All Evidence of Animal Behavior by Colleen Abel
My favorite painting by Kira Simonian is called “Hard Cell #2.” At the bottom of the canvas: rectangles with rounded corners rendered in terra cotta browns, blacks, gray-blues, mint greens. They look like a drift of human cell clusters swimming in the eyepiece of a microscope. These blobs are painted upon a photograph of a partially demolished building, its front blasted away. So much of Kira’s work uses this same photographic image, cells oozing out from the building’s rubble. In her project statement about these works, she wrote, “I want my paintings to show the merging of the human body with the rest of the world. We are so afraid to be a part of nature that we disguise our bodies, hiding all evidence of animal behavior. We make our bodies into buildings, insulating and isolating ourselves.” But life is insistent, or art is: The cell-bricks run, unruly, from the wreckage and at times look like the only things still holding up the structure, keeping it from falling totally into ruin.
On the morning of June 29, 2007, Tim’s cell phone rings. The number is from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where Tim has just finished his first year in the MFA program. He holds his phone in the air while we look at each other, doing a sort of telepathic guessing game. Financial aid? A professor? Studio manager? Admissions?
“Hello?” he says. “Oh, hi!” I watch his face, his expression perplexed until it changes utterly: his muscles slacken, and he goes pale. The conversation is short. “Thank you for calling,” Tim says. Behind him, our cats in squares of sun. They are hairless, so we have to put sunscreen on their wrinkly heads to keep them from turning red. In this apartment, especially: so many windows, so much bright sun.
“That was the dean,” Tim says. “Kira Simonian was murdered yesterday in her apartment.”
When a tragedy occurs, its effects move outward in concentric circles. Where you are in those circles, your distance from the center of the tragedy gives you certain unspoken rights in others’ eyes: the right to mourn, the right to tell the story. In the middle of that circle is the victim, the next ring out is family. In terms of emotional proximity, when Kira died, there was not much I could claim. I never met her. While Tim was in his first semester at MCAD, I lived in dusty Oklahoma at a one-semester writer-in-residence gig, lonely and listening to Samuel Beckett audiobooks on the elliptical at the university gym. He made friends with his cohort of classmates in my absence. They all shared warehouse studio space, a rogue’s gallery of types I’d hear about over the phone. Willow, who made stuffed creatures and whimsical fabric installations; a lesbian performance artist; a goth photographer. He made fast friends with New Jersey Doug, a sound artist. At their first critique, Doug ambled up to one of Tim’s paintings. “Christ, not birds,” he said. Kira was a painter, this was what I knew of her, a painter and from suburban Chicago, like Tim and me. But we were not in that close concentric circle. Not friend friends, not people who had known Kira long. Still, we were somewhere far closer than the strangers in the city, in the country, on the internet who would speculate on the case, closer than the makers of the Investigation Discovery program about her murder, than the people who consumed that program, than the girl who published a short story online about Kira that cannot be described as anything other than a kind of Dead Girl fanfic. It’s a strange place to float, this circle. How could I claim grief over this woman I never knew?
According to the Washington Post, Americans are most likely to point to the year when they were eleven years old as the moment they feel society peaked. Averaging the results from questions like “When do you feel American film was at its best? American politics? Music? Society?” researchers discovered that eleven is kind of a golden age of development, too young to be jaded or hyperaware of global politics, old enough to participate in pop culture and to watch historical events as they unfolded on TV. A few weeks after I turned twelve, an eleven-year-old girl was murdered in Waukegan, a far-north exurb of Chicago, and the hometown I share with Tim. Holly Staker and I were born about six months apart, alike in our hairsprayed early nineties bangs and our saturated pink-and-teal wardrobe, alike in navigating our hardscrabble city. My mom and I were watching the news—it was summer, and our storm door was open to the glowdown of late day. The reporter on the screen told us the girl had been raped and stabbed to death while babysitting. The two children she was watching were unharmed. They said the name of the street; it was the same one my best friend lived on. Who was I seeing when I saw Holly’s photo on television, fine-boned and smiling, blonde where I was dark? Was I seeing her or was I seeing myself? My mom didn’t let me babysit or stay home alone yet, but apart from those details, what kept Holly from being me? And why did I feel so guilty that my mother was wrapping her arms around me and putting her mouth to the top of my head, saying, “Oh that poor baby.” Did we deserve to feel relief that we had been passed over? It felt selfish. There but for the grace of God, I had heard grown-ups say. But what did that mean for the dead girl? I felt sure that there was nothing I had done to deserve grace, and nothing Holly had done not to. I stared at the television, shots of the exterior of the house, brown with two stories, yellow police tape, summer trees in green leaf, a row of bushes in the front yard. It was the first time I really felt that the world, the adult world, had no special wisdom. Holly’s story would spin and spin and spin, outsized and mythic, changing with time, but I am older now than my mother was then, and still no one knows who killed Holly Staker.
In terms of emotional proximity, when Kira died, there was not much I could claim.
When Tim gets off the phone, we go to the Internet to see if there is news footage or website info. We watch the clip from KARE 11 news, which shows Kira’s apartment building, very near MCAD on the south side of the city. The camera shows close-up footage behind the police tape of a first-floor window whose corner has been pulled from the frame. A green plastic chair has been propped below the window. Through a voiceover, we learn that just inside that window, Kira lay on the living room floor dressed in a t-shirt and panties covered in stab wounds. The reporter notes that Kira’s husband, Matt, had been away in New York on a business trip at the time.
Tim and I watch the clip on the KARE site a few times.
“So someone climbed on the chair to break through the window, found Kira alone and killed her?” I say.
“It looks like it,” says Tim, standing behind my shoulder watching the computer screen.
Tim’s phone rings again. It’s New Jersey Doug. “Dude,” he says. “This is fucking fucked.”
New Jersey Doug and his girlfriend, Jen, come for beers; the four of us sit on our balcony grimly looking out into the street below. Next door is a church that is now someone’s private residence—the chouse, we call it—and a party is gathering there like storm clouds. Every weekend, cathunking techno emanates from the chouse, and multicolor lights flare and pulse. Tim and I are never invited.
Tim and Doug discuss a time they went bowling with a few of the MFA cohort at Bryant Lake Bowl before I moved to Minneapolis. Willow the puppet maker had been at the bowling alley. Catherine, Kira’s next-door studio neighbor and fast friend. Kira and her husband Matt. I want to know what they were like together, what Matt is like. These people had been characters to me in Tim’s stories over the phone when we lived apart, but reality now urged me to take them in more fully. But Tim and Doug both shrug, frown, as if to say that a deep impression hadn’t been made.
“He has this fancy marketing job at Target. He looks like a corporate business guy. Not really…” Tim begins.
I look around—two grad students in art, me and Jen scraping by with a combination of freelance and temp gigs, all four of us years away from a foreign concept like a salary.
“Not really like us,” I say.
Talk turns to news of the crime. I’ve been pathologically Googling for information on Kira’s murder. The MPD is saying almost nothing, so I tell myself I’m taking matters into my own hands.
“Apparently,” I tell everyone, “Kira’s apartment building has been dealing with a peeping Tom. So it seems like the neighbors are pretty sure this guy crossed the line from looking in the window to going through the window.”
“Maybe,” Jen says, “he saw Kira’s husband leave for the business trip and knew she was alone in there, so he broke in. Maybe she put up a fight so he killed her.”
“And do we know if she was—” I cut myself off; I am about to ask if she had been sexually assaulted, but this is not the path I want to go down. I start over. “If the neighbors have been comparing descriptions with each other of what this peeping Tom looked like, why haven’t the police released a description or a composite sketch? Or at least a warning? Is this not a big deal to them?”
“You know what all my friends in New York City said when I told them I was moving here for school?” Doug says. “‘You’re moving to Murderapolis’? That’s what people call it. Murderapolis.”
When Matt flies back to Minneapolis from his New York City business trip, he can’t go back to his apartment, so he stays with Catherine and her husband, Billy. The two couples—Catherine and Billy, Kira and Matt—grew close quickly, and Catherine and Billy are protective of Matt. They serve as our conduit for news. We learn that on the day Kira’s body was discovered, police had difficulty reaching Matt on his cell phone. Not knowing yet that he was out of town, they reached out to Kira and Matt’s friends to see if they knew where he was. In this way, word spread about Kira’s death quickly through the MFA cohort, and I can’t shake the haunted feeling that we may have known that Kira was dead before Matt did. We also know from this same lightning-speed information network that Matt’s been going through round after round of police questioning. I’m haunted by this, too: the idea that, on top of grieving his wife, he has to be subjected to another ordeal. But crime stories tell me this is routine: the cops need to rule people out. They need to build their narrative. I’m trying to build one, too.
But the media reporting still tells me too little. Kira died of “complex homicidal violence,” having been struck with a hammer in the head, strangled, and stabbed. Her body was found on Thursday evening when her landlord came to install new locks at Kira’s request.
In the absence of official information, I find message boards. True crime internet forums have been around since the earliest days of the Internet, but the concept of the cybersleuth—the armchair detective who scrolls missing persons’ photos in their spare time, attempting to match them to forensic sketches of unidentified remains—has not widely entered the public consciousness in 2007. But there are other people like me obsessed by the single question I cannot put down: Who did this? It isn’t that I’m waiting for punishment or justice—whatever those abstractions mean—but I am beside myself with a lack of knowledge. I tell myself I just want the truth, but I also feel I can scour these forums and discover a reality that others are unable to see. All I ever wanted to be was a writer, from the time I was four years old. A story, even a true one, could be arranged artfully enough to make sense in a way that reality did not. As I grew up, I cultivated those traits in me that made me a writer: clear-eyed assessment of others’ characters, a distrust of cliche or conformity. But what I don’t realize is that in this instance, I have my own feelings that muddy my ability to be objective: A hypervigilance in the wake of Kira’s death that leaves me imagining a stranger crawling up to our balcony in the night and jimmying open a window. I fear Tim could be accosted, mugged, stabbed to death, left for dead outside the pool of weak light that shines down at night from the MCAD studio building where he often works late. These fears aren’t new: When we were newly married, we lived in New York, and I used to meet him at the Starbucks in Astoria when he closed well past midnight, so scared of something happening to him on the ten-minute walk home that I insisted on showing up to accompany him. None of this was rational. But by the time I find the message boards about Kira’s death, I’ve practiced so much magical thinking about protecting the people I love from harm that I could have earned a degree in it. I can’t see in the moment how these fears color my obsession with finding the truth.
As the cyber-conversation unspools in the first few days of July, it’s clear that the commenters are divided between the idea that a stalker or stranger killed Kira, and those whose suspicion falls on her husband. These camps trade information and speculations back and forth, sometimes in a kind of mild theoretical tone, as if they’re smoking pipes like Holmes and Watson in a drawing room. I hate this. It feels like a game, like one I’d attended as a preteen—not long, actually, after Holly Staker was killed—where I played a femme fatale character-suspect at a murder mystery birthday party. My mother had done my eyeliner. I wore a black beret and a black blazer, smoking a fake cigarette. I can’t remember now whether I was the guilty party.
There are other people like me obsessed by the single question I cannot put down: Who did this?
Very quickly, the exchanges on the message board turn ugly, the divisions between the two broad camps (pro-stranger, pro-Matt) growing starker, those concentric circles rippling out. There are MCAD classmates of Kira’s, Illinois friends of hers, friends of her sisters. There are many people who live in Kira’s neighborhood. A person who claims to be the landlord’s best friend is described by someone else on the forum as “wacki.” A person who claims to live in the quadruplex with Kira and Matt. Many Minneapolis residents looking to understand if they are safe from harm, commentators who don’t hesitate to name registered sex offenders who live near Kira’s address, encouraging us all to Be On the Look Out. Many posters who just love unsolved mysteries, sifting through the clues and claiming an interest partly due to their opinion that the case is being underreported, possibly headed for cold-case status. There appear to be a few factions from within the MCAD community, all jockeying for their particular positions, bickering with each other and with those who were in further circles than themselves. They go by handles like @mcad, @Julia @anotherfriend, @d, @de. They leap to Kira’s defense when strangers invent a persona for her based on her scant online presence or her angular hipster haircut:
JM wrote:
I wonder if [Simonian] was as mean and condescending as she wanted her Friendster account to portray her? This woman didn’t seem to be overflowing with the milk of human kindness. I don’t know, maybe it was an act to give her art school cred. Anyone know her personally?
Wednesday, July 4, 2007 at 7:03 am
friend wrote:
JM …you are sick, you have No idea who she was.
Also, people who claim to be her friends, who are you? @Mcad, D, OM ….who are you? If you were really her friend, you’d know who I am, I am a grad student and Kira & Matt were featured in my work…that’s all I should have to say for you to identify me. If you’re serious, email or call me and we need to discuss a few things. Most importantly how NOT to fan this sick flame!
I’ll say again, all those who are saying they know something CONTACT THE POLICE!
Sunday, July 8, 2007 at 9:16 p.m.
Many strangers respond to “friend,” explaining to them that this is a dedicated space for speculation. People are working together from their different corners to piece bits together to create a bigger picture. One person points out, gently, that strangers might be able to see things more objectively than the people who were close to the couple. Another poster suggests that anyone who knew Kira and Matt personally should find other spaces. The cybersleuths want the right to steer the conversation in the ways they see fit; our emotions are getting in their way.
eloise wrote:
Those of us who DID know Kara [sic] and Matt are desperate for answers and desperate to understand who would take her from us. The police are not doing anything, or at least are not saying anything and there is SO MUCH contradictory info that I appreciate coming to this blog to remind myself that people are still fighting to keep the discussion of this murder alive […] I think this speculation is a way–no more unhealthy or healthy than any other coping mechanism–to grieve for Kira and to assuage what fear we can, and I don’t think you should make anyone from the MCAD community feel bad about that.
Sunday, July 8, 2007 at 10:22 pm
I’m unable to connect any of the posters to people in real-life, even those who say they are part of Tim and Kira’s cohort. Whenever we are together in person, we don’t confess to being on the forum, don’t out ourselves as being behind this or that handle. It seems the least important thing to talk about when we are face-to-face. Seventeen years later, when I rediscover these posts through the Wayback Machine, I’m caught by the name “eloise.” I have no clear memory that I posted at all on these forums. But Eloise was my great aunt’s name, and it’s when I read this particular response—a bit formal, a bit imperious, distorting a connection to Kira as a way to defend against the terror and obsessiveness at the heart of visiting and posting on the blog at all—that I am certain that Eloise is me.
Some MFA students are questioned by the police. Catherine, Billy, others. During the earliest round of questions, police want to know about Kira and Matt’s relationship. How did they seem together? Was Kira afraid of him? Did she ever mention being hit or hurt? Law enforcement heard that Kira originally planned on accompanying her husband on the business trip to New York but backed out at the last minute. Any idea why?
During the second round, their questions shift slightly: Did Kira mention she was concerned about security in the apartment building? Did she mention she and her husband had been bugging their landlady to fix some shoddy locks? Did she mention having trouble with a front window screen? Did she mention whether she slept with a knife under her pillow?
A what, the MFA students say. No. No, of course she didn’t.
In mid-July, there is a candlelight vigil for Kira. Matt is planned as a speaker; community members will walk from Fair Oaks Park to Kira’s apartment carrying candles. The vigil has been spearheaded by a bunch of Tim’s classmates. It’s a remembrance of Kira, and a public show of support for Matt. There is a feeling between Tim and me that we must decide whether or not to go, and in so doing, we are making some kind of decisive statement.
A few days before the vigil, Tim runs into Willow the fiber artist and puppet maker. Willow lived alone just down the street from Kira’s apartment and has now moved in with another MFA student after the murder, afraid to live alone in the wake of Kira’s killing.
“Are you going to the vigil?” Willow asks Tim. They are in the large main hall of the MCAD building: grand staircase, high ceilings. Sound carries easily through its cool halls. She keeps her voice low, unsure who else is around. This is the way conversations are carried on now.
“I don’t know,” Tim says.
“I went to the funeral,” Willow says. “And that seemed like the wrong choice. Too intimate.”
“I’m wondering about that here, too. For myself,” Tim admits.
“I haven’t felt like I can talk about this with anyone,” Willow says. “But the more time I spend around Matt, the more uncomfortable I get.”
Tim reports this to me. I’m holed up at home watching a Civil War documentary. I’ve recently become obsessed by the idea that I have no knowledge of history, that my history education is lacking due to a series of boring high school and college classes, and I’m trying to make up for it now by forcing myself to sit through films with titles like The Ten Most Decisive Battles of the American Civil War. When I pause the screen to talk to Tim, a photograph of Antietam freezes in place. The image is bodies and bodies and bodies, so many bodies that it is impossible to tell where one begins and one ends, heaps of cloth and barely-shaped shapes, almost indistinguishable except for their organic irregularity from the stones and dirt and trenches and ruts of the landscape. I turn off the TV. I know in that moment I will return the DVD with the rest unwatched.
“What do you think she means?” I ask Tim. “Uncomfortable how?” Uncomfortable can mean so many things. I want to know the quality and source of this discomfort: whether it’s because of Matt’s grief, or because she isn’t sure who did this, or because she feels out of step with the cohort and unable to voice her doubts. I think about the message boards, the way the loudest of the MCAD posters fiercely snap like guard dogs at speculation about Kira and Matt’s life together, shutting down rumors and conjecture by people who didn’t know them, who never will. Sometimes, online, I forget that I am among this latter group. But I am anxious not to overstep in person.
“I’m not sure,” Tim says. “But is it ok if I don’t go to the vigil?”
“Of course,” I say. There is no question of me going without him. We stay home and watch a movie—not a documentary, nothing with any death at all.
another thought wrote:
Was there competition for the art gallery showings that Kira was a part of this summer? Did some artists’ work not get picked over hers? Were there individuals who repeatedly could have felt like Kira’s talent was a threat to their own?
Thursday, July 12, 2007 at 3:57 pm
The thought comes to me powerfully: I have never seen a person who is so ill at ease
The show at the Chambers Hotel was curated before Kira’s death, and it is decided that it will go forward in the wake of her murder. Tim is in it, as is Kira, and as he works to hang the show in his role as gallery assistant, he is struck by the changes in Kira’s most recent paintings, the ones she completed right before her murder. Like her old work, this work features photos of demolished or crumbling architecture. Instead of painting cell-like shapes onto the photos, these works pop into the third dimension: spray foam insulation springs from them like a biological nightmare, insides coming out, a building like a decomposing body. It’s a step beyond the other art I’ve seen from her, the painted cells. More evidence of animal behavior, signs of something shifting in her thinking. Would I find it so dark if she were alive? I’m not sure.
The mood at the show opening is somber, but aren’t openings usually, people walking around with a tiny cup of something aloft in one hand, and the other hand tucked under their elbow—somehow the universal gesture of art appraisal. People talk low, shuffle about; outside, the July sun sinks and grows amber, but in the track lighting of the gallery, we all look pale and furtive. I never drink, so I bring a little cup of water to my mouth nervously as Tim and I chat with a rotating cadre of people, until someone—Catherine—sidles up to us with a blonde, stooped man in a suit and tie. “Colleen,” she says, “this is Kira’s husband.”
Matt has a very high forehead, hair receding at the sides. His eyebrows are so light, his face looks almost absent of them, making his eyes appear darker—starker—than they really are. He seems frankly miserable, sweat beading beneath his bangs, his eyes darting around the room.
We shake hands. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I say.
He nods fitfully, automatic. “Thank you,” he says.
I gesture to the walls with Kira’s work. “You must be so proud of her,” I say. He blinks, as if he has not considered this.
The thought comes to me powerfully: I have never seen a person who is so ill at ease, so nervous, so skittish. He fidgets like he hears a heart beneath the gallery floorboards. This is exactly how I believe I would act if I weren’t sure if any stranger I met might suspect me of murder. His behavior makes clear, perfect sense to me.
“Yes,” Matt says. “I am.”
At the end of July, the peeping Tom spotted at Kira’s quadruplex is identified. He was in a halfway house at the time of Kira’s murder and is eliminated as a potential suspect. “There goes my idea,” @SuziQ writes on the forum.
After Holly Staker was murdered in 1992, Waukegan police got a tip from a prisoner that his cellmate had confessed to knowing who murdered Holly. The cellmate, Juan Rivera, claimed to have been at a party on the night that Holly was killed a few blocks away, and that another man at the party kept leaving and coming back, at one point returning with scratches on his face and blood on his clothes. The police questioned Rivera for days without an attorney, pointing out inconsistencies in his story. Finally, during one interrogation session, Rivera began crying and admitted that he himself had murdered Holly. He claimed that she had seduced him (with her babysitting charges nearby—the two-year-old in the house and the five-year-old playing outside) and when he was unable to get an erection, she laughed at him, enraging him to the point that he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and then stabbed her while sexually assaulting her. Holly was eleven; Rivera was nineteen.
Rivera went on trial. Experts testified to the high likelihood that Juan’s confession had been false, noting his history of mental illness, a post-confession psychotic break, and an IQ of 79. (Waukegan police had to write Juan’s confession for him, as he was unable to.) The jury repeatedly told the judge they were at an impasse, with many members of the jury feeling that, without any physical evidence tying Rivera to the crime, they could not make a decision about his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The judge insisted they continue deliberations. Eventually, they found Rivera guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison. What followed was a yearslong cycle of appeals and retrials: Rivera’s sentence was overturned on the basis of new evidence, but he was tried a second time and found guilty. When DNA evidence finally excluded him as the source of the semen found in Holly’s body, his sentence was overturned a second time, but in a third trial, prosecutors were able to convince a jury that Holly was sexually active on the basis of testimony that she had been molested by friends of her brother. In other words, they convinced a jury that Holly had had sex with another person shortly before being killed by Juan Rivera. The DNA evidence, then, said the state, was not exculpatory. The jury agreed. Rivera had now been tried and convicted for Holly Staker’s murder for the third time.
Amid the DNA results, the growing understanding of false confessions, and compelling evidence that Waukegan police had planted Holly’s blood on Juan’s sneakers (they failed to check if the sneakers they chose had actually been manufactured at the time of the murder), the Illinois Appellate Court overturned Rivera’s conviction a final time and barred the State of Illinois from ever putting him on trial again. He had spent nearly twenty years in prison. To date, the $20 million dollar settlement Rivera received as compensation is the largest wrongful conviction payout ever in our state. Holly’s murder is unsolved; Holly’s family remains convinced that Juan Rivera is her killer.
lackman wrote:
Matt was arrested today and is in the Hennepin County jail.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007 at 9:28 pm
MHC wrote:
…didn’t want to believe it. So sad.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007 at 9:46 pm
We learn afterward that police immediately suspected with a high degree of certainty that Matt had killed Kira. Although they began canvassing the neighborhood after Kira’s death and heard the Peeping Tom story from multiple neighbors, they also learned that a fight had been overheard around 5 a.m. on Wednesday, June 27, with a man shouting, “Do you love me?” and a woman screaming twice. Around 5:30 a.m., a cab picked Matt up to take him to the airport for his flight.
Police could also see from the dust on the window, the one with the plastic chair beneath it, that no one had entered the apartment from the outside. The blood evidence showed that Kira had been attacked in bed with a hammer, had stumbled her way to the kitchen, moving toward the block of kitchen knives, and then struggled with Matt there, perhaps over the weapon. Blood was smeared across the kitchen cabinets. She made it as far as the front door, and even grasped the doorknob, before she fell to the ground just inside the entrance, where the landlord found her the next evening.
When police picked up Matt from the airport from his business trip, he arrived without luggage. He had shipped it to Chicago, rather than bringing it home to Minneapolis with him. When the results of forensic testing were done, late in the summer of 2007, Kira’s blood was found on his clothes in the suitcase, inside a watch. Questioning him in Minneapolis, police noted Matt had bruises on his arms and scratches on his legs. His DNA was under her nails.
Matt was arrested, according to Minneapolis police, “at the home of friends.” I imagine the faces of Catherine and Billy as he was handcuffed and put into a police car. What did they think? What did they feel? I don’t know. We never spoke of Matt again.
Like an historian, I can trace the competing stories unfolding on those forums, all of us tugging in the direction we believed was correct until the passage of time unfolded truth, or a version of it. I can see myself there, believing as I stalked those threads that my writerly clarity could keep me and my loved ones safe, that I was helping by seeking a narrative that might be more difficult for others to see. But this was also a failure of vision, a fear of obvious narratives so profound that I felt compelled to reject the husband-did-it arc as if it were a movie pitch and not someone’s life. And underneath it all, an understanding that by refusing to consider that Matt could have harmed his wife, I was protecting against something far more terrifying (and more statistically likely) than a stranger climbing in my window or Tim being mugged at night—the idea that someone I cared about could hurt someone else I cared out. That people who are supposed to love each other are more likely to hurt each other than any act of violence perpetrated by an unknown person. This was not a trope I could reject; it was the way history repeats, repeats, repeats. The way the human animal behaves.
Maybe clarity fails most of us in the face of immense or proximal violence: Catherine and Billy, shielding Matt in their home. Holly’s family, like so many families of victims who ignore evidence or facts to hold tight to the soothing certainty of an answer. Juries, lawyers, police. Strangers on podcasts and message boards who are unafraid to speculate—usually wrongly—and name real, living people in the world as killers, as if testing a clue to a crossword puzzle with a permanent marker. I thought I was different because I could put aside ideas of justice or punishment or vengeance; all I wanted was to see to the center of the circle, to the pure truth at the heart of the tragedy. But there was wrong-headed “eloise” insisting that speculation was a healthy coping mechanism instead of another form of injury. And there was me shaking the hand of a man who took his wife’s life from her just weeks earlier; I looked into the eyes of a man who beat his wife with a hammer and stabbed her to death, thought, he’s acting like a killer, then explained it away. The shame I felt, feel—that part is my story to tell.
There was not a trial. Though indicted on first-degree murder, Matt took a plea deal, pleading guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for a lesser sentence. Anyone hoping for a more complete narrative of Kira’s story—which was most of us, especially her family—could only guess at his motives; at his sentencing, when the judge asked Matt if he would like to make a statement, he declined.
When Matt was released on supervision from prison in the fall of 2023, I saw his page on a job-related social media site with its professional photo and carefully curated work history. If I believe in this as his right—the right to re-narrativize his own life, the right to start again, though with the weight of that time in the carceral system around his neck—I also believe that Kira’s voice should be out there, too, renewed somehow in the ways it can be.
I’m convinced Kira was just starting to figure something out in her work, shown in the changes it was undergoing just before she died: the bursting rot coming forth in 3D from those paintings, destabilizing buildings, uncontainable by the rigid system of architecture. Where before, she had asked us to consider her work as an admonition against hiding all evidence of animal behavior, now it seemed that the ungovernable, the base, was threatening to overwhelm the paintings. No matter how strict the facade, they seemed to say, some things refuse to be contained. I imagine another timeline, a different story, in which Kira’s paintings whispered to her: go, go, go.
Kira, through her art, reaching at a brutal truth and being taken away before she could touch it. Me, so many others, turning our heads. What Kira knew: that it is a human impulse to ignore animal behavior. She asked us to not to, even when, especially when, it was ugly. Mankind was my business, I hear the ghost saying to the villain in one of my favorite stories.
This story is my own crumbling structure, overtaken, overrun with disorderly things, but built with my own striving toward clarity, toward some kind of wholeness. It’s what I have to give her.
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