Free The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson Page A

write about her long-repressed murder. Eventually he is able to reopen her case, which he works on with a homicide cop from the LAPD.
    Ellroy also suffers from murder mind, but his turns him on. The titular “dark place”—the fantasy that nearly drives him to insanity—is that of fucking his mutilated mother. Her amputated nipple thrills me.
    Despite all his hard work on the case, Ellroy’s mother’s murder remains unsolved; at the end of the book he provides a contact number for tips. I’ll learn more , he promises his dead mother on the last page. You’re gone and I want more of you.
    It’s a disappointing ending. Not because the case doesn’t get solved, but because Ellroy never seems to grasp the futility of his enterprise. Instead his compulsion to “learn more” just smashes up against this futility with increasing velocity. He knows that no amount of information about his mother’s life or death will bring her back, but somehow he doesn’t really seem to get it.
    I don’t get it either.
    I’ve never had the desire or need to bring Jane back—I never even knew her. And while the unsolved status of her murder may have once haunted me, now a man has been arrested for it, is being held without bail, and will soon be brought to trial. And yet, daily, while in faculty meetings or paused at traffic lights, I find myself scrawling lists of potential avenues of further inquiry. Should I visit Leiterman in prison? Interview members of his family? Find Johnny Ruelas? Spend more time with Schroeder? What on earth for?
    Conventional wisdom has it that we dredge up family stories to find out more about ourselves, to pursue that all-important goal of “self-knowledge,” to catapult ourselves, like Oedipus, down the track that leads to the revelation of some original crime, some original truth. Then we gouge our eyes out in shame, run screaming into the wilderness, and plagues cease to rain down upon our people.
    Fewer people talk about what happens when this track begins to dissolve, when the path starts to become indistinguishable from the forest.
    Photo # 3:
    A close-up of the entry wound in Jane’s lower left skull. Her hair, thick and red with blood, has been pushed aside to expose it, as if to isolate a tick in the fur of an animal. Around the hole is a bright-red corona of flayed skin which the examiner calls a “contusion collar.” The diameter of the wound is very small; a .22 is not a big-caliber gun.
    A speck of white light from the medical examiner’s laser pen dances in and around the wound for almost twenty minutes. At first I think the puckered hole looks like a sea urchin. Then I think it looks like an anus. The lingering close-up makes me feel like doing something perverse—I feel like standing up and starting to sing. I imagine the courtroom suddenly sliding over into musical farce, a self-help spoof I would title “Circling the Wound.”

Murder Mind, Redux
    T HROUGHOUT THE winter of 2004–2005 the biggest local story in Middletown, Connecticut, was the impending execution of convicted serial killer Michael Ross. The execution was scheduled to take place a few towns away, and was to be the first execution in New England since 1960.
    Ross’s killing spree bore many similarities to the Michigan Murders. He started out in 1981 on the campus of Cornell University, and over the next three years killed eight girls and young women; John Collins had been a student at Eastern Michigan University, and many of the girls he allegedly killed were students at either Eastern or the U of M. Unlike Collins, however, who to this day maintains his innocence from prison, Ross pled guilty. Also unlike Collins, Ross was convicted in a state with the death penalty, and in 1987 Ross was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
    Over the next eighteen years on death row Ross filed a variety of appeals—to be castrated, to be retried, to be executed. But as his execution date in January 2005 drew near he refused to