One night in July of 1960, in a small Connecticut town, the lives of three men collided. Only two would survive.
David Troy was a police officer, and Joseph DeSalvo was the man who killed him. At the time, DeSalvo was out on parole, granted in part thanks to the recommendation and advocacy of an army doctor named Alvin Tarlov, who was conducting research inside the Stateville Penitentiary, an Illinois maximum-security state prison, with DeSalvo’s assistance.
Lisa Belkin, the journalist and author of the excellent Show Me a Hero (the basis for the HBO adaptation), first heard about this tragedy from Tarlov, who happened to be her stepfather. As she writes in the book’s introduction, “What drew me from the first telling was not just the true crime, but the question of what had come before it.” Belkin intuitively understands that crime stories are also personal histories, and sets out, in her book Genealogy of a Murder, to connect the three men—doctor, cop, prisoner, all born and raised in the Depression—through their ancestral roots.
“We shape history even as we are shaped by it,” she writes. “We owe thanks (and blame) to our ancestors, and an explanation (and apology) to our descendants. We are actors without a script, travelers without a map, gamblers who don’t know the odds.” The result is a revelatory work of nonfiction, one that will influence my own future crime writing, and that, I suspect, of others in this space.
Lisa Belkin understands that crime stories are also personal histories, and sets out, in her book, to connect three men—doctor, cop, prisoner—through their ancestral roots.
Belkin goes all the way back to the beginning—that is, the turn-of-the-20th-century ancestral histories of the Tarlov, Troy, and DeSalvo families. We meet all manner of people in the midst of mundane and titanic struggles, emigrating from Ireland and Eastern Europe looking for better American lives, losing children to world wars and influenza pandemics, coping with the Depression, and contending with a spectrum of possibilities, affluent and poverty-laden, through the 1950s.
What might be backstory in a more generic true-crime treatment is the story in Genealogy of a Murder. Belkin expertly renders the humanity in all of these ancestral tales, using her narrative-nonfiction skills to convey adventure, loss, longing, joy, heartbreak, and emotional devastation.
By the time the trio of men intersect, in the summer of 1960, culminating in DeSalvo’s late-night killing of police officer Troy that July, we know their likes, dislikes, faults, and foibles. Thanks to Belkin’s commitment to total narrative and genealogy, we also know all of the familial forces that shaped them and made space for the choices—meaningful and terrible, inevitable and yet purposeful—leading up to that terrible crime, itself sensitively and expertly rendered by the author.
In a seeming tangent that in fact has relevant connections to the central case, Belkin delves into the post-conviction lives of infamous Chicago child killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb—both were incarcerated at Stateville—which included running a correspondence course and researching prisoners’ capacity for change. In doing so, Belkin adds to the voluminous scholarship on these notorious figures that renders them human once more, rather than merely notorious murderers.
What makes Genealogy of a Murder such a revelatory work of nonfiction is how, in exploring the ancestry of Tarlov, Troy, and DeSalvo, Belkin offers a narrative guide for navigating the future—or even the present—of criminal investigation. In recent years, investigative genetic genealogy has upended crime-solving as nothing has since the invention of forensic DNA analysis.
Building out family trees and connecting relatives as distant as third cousins has produced stunning, decades-in-the-making resolutions of dozens of cold cases, shedding monikers (the Golden State Killer, the Boy in the Box) and restoring their actual names (Joseph DeAngelo, Joseph Augustus Zarelli). It took distant relatives uploading their DNA to databases such as GEDmatch to identify Zarelli after nearly 66 years, and to arrest DeAngelo, a serial rapist and killer terrorizing California in the 1970s and 1980s.
Investigative genealogists and law enforcement are not storytellers, though their techniques are pivotal in producing contemporary crime stories. But narrative nonfiction can infuse genealogical exploration with the vivid lives of the people who populate these books.
When true crime is in fresh need of new narrative possibilities that truly center the actual lives and afterlives of those affected by violence, Genealogy of a Murder provides a road map for how to do so. I felt forever changed after reading this book, and know it will have ripple effects for those creating, and consuming, true crime.
Sarah Weinman is the author, most recently, of Scoundrel, and the editor of Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning, publishing on July 4