The 911 call came in around 3:13 a. m. from Robertson Avenue in Thunderbolt, Georgia. Gunshots.
Screams. Two bodies found on the red stairs leading up to the black door of a little southern bungalow. For a long time, I watched cases like that on the news and felt the normal distance of a stranger. Then my little sister Alice became the headline, and that distance collapsed.
Alice was murdered in 2013. She was 24. Her boyfriend Forest was 27. They were shot outside their home after a night out.
One died on the scene. The other died on the way to the hospital. I’ve spent years since then trying to figure out how to live in this new reality. I keep her close in ways that hurt and help at the same time.
My children have stuffed animals passed down from their aunt Alice, though only my oldest ever met her. My daughter’s middle name is Alice. I got a tattoo of a sunflower across my heart because that was her favorite flower. I even bought a convertible like the one she had, some ridiculous, expensive tribute to her.
But I’m ready to give up the car now. The money from the sale will fund this film. I decided to travel across the country and meet the most important people from Alice’s life, hoping to understand who she really was, how she could meet this kind of end, and maybe find some closure for myself. People who knew her describe her as an ethereal presence.
One family friend called her a nymph who left a trail of sparkle wherever she went. She lit up rooms. She never wanted anyone to feel left out. A friend from high school remembered getting their belly buttons pierced together, Alice fearless, documenting every step, laughing, making sure her friend wasn’t scared.
Another friend said Alice was attached to her leg in Sunday school. She did gymnastics with spaghetti arms because she refused to do exactly what she was told. She wore perfume that gave her mother an asthma attack every time she was near. She loved her dad and had a picture made with him without even asking.
She journaled. She painted. She dreamed of being good at something. Growing up, Alice and I were very close.
I was excited to have a little sister and wanted to be hands-on in her life. I’ve heard stories that she didn’t learn to talk for a long time because she spoke in gibberish and I would translate for her, getting whatever she wanted so she didn’t have to worry about learning English. We spent summers on an island off the coast of Maine with friends, and those are my fondest childhood memories with her. We had plenty of friends, but we were always there for each other.
We were pretty much the only other person we felt we could count on. But Alice carried things we didn’t fully understand. She was adopted as an infant. Her birth mother was 16.
I know her family loved her beyond measure, but that primal fact of being given up haunted her. She once said she would rather have an abortion than put a child up for adoption. She never really came to terms with being relinquished, even though she was placed in a family that adored her. Somewhere along the way, she started to lose her direction.
In ninth grade, her pranks got worse. She skipped mass to get a manicure. She acted nasty when she didn’t get her way. She demanded new clothes and talked about the car she wanted.
Her parents, worried she was heading for trouble, sent her to a wilderness program and then to a therapeutic school. Alice was deeply offended by this. She thought she was going home after the wilderness program, and when she didn’t, resentment festered. She said she was learning all the bad stuff the other kids did, all the bad behaviors, more than anything useful.
She was accepted at good schools, the University of Denver, Loyola Chicago, but she went to High Point because her boyfriend at the time was accepted there. It was at High Point that she met Forest. He was a chef at the restaurant where she waitressed. He was older, had a rebellious streak, and something about him made her friends uneasy.
But Alice felt he loved her unconditionally, and I don’t think she ever really believed anyone loved her like that before. She dropped out of High Point and moved with him to Savannah when she got into SCAD. But SCAD was too much for her. The other students were serious, devoted to their art for years.
Alice called me once to say she missed her first class. She lost her key, couldn’t start her car, and the professor told her to get out. She decided then that she wouldn’t keep trying. She struggled.
We all struggle. But I often wonder what would have happened if she’d been given a chance to get out of that rut. Then the relationship with Forest turned dark. He pushed her against a refrigerator.
He gave her a black eye. He strangled her until she had marks around her throat. She called the police, and he went to jail. But every day she wrote to him, apologizing.
“Forest, I know you’re mad and you hate me. I messed up a lot. I’m sorry. I guess I am as stupid as you think I am.
I love you forever, Alice. ” She stayed with him. As it tends to happen in the cycle of domestic violence, she cut herself off from her family. She stopped talking to us much.
This happy, go-lucky girl we knew growing up had changed. She was ashamed and depressed because she knew she wasn’t where she wanted to be. She called me once, desperate. She needed to borrow $500 for an abortion.
I was saving for my wedding at the time, and it was a significant amount of money. I told her she had to confront our mother and that she’d be surprised how forgiving Mom could be. She did get the abortion, and my mom found out about everything. Alice said Mom was very cool about it.
That was one of the last texts I got from her. My wedding was five days after her funeral. We thought about cancelling. Everyone was already coming, and my mother felt that having some hope and levity that weekend would make the funeral more bearable.
The wedding is always going to be associated with the funeral now. Alice was supposed to be a bridesmaid. Her place was marked by a vase of flowers. My wife and I said our vows in that haze of grief, and the priest called it a thin place, where joy and grief come together into something holy.
Then I helped the parish priest prepare Alice’s funeral the next day. She was buried in the bridesmaid dress my wife and I had picked out for her. The hardest part was watching my father bury another child. He had already buried his first wife and my brother Philip, who took his own life.
Watching him bury Alice broke something in him. He died a few months after she did. I think her murder made the world feel too cold and cruel for him. When he got to the hospital, he made the choice to stop fighting.
We buried some of Alice’s ashes with him. The rest I kept for myself, hoping to scatter them in a special spot someday. Before he went into the hospital for the last time, he wrote me an email. He reminded me that bad things happen to good people all the time.
He told me I would still miss Alice and grieve for her, but I could also enjoy those around me, the good and important things in my life. He told me to give my wife and our new son hugs from him. The murder trial took years. Two men, Nathaniel Wilkins and Michael Jones, were charged with malice murder.
The motive was almost absurdly petty. Forest had fired Nate from his job as a dishwasher at the restaurant. Nate felt disrespected and pissed off. That was it.
That was the motive for killing two people. Alice was just coming home with her boyfriend. She was just there. If she had gotten sick that night or gone somewhere else, would she still be alive?
The first trial, for Mike Jones, ended with two consecutive life sentences. The jury deliberated for about thirty minutes. His own family apologized to my mom, saying they didn’t know who they had raised. But the second trial, for Nate Wilkins, was the one that nearly broke us.
There was little physical evidence and almost no circumstantial evidence. The only eyewitness was Tracy Burgess Wilkins, Nate’s sister, who drove the getaway car. She changed her story repeatedly. She forgot things.
She got dates and timing wrong. She testified that she was in the back seat having sex with Mike at the time of the shooting, then recanted. The defense tore her apart. They painted her as a liar and a thief, and they were partially right.
But she never wavered on the core fact: her brother Nate and her boyfriend Mike were the killers. The chief of police, who had a heart condition, took the stand and looked gray and confused under cross-examination. A witness suddenly remembered dreadlocks on one of the perpetrators after four years of never mentioning it, and it was clear he was trying too hard to help. We watched the defense try to make the chief look like he botched the police work on his very last case.
Our confidence sank. There was a plea deal on the table: Nate would plead guilty to one count of manslaughter, serve about fourteen years, and get credit for time served. Some of us thought we should take it. Then Nate turned it down, thinking he could win.
So we went to trial. The forensic evidence was brutal. The medical examiner testified that both victims were shot in the chin first, shots that miraculously missed vital organs, leaving them stunned, trying to process what was happening. Then Forest got a shot to the chest, and a large bruise on his lower back suggested he was kicked forcefully to the ground.
The shooter walked up, put the gun to the back of his head, and pulled the trigger. Alice was shot in the side of the head, the bullet exiting through her temple. One witness described hearing Alice scream, “No, Nate. No, Nate.
” Another witness, a former coworker, testified that Mike had bragged about the murder and showed him a bloody shirt, the t-shirt they used to wipe the gun. The forensic evidence backed that statement up, making him suddenly more credible. The verdict finally came back guilty on all counts. Guilty.
Guilty. Guilty. Six counts, including malice murder and aggravated assault. I had to temper my joy in the courtroom out of respect.
What kind of justice is that for the victim? But the verdict didn’t change everything. There was a weight lifted, yes, but Alice was still dead. Two people still snuck up on her in the middle of the night and shot her at close range.
She didn’t instigate anything. She didn’t have anything to do with what happened except that she was there when two men with guns came after her boyfriend. I have three kids now, and it terrifies me that they live in that world. The prosecutor said the families never get closure.
They get a starting line, not a finishing line. They get to start the rest of their life. People tell me to move on. They tell me everything happens for a reason, and she’s in a better place.
I don’t believe any of it. The grief is still there. It will always be there. There will always be an empty chair at the dinner table and an empty place at the holidays.
I don’t forgive him. I don’t forgive him. I want everyone to know that. I stopped being a devout Christian after Alice died.
It felt like random chaos, and I couldn’t trust or worship a God who would let this happen to my family. I stopped caring for myself too. I’d been in good shape before the wedding, but afterward, I lost the motivation. I ate whatever I wanted, didn’t work out, and it affected my health for years.
My wife and I went through hard times, lashing out at each other, unable to articulate what was wrong, both grieving in our own ways. But making this film changed me in some ways. It made me realize how much love Alice gave to the world and how much she was loved, even if she wasn’t aware of it. People took time out of their day to tell me how wonderful she was.
It’s incredible to know she made a difference. It’s Alice’s birthday today. She would have been 28. She loved turquoise, so I have turquoise trim on the cake.
It’s a white cake because that was her favorite, even though I prefer chocolate. My family and I gather around it, remembering her, wishing she were here. I read her old letters and journals now. In one, she wrote to our brother Philip, who died years before her, telling him how much she loved him and that not a day goes by where she doesn’t think of him.
She signed it, “Love your little sis, Alice. ” She was always reaching out to the people she loved, even the ones she lost. I know I’ll never fully heal. I’m probably changed forever in many ways.
But I’m doing my best to keep Alice’s memory alive through my family. I know she wouldn’t want me to completely fall apart. She’d want me to be there, to be a good father, to be a good husband. My wife and I recently renewed our marriage vows, and our new anniversary is nowhere near the date Alice was murdered.
As much as I don’t want to leave Alice completely in the past, I hope this is one small step forward in my quest to find happiness again. The day before her birthday, I stopped at a flower shop to buy sunflowers, her favorite. The cashier asked if I wanted a card to go with them. I said no, they were for me.
I told her my daughter’s birthday was the next day, and that she was murdered four years ago. These were her favorite flowers, and we were just honoring her. The cashier said that was very sweet.
I paid and walked out with the sunflowers, holding them close, carrying her with me all the way home.
