GLOUCESTER, MASS. -- When Gregory Gibson received the envelope one afternoon in November, mixed in with the junk mail and the bills, he knew right away what it was. The return address was a post office box in Norfolk, where there is a state prison.
His son's killer was getting in touch.So much came back that afternoon when the letter arrived at the Gibsons' house in Gloucester.
"I read the letter," said Gibson, 54, "and, of course, all of a sudden, my head is spinning and I am right back in this whole welter of emotions."
It had been seven years since that night of December 14, 1992, when the oldest of his three children, Galen, an 18-year-old student at Simon's Rock College in western Massachusetts, had been gunned down by a fellow student named Wayne Lo.
Two people were killed, four wounded. And if the rifle had not jammed, Lo conceded recently, there would have been more bodies.
When he opened the envelope that day in November, Gibson found two pages of Lo's carefully printed handwriting inside. "Dear Mr. Gibson," the letter began, "I really don't know how to start or what I should say." What Gibson went on to read seemed to be a killer's effort to join him in the same search as people everywhere to understand how the unfathomable tragedy of random killing sometimes comes to innocent places.
By the time he read that letter from Lo, Gibson had long been on a path not usually taken by people who have endured what he has. For years, he has methodically forced himself to confront in extraordinary detail the crime that caused his family's heartbreak.
"All we've got now is absence and sickness," he said. Somehow, if I follow this story long enough, it will be positive in the world rather than negative."
After the crime, the Gibson family sued Simon's Rock, claiming the college's inattention to warning signs about Lo was a factor in the murders. Simon's Rock, which is part of Bard College, denied any negligence but eventually settled the case for an undisclosed sum.
Still, for Gibson, the shortcomings of Simon's Rock were only part of the story he was working so hard to construct. He set out to learn as much as he could about every aspect of the narrative -- characters, scenes, circumstances -- that ended in Galen's murder.
Much of Gibson's quest to have Simon's Rock admit some responsibility in Galen's death, along with his search for how Lo could have so easily purchased a semiautomatic rifle, can be found in a book he has written, his first to be published: "Gone Boy, A Walkabout: A Father's Search for Truth in His Son's Murder" (Kodansha International, 1999).
The book is an elegant account of the missteps and deceptions that clear the way for random killing. But Gibson had not interviewed one central character: Wayne Lo.
Wayne Lo, now 25, has been on a kind of journey, too. After the crime and for the first years of his imprisonment, he said recently, he believed that God had chosen him to commit carnage. Now, he calls that his period of denial.
The story Lo long told himself was that he received a divine message to go to the gun store, order the ammunition with his mother's credit card, then lie and deceive and kill. A jury rejected Lo's insanity defense, as often happens with abhorrent crimes that are meticulously planned. He was sentenced to life behind bars. The new ideas began to occur to Lo last summer or earlier -- he's not sure. He began to think, maybe it was not God who had told him to kill. And if it was not, could it be that what he had done was wrong?
"What I really want at this point," Lo said, "is to go back in time and for this to not happen, not so I don't have to suffer, but those people -- that this didn't have to happen to them.
"If I could go back and you would still put me in jail for the rest of my life but these people can live and these people don't have to get injured, I would do that, I would take that. But what's happened has happened."
He insisted, for example, that he was "a very happy person" before the message to kill came, as he believes it did, out of nowhere. He professed confusion at prosecutors' descriptions of him as an angry youth.
Lo said that reading Gibson's book was an emotional experience, especially when he learned about the Gibsons' warm family and how it had been wounded by what he did. "The book really did a lot to open me up," he said.
Soon, Wayne was composing that first letter. "I just finished reading your book," he wrote. "It was a good book, though I don't think you need to hear that from me, because you didn't need to write it, I mean, if it wasn't for my horrible act. There is so much I want to say, but it is hard to put all of it on paper."
On Dec. 1, two weeks shy of seven years since that murderous night, Gibson wrote back: "Dear Wayne, Thank you for your letter. As you can imagine, I have been thinking about it a great deal."
More than a dozen letters have since been exchanged. The two men have yet to talk to each other face-to-face. But separately over the months of their correspondence, each has talked at length with a reporter about the other, the crime and their hopes for their fledgling relationship.
"He's going to help me resolve my feelings about the person who murdered my son, and maybe I can help him too," Gibson said. "It helps him redeem his humanity and it helps me feel I put something into the situation other than hatred and rage. If we do pull it off, it is like some kind of alchemy."
Lo has concluded he likes Gibson. But he does not expect Gibson to return the warmth.
Gibson said he had been surprised to discover that he felt compassion and empathy for Lo. But he added: "Could I ever like the kid who killed my son? I don't think so."
To preserve some privacy, Gibson provided only a few excerpts of the letters; Lo said he would leave that decision to Gibson. But the interviews and letters to a reporter seemed to duplicate much of what the two men have been saying to each other.
Lo described the evolution of his thoughts. As he had come to realize God would not have chosen him to inflict so much pain, he said, he had struggled to understand what made him into a killer.
He remains convinced that it was something outside of himself that gave him a message to do what he did. Perhaps, he said in answer to a question, it was a supernatural or satanic force.
Lo would still prefer not to consider the possibility that he is mentally ill, he said.
"He's got dignity," Gibson said of Lo. "He doesn't want to be regarded as an insane monster."
At times, when he considered the unlikelihood of his bond with Gibson, Lo sounded hopeful. Maybe his other victims and their families, too, might want to hear his explanations and his remorse.
Gibson said he and Lo are contending together with the spiritual consequences of that horrible night. Someday, he might try to visit his son's killer in prison, he said.
Lo said he is willing to do whatever is necessary to provide the answers his victims might need, no matter how difficult. "It is uncomfortable," he said, "in the sense that it just reaffirms every day and night: 'It's not a nightmare. I can't wake up from it: This is you, Wayne. You did it."'
Gibson said the work of the killer and the victim's father is not likely to be so simple as a quick exchange of letters and an atonement.
"I figure," Gibson said, "we've both got the rest of our lives to talk about this."