Summary of Genealogy of a Murder By Lisa Belkin: Four Generations, Three Families, One Fateful Night

By Willie M. Joseph

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Summary of Genealogy of a Murder By Lisa Belkin: Four Generations, Three Families, One Fateful Night

 

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Lisa Belkin's Genealogy of a Murder is a multigenerational tale of three families whose paths collided one summer night in 1960 with the murder of a police officer in Stamford, Connecticut. The killer remains at large, but a young Army doctor on vacation from his post at a research lab in a maximum-security prison realizes the shooter was a prisoner out on parole. Belkin examines the coincidences and choices that led to the murder, which illuminates how we shape history even as we are shaped by it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: May 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223722618

Willie M. Joseph

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Introduction

The story of a young army doctor stationed at a maximum-security prison and becoming friendly with a prisoner leads to the murder of a police officer. The story is about how the three men, the prisoner, the officer, and the doctor, all began at the same starting line and had parents or grandparents who had left different homelands to pursue the same American Dream. This is a central thread in the knot of who the author is, and it is one of the reasons he first gravitated towards journalism. The story of the author's stepfather is a colorful tangle of coincidences, connections, deliberate choices, chance events, global forces, and intimate interactions. It began when the author messaged the police officer's children and stood in the ruins of an Illinois prison with her great-great-step-granddaughter.

The murder of the warden's wife had shaped the life of her great-great-step-granddaughter and the next century of American prison life, but until they met, she didn't fully understand how. The pandemic of 1918 was a ghastly year, with more people dying from the 1918 flu epidemic than from any other natural event in human history up to that point. History divides neatly into chapters only in retrospect. The most important details in this text are that each one of us has a similar story, in which we shape history even as we are shaped by it. We are actors without a script, travelers without a map, and gamblers who don't know the odds. We have less influence over who we are now than we believe, and much more power over the future than we think.

GENEALOGY OF A MURDER

Friday, July 8, 1960 The Tarlovs Madison, Connecticut

The narrator is a young married couple at the Connecticut shore on Independence Day. He is leaden with exhaustion due to his work in a prison, where he brought tropical illness to a federal penitentiary as part of a military experiment. On this summer day, he was certain his work was good and his cause was right, but he also had the exhaustion of being a new parent, his youngest just six months old. He had come to fear for her sanity and their children's safety. The doctor had blocked off his two weeks of vacation time from the army and the lab and driven his family 950 miles from Chicago to Norwalk, Connecticut.

He left the three children with his parents and headed fifty miles further east in a wood-paneled station wagon to a beach where he hoped the sun, sand, and sea would bring back the woman he'd wed. The caller was a natural, the doctor quickly saw, and the caller was a natural, the doctor quickly saw. The caller was a natural, the doctor quickly saw, and the caller was a natural, the doctor quickly saw. The doctor and prisoner worked side by side in the lab at the Stateville Penitentiary near Chicago. The doctor heard echoes of his own life in the trainee's quiet tone, deliberate manner, and meticulous ways, and saw something familiar in his bent for history, science, and poetry.

One day, the prisoner asked the doctor for help with his parole case, which would be strengthened by a recommendation from a respected someone. The doctor considered every possibility and saw prisoners leave and return each week. Every week, at least a few were returnees, and they waved to the doctor as they marched past the barbershop window. The doctor of medicine, Dr. Alvin Tarlov, had become a student of recidivism and found that three things make all the difference: a job upon release, a safe place to live, and a fresh start. He secured a position for the convict in the medical lab and a room to rent in a staff dormitory.

The parole board believed the convict was ready to assume his place as a useful citizen in society, and just over a month before the doctor spirited his wife away to the beach, the State of Illinois handed the convict his freedom, along with a suit of clothes, fifty dollars in new bills, and a bus ticket from Chicago to Norwalk. Three men, Alvin Tarlov, Joseph DeSalvo, and David Troy, were killed on Independence Day weekend. Dr. Tarlov sat on his beach chair and wondered how they had become doctors, cops, and convicts. His mind swirled with questions about how things can change, how tiny moments can become sweeping history, and how trying to do the right thing can go wrong.

1900s

May 1906 Max and Raisel Tarlov On the No. 18 Train

The No. 18 train, also known as the Chicago Mail, was on the wrong track at the wrong time and moving at the wrong speed on a Friday night. At 8:24 p.m., a different eastbound train near Union Furnace began to leak, causing the Westinghouse air brakes to apply and twenty-one cars tumbled off and over the main line. The No. 18 was headed towards that second train and would not be able to pass. Signal tower operators telegraphed warnings to stationmasters, who wrote out new orders and handed them to the conductors. When the train neared Elizabeth, the stationmaster handed engineer John L. Fickes instructions to retrace his steps and return the train to Altoona.

The crew uncoupled the locomotive, rotated it 180 degrees, switched back onto the main, then backed up and recoupled to the cars on the opposite end. The No. 18 was ordered to take a single track cutoff through Petersburg, Pennsylvania, which was particularly dangerous due to the crooked, winding lay of the track and limited visibility. Max Tarloffsky was not supposed to be on the train, as he had promised to be back before sundown on Friday. He had a knack for horses and had learned to break the wildest ones back in Russia, outside his home city of Grodno. The No. 18 paused in Hollidaysburg and took on D.

P. Shaffer, a local pilot who worked the cutoff regularly. Max Tarlov, a 19-year-old from Norwalk, Connecticut, built a thriving business in the late 1800s by corralling stallions and shipping them east to train them to pull buggies. He chose twenty-six horses from the eighty-four horses in the No. 18 and waited for them to make their way out by freight. When the animals were held up in Pittsburgh, Max and T. J. Scott untangled the problem and by Friday afternoon, all twenty-six horses were on the No. 18 going east, scheduled to reach Harrisburg before midnight.

Max knew that the majestic animals, which had kept civilization running for thousands of years, were soon to become just a quaint bit of history. The Tarlov family immigrated to New York in the 1880s, where horses were a major environmental hazard. This caused flies, disease, accidents, and the smell of horse manure. A turnof-the-century wave of immigrants made cities more crowded, and the mass manufacture of the automobile meant there was a door-to-door alternative to the horse. Max and Raisel had spoken of their hope that their younger children could get an education that would allow them to be more than horse wranglers in a world of machines.

Max Tarlov had started adulthood in America with nothing, so he wanted to ensure his children would not have to do the same. As the No. 18 rolled through the darkness, Max saw his boss lying across the third row from the rear of the car. J. D. Conover, a traveling salesman from Manhattan, asked Scott if he had a stogie to spare. Mrs. W. N. Trinkle and F.

M. Harder joined the group and smoked and chatted into the night. The No. 21, the Chicago and St. Louis Express, was headed west, also toward the derailment, but from the other direction. Engineer John Lehr surrendered the throttle of the No. 21 to fellow engineer James T. Dougherty, who was a survivor in a profession where a long career was far from guaranteed. Dougherty had stopped just short of a tree three weeks ago, and now he had the right of way. On the rear platform of the eastbound No. 18, T.

J. Scott made his unsteady way past Max Tarlov and continued up to his own seat. When the No. 18 crested the hill and gathered speed downgrade, D. P. Shaffer saw the headlight of another train burst through the blackness and the two locomotives collided. Shaffer and the fireman next to him jumped, landing on rocky embankments to the north and south of the track. Fickes, Dougherty, Lehr, and T.

J. Scott were all killed in the crash of the No. 18 and No. 21 train. A group of Italian laborers heard the crash and came with lanterns. A traveling salesman from West Fairview, Pennsylvania, grabbed one of those lanterns and headed down the track. The engineer of the No. 18 saw the man and his lantern in time to stop and cut the rear helper engine loose and ran it backward into the nearest depot. All four doctors