AFTERWORD TO FRIENDSHIP
by Stephen Paul Foster
An author’s thoughts on the (double) murderous background behind his novel Fatal Friendship
Fatal Friendship: A Philosophical Novel (FF) is a fictionalized account of a true story of the author’s (yours truly) torturous discovery that his best friend had murdered two women, his ex-girlfriends. What made the discovery so uniquely torturous was that my friend was an extraordinarily brilliant and gifted human being.
The fictional character, as described in FF:
The Claretta Petacci murder, however, proved to be “Man bites dog.” It had aroused the usually fickle attention of news purveyors nationwide. The reason was that the prime suspect was a remarkable departure from that of the typical loser who works himself into a violent temper and up-and-slays his defenseless girlfriend. This particular slayer turned out to be a man of sophisticated tastes, serious books, and immense erudition. He evinced a profusion of brainpower that made him stand out like a lone Mercedes-Benz in a parking lot surrounded by Ford Fiestas …. Beyond the boundaries of his formal education, the range and depth of Richard’s knowledge was phenomenal. He could converse insightfully about the influence of Kantian ethics on German legal positivism, help you fathom the aesthetics of Arnold Schoenberg’s atonalism, and substantively compare English translations of the pre-Socratic philosophers. An intense, engaging conversationalist, he was like an orchestral maestro in dignified command, gracefully conducting a serious discussion — conveying distinct harmonies of insight, transparently drawing out the best ideas and observations in his fellow interlocutors. He understood classical music, knew its history, and evinced an extremely sophisticated appreciation of poetry and literature.
My wife adored him and was shattered with discovery of the homicides. The second murder made national news: my friend became an international fugitive and was featured in an episode of America’s Most Wanted, and in a cover story of issue of The Atlantic Monthly (Eric Schlosser, “A Grief Like No Other: How do you recover from the murder of a son or daughter?” The Atlantic Monthly, September, 1997).
The novel attempts to uncover the fragility of the human condition explored with an array of fascinatingly colorful characters.
A Fort Lauderdale homicide detective:
The unfamiliar male voice with a Spanish accent had a slightly hostile, insinuating inflection. It belonged to Lt. Jorge Santayana, Jr., who immediately introduced himself as a Ft Lauderdale city homicide detective. He then proceeded with a question, which is, of course, what homicide detectives are supposed to do: ask questions, beginning with easy-to-answer ones, then moving to those of a more uncomfortable nature. would be questions such as: Do you own a Smith & Wesson 357, short-barreled revolver? Did you take out a life insurance policy for $500,000 on your recently deceased wife? Where were you on August 9th, between the hours of 1:00 and 4:00 a.m.? You have to admit it: Having the job of popping up unexpectedly and putting those kinds of questions to slippery-acting suspects caught suddenly off-guard would get you up and going in the morning. Chop-chop!
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Jerry Lee Bentham, who covers the murder story.
Known to his family, friends, and colleagues as J. L., the reporter possessed highly tuned radar sensors, perfect for his kind of work. His sensors pointed toward foul play buried below the surface of things, and they were permanently set on full alert. They were signaling him that there had to be more to this story than: “Boyfriend goes berserk, kills girlfriend.” Falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus was the foundational premise of his modus operandi for investigative reporting — “False in one thing, false in everything.” J. L. was determined to find out what was hidden and bring it to light.
FF’s prose is deliberately sardonic as it explores the emotions and the meaning of those experiences that make life worth living: friendship, marriage and moral purpose. It also grapples with the mystery of the human heart and its potential for wickedness. The mystery of humanity lies in the inexplicability of its wickedness and the precariousness of its goodness.
It was Sunday, “the Lord’s Day,” as he heard it called in his childhood. Frank, that morning, woke up with a clarity of moral vision. Finally, he was in possession of that elusive “perspective” regarding his years of friendship with Richard and the devastation of his homicides. Feeling the supplication of a dead man’s hand, Frank’s preoccupation moved beyond the boundaries of his failure to know the mind of Richard Wahnfried. His wickedness was merely a small brush stroke in the larger portrait of human depravity. The immense effort spent meditating on this one man as some kind of self-contained, mysterious, immoral entity apart from the rough and tumble grubbiness of humanity had been a fool’s errand.
The plot centers on the lives of two best friends, Frank and Rich. Both men are brilliant intellectuals – Frank a law professor and philosopher; Rich a gifted linguist and novelist. Both have marriages that fail. Both men differ profoundly in their personalities and world views. Richly ironic is that those differences form their bond of affection and are the source of their mutual respect. Frank still loves his ex-wife and mourns his loss of her. He also discovers to his horror that Rich has brutally murdered his girlfriend. Additional horrors emerge for Frank that turn Rich suddenly into an ex-friend and make him an increasingly challenging and torturous study in the nature of evil. The novel unfolds with Frank’s attempts to grasp the dimensions of moral betrayal and depravity in a man whose intellect he so deeply admired – yet another personal loss that in its shocking dimensions of violence and wickedness seems incomprehensible.
FF culminates dramatically in Frank’s appearance as a prosecution witness in Rich’s murder trial that brilliantly showcases another philosophical dimension of the novel – the question of the morality of death for a convicted murderer. What punishment is fitting for the crime of taking an innocent life?
The living have obligations to the dead. The victim, J. L., whose life is taken is owed…something. That something is the symbolism of punishment. Human beings are symbolic creatures who compose and order their lives around symbols that give life meaning. So many of the important events of our lives are symbolic acts; namely, ceremonies — weddings, funerals, graduation time, baptisms, and the like. These define who we are and what we are about, what our obligations are to one another. A state-sanctioned execution, among other things, is a symbolic, obligatory act. It tells the world that the life of the victim was important and the injustice of it being taken from her must be recognized. It says that the person who took it from her must be made by her fiduciaries to pay that debt with his life. It’s an act of justice that connects the living to the dead through a ceremonial act of restitution.
Fatal Friendship from start to finish grapples with those dysgenic aspects of life in the modern, secularized world — the loss of religion, hedonistic atomism, the fracture of community, and the nihilism of popular culture.
Mr. Foster is a world traveler and a philosopher (Ph.D. St. Louis University) whose writings cover the world of politics, religion, and contemporary culture. His lifelong fascination is with totalitarian tendencies in modern life. He is a native Midwesterner who grew up in Michigan, married in Missouri, and currently resides in Ohio, with his wife of forty years.