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Madness and its alleged dissipation

a book review by Roxanna Cain

Facing the Wind: A True Story of Tragedy and Reconciliation
By Julie Salamon

Random House, 2001
302 pages

I am still not over the shock of reading this book. Don’t get me wrong, it is not a sensationalist story. It is simply a very tough story to read and to digest.

This is the story of a mass killer and what happened to him as a result. It is the story of a man who killed his wife and his three children and was acquitted in court on an insanity plea. In consequence, instead of going to jail for the rest of his life, he went to a mental institution, from where he was released three years and ten months after the killings occurred. It is the story of how his brother and sister-in-law — his only remaining family — reacted to the event, and of how his and his wife’s friends reacted the event and to him after it had happened. More especially, it is the tale of how they reacted to his remarriage and fathering another child.

Did he remake his life after a terrible bout of psychosis? Was it cured or would he do it again? Was he possibly dangerous? Should he be forgiven? Should he try to forget his wife and children and make a new start on life? Did he get away with murder? What did his new wife think? How could she have married him? What did she see in him? Was he a monster? Why did he kill his entire family in a single blow? Was he as crazy as they said?

Julie Salamon does not purport to answer all these questions in her book. All she does is provide the hard facts that might allow us to form an opinion. His psychiatric reports in the mental ward, interviews with people who knew him. She lets the record speak for itself, and then throws up her arms in amazement and shifts over to us the weight of having to form an opinion. A tall task. A good read.