From the stage, Em and I saw how the snowshoer had persevered; her small, strong hands still had hold of the killer’s heels. The force of the second shot had blown Trowbridge backward; his head wound left a smear of blood on the wall of the lounge, where he slid sideways as he fell, dragging the little English teacher after him. The pretty Mr. Barlow’s hand strength has been accounted for; when she was dragged across the floor at the back of the lounge, she’d not given up her grip on the shooter. One newspaper report was syndicated to two hundred (or more) other papers—Elliot Barlow was called “the only hero.” She was sixty, she was four feet nine, yet she was the only one who confronted the Gallows Lounge killer—she went after him, on all fours. Eventually, when Emory Trowbridge’s diaries revealed that Elliot Barlow had been an intended victim, Mr. Barlow would be outed. In one entry, the brave trans woman would be called not an actual woman but a former wrestler, and Trowbridge wrote worse things about her in other entries. While some journalists didn’t hesitate to call the Gallows Lounge shooting a hate crime—in more than one instance, a singling out of sexual minorities—other journalists categorized the killing as part of a widespread societal misogyny. There would be some nonsense about a commando-minded murder-suicide—in which the killer targets a specific group, usually in a public space—but the biggest bullshit would be perpetrated by the Trowbridge family psychiatrist. The psychiatrist said that Emory’s primary motivation was suicide—specifically, a homicide-suicide strategy that entailed killing himself after killing others. The psychiatrist concluded that this was a sign of a serious personality disorder. It’s impossible to know what Nora would have said about this assessment, or how Em might have pantomimed the disorder.

There was no actual suicide letter—only the diary entries in Trowbridge’s notebooks. Criminal-justice officials decided that a public inquiry or extensive public discussion of the Gallows Lounge shooting would cause pain to the families and could lead to more violence against sexual minorities. Speaking as Nora’s most immediate family, Henrik had not expressed any pain; he was “estranged” from his cousin, the Republican congressman wanted everyone to know. Henrik had mentioned Nora’s “left-wing political radicalism” as the cause of his estrangement.

Emory Trowbridge’s father wanted everyone to know he was “estranged” from his son. “His mother is entirely to blame—Emory was a mama’s boy,” was all the divorced dad had to say.

Emory’s mom said she had worried that Emory would “hurt himself.” She believed Emory suffered from “attachment disorder—due to his being abandoned by his bad dad,” the mom said.