* * *
—
BETWEEN HOSPITAL STAYS, Donald was home in time for another family wedding, this one a less pleasant affair than John’s a year earlier. Richard, son number six, had been the Galvin family’s schemer—ambitious and gutsy, entrepreneurial, and more than a little willing to bend the rules to get what he wanted. As a freshman at Air Academy High, he found a way to sneak into the school commissary by applying chewing gum to the lock of a door. For months, he and his friend stole jeans and food and anything else they could get their hands on. Once he was caught, he was suspended for a year and forced to go to another high school, which had infuriated his father. “You’re going to mess up if you keep going this route,” Don would say.
In 1972, Richard was back at Air Academy High, completing his senior year, when he scored the winning goal in the state hockey championship. After the game, a girl from the opposing team’s cheerleading squad asked Richard if he was going to the victory party. He was, and she got pregnant that night.
Their wedding took place a few months later, somewhat under duress, at the Garden of the Gods, the geological marvel in Colorado Springs. Richard was high on mushrooms during the ceremony. His friend Dustin played “The Times They Are a-Changin’ ” on the guitar. Still, all seemed to be going smoothly until a voice cut through everything. Donald had climbed to the top of the rocks. Now he was shouting: “I’m not allowing this marriage! This marriage is not in the truth of God!”
Jim and Don subdued Donald, and the ceremony went on.
* * *
—
IN MAY 1973, Don and Mimi agreed to take Donald back from Pueblo one more time. This time he lasted four months.
On September 1, a member of the sheriff’s office brought Donald back to the state hospital on another “confine and treat” order, requested by his parents. Donald told the intake staff that he’d taken his Stelazine, as instructed, but when he asked Mimi for some Benadryl, she refused to give it to him; she was worried it would make him too sleepy to drive safely. That was when Donald lost control, grabbed her by the throat, and began to shake her. Yet again, it took a few of the other boys to keep Donald from strangling his own mother.
Back in Pueblo, Donald asked to see a Catholic priest. “He denies hallucinations or delusional paranoid feelings,” the hospital staff conference notes read. “The only problems he admits to are emotional problems that he encounters with his family, which apparently includes some physical fighting.” His prognosis, once again, was designated “guarded.”
Within a few days, Donald’s troubles would be the last thing anyone in the family was thinking about.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 16
In a home that now rarely knew a moment’s peace, an appearance by Brian, riding in from California for a family visit, was a welcome balm, a break from the pathos and a shot of electricity—the rock ’n’ roll star, or at least the Galvin family’s version of one, returning home. When he turned up with a girlfriend, that got everyone’s attention. The couple communed with everyone in the Galvin living room, playing reel-to-reel tapes Brian had brought of his band, Bagshot Row. He brought his guitar and played along with his brothers, and the air pressure of the place changed completely. Mimi even let the couple sleep in a room together downstairs—a special dispensation that spoke to Brian’s elevated status in the family.
Lorelei Smith, or Noni to her friends, was a native Californian—bright, cheerful, and no-nonsense, with sun-kissed blond hair and a friendly smile. She was three years younger than Brian, and her childhood had been far more luxurious than his. The walls of Noni’s childhood bedroom in Lodi, a small town outside of Sacramento, were covered with ribbons from horse shows. But there was more than enough heartache and strife in Noni’s life to interest Brian, who had always seemed drawn to the darker aspects of the human condition. Noni was barely a teenager when her mother died from a combination of pills and alcohol. Her father, a well-known pediatrician in town, married a woman from the horse show set who was less than ten years older than Noni was. Noni never lived with her father again. She spent three years at boarding school, and her senior year at her sister’s house in Lodi, so that she could finish at the local high school. By the time she and Brian were together, Noni had found work at a veterinarian’s office in Lodi while taking classes at a business college.
Nearly a half century on, few people are left who remember Noni. Her father, mother, stepmother, and sister have all passed away. Her sister’s former husband remembers her as a happy girl, likable and charming. She had floated through Lodi High School for just a year, not long enough to make a lasting impression. The only member of the next generation who was alive at the same time as Noni is a nephew, the son of her sister—now an adult, nearly twice the age Noni was in 1973. All that nephew has is the awareness that once there was a girl named Noni whose boyfriend shot and killed her—and that after that, no one in his family ever was the same.
* * *
—
BEFORE HE’D LEFT for California, Brian had been given to hippieish philosophical musings. He had talked about death, but not in a grim or fatalistic way—more as if it were a state of mind, a crossing over to another dimension. “To him, it wasn’t ending,” said John, the third son, who roomed with Brian for a year in the music program at CU Boulder. “It was just going somewhere else. He’d always talk to me about going over to the other side.”
To John, there didn’t seem anything too urgent or dangerous about the way he was talking. “It was the times,” John said. “The psychedelic times that we lived in.” Some of this could have been fanned by drugs; no Galvin brother dropped more acid than Brian. But there was a darkness to Brian that never seemed to concern his brothers, either because they couldn’t see it, or because they didn’t want to see it, or because they found it romantic.
On the afternoon of Friday, September 7, 1973, the Lodi police department received a phone call from Noni’s boss’s wife at the Cherokee Veterinary Hospital, concerned that Noni had gone home for lunch at noon and had never come back. An employee missing for an hour or two would hardly seem to rise to the level of a police matter—unless there was something happening with Noni that everyone at the office knew about, something that made her vulnerable.