“So, honey. That long story you were going to tell me at some point?” she says, looping her arm through mine as we sit on the bench. “If you’re ready, I think I’d like to hear it.”

Penny’s Sister Takes the Stand

THERE ARE many more parents tried for the murders of their children than anyone would like to think about, and the sad reality is that most of these cases are no more than a blip on the local news. But the particular elements of our story combined for a perfect media maelstrom. First, there was Penny herself: a middle-class, conventionally attractive white woman. I’d now spent enough time around social workers and at family court to discover that this made her wildly unusual as a suspect of any kind of child neglect or abuse, let alone murder. These weren’t the usual depressing systemic circumstances—poverty, addiction, prison time, child neglect as a result of parents whose lives were in tragic disarray. My sister—with her nice clothes, her professional background, her shiny hair—slipped right under the radar. A pretty, white female murderer is a beast that hides in plain sight because no one believes she exists. I suppose it would have been different if she’d killed her cheating husband or something—after all, Chicago was a hit—but pretty ladies only kill for sexy reasons in the public’s imagination. Second, there was the sheer horror of the crime itself and the immense backlog of social media for speculators to parse. Third, there was me. No one other than skiing fans and Luke Duncan groupies knew who I was before the trial, but even the most minor level of celebrity mixed with a murder case turns the wattage up to a million. Suddenly, I was recognized everywhere. I got messages of support, hate mail, rape and death threats, marriage proposals, the gambit.

The narrative Penny’s defense team tried to advance was that my parents had favored me in such a way that it amounted to neglect and deprivation of my sister. Trial watchers obsessed over our relationship; rating women against one another is America’s favorite pastime, after all. Who was the sweet one? Who was the bitch? Who was the smart one? But most importantly, who was the hot one? Was it Penny, with her curves, or me, with my lean physique? Penny was a bit fat actually, the pathetic men who comment on such things online opined, but wasn’t I a bit masculine with my muscles? Plenty of guys registered the opinion that they’d do both of us, a smaller number—trolls with unreasonably high standards—said neither of us would make the cut. I briefly considered having DON’T READ THE COMMENTS! tattooed on my hands.