(Editor’s Note: This is the first in a new series for NORTH of the JAMES. Each month we will feature a story from our archives. This one appeared in our February edition sixteen years ago, just one month after the horrific Harvey family murder.) 

Four Kites Ascending Over A World Without Mirth

by Charles McGuigan

On New Year’s Day the tapestry of Richmond was cut clean through. Woof and warp were rent and no artful needlework will ever make the fabric seamless again. Like a scar in flesh, the seam of time’s repair will always be a reminder of the moment the frail threads of life were severed.

For on the first day of this year Bryan, Kathryn, Stella and Ruby Harvey—every member of this small family—were slain in the basement of their Woodland Heights home by certain creatures. There were other murders in Richmond during those first few days of the New Year, three of which have been linked to the same creatures who were arrested for killing the Harveys. And all these murders and subsequent murders were tragic.

But the murder of the Harveys seemed the hardest to comprehend, perhaps because of the two little girls and the parents’ high profile in the community. By all accounts the parents, Bryan and Kathryn, were sweet, loving, talented, intelligent people and excellent parents. The front door to their home, according to some accounts, was unlocked, attesting to their openness and trust. But who would ever wish them harm? 

I think that’s one of the things nobody will ever understand, because the killers were simply not human beings. They were demonic, they may have been a subset of our species, but they were not human. I would call them animals, but this would defame members of entire taxonomic classes. These are not animals driven by instinct, but un-human beings with diseased souls. They are mutants, genetic mishaps, Evil Incarnate—and evil is the operative word here. For there is good and there is evil in this world. And despite the relativism of certain pseudo-theologies that would have us believe there is no such thing as a good action versus a bad action, evil does exist. It is the palpable enemy of all that is good, because evil, ultimately, is the absence of love and light, the two things human beings thrive on. Removing either one of these essentials from the human diet spells death as surely as a deprivation of food or water.

So it was a pair of un-humans who deprived a small family of a life, a family that until New Year’s Day was blessed with love and luck. 

***

A gloom settled over Richmond immediately after the news of the Woodland Heights slayings began trickling in. It was a tangible gloom reflected by the weather--grim, cold, damp, lifeless gray— a world without mirth. Over the next few days I would talk with hundreds of people and almost every one of them expressed a similar thought: “I just can’t get my brain (or mind) wrapped around it.”

The day after the murders I had lunch with a few old friends at River City Diner in the Bottom. Each one of them had at least a peripheral relationship with the Harveys. And even then, the rumor mill had begun to grind away truth. There were theories as to who had committed these atrocities and why. One member of our party brought his fist down on the table after listening to one false theory. “Let the police do their job,” he said. “And then let the courts do theirs.”

Later that same day a man told me that God had called the Harveys home, had taken them away from the world to be with Him. I almost choked when he said this. 

“What, is He lonely?” I asked.

The God I know never takes anybody. Cancer takes people. Tsunamis take people. Murderers take people. But God sure as hell doesn’t, and if He does then He’s got some serious problems. Plucking human beings from the world would suggest God is a selfish entity, pathologically needy. And I just don’t buy that. The Creator may welcome His children home once they’ve been evicted from this world by disease, natural disaster and brutality, but He doesn’t take them from us.

The brutal slayings called instantly to mind “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote. It also made me think of perhaps the best crafted work of American short fiction—“A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, by the late Flannery O’Connor who was welcomed home by her Creator many years ago, having been evicted from the world by lupus erythematosus.

***

On the Tuesday following the murders, I talked with a friend who had the pleasure of teaching Ruby Harvey, the four-year old daughter of Bryan and Kathryn. There’s a vacant seat now at Second Presbyterian Church Child Care Center where the little girl was learning about the world.

“The teachers are kind of sleepwalking,” my friend told me. “We’re just in shock.” Getting through the day has been difficult for her, particularly with the grim reminder of Ruby’s absence. “You try and do your work and then something reminds you,” she says. “And you get that blow to your stomach.”

She choked back tears, then said: “Ruby was just a sweet girl. She had a sparkle to her. She was like a little fairy. It makes me so angry.”

The anger inspired by the slayings ignited the gentlest souls. Women and men I have known for years talked about buying guns for self-protection, people who literally wouldn’t harm a fly.

A thing like this, an evil of this magnitude unleashed on the world, conjures our basest nature. All the reasoning against capital punishment I had ever entertained fled my mind with the swiftness of a sparrow. The crimes committed deserve the harshest punishment imaginable. It is also the responsibility of a civilized society to ensure that beings like these do not move among us. They don’t belong; there is no room for them. Not even in penitentiaries or insular penal colonies.

I think what was driven home by the murders was this: The world is a dangerous place and you need to keep up your guard for the sake of your children and your family. It was a reminder that there are predators among us who would slit the throats of innocents. 

***

That night my daughter and my son had fallen asleep on the couch, watching “Elf”. He is four; she is nine—the same ages of the Harvey girls. I watched them in their slumber, arms and legs that had run wild, now splayed out, the faint whisper of breath issuing from nostrils, the slight heaving of small bird cage chests, angelic faces supported by delicate necks. When I saw the beauty of their throats, thin, smooth, unblemished, a tick of vein pulsing blood, I wept. And then I carried them to their bedroom where they slept soundly till morning. I also tucked a buck knife, its blade drawn, under my pillow. I was armed and ready. 

And herein lies the problem: Through their horrifying actions, these un-humans have made us like them. I suspect at some point when these creatures are brought to trial we will hear about their substance abuse and their mental disorders. Perhaps, unspeakable things had been done to them as children. Bullshit. They had free will, they made the choice to do what they did. They were murderers and the foulest kind. They massacred children, and adults as innocent as their offspring. And they apparently had time to consider their actions. There must have been resistance and screams and tears and pleading. There must have been terror in the eyes of parents and children alike, and disbelief. These un-humans had to have seen the open innocence of the children. And yet they sliced their throats, let them bleed to death, watched warm, thick, pooling red spread across a basement floor. They watched.

***

The next morning, after I’d taken my kids to school I walked over to the Fan where so many of us earned our stripes and came of age. Walking clears the mind and the longer the walk the better. I made my way along old Hermitage Road behind the Diamond, through the area where stockyards still operated when I first came to Richmond in the seventies, then up to Meadow and at last pierced the heart of the Fan.

The neutral gray sky does something to the perspective of the homes in the Fan. I’d noticed it years before and have never seen anything quite like it in any other city. Against the backdrop of an overcast sky the houses lose a dimension, become planar, two-dimensional, as if they are nothing more than part of an old Hollywood set. 

As I stood on the north side of Grove, near the corner of Stafford, marveling at the two-dimensional facades on the other side of the street, something rose through the dull pewter sky high above the rooflines that caused my heart to quaver. It was followed by another, and then another and still another until there were four, each a different color, each diamond shaped and each tethered to Earth as if the planet were unwilling to let them go. A stiff breeze carried them aloft, and they shimmied through the air like living things, flicking their long flagella, swimming toward the clouds. 

I will never know who held the lines and launched these marvels of balsa wood and vinyl, these machineries of mirth, or where they stood, perhaps, over near Fountain Lake in far off Byrd Park. But none of that really matters. What does matter is that three days after four people were slaughtered in the safe haven of their own home, four kites ascended over a transformed city where perspective had inexplicably vanished. And it was as if these inanimate things were alive and being welcomed home by their Creator in the heavens.