A better ending A brother's twenty-year quest to uncover the truth about his sister's death

James Whitfield Thomson

Large print - 2025

"On a summer evening in 1974, Jim Thomson arrived home from a baseball game to the news that his younger sister, Eileen, had taken her own life. To Jim, his parents, and his brother, Keith, the loss was unexpected and devastating. Only twenty-seven years old, Eileen had been living in California with her high school sweetheart, Vic, a cop, surrounded by a circle of close friends and working at a job she loved. It seemed unfathomable that she would kill herself, but as the family gathered in Pittsburgh to say goodbye, more details emerged that seemed to explain the tragedy: Eileen had confided in her parents that she had been suffering from depression, and her storybook marriage had been plagued by bitter fights, infidelity, and guilt. ...Twenty-seven years later, with all of his family passed away, Eileen's death began to nag at Jim. Now a writer, he wanted to fill in the blanks of her story and answer the questions that were plaguing him. What had the final months of Eileen's life been like? Why had she not told him about her troubles? How had the infidelity in her marriage brought her and Vic to that fateful day, and who else had been a part of it? What other demons had she been battling? Determined to uncover the truth, Jim hired a private investigator to help him. Together, they tracked down Eileen's old friends and clandestinely obtained copies of police reports, which revealed that Vic and Eileen's relationship and the sheriff's investigation that followed her death was much darker and more complicated than they had imagined."-- more