RIPPED FROM THE WOMB

MANY OF THE NAMES WERE BIBLICAL: Elijah, Jordan, Joshua. But the horror story that riveted America last week had the bloody pathos of Greek tragedy: a mother and two of her children slaughtered; one child ripped from her womb; another spared, murmuring, "Mommy hurt."

At 8:30 p.m. on Nov. 16, a Thursday, Laverne Ward, 24, rang up his old girlfriend Deborah Evans, 28. Evans, a welfare mother with three children and another on the way, had moved away from Hanover Park, a drug-infested Chicago suburb frequented by Ward, to try to rebuild her life in middle-class Addison. A few hours later,...