for their lives. He told the intruder that Nancy was pregnant. Richard offered whatever they had in the townhouse: jewelry, electronics, $500 in cash Nancy had gotten when she'd cashed a paycheck at the bank earlier that day. Police evidence technicians later found the money strewn on the ground, as if it had been tossed...