The title A Better Ending, James Whitfield Thomson’s memoir of, as the subtitle puts it, “A Brother’s Twenty-year Quest to Uncover the Truth About his Sister’s Death,” suggests a clear, clean conclusion. But was Eileen’s fatal gunshot wound to the chest a suicide, as police reports indicated, or a homicide, as Thomson’s disbelief that Eileen would kill herself, and circumstantial evidence mounts to suggest a homicide.
The title also suggests that what Thomson finally decided after an extended investigation was something other than what he had originally conceived. And wanted. He did find a “better” ending to his inquiry, but not because he found the unequivocal truth, or that a cold case dating back 50 years was resolved.
What he discovered – about Eileen and himself – and family and friends - had to do with his decision to give up an academic career and, later, success in corporate sales to become – his heart’s desire - a writer. A short epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke, the famous early 20th-century Austro-German poet and novelist, hints at Thomson’s theme about accepting ambiguity. Even though TV courtroom dramas and police procedurals offer satisfactory endings. As Thomson notes, “Viewers want stories about cases that have been solved and reaffirm their belief that there is order in the universe, that justice will out.” They want – authors want, readers want -- “redemption, resolution, certainty.”
In a prologue, Thomson says he tried to tend to every aspect of this memoir “without bias or embellishment.” He succeeds, though he justifiably acknowledges changing some names, including the street address in San Bernardino, California, where the shooting took place, where Eileen lived with her husband Vic, a cop, who was inches away when the gun went off. Thomson also succeeds in evoking childhood memories of himself, his sister, and other family members, scenes full of playful fantasy and kids-will-be-kids cruelty. The Thomsons were a lower-middle-class family living in Pittsburgh in the `50s, but “Jimmy” never felt deprived. That was the way life was. He was smart, won a scholarship, went to Harvard, then Penn, where he earned a Ph.D. in American Studies.
His “quest,” like many quests, yielded challenges – dead-end leads, memory lapses, contradictory analyses and reports where head clashed with heart, such as testimony about Eileen’s depression. There seemed to be universal agreement, however, that the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department was either incompetent or indifferent, or both, in investigating and writing up Eileen’s death. Were they protecting one of their own, following a code peculiar to police? The fact that Vic took out a new marriage license one year to the day of Eileen’s death meant nothing legally, no matter what it might say of Vic’s “sick” character, as Thomson writes. Nor did assertions from Eileen’s friends that Vic often beat her up.
Clearly, Thomson’s “quest” took time to evolve. By 1974, when Eileen died, he was married and had a daughter. And then that September, a call came with the news that Eileen was dead. He thought he could deal with his mounting doubts about suicide by way of writing a novel, but his second wife urged him not to write about a fictional narrator but to put himself in the story. It was a turning point. “Obsession, mission, quest?” For two decades, he had been creating journals for his children, but once his sister’s case got to him, it proved all-consuming. As Norman Mailer once said, if you want facts, write nonfiction; if you want the truth, write fiction. In A Better Ending, Thomson has made the best of both genres, creating a narrative with plot, characters, setting, and theme to look deeply into a disturbing real-life event.
