Michelle Kane

Although all 147 adults charged in the case provided a full and detailed account of their gruesome crimes...

Not a single one of them would say a word about what drove them to it.

Stony silence.

Because of this, they received the harshest possible sentences.

Death row in many cases and life for the rest.

And among the lifers, all but one was murdered by other prisoners.

The one survivor did so by doing his time in complete isolation, and for years he spoke nothing but gibberish.

The FBI report is the only official account of the crimes that exists, and it consists of a narrative of discovery and a cataloging of people and evidence.

The document is remarkably taciturn and goes to great lengths to shield the reader from the more painful details.

For those, one must turn to the underlying case evidence delivered in 1998 as part of the trance of files released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Some 4,298 different documents.

I have read each one, looking for information about my grandparents, what bodies they literally had buried in the backyard.

One will find a catalog of common kitchen tools and exotic butcher knives, basins, tarps, and other mundane supplies connected to the crimes, a map of each house and the excavations conducted there, interviews with every adult, brief as they are, and the names and ages of the minor survivors, all under the age of five and the youngest just 18 months.

That was my mother.

In all those pages, you will find not a single word dedicated to the question of why.

It is the question that hangs over this and other cases.

What drove them to do what they did?

What turned an entire community from loving parents into child eaters?

What made them feel like it?

I never knew my mother growing up except as a dark shadow of the past.