Notes on an Execution

“‘This is yours now,’ Lavender said. ‘It will always keep you safe’.”

Lavender gifts Ansel her mother’s locket with the promise that it will keep him safe. Her subsequent, accidental revocation of the gift symbolizes the way Ansel’s chance at a safe and happy childhood was taken from him. As an adult, Ansel seeks out this lost sense of safety by murdering women.

“In the milliseconds before the blow, Lavender looked at the same rugged man she had always known, and she thought, with a clarity that bordered on sympathy: You could have been anything, Johnny. You could have been anything but this.”

Men like Johnny and Ansel make choices that turn them into monsters in the eyes of the public. Here, Lavender laments the preventability of their actions—they, like all people, had the option to be kind and gentle, and they chose violence instead.

“Your Theory is an exploration of the most inherent human truth. No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between.”

While the narrative largely dismisses Ansel’s murky Theory as a wannabe manifesto, this particular argument is proven by the ways in which each character acts out both kind and unkind impulses. Where Ansel loses the thread is in his claim that everyone is equal, as certain actions cause quantifiably more harm than others.

“She was numb and stupefied, giddy with his touch. For the first time, Saffy hated herself. She hated herself with a profound sense of awareness, less like a girl and more like a woman—with fury, desperation, shame.”

Kukafka acknowledges that women are sometimes attracted to cruel men. This attraction happens on an individual level as well as a societal level and is one of the factors that may explain why women consume true crime content.

“Sometimes I do things I can’t explain. The need was piercing, persistent. It didn’t really matter that the act was wrong—this seemed like the most trivial and irrelevant detail.”

Notes on an Execution proposes that searching for a killer’s motive may be futile in cases like Ansel’s. He is never able to offer a satisfactory explanation for his murderous compulsions. There is no closure to be found by picking apart his psyche.

“We are created by what has happened to us, combined with who we choose to be.”

This belief of Ansel’s plays into Kukafka’s exploration of the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Ansel believes humans are shaped by a combination of their circumstances and their choices. He leans on the former factor to rationalize his crimes, but Notes on an Execution argues that the latter is more important in shaping a person’s outcome.

“Those Girls, Ansel. In an alternate world, a world in which you had not killed them, what would they be doing in this exact moment?”

All of Ansel’s speculation about morality, choice, and alternate timelines is self-focused. He never extends the same empathy to the girls he killed—even when he imagines a world in which he had not killed them, he is thinking of his own life, not theirs. This supports the idea that he does lack empathy on a psychological level.

“There is a version of you out there—a child, unabandoned.”

While roundly condemning his actions, Notes on an Execution contemplates what could have become of Ansel if circumstance had not combined unfavorably with his genetic makeup. Ansel’s crimes are unforgivable, but his life is a tragedy, intensified by familial and systematic failures to protect a child.

“She glimpsed that same craving in Jenny Fisk—an ask, for suffering. It was the scariest thing about being a woman. It was hardwired, ageless, the part that knew you could have the good without the hurt, but it wouldn’t be nearly as exquisite.”

Kukafka examines the origins of the attraction some women feel to violent men. One possible explanation is the correlation between love and violence, a narrative often fed to young girls through movies and TV. This idea of a predatory, ravenous love confuses Saffy as she tracks Ansel.

“She would have been twenty-six years old. A yellow sundress, a green backyard. The Fourth of July. Lila would have glowed, all pollen and sunscreen, a crowd of friends in plastic chairs on the porch…”

Much of Notes on an Execution is dedicated to holding space for Ansel’s victims as they were and as they would have been. In letting Ansel’s victims (both living and dead) own the narrative, Kukafka breaks the typical structure of a crime novel and highlights the folly of focusing only on a killer.

“‘How do you wake up every morning?’ You had asked, unable to keep the anger from your voice. ‘How do you get out of bed, knowing you work in a system like this?’

‘My dad had this job,’ she said with a shrug. ‘My brother, too.’”

Notes on an Execution raises the question of whether the death penalty can ever be ethical. This exchange between Ansel and Shawna highlights the apathy that can allow regular, nonviolent people to uphold violence on a systemic level.

“For the first time, Hazel felt bigger than her sister. The feeling was so sick, so addictive, she knew she could never let it go.”

Even the novel’s well-adjusted and kind-hearted characters experience moments of malevolence, lending credence to Ansel’s theory that no one person is all good or bad.

“What you’ve done is bad, but not bad enough to warrant the attention that was supposed to come along with your mistake.”

This quote calls out a culture that is growing increasingly desensitized to violent crime due to crimes being treated like entertainment. Notes on an Execution describes the emotional impact of Ansel’s crimes in painstaking detail, so the revelation that the four murders aren’t enough to gain significant media attention is sobering.

“You are expansive, like everyone else. You are complex. You are more than just the wicked.”

Ansel is a full person who has the potential for both good and bad. His decision to act on his worse impulses doesn’t negate the potential goodness within him, which is the same potential shared by all humans. The existence of this core complicates the court’s decision to execute him.

“Every brain was different in its deviance—human hurt manifested in select, mysterious ways.”

One of the novel’s major themes is the way trauma can affect victims for a lifetime and lead to wildly varying outcomes. Here, Saffy highlights that brain chemistry is one of the factors that influences how an individual processes trauma.

“At a certain point, the why of it ceased to matter, lost in the crucial question of who.”

As a detective, Saffy knows what is made of discovering a killer’s motivations, but ultimately the why can’t bring closure. Only capturing the killer and bringing them to justice can restore a semblance of peace.

“It was this. Men like Lawson, who believed their very existences afforded them lawlessness. Men who had been handed the world, trashed it, and still demanded more.”

This quote speaks to the presence of a system that enables male violence. Ansel didn’t act in a vacuum. He was empowered by the same broken system that shaped men like his father and which continues to encourage violence on micro and macro levels throughout society.

“It seemed insane, almost laughable, that one person—Ansel, a single man, so deeply average—had created a chasm so colossal.”

Notes on an Execution separates the impact of Ansel’s crimes from his importance as a person. His killings have a huge impact, but this doesn’t make him important on a personal level. Rather than assigning power to Ansel, Hazel recognizes the absurdity of his entitlement in bringing about so much grief.

“It was almost pathetic, this distance from reality: Ansel was no evil genius.”

Kukafka breaks down and then rebuilds her killer, stripping away all the glamour from the designation of ‘serial.’ The contrast between the image of serial killers presented in TV documentaries and books versus the reality of Ansel is a recurring motif that also functions as a criticism of crime-related media.

“There would be no story, for these girls alone. There would be no vigil, no attention at all. They are relevant because of Ansel and the fascination the world has for men like him.”

Kukafka criticizes a media body that shows more regard for a killer than for his innocent victims. The focus placed on Ansel over Angela, Izzy, Lila, and Jenny reflects a real-world pattern of serial killers rising to infamy while their victims’ names are all but forgotten.

“How unnecessary, she thinks. How pointless. The system has failed them all.’”

Notes on an Execution encourages turning a critical lens on the institutions that are supposedly in place to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. Reform is needed to prevent tragedies like Ansel’s crimes and to dole out appropriate justice after the fact.

“How insane, you think. How deranged. The government paid money for this glorified table and placed it in the room. These twelve people woke up this morning, put on their uniforms, and drove to work, just to perform this demented exercise.”

Ansel is subjected to the same fate he brought upon four women. His execution via lethal injection is framed as another meaningless loss of life dressed up in the trappings of civility and justice.

“But there is a place for you, in the category of personhood. There has to be. Humanity can discard you, but they cannot deny it.’”

Notes on an Execution finds fault with labels like psychopath and sociopath when used solely to write off criminals. Without systems in place to understand, intervene and treat these diagnoses, they are little more than flimsy safeguards against the fear of human atrocities.