The snow globe’s liquid drained into the piano, and shards of glass scattered under the wires and out of reach, but Mona did not move toward it. Her ever-present anxiety had found a place to dig in. She was inexplicably terrified for her child, struggling to attend to the cleanup without letting the loss of a small memento send her into a tailspin as little things so often did. She ran to the phone to call Walt, the man she would soon marry. 

“I dropped Tiffany’s snow globe into the piano,” she told him.  “It broke. Can you fix it?”

“Not a good idea,” said Walt, and he told her to call the man who had cared for the instrument since she bought it 15 years earlier.

Inside the apartment in San Diego, the man stood looking at the woman he had posed on the floor. To the 52 stab wounds, he added drops of blood on her thighs. He closed the bedroom door. Then he rinsed the knife, washed off all the blood he could and tried to hide the blood on his clothes. He checked the lock on the front door, looked through the jewelry in the other bedroom, picking up a watch and two rings. Finally, he slid open the screen door to the balcony and slipped out and over the edge. It was just past noon.

In the living room, the mother stood, arms folded tightly against her chest, her hand obsessively smoothing the fabric in her sweater, and stared at the piano. She had reached the repairman and explained the accident. Walt had come to check on her. “He says it could be a big problem,” she said.

"I am sure they can fix it, honey,” he told her.  “Most things are fixable.” 

She began washing the two small plates and two coffee cups that had been deposited in the sink after lunch. He stood behind her, resting his hands on her shoulders as he often did when she struggled with anxiety. He was a slim man, not tall, soft spoken, solid in a way her imposing ex-husband never was.

"Honey, it’s probably not a big deal," he said. He moved toward the door. He needed to get back to work.

"I hope it’s not ruined," she said.

"I’ll be back," he assured her and closed the door gently. She stood looking at the suds in the sink, then, remembering the phone call from Tiffany the day before, she hurried to the door and called after him,

"I am mailing Tiffany that check today."  He was halfway to the car and waved his agreement.  She returned to the sink, carefully wiping the entire surface, waiting. She could not shake the feeling that something was very wrong.

After the woman’s body was discovered, after the police processed the crime scene, after the body had been taken to the morgue, after the autopsy was complete, the coroner called her next of kin. Mona answered the phone.  It was 6 in the morning.

“Mrs. Schultz, I regret to inform you that your daughter, not by her own hand, has died.”

KELLEE WEINHOLD, a 1997 graduate of the literary nonfiction program at the University of Oregon, is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois. Her cousin, Janene Weinhold, was the second of six women killed by the same man in San Diego, California in 1990. Tiffany Shultz was the first. This work is part of a book-length project exploring the experiences of the victims' families since their deaths.