September 22, 2006
To Whom it May Concern:
I guess the first people to read this will be the police. So I’ll skip right to the most important details: I killed Mark Lemons. I shot him three times in the back of the head. It was premeditated. I had no accomplices, and no one else knew about the crime until it was discovered.
I saw on the news that James is being held for questioning. But I promise you, he’s not involved in the shooting or the fire. It makes good TV, I guess, to say there had been some kind of catastrophic disagreement over late rent, but rent has nothing to do with why Mark is dead.
And Mom, Dad... I know this is hard to read. I love you both so much. You taught me to do the right thing whenever I could. To help people. I hope that by the end of this letter, you’ll see that I listened to you.
No explanation I give will make this crime any less shocking to someone who wasn't there. Who didn't see what I saw. I know all my friends are looking back, trying to figure out whether I showed any signs of cracking, whether they could have seen it coming.
Well, they couldn’t have. Not even I saw it coming.
So now, let me walk everyone through this. That’s probably the easiest way. I'll try to include most of the details. The stuff I can't forget.
It's been established, I’m sure, that Mark was killed sometime between noon and 4 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 15.
On that day I arrived at our house on Tennessee Street about 12:30 p.m. My Torts class ended at 12:20, and I managed to miss all the traffic and hit all the green lights on the way back from the law campus.
This semester, I had my Fridays scheduled so Torts was my last class of the day. That way, I could come home, eat lunch, maybe do some homework, and be out at the bars by happy hour. My roommates, on the other hand, enjoyed sleeping off the results of their Thursday night binge drinking. So none of them even had classes until 11:30 a.m. James usually was the first one to arrive home on Friday afternoons. He got in around 4. If I remember right, he had a psych class until 3:50.
Mark, on the other hand, never kept regular hours.
He was in grad school. Grad schools, really. The only multi-PhD candidate I've ever met, well on his way to doctorates in physics, philosophy and astronomy.
I’ve never met anyone that intelligent. Calling him a "genius" just doesn't capture how blindingly brilliant he was. He learned on his own terms, though. I’ve never seen him study for class. Not once. Sometimes he shut himself in his room for hours behind a gargantuan deadbolt that he installed himself. Maybe he studied then. But he probably just fiddled with his computer the whole time.
We got him as a roommate to replace one of our buddies, who left the house when he graduated at the end of the fall semester. Mark answered our newspaper ad. He told us all he wanted was a quiet room that wasn't on the ground floor in a place where he could come and go as he wished. He said he had some big project he was working on, and he needed flexibility and privacy.
Our one empty bedroom fit the bill, and he seemed decent, if not completely normal, so we signed him up.
But he never really was part of the group. He didn’t hang out with us much. We balanced social lives with school. Mark, he just balanced his education with his need to occasionally sleep.
I'm getting off-track. The point is, you never knew when he’d be around.
When I came back from Torts, he was at home. I saw his blue Civic, economical and weather-beaten, parked in the alley behind our house.
Now let me tell you about the murder weapon. I only had one elective this semester, and I chose the most oddball course I could: target shooting, which met on Friday mornings. As I walked toward the house that day, I was carrying my backpack and a black metal case that held a .22-caliber target pistol.
The back door was open and unlocked, another sign that Mark was home. For all his genius, he was an erratic roommate. I don’t remember a single month when he gave his rent check to James on time. But let me repeat, Mark did not die over a few hundred dollars.
I walked into the tiny kitchen and Mark, running full speed in the opposite direction, almost knocked me down. His face was flushed, a sweaty red oval topped by a mop of black hair.
His expression at that moment is one of the details I won't ever be able to forget. Wide-eyed jubilance, excitement on a scale I'd never seen from him. It took a few seconds before my presence between him and the doorway really registered.
Mark didn’t even look down as I dropped my stuff and grabbed the edge of the stove, trying to keep my feet from slipping on the floor's scuffed linoleum.
In one muddled sentence, he asked to use my cell phone, explained that the house's land line and broadband connection were dead again, and said it was important to get it fixed right away because he had something vital he needed to e-mail. I gave him my phone, and as he walked outside to get better reception, he tossed four final words over his shoulder at me.
“Kris, I did it,” he said.
I was nearly to my bedroom on the second floor before I figured out what he was talking about. When I walked into my room, I noticed my computer was on, and the screen was filled with some kind of number-crunching. Not a game, not a word processor. Nothing that belonged to me.
I looked closer, and recognized it after a second. It was a program Mark had written himself.
It's time for me to backtrack a little bit.
Every genius is, I think, required to have a pet theory. Mark's was that if God existed, it could be proven through observation. He tried to explain his plan to us on one rare night when he accepted an invitation to have a beer with his roommates on the front porch.
We were drunk. He was enthused. I don't remember much of what he said, and now I think that's fortunate for my sanity's sake.
As usual, his words were half philosophy, half science and almost completely over our heads. The gist of it is that if God is omniscient and omnipresent--in other words, all-knowing and everywhere--then certain discernible patterns should emerge if enough measurements are taken.
Measurements of what? Everything. He was going to take all known observations about the universe, physical laws and astronomy, and somehow evaluate all of them in relation to each other. Then he’d sift through the results.
He told us that at first, he thought he was going to have to do the whole project piecemeal during the university supercomputers' off hours. But his intellect overcame that obstacle. He did a lot of the initial work on the supercomputers. After a few months, though, he was able to pare down the remaining work to a program for his souped-up PC at home.
It was this software, I now saw, that had been running on my computer. The printer tray held a few sheets of paper, which I picked up and read. It was a lot easier to understand than I would have expected.
I walked across the hall, the printouts clutched in clammy hands. The door to Mark's room was open, and on his cluttered desk lay dozens of pages that looked like the ones I was holding. The flat-screen monitor there was filled with numbers and graphs, topped by the words “PROGRAM COMPLETE.”
He had wanted to check the results on my computer too. I could see why he’d want to be sure.
I was having a hard time breathing and my brain was stuck in neutral, bludgeoned by the figures glowing in front of me. They were simple and yet their message was beyond comprehension.
That’s where premeditation came into play. I don’t know how long I stood there in front of his computer. It probably was just a few seconds. But in that brief time, I felt the world falling apart.
I walked back to my room. I don’t really remember how I felt right then. Overwhelmed. Kind of numb.
I got the gun out of its case in my bedroom and loaded it. I heard Mark race back up the stairs and into his room, where he began typing, hammering at the keyboard.
Holding the pistol behind my back, I walked across the hallway and into his room. He was sitting at the computer, facing away from me. He had the program running again.
This was the one moment that could have changed things.
I asked him whether he had told anyone what he had found. If he had, it wouldn’t remain an obscure discovery very long. I might have shot myself instead of him.
No, Mark said, he hadn’t been able to call or e-mail anyone because the phone line was down, and he had only used my phone to call Ma Bell. He still sounded so excited.
I think he might have been turning around to look at me.
But I shot him twice in the back of the head, and he fell face-first onto the keyboard. I pressed the gun muzzle against the base of his skull, and shot him again.
Then I went back to my room, grabbed my baseball bat, and smashed my computer and his. The printers, too. After wadding up all the printouts and shoving them into his wastebasket, I unplugged the wreckage of my computer and carried it into his room. I piled a bunch of clothes and books around the wastebasket and set it on fire.
I looked at the clock in the kitchen as I left the house. It was 1:14 p.m.
I got in my car and drove until I was about out of gas. Then, at a motel along I-35, I stole another car. I’ve done that a couple of times now.
You’ll see by the postmark that I sent this letter in Racine, Wisconsin. Here are a few more leads: I’m writing this in a Holiday Inn along I-94. The TV’s on right now, and it’s the local news, but there’s no mention of me. I know that’s not because you’ve given up.
I also know that there are going to be a million psychologists poring over this letter, trying to glean clues from between each word. Well, do what you can. But I promise you they’re not going to find out where I’m going or what my plan is. Because I don’t know and I don’t have one.
I know what I saw, though, and that I can be coerced into telling what it was. So just understand that I'm not going to allow myself to be arrested, let alone interrogated. Like killing Mark, suicide would be an ugly necessity.
I’m not happy I had to kill him. It felt horrible. I know saying that won’t make his parents, his siblings, or his friends feel any better. Mark didn't mean to do anything wrong. He was a good person, as far as I know. He didn’t deserve to die.
Yet he had to. There's no doubt in my mind.
I feel like I need to explain more, but I'm not sure it’s possible. I don’t feel guilty about what I did, though. My sacrifice, and Mark’s, saved the world. That’s the way I look at it. The way I have to look at it.
If you saw what I saw that day, you would have pulled the trigger too. I won’t--I can’t--explain what the result of Mark Lemons’ program was.
But I will tell you this much: It’s not what you think.
Kris E. Alexander
Racine, Wisconsin
