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Sometimes a photograph changes after you learn what happened outside the frame.
My mom and I spent three nights in this house while visiting Cape Cod. We stayed in the lower part of the main house while the owner, an older woman, lived upstairs with her adult son and daughter-in-law. There was another smaller rental on the property, too.
When we arrived, her son showed us around.
There was a pond we were invited to swim in, an old cranberry bog, a large garden and a pet duck that I was delighted to be allowed to pet. There were also some rather unmistakable cannabis plants growing on the property—which, this being Massachusetts, didn't seem particularly remarkable.
Everything about the place was quirky, peaceful and very Cape Cod.
And the family couldn't have been nicer to us.
One evening, I took this photograph.
The house was glowing against the fading sky, surrounded by trees that had nearly disappeared into silhouette. The windows were warm. A string of lights illuminated the porch. From where I stood, it looked incredibly inviting.
Three days later, my mom and I packed up and headed back toward Boston to catch our flight home.
On the drive, I kept thinking about how kind our hosts had been. I decided that when I got home, I was going to send the woman a Wisconsin cheese gift basket as a thank-you.
There was only one problem.
I didn't know her last name.
Airbnb had given me her first name, and of course I knew the address where we'd just spent three nights. So I did what any reasonable person trying to send someone cheese would do.
I Googled her.
That is when this story took a very unexpected turn.
Search results began appearing about a decades-old Massachusetts murder case.
The woman whose home we had just left was Suzanne D'Amour, the widow of Robert D'Amour, a member of the family behind the Big Y supermarket chain.
Robert D'Amour had been found shot to death in the couple's South Hadley home in 1993. Prosecutors alleged that Suzanne D'Amour and Alex Rankins—described as her longtime friend and lover—were involved in his killing. Rankins was ultimately convicted of first-degree murder. Suzanne D'Amour was tried for first-degree murder and acquitted, although she was separately convicted of perjury for lying to the grand jury investigating the case.
The case involved love letters, a multimillion-dollar life-insurance policy and even an earlier attempt on Robert D'Amour's life. Years later, Massachusetts' highest court ruled that Suzanne could not be prosecuted again on a murder-conspiracy charge because her previous acquittal protected her from being tried twice for the same alleged crime.
And I was sitting in the car thinking:
I was just trying to send this woman some cheese.
😂
Nothing about our stay had felt ominous.
Quite the opposite.
She had been friendly. She welcomed us onto her property. She told us we could swim in the pond. She let me pet her duck. We stayed downstairs while her family went about their lives upstairs.
Had I never decided to send that thank-you gift, I probably never would have known any of it.
And that's what makes this photograph interesting to me now.
When I took it, I saw a beautiful old house glowing warmly through the trees at dusk.
I still see that.
But now I see something else, too.
A reminder that a photograph records only what was visible in that particular moment. It can't tell you everything that came before it.
Sometimes the story is sitting quietly outside the frame.
Read more about the D'Amour case from these news articles below:
CAPE COD TIMES | Murder, Money, and Love
WIDOW OF BIG Y HEIR SPARED SECOND TRIAL
