A father faces the unthinkable
A true-crime account of his campaign for the death penalty, then against it.
The Ride
nolead ends nolead begins A Shocking Murder and a Bereaved Father's Journey from Rage to Redemption
nolead ends nolead begins By Brian MacQuarrie
Da Capo. 275 pp. $26.
nolead ends nolead begins
Reviewed by Bill Kent
I don't want to jinx this, but, having finished the most emotionally challenging true-crime account I have ever read, I want this book to win every nonfiction reporting award there is.
This book was difficult to read because, as a father, I cannot tolerate violence against children. I find it unsettling, repugnant, and infuriating.
This book is about a father's encounter with the worst thing that can happen to a child, an unthinkable horror, and how he comes to terms with it.
In 1997, a petty thief, con man, and pedophile named Charles Jaynes promised 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley a bicycle if Jeffrey would go for a ride with him in his big Cadillac. Driving the car was Jaynes' friend and partner in crime, Salvatore Sicari.
Both Jaynes and Sicari were known in the working-class East Cambridge, Mass., neighborhood where Jeffrey lived with his mother, Barbara, and two older brothers. Jeffrey had seen and spoken with Jaynes several times, and Jaynes had sworn him to secrecy about their meetings. Jeffrey never mentioned Jaynes to his mother, brothers, or his father, Bob, a mechanic employed by the Cambridge Fire Department, who was living with another woman three miles away, prior to getting a divorce.
This is not a cautionary tragedy about what happens when families break up and innocent kids are left to fend for themselves on the mean streets. Bob Curley was not a stranger to his family. The East Cambridge neighborhood that Boston Globe editor Brian MacQuarrie describes is close, tight, and supportive.
Sicari and Jaynes were known to be sleazy. Both had criminal records and outstanding warrants for check kiting and other petty crimes. No one thought them capable of murder.
At his trial, Sicari would claim he just drove Jayne's Cadillac while Jaynes smothered the boy in the backseat. Jaynes and Sicari later took the body to Jaynes' apartment in Manchester, N.H., where Jaynes was living under an assumed name. They stuffed it into a large plastic container, filled the container with lye, taped the container shut and threw it into a river on the border between New Hampshire and Maine.
The pair split up. Sicari returned to Cambridge and joined a neighborhood posse in search of the boy. He promised a distraught Barbara and Bob Curley that he would do everything he could to help. Within 24 hours, Sicari broke down and confessed, both he and Jaynes were jailed, and Bob Curley demanded that Massachusetts reinstate the death penalty.
Sicari, who was tried as an accessory to first-degree murder, got life in prison without parole. Jaynes got life with the possibility of parole, because the jury did not have enough evidence to believe that Jaynes was completely responsible for the boy's murder. A typical true-crime book would end on this bitter note.
MacQuarrie takes the story further, showing how Bob Curley became a willing, and convincing, spokesman for Massachusetts death-penalty advocates, who narrowly lost a legislative fight to restore capital punishment. He also chronicles how Curley began to drink heavily, unable to get past the guilt and horror of what happened to his youngest child.
When he was invited to speak at public forums on the death penalty, Bob Curley refused to share the same car with anti-capital punishment advocate Bud Welch, a gas-station owner who lost his daughter Julie when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City. The violent death of a child had caused Welch, like Curley, to lose himself in guilt, rage, and alcohol.
Welch eventually determined that executing Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols "wouldn't be part of my healing process. I wasn't going to gain anything from an act of hate and revenge. And hate and revenge, I realized, were the very reasons that Julie and 167 others were dead. I was finally able to see what the Oklahoma City bombing was all about. It was about retribution."
Bob Curley didn't see it that way, but he shared with Welch a resentment at being used by politicians and the news media. From that common thread, the two began to talk, and Bob Curley slowly understood that to get on with his life, he had to end the cycle of anger and guilt that was consuming him.
Curley began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. After many months of inner turmoil, he decided that watching his son's murderers die would not make it easier for him to deal with his grief. Now he believes that a society that kills convicted criminals is not as strong as one that refuses to do so.
MacQuarrie's book doesn't offer answers to the larger problems of crime and punishment, but Bob Curley's story is profoundly important as the debate over the death penalty continues.
Somebody has to make us think about whether two wrongs ever make a right.