A young man and his bride. It doesn’t matter what their names were. Let sleeping dogs lie. This murky picture is 64 years old. In a late ‘forties Newsweek, it was credited to the Milwaukee Sentinel from International, and the caption read: [A man] and his bride: En route to jail because [her sister] knew too much.

The one-paragraph story: Tragedy: Honeymooning in Minneapolis, a 19-year-old and his bride, 17, were picked up by police for questioning. Rushed back to Milwaukee, he confessed that he had murdered his wife’s sister, 16, and thrown her body, weighted with a concrete block, into the Milwaukee River. The reason: the sister had discovered that his bride was pregnant and “threatened to tell.”

Imagine his angst on that honeymoon. I want to know what went on inside his head, what went on inside his new wife’s head. When did he tell her? That’s why I write fiction in which crime looms large. Human nature gives rise to tragedy, and in tragedy we stretch and contort and become unrecognizable even to ourselves.