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When Alison Galvani graduated from kindergarten in the summer of 1982, her mother took her to the musical "Annie" to celebrate. Then they went to Golden Gate Park for a picnic, spreading out a sleeping bag with white and yellow egrets on a green background. Alison played with her "Annie" doll.
Her mother, Nancy, had just filed for divorce, and she and Alison had moved into a residential hotel in San Francisco's seedy Tenderloin. Alison's father, Patrick, remained in the family's Victorian in Pacific Heights, one of the city's priciest neighborhoods.
Days after the picnic, fishermen found Nancy's body floating in San Francisco Bay. She had been strangled and was wearing only underpants. Her killer had bound her ankles and stuffed her into a sleeping bag, tying it with rope and weighting it with a cinder block.
Alison was 5. She remembers being with her father after her mother disappeared and waiting for her return. She ran to the window every time she heard a car. She remembers the arrival of police officers. They swarmed the house.
She said she was shown a photograph of the sleeping bag that shrouded her mother's body. It was the one she and her mother had used for the picnic, sprinkled with yellow and white egrets. It looked wet.
Alison said she remembers peering through a window and seeing her father handcuffed in the street and put into a police car.
Then her father returned home and took her to Pier 39 to ride the carousel. She said she felt relieved, and told him how much she loved him.
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Alison, now 37, said she had fleeting suspicions about her father as she grew older.
At her wedding, something made her ask him to walk in front of her up the aisle. She didn't want to have to touch him, but she didn't understand her revulsion.
In 2008, her father came to visit in Connecticut, where she teaches epidemiology at Yale University. She was a new mother, and parenthood made her yearn for her own mother and identify with her.
When her father held her infant daughter, she felt nauseated. She started an argument with him, ostensibly about waking the baby.
Then, she said, she blurted out: "You killed...