Murder in Massachusetts

Who Needs School

By this time, Patricia had opened Mrs. O's. It had been a childhood dream to run her own restaurant. She was great cook. Hard worker. And being gone much of the time didn't seem so bad lately, seeing that she was having so many problems with the kids.

As a comptroller, Patricia supervised the financial affairs of Lenco. She was in control, basically, of how much money went out, how much was left. Pretty simple stuff. Now, she was doing the same thing with Neil's sign-making business, her restaurant, and the household bills and expenses. Anything having to do with the finances, in effect, was under Patricia's control. Insurance. Mortgage. Car payments. Food.

All of it.

If, however, being able to control extenuating financial circumstances at home professionally satisfied one aspect of Patricia's character, not being able to get a hold on the children consumed the other. Christopher wasn't doing any better. By the eleventh grade, Patricia and Neil were disappointed to learn, he had only accrued enough credits to serve on a ninth-grade level; he'd have to repeat, mainly, two grades, and wouldn't graduate until two years after his fellow students.

When that reality hit Christopher, he decided that going to school wasn't worth the effort any longer.

So he quit.

"Find yourself a job if you're not going to school," Neil told him, demanding that if Christopher was going to live in the house, he had damned well better be working. "Either that, or get the hell out."

Meanwhile, by Amanda's own account to police later, she was getting actively involved in harder drugs. Then she and Christopher, after he moved out of the house, hooked up and started hanging out together, running with the same crowd.

A runaway train was in motion—one Patricia later claimed she never saw coming.

"One thing I've felt about [Christopher]," a family member told me during an interview, "was that beyond him being a pathological liar, being near him [later] actually gave me the chills."