A letter written by Jeff’s father:

Initially, of course, I couldn’t believe that it was really Jeff who had done the things the police had accused him of. How could anyone believe that his son do such things? I had been in the actual places where they said he had done them. I had been in rooms and basements which at other moments, according to the police, had been nothing less than a slaughterhouse. I had looked in my son’s refrigerator and seen only a scattering of milk cartons and soda cans. I had leaned casually on the black table they claimed my son had used both as a dissecting table and a bizarre satanic altar. How was it possible that all of this had been hidden from me – not only the horrible physical evidence of my son’s crimes, but the dark nature of the man who had committed them, this child I had held in my arms a thousand times, and whose face, when I glimpsed it in the newspapers, looked like mine? If the police had told me that my son was dead, I would have thought differently about him. If they’d told me that a strange man had lured him to a seedy apartment, and a few minutes later, drugged, strangled, then sexually assaulted and mutilated his dead body – in other words, if they’d told me the same horrible things that they had to tell so many other fathers and mothers in July of 1991 – then I would have done what they have done. I would have mourned my son and demanded that the man who’d killed him be profoundly punished. If not executed, then separated forever from the rest of us. After that, I would have tried to think of my son warmly. I would, I hope, have visited his grave from time to time, spoken of him with loss and affection, continued, as much as possible, to be the custodian of his memory. But I wasn’t told what these other mothers and fathers were told, that their sons were dead at the hands of a murderer: Instead, I was told that my son was the one who had murdered their sons.