A Better Ending review: James Whitfield Thomson probes sister’s death

How well do any of us know our adult siblings? In “A Better Ending,” James Whitfield Thomson looks back on the events of summer 1974, when his younger sister Eileen died at the age of 27 from a gunshot wound to the chest. His sister’s death was quickly ruled a suicide, although it bore all the hallmarks of murder, and Thomson’s initial reaction to the circumstances surrounding her death reveals much about the separate realities in which men and women continue to live.

According to official police reports, Eileen died by suicide in the middle of an argument with her husband Vic, then a cop in San Bernardino. The San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department investigated her death, and almost immediately determined it as a self-inflicted gunshot, despite the presence of Vic in the house when she died.

Eileen was the youngest of three and only daughter in the family. Thomson describes a Pittsburgh childhood where money was tight and their father’s alcoholism was a destabilizing force. The two younger siblings, only a couple of years apart, were both very close and prone to fighting and hitting each other.

One of the undercurrents in Thomson’s writing is the admission of the casual violence that surrounded them, and the sense that the family was not particularly adept at discussing feelings. At times, Thomson’s accounts of events — such as his role in the hazing of one of his high school football teammates — is narrated at such a distance that it reads as if he wasn’t a participant. That distance recurs often when he becomes a character in the story — almost as if he feels duty-bound to report his actions, but is unwilling to offer insight about himself.

After Eileen’s death, his grief-stricken parents asked him to speak to Vic in order to try and find out anything that might suggest that Vic had killed his wife. In their conversation, Vic reveals to Thomson that Eileen had demanded a trial separation, but after a couple of months they had reconciled and everything had been fabulous. But Vic had accused Eileen of cheating on him during their separation after sitting in his car outside her house all night, rough-handling Eileen even as she had denied having sexual relations with the man. Vic tells her brother that Eileen had accused him of spying on her. (Which he was.)

On the day of her death, soon after the pair had reconciled and started seeing a marriage therapist, Eileen had confessed that the one-night stand she had disclosed in their counseling session had in fact been a full-blown multi-date affair with a co-worker. She wanted to get everything out in the open so that the pair could move forward.

The two of them argued violently. When Vic left the room to make a phone call, Eileen shot herself, supposedly out of shame for her infidelity.

And here is where gendered perceptions come into play. Shocked to find out that his sister had broken her marriage vows, Thomson shifts his loyalty to Vic. He asks Vic if he had hit her when he first became aware of the cheating. It’s not an irrelevant question since Thomson had hit his wife when he discovered she was having an affair.

He writes, “How could I condemn Vic? A month before, I had slapped Connie and condoned it in my own mind as an acceptable action for a man whose wife had cheated on him. The feeling I had at this moment was one of empathy with Vic, so much so that I assumed, as he did, that Eileen was lying when she said that nothing had happened between her and the salesman.”

Eileen died in 1974, when domestic violence was still regarded as a private matter between husband and wife and rarely criminally prosecuted. Perhaps still wounded by his own experiences with his wife, Thomson, author of the novel “Lies You Wanted to Hear,” sees Vic as the injured party. Vic claimed that he left Eileen in their bedroom because she was “hysterical” and he wanted to call Eileen’s mother to see if she could help calm Eileen down. That’s when Vic heard the shot.

These details set off alarm bells in my head. Eileen’s motivation for shooting herself felt like a flimsy excuse made up on the spot by a murderous husband. According to recent government statistics, the number of women murdered by an intimate partner was five times higher than for men; according to research by Everytown, 76% of women killed by firearms were murdered by their partners in 2021.

While Thomson’s obliviousness to the phenomenon in 1974 might be a product of attitudes and awareness of the issue that time, he still seems unaware how prevalent domestic violence is when he starts investigating Eileen’s death in 2001. He hires a male private investigator to track down more details, but it’s not until a female investigator joins them that she immediately spots a pattern of domestic abuse that should have been an immediate red flag.

What follows is Thomson’s account of his obsessive search for answers about what really happened to Eileen on that afternoon. It’s never clear what fuels his quest nearly 30 years after she died: At first, he says it’s because he wants to write a novel about his sister’s case; later, when others ask him, “Why now?” his response is “happenstance.” As if it had accidentally occurred to him.

True crime stories often turn on the pursuit of a more accurate account of what actually transpired than authorities first agreed upon. Traditional ideas about narrative — that a story has a beginning, middle and end — fuels the expectation that by uncovering the sequence of events and the motivations of those involved, that we will arrive at a place called “truth,” and that in knowing the truth, justice will prevail.

What then, does a writer — a grieving brother — do with a case that begins in ambiguous circumstances? If it turns out that Eileen did aim a gun at her own heart, will having the suicide confirmed be a form of justice? And if Thomson’s investigation reveals that her husband killed her in 1974, what then would justice look like decades later?

Thomson is aware of the quandary. “We want a verdict in cases like this, truth sealed with an imprimatur of a court of law,” he writes as he discusses the true crime cases that are a staple of TV programs such as “Dateline,” observing that producers of such shows “know their audience. Viewers don’t want ambiguity: they want stories about cases that have been solved and reaffirm their belief that there is order in the universe, that justice will win out. This is what I wanted for Eileen — and for me — order, justice, redemption, resolution. Certainty.”

Thomson is seeking his own redemption. When Eileen died, he had accepted the idea that her suicide had been a natural consequence for breaking her marriage vows. His understanding of her was based on a one-dimensional view of what a moral woman was. But marriage is much more complex, and he knew almost nothing about Eileen’s life in California. He admits that he casually accepted Vic’s story because of his own “hubris and eagerness to get on with my life.”

His views of Eileen as an adult woman needed to change if he was to find any peace with Eileen’s death. At best, what he gets is an uneasy peace.

Even in 2001, Thomson operated in a world in which he was oblivious to the ways that gender ideologies and power imbalances affect men and women in different ways. His assumptions about Eileen were based on views he’d had of her as a kid. What he comes to understand is that his little sister had been 2,000 miles away from the support of family, living with a husband with a bad temper, a gun and a badge. In her last moments, she was alone and frightened with that angry man, and about to have her life cut short by expectations about how a “good” wife should behave.

Berry is a writer and critic living in Oregon.