What Really Happened Inside 121 Greycourt Road?

Not even a best friend since first grade. Not even a mother.

And that’s what makes the story of Rob and Sophie DiAndrea so frightening.

What happened inside 121 Greycourt Road could very well have happened on Kings Highway or Lombard Street or Haverford Road. A couple in counseling, struggling with debt. A middle-aged husband feeling bad about gaining weight. A distracted wife spending too many hours on Facebook. “There are millions of couples out there who have the same kinds of issues that these people had, but less than one-tenth of a percent of them end up like this,” says Lieutenant Riehl. “Most people find other ways to solve it.”

So why didn’t they?

The details of what happened on that September afternoon aren’t what’s important for those still living in the aftermath. Certainly not for Sophie and Rob’s young boys, now living with Sophie’s brother Joe and his family. Details will never help those boys. What happened in the days before, the months before, the years before—the story that doesn’t interest police, that no one is charged with investigating—that’s the story the friends and mothers and sons will spend the rest of their lives trying to piece together.

“I accept the fact that my son is responsible for Sophie’s death and responsible for his own death,” says Rob’s mom, Bernadette. But that’s all she can accept. The rest, she says, she puts in a box in her mind, and she puts that box on a very high shelf. Every now and again, she’ll take it down, peer inside it, try and understand. Then she’ll put it back.

“That wasn’t Robbie,” she says. “It was not the Robbie I knew and loved.”