Heather Ann Thompson

So glad to be here.

Well, in part because the really striking thing about this event at the time and as it's been remembered since is that the story is all about him.

The story is about writing the justification for what he did on that subway so many decades ago and so much so that I am really embarrassed actually to say that when I –

began to think about this case again, I didn't know the names of the teenagers he'd shot.

And I suspected that I was not alone, that there was a complete erasure, actually, of the serious victims of this crime.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it was something I had to really reckon with.

And so at the end of the day, I initially thought I would try to talk to everybody, even though most of the work I always do is really steeped in the documents of the moment and the words people were saying in the moment.

But when I realized that I wasn't going to actually be able to talk to all of the victims, I wasn't going to be able to talk to one of them because he was –

permanently paralyzed and had suffered brain damage as a result of his injuries.

I wasn't able to talk to another because he had killed himself on the anniversary of this event.

I wasn't able to talk to the third because he had died after years of drug addiction, suffering this event.

And the other one, the

really kind of retreated from the public eye for all kinds of understandable reasons.

And so without talking to them, I thought, you know, I don't want to talk to the shooter.

I want to let that moment in the past tell itself.

I think he's on the one hand a very complicated figure because when I began to dig into his own biography, it is a troubled biography, I think, by any estimation.

He was the youngest child of a clearly quite strict family.

and quite domineering father.

He grew up in rural New York, clearly felt alone, a bit picked on by his peers as a child, and I think raised rather sternly.