Death and the Matrons
With her trial soon to begin, everyone wants to know how Rowlett’s Darlie Routier could have brutally stabbed her kids. As the case of another accused murderess suggests, the answer lies in the suburbs.
(Page 2 of 2)
The particular sort of setting Candy and Darlie chose is known to urban topographers as an exurb. Rowlett and Fairview aren’t merely bedroom communities; these havens for the latest wave of white flight are not so much residential extensions of the big city as they are small towns unto themselves. As such, they tend to be geographically and culturally far-flung. “All I ever wanted was a house in the country and lots of kids—kids and animals,” Candy frequently said. And, indeed, it seemed to me that all her aspirations and dreams, disappointments and depressions—and, perhaps, her incomprehensible eruption of violence—could be traced to her carefully chosen lifestyle. The simple, bucolic life that both Candy and Darlie sought could be found here, along with cheaper real estate, lower taxes, safer streets, and better schools. But so could a sense of isolation and boredom that is even more intense than that suffered by residents of the original bedroom communities, let alone denizens of the city.
In Candy’s case, the satisfaction of her life’s longing soon became a source of irritation. She felt “stuck,” she often said, as if she was “missing something.” This sense of disconnection, I always felt, had to be especially profound for a woman of her generation. Having given herself over to this sort of retro-woman role, she found herself a frustrated spectator to the other, more exciting versions of womanhood being lived out around her, lifestyles that included a family, a career, and extramarital sex—or so she fantasized. Not surprisingly, she decided on the latter as an antidote for her malaise. She toyed with the idea of getting her college degree, even took a few courses, but mainly she flirted with her fellow churchgoer Allan Gore. She told me that she was looking for an affair that would provide “fireworks,” but the ensuing tryst turned out to be little more than a few months of moderately passionate nooners followed by a more platonic friendship that eventually fell dormant for mutual lack of interest—another version of being stuck.
Is it possible that the malaise caused by feeling trapped in suburbia is psychologically similar to the criminal pathology found in the urban underclass, where the sense of being stuck has been blamed for everything from juvenile crime to domestic abuse and the drug plague? It is hard to imagine two cultures that are more different, but the pressures of each may be enough to cause an otherwise sane person to snap. The idea of suburban angst may seem absurd given the idyllic facade of suburban life, but maybe that’s the point: For some suburbanites, it is nothing more than a facade beneath which their dark or different selves toss and turn restlessly.
One of Candy’s selves was the happy homemaker living out her Norman Rockwell dream. Another self, one that perpetually longed for something to enliven its existence, dreamed of dabbling in self-destructive adulterous flings. Darlie Routier’s sunny suburban wife and mother self, it turns out, was joined by another self that penned thoughts of suicide in a diary, and yet another that was judged by some to be an overly flamboyant dresser and a spendthrift. As an anonymous acquaintance of Darlie’s said after her arrest: “There were two of her, kinda. She was a real nice mother who was the June Cleaver type, and then there was the part that made her want to be on Knots Landing.”
But alienation, ennui, and acting out are only part of the suburban angst. There was also a certain narcissism about these two women, a kind of hubris that seemed to make them feel somehow above the law. If Candy was contemptuous of her chosen lifestyle, for example, she could also be defensively deceptive about it. After the mutilated remains of Betty Gore were found by neighbors, she did not volunteer to her husband, her friends, or the police the fact that she had had an affair with Allan Gore. And even a year after her trial and acquittal, she betrayed little remorse about what had happened. Instead, she whined about how “humiliating” the pre-booking strip search had been and mugged scornfully for the news media’s cameras. The whole business seemed to be out of sight, out of mind, “unthinkable”—precisely the suburban worldview.
Darlie Routier may yet be found a victim rather than the perpetrator in the deaths of her sons. But police officers’ suspicions were aroused by the contradictory series of statements she gave the morning after her breathless 911 call—statements that seemed so arrogantly specious that investigators considered them prima facie evidence of guilt. Among the more dramatic of them, as detailed in her expansively documented arrest warrant, was the fact that though she had said her boys were dying, she apparently did not lift a finger to save them as they bled to death, and she never showed any concern about her husband or infant son. Moreover, though Darlie implied that the assailant had exited through a slashed screen window in the garage, the police found no trail of blood in the area and no disturbance of dust on the windowsill or mulch in the yard immediately outside the window. Initial tests, in fact, revealed traces of the screen on a knife found in the Routier kitchen. Finally, the police doubted Darlie’s own wounds: The neck wound didn’t seem to jibe with her account of a vicious assault—it looked self-inflicted. And the wounds on one of her hands were less consistent with her being stabbed than with her stabbing herself.
When Darlie went to court for pretrial proceedings, she wore an expression of contempt on her face that reminded me of Candy’s. As police officers testified about the gaping inconsistencies in her story, she shook her head defiantly. One may choose to view her behavior as normal for a wrongly accused defendant under considerable duress. On the other hand, it may be seen as a slightly different permutation of Candy Montgomery’s suburban arrogance—as in, How dare you question and judge me?
Suburban culture is, above all else, a matriarchy. Its queens are part of the most sought-after political and socioeconomic class of our age. They’re the voters politicians are trying to demystify, the buyers marketers are trying to lure. If they feel isolated in their fiefdoms, they also feel morally and socially superior. And, if Candy’s attitude was any indication, they don’t appreciate having their ethical purity questioned. But if Candy Montgomery and Darlie Routier were haughty, they were also, deep down, unremittingly sad, and no wonder. The suburban dream they’d invested so heavily in hadn’t paid them back in kind. They had dwindling options; the sheer sanity of their lives had become overbearing.
Any of us who take pride in being “normal” can identify with that predicament, which is why we’re so fascinated by cases like these. Hideous crimes always invite our fascination. But only a few elicit an uncomfortable empathy as well. As unthinkable as the crime may be, the alleged perpetrator is not so easily dismissed. She is, as advertised, a totem of all that’s supposed to be good and righteous about the American middle class; she is one of us. And when one of us does the unthinkable, it becomes just a little too thinkable for comfort.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
