Kill the Messenger Read Online Free PDF

each other again, but somehow we made it work,” she says.
    Anita Webb says she realized her son was going to marry Sue the first time she saw them together. “They were in the dining room sitting near this big window,” she says. “Shewas a sweet girl, very nice, and just sixteen at the time. He fell for her. They were always together. When we moved to Kentucky, I figured he’d get over it. But they kept communicating. The funny thing is, she would write him and he would take a red pen and correct her letters. I’d say ‘Gary, you can’t do that.’ But she put up with him. I couldn’t believe it. I would have ditched him right away. But he was funny that way. Very strange.”
    More than thirty years later, Sue still has those letters, including one from July 11,1974. “Your mistakes are getting fewer, thanks to my brilliant tutelage,” Webb wrote. “Here they are: ‘Sorry I haven’t written sooner’ should read ‘Sorry I didn’t write sooner.’ The tense in your sentence doesn’t agree.” After pointing out several other grammatical errors, Webb added, “‘Alex finally took Pam out from the bank’ doesn’t make any sense. (By the way, ‘sense’ is not spelled ‘since.’) Did he take her out from the bank or out for a date? (I knew what you meant but grammatically, it’s wrong.)”
    Webb then pointed out that “a lot” is not one word, “to often,” is spelled “too often,” and “No, you better not,” should read, “No, you’d better not.” “Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “I’m glad to get your letters and I want one a day if you manage. Well, enough corrections; let’s get to the meat of your article.”
    According to Sue, those corrections, annoying as they were, also showed that her boyfriend couldn’t stop thinking about her. Halfway through one of his letters to Sue, in fact, he realized he was in love. “Oh, shit,” he wrote. “For once, I can’t even think of the words to tell you. This is the first time words have ever failed me. Words were created byman to tell of happenings and not of inner feelings. They don’t describe the emotions of the . . . deepest emotions I feel. And they shouldn’t. What I feel for you is too delicate to be mauled by unwieldy words. A touch, a look, a sign between us is the proper medium.”
    When he was eighteen years old, Webb’s parents separated and two years later, divorced. The experience damaged him in a way that left him unable to talk about it to anyone. “Gary was very intense and he kept a lot of emotions very tight to himself,” Anita says. “A lot of the disappointments he had in life, he kept to himself.”
    Kurt Webb says his older brother never truly recovered from the divorce. “Gary was a strong sentimental family man,” he says. “He took umbrage to our parents getting divorced. Gary was an idealist. He wanted a perfect world where people weren’t corrupt and where family life really mattered.”
    Anita wouldn’t say what led to the separation. “It was a stressful time,” she says. “Things were up in the air. I don’t remember. We got in an argument, and he said he was leaving and I said that was fine with me.” But she added that her son never forgave his father for the divorce. “When his father broke away from the family, that bothered Gary a great deal,” she says. “I didn’t go into gross detail with the kids about why I didn’t want to live with their father, because he was a very devoted father. He might not have been the best husband, but there’s nobody who had a better father than those kids.”
    After his parent’s divorce, Webb moved in with Sue’s parents in Indianapolis. They were already talking about marriage. “My parents had