Gone Boy: A Walkabout: A Father’s Search for the Truth in His Son’s Murder
by Gregory GibsonKodansha International, 224 pp., $24
“If the truth didn’t always set us free, at least it kept us clean and made our lives less complicated,” Gregory Gibson writes in Gone Boy, the story of his son’s murder. Being set free by the truth is exactly what Gibson attempts in Gone Boy, and he achieves it with the unadorned naiveté of a father trying to make sense of the senseless. The 38-year-old antiquarian bookseller takes us on a six-year journey of emotional destruction and healing that never lapses into political grandstanding or self-promotion, but that does seek to assign blame for a disaster so easily preventable.
On the night of December 14, 1992, Wayne Lo, acting on “a command from God,” opened fire with an SKS automatic rifle on the small campus of Simon’s Rock college in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, wounding several and killing a professor and a student. The student was 18-year-old Galen Gibson. After facing the initial shock of losing his eldest son, Gibson went through an emotional windfall that jump-started his quest to discern the “big fate-machine that put Galen and that bullet together.” Gibson examines the underpinnings of this “machine” in phases. The first, fueled mostly by his anger toward the negligent Simon’s Rock faculty, seeks an explanation as to how Lo’s shooting spree occurred, and the results are disturbing. Wayne Lo purchased a package from a weapons retailer named Classic Arms that went unchecked by campus officials, even after a meeting was held on the issue. A student phoned security to report that Lo had a gun and planned to hurt someone. Yet despite these and several other warning signs (Lo repeatedly made racist and homophobic comments aloud, often joking about “killing people” to his group of conservative-minded friends), the only excuse Simon’s Rock could offer in their defense was that the matter “needed more investigation.”
After months of delays, Wayne Lo was sent to prison for life, but Gibson still wasn’t satisfied with the “why” of the situation. It is not until he meets and comes to know Lo’s parents that he achieves a sense of redemption, when he realizes that they spend each waking moment wondering if their son will ever “wake up one day and realize what he’d done.”
Gibson’s journey is written with heart. He never loses sight of his supportive family or his love for his son. Distracted by rage, saddled by guilt, and fueled by love, Gibson takes the reader down a harrowing path no parent should have to travel. He moves with grace and dignity, never exploiting the narrative’s events in a sensational light. “No one in the world can guarantee anyone else’s personal safety,” Gibson writes. Yet his fierce determination to uncover the truth allows the bureaucratic negligence of academia to be put into question. At least that’s a step in the right direction.
This article appears in November 12 • 1999.