Patrick Radden Keefe
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
They had kept his death very quiet.
There was no mention whatsoever in the press on the internet that he was even dead.
And so the family wasn't sure that they wanted to talk.
And I think that they had been feeling very isolated for years in trying to figure out what had happened to their son.
And we then had this kind of delicate process where I really wanted them to go on the record with me, but I also didn't want them to feel as though I was kind of twisting their arms or I didn't want them to kind of say yes on the day and then later come to regret it.
He was the second child of this couple, Matthew and Rochelle.
There was an older brother named Joe.
And Zach, who was born in the year 2000, was a kind of fun, zingy, unpredictable little boy, a boy who did voices and told jokes and could do impersonations and accents.
You know, not everything he said was completely reliable, even from a very early age.
He sometimes was putting a little spin on the truth to entertain people.
As he got older, he ended up going to a school called Mill Hill on the outskirts of London.
He came from a very particular kind of family.
He had...
Two grandfathers who were Holocaust survivors.
One of them had become a very famous rabbi in London.
And he grew up, I would say, upper middle class.
His father worked in finance.
His mother was a freelance journalist.
A very comfortable family, but also a family that was quite modest in terms of their approach to religion.
money and wealth and conspicuous consumption.