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. C1). Lardner said his work on the story began when he spoke with a Brookline, Massachusetts, police officer. Lardner discovered, after talking with the officer, how little he really knew about what had happened to his daughter. In his efforts to find out the truth about Kristin's case and her death, he collected enough information that would grow into his article, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. This is how Lardner began his lengthy article:The phone was ringing insistently, hurrying me back to my desk. My daughter Helen was on the line, sobbing so hard she could barely catch her breath."Dad," she shouted. "Come home! Right away!"I was stunned. I had never heard her like this before. "What's wrong?" I asked. "What happened?""It'sit's Kristin. She's been shot . . . and killed."Kristin? My Kristin? Our Kristin? I'd talked to her the afternoon before. Her last words to me were, "I love you Dad." Suddenly I had trouble breathing myself.It was 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 30. In Boston, where Kristin Lardner was an art student, police were cordoning off an apartment building a couple of blocks from the busy, sunlit sidewalk where she'd been killed 90 minutes earlier. She had been shot in the head and face by an exboyfriend who was under court order to stay away from her. When police burst into his apartment, they found him sprawled on his bed, dead from a final act of selfpity.This was a crime that could and should have been prevented. I write about it as a sort of cautionary tale, in anger at a system of justice that failed to protect my daughter, a system that is addicted to looking the other way, especially at the evil done to women.But first let me tell you about my daughter. Page 369She was, at 21, the youngest of our five children, born in D.C. and educated in the city's public schools, where not much harm befell her unless you count her taste for rock music, lots of jewelry, and funky clothes from Value Village. She loved books, went trickortreating dressed as Greta Garbo, played one of the witches in "Macbeth" and had a grand time in tapdancing class even in her sneakers. She made life sparkle. (Lardner, 1992, p. C1)Lardner tells the story chronologically after setting it up with this lead. Following the description of his daughter, he traced the history of the relationship how Kristin met the man who would stalk and kill both her and himself. Lardner gives readers detailed biographical material about Cartier, her murderer. As he does, the story becomes more third person in voice. Lardner quotes friends of his daughter and persons who knew Cartier, a man with psychological problems. The detail of Lardner's writing includes numerous incidents and anecdotes recounted by persons who knew the couple. He also used his investigative reporting skills in locating and reviewing public records involving his daughter's murderer. His eye for detail is evident in this paragraph midway through the story:Left in her bedroom at her death was a turntable with Stravinsky's "Rites of Spring" on it and a tape player with a punk tune by Suicidal Tendencies. Her books, paperbacks mostly, included Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," along with favorites by Sinclair Lewis, Dickens and E.B. White and a book about upper and middlecaste women in Hindu families in Calcutta.Her essays for school, lucid and wellwritten, showed a great deal of thought about art, religion and the relationship between men and women. She saw her art as an expression of parts of her hidden deep inside, waiting to be pulled out, but still to be guarded closely: "Art could be such a selfish thing. Everything she made, she made for herself and not one bit of it could she bear to be parted with. Whether she loved it, despised it or was painfully ashamed of it . . . she couldn't stand the thought of these little parts of her being taken away and put into someone else's possession." (Lardner, 1992, p. C1)Still another insightful passage utilized another writing technique. Lardner recreated dialogue in this portion: Page 370What did she see in him? It's a question her parents keep asking themselves. But some things are fairly obvious. He reminded her of Jason, her friend from New Zealand. He could be charming. "People felt a great deal of empathy for him," said Octavia Ossola, director of the child care center at the home where Cartier grew up, "because it was reasonably easy to want things to be better for him." At the Harbor School, said executive director Art DiMauro, "he was quite endearing. The staff felt warmly about Michael
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