Road to Paradise

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At nine forty-five on a bright and beautiful Saturday morning, Sam DeStefano had less than half an hour before meeting his violent death.

In his tan brick ranch-style house in a suburban upper-middle-class enclave of Oak Park, Illinois, this harmless-looking grandfatherly individual of sixty-four — slim, five feet eleven, wearing large black-rimmed glasses — had no foreshadowing of his imminent demise.

In fact, he was involved in some mundane spring cleaning in his garage, at the behest of his wife, Anita (who was spending the morning with her mother), straightening and sorting and, at the moment, using a new stiff broom to break up and sweep out the caked mud dragged in by their two vehicles over the winter.

His hair a gray unruly mass, Sam certainly appeared innocuous enough, though his features — close-set eyes, lump of a nose, and lipless slash of mouth centered in a cleft-chin oval — were suggestive of a man who might have been formidable in his day. The only thing vaguely eccentric was his dark blue silk pajamas; he also wore beat-up Hush Puppies shoes, and a lighter blue windbreaker with villa venice in white script on its back, advertising a nightclub that had been closed for better than a decade.

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