Episode one — By every account

Eleven people who knew Julie Schenecker were asked about her in the last days of January 2011 — a cross-country coach, a neighbour, a colleague from her Army days in Munich, a friend she had grown up with in Iowa. Every one of them said a version of the same thing: that this did not fit the person they knew.

This episode is the family before that week. A Russian linguist who interviewed refugees coming west out of the Eastern Bloc. An intelligence officer who named his daughter out of his university yearbook. A sixteen-year-old who was the fastest freshman her coach ever had, and who stopped in the middle of training runs to look at a leaf. A thirteen-year-old who played street hockey in the cul-de-sac until it got too dark to see.

Then the same three years over again, in the record: a Tampa police report from November 2010, a wrecked car, a closed file at the Department of Children and Families, psychiatric treatment going back to the early 1990s described in a filing by her own lawyer, and an email a husband wrote to his relatives eleven days before the end.