Chapter One

The man known to me as Dominique was born Dominic Jerome Green in Houston, Texas, on May 13, 1974, the first child of Emmitt and Stephanie Faye Smith Green. This was less than four months after my own first child was born. As in all our lives, the most important truths of our histories come to us through the uncertain lenses of remembrance, viewpoint, and self-justification. It is always hard, and often impossible, to sort out what actually happened from the way it is remembered either by the subject himself or by those closest to him. But having listened to several witnesses to Dominique's early life, I set down here the truest account I can frame of his early years.

That Stephanie was a mother from hell seems to be taken for granted by everyone. But the truth of this portrait is open to question at least in some of its particulars. How did Dominique, who looked so much like her, who possessed her intelligence and even her cunning, evolve into the expansive human being he became if all his early experiences were negative? Mothers mold us more surely than do all others. In his earliest years, Dominique's mother was a different woman from the creature she became. Our most damning evidence against her comes from the 1980s, and there are no incidents related of her before 1981 that would force us to name her an abuser of children.

I met Stephanie and spent several hours with her in mid-July of 2007. There can be no doubt that most people would find her evasive, narcissistic, and creepy. The row of gold-capped teeth that glint from the front of her mouth, combined with the quicksilver indirection of her responses, can almost leave the im

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