Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder.

• Author: Shenk, Joshua Wolf

An early 20th century building perched aside the Charles River, Dunster House is known among Harvard undergraduates for its grand common spaces and awkward, cramped living quarters. And so, when police entered suite H-22 on May 28, 1995, the bodies were not hard to find. On the floor in the first of two small rooms, Trang Phuong Ho lay dead of 45 stab wounds, including 11 in the head, chest, and neck. Sinedu Tadesse, her roommate of two years, hung by a noose in a shower.

The story's basic outline was quickly apparent. Tadesse, a 21-year-old Ethiopian whose already deep troubles had festered in her three years at Harvard, had killed her roommate after Ho, a sweet, diligent, pre-med student, insisted on living with others the following year.

But this explanation raised as many questions as it answered. By what path did Tadesse descend into violent madness? What, if anything, had Harvard done to help her? And what meaning could be taken from the fact that these brutal acts -- the killing of another and the killing of self -- had taken place at a university which many consider synonymous with knowledge and human progress? Several days before her death, Tadesse dropped off her picture at the offices of Harvard's daily paper, The Crimson, with a note that advised, "KEEP this picture. There will soon be a very juicy story involving the person in this picture" But what is that story really about?

Melanie Thernstrom tries to answer these questions in Halfway Heaven, a meditative "diary" of the murder-suicide. Thernstrom's relentlessly self-conscious style is sometimes tedious. But ultimately the book succeeds in highlighting the two critical themes of this tragedy: First, this is a story about mental illness and the mysteries of its depths, causes, and cures. Second, it is the story of a rarely seen side of Harvard University -- the self-interested bureaucracy that is less interested in student welfare or truth than in protecting its reputation.

Sinedu Tadesse was clearly a troubled young woman when she matriculated to Harvard from an elite private school in Ethiopia. She grew up under military rule; 30,000 people died in an official campaign of terror that began when she was two years old. A political prisoner for several years, her father was one of the junta's many victims, and the children were raised to be paranoid and distrustful. At home, "there was no comfort to seek ... no warmth," Tadesse wrote later.

By virtue of exceptional test scores...