Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1997 by Joshua Wolf Shenk

An early 20th century building perched aside the Charles River, Dunster House is known among Harvard undergraduates for its grand common spaces and awkward, cramped living quarters. And so, when police entered suite H-22 on May 28, 1995, the bodies were not hard to find. On the floor in the first of two small rooms, Trang Phuong Ho lay dead of 45 stab wounds, including 11 in the head, chest, and neck. Sinedu Tadesse, her roommate of two years, hung by a noose in a shower.

The story's basic outline was quickly apparent. Tadesse, a 21-year-old Ethiopian whose already deep troubles had festered in her three years at Harvard, had killed her roommate after Ho, a sweet, diligent, pre-med student, insisted on living with others the following year.

But this explanation raised as many questions as it answered. By what path did Tadesse descend into violent madness? What, if anything, had Harvard done to help her? And what meaning could be taken from the fact that these brutal acts -- the killing of another and the killing of self -- had taken place at a university which many consider synonymous with knowledge and human progress? Several days before her death, Tadesse dropped off her picture at the offices of Harvard's daily paper, The Crimson, with a note that advised, "KEEP this picture. There will soon be a very juicy story involving the person in this picture" But what is that story really about?

Melanie Thernstrom tries to answer these questions in Halfway Heaven, a meditative "diary" of the murder-suicide. Thernstrom's relentlessly self-conscious style is sometimes tedious. But ultimately the book succeeds in highlighting the two critical themes of this tragedy: First, this is a story about mental illness and the mysteries of its depths, causes, and cures. Second, it is the story of a rarely seen side of Harvard University -- the self-interested bureaucracy that is less interested in student welfare or truth than in protecting its reputation.

Sinedu Tadesse was clearly a troubled young woman when she matriculated to Harvard from an elite private school in Ethiopia. She grew up under military rule; 30,000 people died in an official campaign of terror that began when she was two years old. A political prisoner for several years, her father was one of the junta's many victims, and the children were raised to be paranoid and distrustful. At home, "there was no comfort to seek ... no warmth," Tadesse wrote later.

By virtue of exceptional test scores, Tadesse won a coveted spot in a school for diplomats and foreigners. But her outward achievement was matched with intense loneliness. The summer after her freshman year at Harvard, Tadesse confessed these feelings in a letter that she sent to strangers, picked at random from phone books and Internet chat groups. "As far as I can remember my life has been hellish," she wrote:

Year after year, I became lonelier and lonelier. I see

friends deserting me. They would take every chance

to show me they did not have any love or respect for

me.... High school turned out to be even worse....

If I went early or left late, I would be roaming the

yard or deserted hallways alone while other students

roared with laughter or talked their hearts out

standing in groups. Home was not a comforting

place. I swallowed my pain and anguish just as my

siblings did to theirs. I was so lonely. But I hung on

tight because I wanted to come to the States in

search of a solution.

There is a moment in time, always difficult to discern, where common feelings of unhappiness verge into depression, where the vocabulary of ordinary experience should be discarded for the vocabulary of disease. By the end of her freshman year -- by the time she told her life story to strangers and begged them for "a few hours from your week ... please do not close the door in my face" -- Sinedu Tadesse had certainly crossed that line. Desperate for friends, she found herself paralyzed in social situations. She was thrilled to find a roommate for sophomore year, but when this friendship proved to be less than perfect, Tadesse relapsed into bitterness and anxiety -- with an edge of mounting rage. The roommate, of course, was Trang Ho.

Looking for a Villain

When she decided to attend Harvard, Tadesse was surely drawn to the mystique captured by Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward Angel: "It was rich magic, wealth, elegance, joy, proud loneliness, rich books and golden browsing; it was an enchanted name like Cairo and Damascus."

Tadesse may or may not have been warned that the university was also famously indifferent to its undergraduates. For a lost young woman, thousands of miles from home without friends, Harvard offered nothing except a two-hour orientation for foreign students and occasional therapy sessions -- with a doctor of education. (Shortly before the murder/suicide, the therapist tried to reach Tadesse. Not because he sensed danger for his patient, but because he wanted to cancel an appointment.)

Far from the "solution" Tadesse sought, it is hard to imagine an environment worse for her than Harvard. Even the best-adjusted and most-confident high schoolers can be reduced to quivers there. Many students find a niche -- academic, social, extracurricular -- that allows them to enjoy, rather than be threatened by, the exceptional talents of their peers. But in such a highly-charged atmosphere, the search can be daunting and fraught with obstacles. The first academic experience for many students is applying to freshman seminars and being turned down by most, or all. Tadesse, in fact, had been rejected for a seminar taught by Thernstrom, for which she had more than 100 applicants. "It was an unfortunate system," Thernstrom writes, "that in order to take a writing class to learn you had to prove you were already accomplished -- but it was the way many things were done at Harvard."