A cop, a doctor, a criminal and the 1960 murder that connected them
GENEALOGY OF A MURDER: Four generations, three families, one fateful night, by Lisa Belkin
Alvin Tarlov first met Joseph DeSalvo at the prison hospital at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois. Their reasons for being there couldn’t be more different: Tarlov, a doctor just a few years out of medical school, was leading a drug against malaria, using the inmates as test subjects; A convicted felon with a mile-long criminal record, DeSalvo was an inmate who worked as a medical technologist, handling bugs, slides, and the like for doctors like Tarlov. DeSalvo had impressed everyone around him with his work ethic and intelligence—he was perhaps the only one in the lab who recited poetry while he worked—and when the inmate asked Tarlov to write a letter of recommendation to help find dependent on a job on his parole, the doctor was more than willing to help.
“He had an unhappy beginning in his life,” Tarlov wrote. “I have great confidence in Mr. DeSalvo and would like to see him useful.”
That letter led to a job offer from a laboratory at a hospital in Norwalk, Connecticut. In June 1960, DeSalvo was paroled under that offer. And just a few weeks later, behind a bar on Main Street in Norwalk, DeSalvo shot and killed a police officer named David Troy, leaving him a widow to Troy’s wife and leaving his children fatherless. Tarlov would spend the rest of his life pondering his decision to help DeSalvo, wondering what he had missed. Was he deliberately cheated? Should he have helped the ex-con more, kept in touch better once he started living outside?
Decades later, Tarlov became the stepfather of the journalist Lisa Belkin, whose work includes the non-fiction epic “Show Me a Hero.” He shared the story with her and she couldn’t let it go. With her new book, “Genealogy of a Murder,” Belkin has turned the stories of three men—Tarlov, DeSalvo, and the murder victim, Troy—into a slightly gnarled yet thrilling, intimate study of fate, chance, and the hugely meaningful intersections of diverse lives.
At the front of the book is a family tree—actually four different family trees, with dozens of different people in between. My advice is to stick a note on this page and keep a pen handy while you read, all the better to mark these pages with relevant information: “Charles: motorcycle accident, brain injury”; “Max: Train Collision.” (Things have a way of crashing in this book: careers, marriages, dreams.) There’s perhaps no better way to fully appreciate Belkin’s strategy. While many true crime books focus on a single event where worlds collide and the lives of everyone involved change, Belkin approaches this murder as the culmination of many tipping points – smaller ones that happened long ago.
It’s not that Belkin is so devoted to fate or destiny, quite the contrary. She is a connoisseur of chance, a persistent observer of the so-called butterfly effect, one random event leading to another, and then another, and another. Belkin is curious about, as she puts it herself: “How things you seem to control are out of your hands. How lives you know nothing about, even those lived generations before you were born, can completely change yours. How small moments, stacked and layered, become profound history. How sometimes what seems wrong can turn out to be unexpectedly right. And how trying to do the right thing – being careful to do the right thing – can go so inexplicably wrong.”
It takes Al Tarlov over 250 pages to meet Joe DeSalvo in that prison malaria lab. Belkin takes the time to get there and begins the story with everyone’s grandparents, all of whom were immigrants to the United States, with similar hopes and aspirations. She jumps storylines in dizzying, short spurts, reminding us at key moments how things would have been different if a particular incident had happened a little earlier or later. The risk of this structure is that it prevents readers from investing in individual people. It helps that Belkin writes enlighteningly and captivatingly, “Bridget’s core was complaints, not compassion,” she says of a thorny mother-in-law. She has a keen eye for anecdote and a keen sense of humor: “The family celebrated the couple’s first anniversary by pretending it was their second,” she writes of a surprise pregnancy. “None of their kids would ever know.”
In 1941, when the trio first appear as children, the timelines begin to merge. We witness David Troy’s winding path to law enforcement; Al Tarlov’s decision to study medicine; and Joe DeSalvo’s parade of bad choices and limited options.
Themes emerge, such as the debates on rehabilitation and recidivism, and the ethics of medical experiments on prisoners. Sometimes those themes lead Belkin down narrative rabbit holes. Many pages are devoted to the lives of the former prison guards where DeSalvo and Tarlov will one day meet. Even more space is dedicated to the famous criminal Nathan Leopold, who, together with his friend Richard Loeb, committed one of the most infamous murders of the 20th century. While in prison, Leopold created some of the rehabilitation and education programs that DeSalvo took advantage of, while also participating in the antimalarial medical trials that led Tarlov to work in the same prison. Never mind that Leopold never really dealt directly with either man. These coincidences are enough for Belkin; the connections are important because of where they lead, the world they come to share.
At its best, reading “Genealogy of a Murder” was like reading “Cloud Atlas,” David Mitchell’s novel that wraps hundreds of years of history and connects generations of people. Belkin’s message comes through clearly: we are blind to the future. Our attachments are left to chance. We are left to make up stories to understand everything. “There are the facts and the truth of our lives, and the distances between the two,” she writes. “We are partly made up of the stories we are told, the memories we carry with us. Even if they are distortions or illusions, they can also be real.”
Robert Kolker is the author of ‘Hidden Valley Road’.
GENEALOGY OF A MURDER: Four Generations, Three Families, One Fateful Night | By Lisa Belkin | 416 pp. | WW Norton & Company | $26.95