The Podcast version of the essay, The Latchkey Toddlers.

"Father and Son" tells the story of my father's past as a gifted portrait painter, father and his violent past. A murderous secret past.

The murder of Jacob Kohn wasn't just some killing in Boston's Back Bay; it was the vicious murder of an elderly antique dealer, Jacob Kohn, beaten to death with a claw hammer in 1947.

The killer left behind a set of keys. Boston police went door to door, searching for the residence they belonged to. The keys opened my father's apartment, but he had vanished.

What followed was an international manhunt. The press described my father as handsome and debonair, featuring him daily in that "EXTRA, EXTRA, EXTRA" kind of way. Picture young boys on street corners shouting my father's name, followed by "the Hammer Murderer."

Police apprehended him in San Francisco in his Sunbeam Talbot—an extinct breed of British sports car, then equivalent in prestige and cost to a Porsche. Its rarity made it an odd choice for a fugitive, but that was typical of my father.

The largest criminal trial in Boston's history commenced with my father facing the death penalty. My grandfather, whom I met when I was nine, secured the best legal defense money could buy. Despite this, my father was convicted.

Thanks to my grandfather's connections, my father served just six years. After his release, he met my mother, who was seventeen years his junior. They had four children together, and he built a successful career as a portrait painter.

We lived in Old Chatham, a small village in the northern Hudson Valley, where my father taught at Malden Bridge School of Art alongside well-known artists. From the outside, life appeared idyllic.

My mother cut a striking figure with her platinum blonde hair, jeans, and kitten heels, while my father wore an ascot. This façade of perfection shattered when my father, while drunk, struck and killed Nancy Campbell, whose husband owned Lindenwald, President Martin Van Buren's historic home.

In Columbia County during that era, anything could be arranged—and it was. The local newspaper belonged to one of my father's closest friends. The District Attorney proved amenable to looking the other way for the right price. Mr. Campbell, facing financial difficulties, agreed to convert the property into a museum in exchange for compensation and lifetime residence in the guest house.

Old Chatham was a forgotten paradise in the 1960s and 1970s, attracting privacy-seeking folks like Harry Belafonte, Rupert Murdoch, and Morris Levy. But being "born" there granted access to a different world of privilege, however small.

The town protected more than just crimes—it guarded secrets. I never knew about my father's past until after his death from a sudden heart attack (though even that remains questionable). I met my half-brother the morning my father died.

Were there signs of my father's violent history? No. Did I experience his violence firsthand? Yes, terrifyingly so.

He died when I was eleven. I knew who he was but not what he had done.

As I grew older and spent time with other families, I recognized our uniqueness. When I questioned my childhood, family and old friends deflected with lies. Decades after my father's 1976 death, people still blocked my inquiries. Finally, one of his friends cracked, offering a cryptic clue: everything I wanted to know about my father could be found in any library.

My siblings and I began combing through newspapers from my father's lifetime. We found interviews about his PBS pilot and coverage of his portrait of Governor Malcolm Wilson hanging in the Hall of Governors.

Weeks into our search, my brother Seth, working forward from 1920 while I worked backward from 1976, called out, "You need to see this" in the library's microfiche room.

That discovery marked the beginning. This story belongs to a vanished era. Gone are the small towns where newspaper publishers wielded immense local power. Today, people seem more inclined to reveal secrets than keep them.

In our age of internet, social media, and ubiquitous cameras, true privacy grows increasingly rare. The secrecy I knew as a child might as well have existed on another planet.

Josh Powell’s memoir, Father and Son, is the story of family secrets and the damage they do.