Newtown: An American Tragedy (9 page)

By 2012, Adam had slipped into further solitude. “It was nearly complete isolation and it was self-imposed,” one relative recalled. “Adam was by himself all the time and there was nothing Nancy or anyone else could do to get him out. She tried, but he just wouldn’t have it. The more she tried, the more she believed she pushed him further and further away.”

Another friend referred to Adam as a “shut-in.” His mental health issues, combined with his military ambitions, his gaming habit, and a dramatic decline in any form of social interaction had caused the young man to withdraw further and further from reality. Even the shooting range was barely appealing.

N
ancy, too, began to change. She had always been an attractive, upbeat blonde known for her unique brand of humor and sarcasm. But friends noticed that she was spending more and more time away from home and started talking about “getting away.” In the fall, in anticipation of the move, she parted with one of her most prized possessions—her beloved Red Sox season tickets.

Neighbors began to notice a shift toward seclusion in the Lanza family. Their sprawling yellow Colonial family home, hidden away in a wooded area at the end of Yogananda Street, had been so full of life during its first few years but had since became a “black spot” in the neighborhood. The family had earned a reputation as very quiet, private, and largely unknown.

“I knew every single one of my neighbors but them,” recalled one neighbor who lived three houses down. “Hardly anyone spoke
to them. It’s as if they stopped being part of the community altogether and just fell off the face of the earth.”

Although Nancy had dedicated so much of her life and energy to helping her son, she sensed that her ability to keep a handle on the situation was slipping from her grasp. Her child was well past a point of crisis and, whatever was going on inside his head at this point, was beyond her ability to comprehend.

“Parental bonds are formed so early in life . . . they are either there or they aren’t,” she had emailed a friend more than a decade earlier, during an easier time when she still felt optimistic about her ability to shape Adam’s future. “It is a direct product of how much the parent put into that relationship.”

Now, her attitude had shifted. With Adam, perhaps it was already too late, she confided in a friend. Nancy was becoming accustomed to leaving her son alone for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Beginning in January 2012, she traveled to London, New Orleans, and New York City, in addition to frequent trips to Boston.

On October 6, 2012, Nancy emailed a relative about her extensive travels and plans to eventually downsize her home. She was waiting for the market to improve before listing the Yogananda Street residence with a Realtor.

“I hear you there . . . no sense selling at a loss!” she wrote. “Best to keep stability in the kids’ lives. Moves are so tough at that age. I am still in the same place but getting to the point where I may want a smaller house. I travel a lot (a little bit of everywhere . . . Boston, New York, Maine, Toronto, London, San Francisco, Nantucket, Charlotte, Baltimore . . . that covers this year) spend time
with friends, work with a couple of charities. Low key life and very happy.”

Nancy spent Thanksgiving 2012 in northern New England with family, leaving Adam home alone with a prepared meal in the fridge. She had come to realize that she could not let her own life come to a grinding halt because of her son. His social interactions had dwindled to rare trips to the shooting range—getting him to a holiday feast with relatives was out of the question.

She told friends she planned on being out of town for Christmas, too, but didn’t say where. These long stretches away from home didn’t seem to worry her though. She somehow thought her absence might make Adam more independent. When a close friend asked if she was concerned about her son spending so much time alone, Nancy said she wasn’t worried. Adam needed more solitary time than most people.

“He’s fine,” she said reassuringly. “Just so long as he has his computer and his video games, he can keep himself occupied.”

In 2012, Nancy Lanza also learned that her father had a secret life in Ohio and that she had a half sister she had previously not known about. On October 6, 2012, she emailed her sister-in-law Marsha Lanza about recently reconnecting with a long-lost family member, Cheryl.

“I discovered I have a half sister in Ohio, so I have to get there to meet her soon!”

“Ha! Yes, indeed . . . definitely part gypsy.”

“Yah . . . that’s what I thought too but apparently my father was married previously and actually lived in Ohio . . . secret life
and all. Weird. Cincinnati . . . Story TOO long to text off my little I Phone . . . But yes, life is funny and strange.

“Lies people tell and try to live in those lies. Sad. She seems nice and I would like to meet her. I feel sorry that my parents turned their backs on her at such a young age. No one is talking so I don’t know the real story.

“As for Cheryl . . . she had no clue what happened. Her mother is dead, our father is dead, and my mother won’t say. It’s a mystery. We will never have answers . . . just have to deal with what is.

“Ryan works in Manhattan . . . Adam still at home. Yes, they do grow up too fast. I am off to bed . . . SO good to hear from you. Let’s keep in touch! Maybe I can visit you when I visit my sister . . . I’ll be halfway there.”

The last communication from Marsha to Nancy came on December 14, 2012, when she sent one last message that was never returned. “Hi Nancy, Just checking in to see if you are OK and what you might know about the school shooting. Isn’t this the town you live in? not sure. Drop me a line when you get a chance. My prayers go out to all.”

T
he second week of December 2012, Nancy dropped by My Place Pizza & Restaurant, and Dennis Durant greeted her with a beer and chatted with her for half an hour or so, as they did two to three days a week. She was her usual bubbly self; there wasn’t the slightest indication that anything could be wrong until halfway through her third draft.

“I don’t know what else I can do for him,” she confided to Durant. “I’m running out of answers.”

Nancy did not have to say “his” name. Adam was sick and getting sicker. Her twenty-year-old son had been acting out more over the past few months, throwing temper tantrums triggered by the mere mention of the future. Any break from his routine made him hysterical. He would often stomp and scream, and then not speak to her for days.

Over the years Nancy had grown to accept such episodes. She could deal with temper tantrums. But as she sipped her beer, she told Durant it was the severe bouts of isolation coupled with a growing obsession with the military that had her worried.

As a kid, Adam hoped to follow in the footsteps of his uncle James, a Green Beret, and join the military. He admired his uncle, often telling family members when he was little, “I’m going to be just like Uncle Jim.” At first Nancy encouraged Adam’s desire to follow in his uncle’s footsteps, thinking the discipline of the armed forces would give him structure and help channel his nervous energy. Yet she soon realized that the deteriorating state of his mental health would adversely affect his future plans.

Nancy had always looked up to her brother, too. “I don’t know if there is a name for the kind of training the Green Berets get . . . they are simply trained to kill,” Nancy emailed a friend back in the late 1990s. “He taught me two moves that even someone my size can use . . . although I have never had the chance to test them, I am sure they are effective.”

Nancy had been the victim of a physical assault in the early
1980s on the Boston Common and the incident had shaken her to her core. The physical confrontation happened in broad daylight and in front of onlookers and she had feared her attacker would follow her back to Kingston and victimize her again at home.

“Nancy was nervous about that. She felt that her life was in danger,” an official from the Kingston Police Department recalled.

While the self-defense lessons from her brother were helpful, in another email she wrote, “I really miss having my brother right next to me. I always felt so safe that way. No one messes with you if your brother is a cop . . . I never fully appreciated how wonderful that was.” As much as Nancy enjoyed her firearms for recreational use, without her brother around they also gave her a much-needed sense of security. Over the years she amassed an impressive collection of weaponry, including eleven knives, a starter pistol, a bayonet, three samurai swords, several firearms, and more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition.

Adam had at least four of his own guns that he’d picked out himself after researching them online and that he kept in a safe in his bedroom upstairs. Nancy told Durant that she exposed him to the firearms as a way to help him learn responsibility. Durant later said she shouldered the blame for her son’s obsession. Target shooting and their mutual love of firearms had given her a way to connect with her children, especially Adam.

Nancy recalled a conversation she’d had with her son just a few weeks earlier when telling Durant about Adam’s medical conditions crushing his dream of joining the armed forces: “I told Adam, in as gentle terms as possible, that he will never be a marine, that he’s just not cut out for it and that life has something different
planned for him. How can you be a marine if you won’t let people touch you?”

But Adam took the news harder than even his mother expected. Instead of exploring other options for his future, he became more and more obsessed with the military. The basement, which Nancy had remodeled into a game room for Adam, now looked more like a military compound. Nearly every inch of the Sheetrock walls were covered with posters of weaponry and old tanks from World War II. Pictures of submarines, military equipment, and depictions of battle were proudly displayed.

In another room of the house, which she had originally designated as a space for exercise, Adam, often dressed from head to toe in military garb, had created an indoor shooting range where he used his pellet gun to shoot at paper and cardboard targets he had set up on a clothesline.

Nancy also told Durant about Adam’s other obsession with violent video games. He would sit in front of the screen for hours, “zoned out,” she explained. On the rare occasion that she watched him play, Nancy said she found the images downright disturbing. She told Durant she had begun to notice that lately her son rarely ventured outside his compound. “He’s like a zombie in front of the screen,” she said, noting that Adam sometimes sat playing the game well into the night and slept most of the day. He had no friends, and now, no future ambitions. His life revolved increasingly around the game of war.

He owned a Sony PlayStation 2, an X-Box 360, and hundreds of games, most of them war games that he had meticulously lined up in alphabetical order against his wall. He spent his waking hours acting out fantasies he learned from the violent video games. Nancy told
Durant she was baffled by her normally restless son’s unwavering focus on the screen.

Still, she noticed that the increasing amount of time Adam spent playing violent video games coincided with his growing aversion for affection. He had always hated human touch, but Nancy had been the exception. Now when she reached for him, Adam physically recoiled. Nancy was worried and wanted answers. She had recently decided to take a peek inside his upstairs bedroom.

After a few minutes of searching, she found a disturbing number of drawings stashed underneath Adam’s nightstand. Most were pictures of guns, “normal teenage boy crap,” she called it. But other sketches were gruesome depictions of death, images of mutilated corpses. One drawing she described was of a bloodied woman clutching a rosary as bullets ripped through her spine. Another sketch depicted a large rolling grassy field lined with the corpses of young children. In the drawing, the faces of the children were severely mutilated and couldn’t be recognized. One sketch appeared to be a self-portrait of a younger Adam with blood gushing from a large hole in his forehead and his arms stretched upward to the sky in a posture of triumph.

Adam had found several more graphic images online, printed them out, and kept them in a manila folder. Like his sketches, most depicted death.

One of the pictures showed a gunman dressed all in black taking aim at a man on his knees. The man appeared to be begging for his life in the clearing of a forest with the gunman’s rifle pointed at his head. The two were surrounded by dozens of dead bodies covered in blood.

The picture that disturbed Nancy the most showed a naked woman covered in transparent plastic wrap. Her hands were bound behind her back and her face had been contorted to give her the appearance of a smile. Lipstick had been sloppily painted on her face.

“It gives me the chills to even think about it,” she told Durant.

Nancy had always respected her son’s space and she felt conflicted about going through his personal belongings but was horrified by the discovery. Durant said she decided it was best for the time being not to approach Adam about the images. She feared he might further shut her out if he discovered this breach of his space.