A Death in New Orleans

by Jason Berry
September / October 2007 , Page 86

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Mardi Gras, 2001

They got up before dawn, put on costumes he can no longer remember, and set out on foot for the parades, several miles from their apartment in a leafy Uptown neighborhood. Helen Hill and Paul Gailiunas had just moved to New Orleans after six long winters in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Paul had completed his medical degree and residency. They had spent a year in New Orleans after graduating from Harvard in 1992, and Helen had fallen hard for the city even before she fell hard for Paul. “Some people romanticize the green, overgrown shabbiness” of New Orleans, Paul says, a trace of sadness in his voice. “Helen loved the city so much, she couldn’t allow herself to see beyond that.”

Helen Hill was making a career creating experimental animated films. She had light-brown hair and a full-jawed smile, and radiated optimism. Paul, slender and quiet with a mop of black hair, was her soul mate, a young doctor with a creative side. He performed cameo roles in several of her film shorts, played guitar in rock bands, and wrote music tracks for her visual stories.

The life they were making together was itself like a movie; a gutsy, romantic, quirky adventure, light years from the expectations and norms of most of their college friends. Paul and Helen were living out their values as radical humanitarians with a contagious joie de vivre, and New Orleans seemed the perfect place in which to do it.

But on that winter day in 2001, they weren’t thinking about the future. Sunlight washed pink across the early sky as they passed through an African-American neighborhood. Helen stopped to inspect a stack of handsewn dresses someone had put out on the sidewalk. Paul watched her sift through the garments, touching the fabric, marveling at the designs. She held up one dress, then another and another—just her size. “This is the best trash-pile find in the world!” she exclaimed.

Paul knew his wife’s habit of scoping out flea markets and curio shops for eclectic items, like the cigar boxes she decorated as gifts for their many far-flung friends. But parade day beckoned. The two walked all the way down to a Central City corner and caught the vintage satire of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club—African-American men, girded in grass skirts, their faces white with grease-paint, riding on elaborately decorated floats, tossing gilded coconuts to fans in the street. Helen was thrilled with hers.

That night, she persuaded Paul to drive her back to the house with the discarded dresses. It was on a street named Adams, the same name as the Harvard house in which they had once lived. Helen put swatches of the dress fabric in the car. The next day she returned once more, toting off about a hundred dresses in all, her mind spinning with questions and possibilities. How had these beautiful garments wound up simply lying on the ground?

She was not the type to let her curiosity fade through inaction. Before long, Helen came to know the pastor of the neighborhood Baptist church, and he told her about Florestine Kinchen, the 90-year-old seamstress whose family had emptied her house just after her death. For Helen, Kinchen’s life was perfect material for a film, one about a search for the identity of the woman with whom she felt a spiritual kinship. In 2004, Helen received a highly coveted Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, worth $35,000, for the work-in-progress. She kidded Paul: “I’m an alternative filmmaker supporting a doctor!”

By then, Paul had helped establish a medical clinic, Little Doctors, that catered to artists and poor folk in a city where 40 percent of the residents were very poor. In off-hours, he sang anarchist lyrics with his band, the Trouble Makers. Paul and Helen bought a house in a racially mixed Mid-City neighborhood and painted it yellow with red trim; they held block parties and welcomed kids curious about one of their pets, Rosie, a potbellied pig. As Helen worked on her films and taught filmmaking, they became part of a circle of artists, activists, and “anti-establishment people who enjoyed life, including friends who weren’t necessarily educated,” as Paul puts it. “Our lives,” he says, “were quite far from Harvard.”

On October 15, 2004, Helen gave birth to their son, Francis Pop Gailiunas, and it seemed that the couple had fashioned the lives of their dreams.

“They were insanely, genuinely, happy people; outgoing and caring,” says René Broussard, who runs Zeitgeist, the city’s alternative media center, where Helen showed her films. “I thought, no one is that happy.”

But Paul and Helen were—until the storm came, and changed everything.

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A Death in New Orleans, page 2

On August 28, 2005, the news of a category 5 hurricane barreling across the Gulf of Mexico toward the city sent them packing. They took Rosie the pig, but left two cats inside with a supply of dry food and litter. Like nearly everyone in New Orleans who had a car and evacuated, they assumed they’d return in a week or so. Paul, Helen, Francis, and Rosie drove for a day-and-a-half to Helen’s hometown of Columbia, S.C. From the safety of her parents’ house, they followed TV news as Hurricane Katrina assaulted the city. They felt agony as the levees broke, putting 80 percent of the city underwater. Looters marauded through streets; thousands of destitute people were trapped in downtown public spaces. Their own house took four feet of water, trashing the floors, walls, and most of their belongings. Paul’s clinic was one of several thousand small businesses forced to close.

The following week, Paul drove back to save their cats. He got through National Guard stops with friends who had press passes. The water had receded by the time he entered the house. Fetid mud caked the floor. The walls were coated with a gray slick that gave off a terrible stench. The cats were hungry but alive.

Paul rescued the screening prints for Helen’s films from an upper shelf, and imagined her relief at the sight of Florestine Kinchen’s dresses, most of which were above the water line. This is it, he figured. New Orleans is over for us.

Back in Columbia, he secured an eight-month contract as a physician. Helen’s folks were thrilled. Her mother, Becky Wingard Hill, and stepfather, Kevin Lewis, had recently moved into the larger home of Becky’s late mother. Paul, Helen, and the baby, nicknamed Poppy, moved into the house where Helen had grown up, a house with good memories—and a yard for Rosie.

All of which suited Paul just fine. The idea of moving back to New Orleans scared him. From his time at the clinic, he knew how dangerous the city could be even before Katrina. Now the city had skeletal public services and debris-lined streets throwing off unimaginable toxic hazards.

But Helen was emphatic about going back. “We can do this,” she vowed. She started a secret campaign to change Paul’s mind, sending pre-addressed postcards to friends, entreating them to write Paul, endorsing a return. Gradually, over the summer of 2006, she wore down his defenses. “She was truly fearless,” Paul says. “But she hadn’t had the same experience I’d had, treating drug addicts at the St. Claude hospital. I had seen another side of New Orleans.”

One year after their evacuation, Paul, Helen, and Poppy returned to New Orleans. Half of the city’s 444,000 population was gone.

Six weeks later, Poppy turned two. As Paul and Helen dealt with insurance issues on their wrecked home, they rented one side of a faded, white, shotgun double on North Rampart Street, a dozen blocks behind the French Quarter, in Marigny, an eclectic neighborhood of old houses, cafes, and music clubs. Paul rode his bicycle to a job at Daughters of Charity Health Care, just the near side of the sprawling, flood-battered Ninth Ward. They were trying to pick up the pieces.

Helen and Paul met in September 1988, in their first week at Harvard. She was a free-spirited young woman from South Carolina. For all of her extracurricular activities and A’s at Dreher High School, a public school in Columbia where blacks were a majority of students, Helen had a bohemian streak from a childhood full of self-expression. Her mother, Becky, instilled in her a love of reading, a tradition of hand-making holiday cards, and a love of film. Becky had deep roots in Columbia, but her marriage to a hometown guy had fallen apart by the time Helen and her older brother, Jacob Hill III, were starting school. As the children’s father drifted out of their daily lives, their grandfather, Albert Wingard, assumed a central role. Pop, as Helen and Jake called him, doted on them. Home movies show Pop giving them rides on his tandem bicycle, a two-seater that thrilled the kids.

When Helen was just a girl, her mother met Kevin Lewis, a 1965 Harvard grad and religious studies professor at the University of South Carolina. “Kevin really was a knight who came into my life,” says Becky, who was teaching school at the time. When Becky and Kevin married in 1976, Helen was six and Jake was eight. Becky entered graduate school at the university, earning a Ph.D. in English, eventually landing a position on the faculty. Kevin helped raise the children as if they were his own. He encouraged them to try for Harvard. Jake, who lived in Winthrop House, graduated in 1989.

Helen’s Harvard application showed a young woman who knew herself well enough to predict her long-term interests. “I admit to leaning strongly towards literature,” she wrote. “Also, I would like to learn more about the techniques and opportunities in the film medium, especially animation, as I suspect this will be an increasingly influential medium through which to help society recognize its faults and see solutions to problems.”

Paul was a Jewish boy from Edmonton, Canada, a physician’s son who grew up in a household filled with music: Two of his brothers became professional musicians. Paul played guitar in a high-school rock band and dreamed of serving as a doctor in Africa.

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A Death in New Orleans, page 3

At Harvard, he would concentrate in African history, making sure to take enough science courses for medical school.

In college, their relationship was platonic. Helen was dating a classmate named Elijah Aron, from Santa Cruz, Calif. Elijah had a satirical side and knew he wanted to be a writer. Sophomore year, all three landed in Adams House, which had a long tradition of artists, intellectuals, and extravagant personalities. “There was even skinny-dipping in the pool at Adams,” recalls Jake Hill.

Paul and Elijah became friends, part of a circle with Helen at the center. “Elijah wore a cape and Doc Martin boots, and he was really into spontaneity,” says Keiko Morris, Helen’s roommate, now a reporter for Newsday. “He and Helen often headed out on night adventures, running around downtown Boston, twirling off the light poles. Elijah loved to make fun of the over-seriousness of Harvard, the whole atmosphere.”

“Helen, Elijah, and Paul were the Three Musketeers,” recalls Jake.

An English concentrator, Helen loved the fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Helen Vendler’s writings on poetry. But she might have taken even more pleasure from her filmmaking courses. In film classes, she made small puppets and figurines, and used felt pens to draw images directly on the celluloid, a natural extension of her childhood traditions, hand-making cards and little gifts. Keiko remembers the night sophomore year when Helen practically danced in jubilation: “I know exactly what I want to be, Keiko. I’m going to be an animator—an animator!”

She approached the celluloid like a canvas, drawing or painting on the thin strips, experimenting with color combinations for the settings, frame by frame. The figures she made out of cardboard, clay, and plastic functioned as tiny sculptures which she delighted in choreographing around, imbuing them with voices and on-screen life. Her first film, Rain Dance, was dedicated to Elijah.

Helen’s creative side was balanced by decorum in keeping with her Southern manners; she loved to host tea parties. At a parents’ weekend in junior year, recalls Keiko, “My parents came up from New Jersey with my aunt and uncle. Helen, Paul, and Elijah had a tea party in our common room. She served ladyfinger sandwiches. My family still talks about it.”

But the more time Paul and Helen spent at Adams House, the more they came to believe that its aura of tolerance was laced with undercurrents of self-satisfaction and self-congratulatory hipness. “As alternative as it was,” Paul reflects, Adams House also “had a cynical, ironic edge.” The realization crept up on Helen and Elijah Aron that their romance was fading. Elijah viewed life through a comic lens, with all the pain on which artistic comedy thrives. (Today, Elijah lives in Los Angeles, where he writes scripts for TV comedies.) In contrast, Paul and Helen saw each other as genuine idealists, the real deal, people who believed they could make a better world and take pleasure in doing so.

Helen and Elijah remained steadfast friends after breaking up; so did Elijah and Paul.

Helen and Paul moved to New Orleans.

“Helen insisted that everything in her life become an event,” Paul says, “something made festive, to be remembered.”

Heading to New Orleans in 1992 was one such event.

She had dreamed of the city since she was a teenager, when Helen had visited an aunt who lived in the French Quarter. The Old World ambience of New Orleans fascinated her, as did the city’s tropical pace, its contrasting combination of stately avenues draped with ancient oaks and the rich roots culture of black music. After graduation, she wanted a year off before the next step in her studies. New Orleans was a city, they felt, in which their passions could find a home.

They found an apartment together, living as close but platonic friends; took jobs, and explored the neighborhoods, enjoying the ethnic parades and festivals. Inevitably their relationship deepened; that fall, they became lovers. After a dreamy spring of 1993, they were confronted with career plans and headed off to opposite ends of the continent, she to Los Angeles for graduate work in film, he to Nova Scotia for medical school.

Paul and Helen resolved to write every day. They called each other often, but Helen wanted real letters. They numbered each one.

Paul and Helen were married on June 18, 1995, at the chapel of the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Kevin Lewis, Helen’s stepfather, officiated. Helen and Paul wrote their vows. Wearing a daisy in his hair, Paul surprised her at the appointed time. His brother Adam began playing guitar; the groom sang the vows he had written.

Sweet Helen Hill,
Will you be mine?
Until the end of time...
I will be strong,
I will be sweet
I’ll hold your hand
When things ain’t great...
I will, I will, I will

Helen could not stop crying.

After the wedding, they surprised guests by riding the old two-seater bicycle on which her late grandfather, Pop, had given Helen countless rides. The newlyweds pedaled to their reception. They held a second celebration for assorted friends a week later in New Orleans. And then, with her freshly minted MFA from the California Institute for the Arts, Helen moved up to chilly Halifax, Nova Scotia, as Paul returned to Dalhousie University Medical School.

Paul’s commitment to living a moral life had only become more profound. In medical school, he became a vegan, eating no animal products of any kind. Vegans often share an ideology linked to pacifism, a belief that killing animals corrupts a pristine order of nature. By this logic, as humans prey on animals, so the predatory hungers of humankind feed on violence and lead to war. "I felt it was unnecessary for animals to suffer and die for people to eat in the modern world," Paul says. Inspired by Paul, Helen also became a vegan.

Helen kept busy while Paul finished becoming a doctor. She taught animation at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, was a founder of the Reel Vision Festival for women artists, and won a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commission for several shorts on Street Cents, a popular children’s TV series. In 1999, with Canadian Council for the Arts funding, she traveled across the country, meeting with colleagues in the alternative film network, collecting information on handmade filmmaking techniques. The spiral-bound booklet she produced, Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Film Cookbooklet, parodied a cookbook, including how-to tips on filmmaking and a simulation of her approach with handwritten notes, e-mail messages, different fonts, and her own cartoons. Her travels took her to Phil Hoffman's film farm, a filmmaking retreat in Mt. Forest, Ontario, where she learned how to use chemicals to hand-process film. She was a purist—no video or digital, only celluloid would do.

Several miles from Hoffman's barn, Helen found an animal farm with monkeys, zebras, lizards, and a gaggle of baby pigs. Helen was so taken by the piglets that she bought one as a surprise for Paul. The film she made in Hoffman's barn, Your Pig Is Down the Road, is a love song to Paul and a celebration of pigs, with intimations of the vegan good life.

She would later make a companion piece, Madame Winger Makes A Film. With Paul’s guitar lines as a music track, the film is narrated by “Madame Winger,” actually a friend of her mother’s, Meredith Pogue. The raspy Southern accent, seasoned by cigarettes, wraps around the syllables in a wonderfully comic way. “Filmmakers! How will you survive the new century?” Madame is represented by a hand-drawn woman with a doe-eyed face, snowy hair in a layered beehive, a matching boa around her neck, a red dress, and black-and-white stockings.

Happy pigs and piglets swirl to the voice-under drawl: “The bad news is this: Film for photographs and movies still contains gelatin, which is made from animal bones. I hope that one day, a vegetarian film will be used. After all, toothbrushes used to be made from boar bristles!”

The story line roams from instructions on chemical processing to home movies of Helen as a kid then on to Paul, grinning, hugging, and kissing a 50-pound pig: The artist presenting scenes from her life.

No one could be that happy.

But Helen and Paul were, and, when Paul was officially a doctor, they headed back to the city of their dreams, the place neither had wanted to leave.

On January 4 of this year, at 10 minutes after five in the morning, a 60-year-old woman in a bed-and-breakfast on Rampart Street, four houses down from Paul and Helen, awoke to a strange knock. She opened the door but saw only a darkened hallway. She closed the door. The knock came again. Again, she opened. This time she saw an African-American man—that was the only description the police would release—“just standing there, holding a gun,” she would tell Brendan McCarthy of the Times-Picayune. “He mumbled something and then butted against the door, trying to enter.”

The woman’s husband forced his body against the door, shutting the intruder out of their bedroom. As the man fled, the couple called the police. Officers from the New Orleans Police Department arrived within minutes.

Four houses away, at about the same time, Paul was sleeping in the back bedroom next to his toddler when he heard Helen scream from the living room: “Get away from my baby!”

He bolted out of bed and pulled the boy into his arms.

Her voice again: “Call 911!”

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A Death in New Orleans, page 4

He heard a gunshot. Carrying his son, Paul ran to the doorway and saw a man with a gun standing over Helen, who lay on the living room floor, bleeding.

Poppy screamed.

Paul turned on his heels and made for the back of the house, holding the boy. He tried to hide, but the man followed him into the bathroom. Paul sank to his knees in a corner, head down, shielding his child. The man fired. Gailiunas felt a bullet sear his cheek. Another one burned into his left forearm. Something—another bullet? A ricochet?—slashed his right hand.

Leave, prayed Paul. Leave now. He felt his blood spreading on the floor. He tried to pretend that he was dead. Don’t reload. His body covered the boy, who had gone silent. At least one of us is shot, he thought.

He heard the back door slam.

Paul pushed himself off the floor. In a daze, he led Poppy into the bedroom. He fumbled on the nightstand and found Helen’s glasses, put them on, and punched the numbers 9-1-1 on his cell phone.

Police officers were questioning the man and woman in the guesthouse when Paul Gailiunas’ scream burst out of the squad car’s radio. Helen had a bullet through the neck.

He unlocked the front door as the police arrived. One of the officers ushered Paul and his son onto the front steps. The house had become a crime scene.

As Paul and Poppy sat on the steps, Paul tried to figure out what had happened. Helen must have woken up to let Rosie into the backyard. Police would theorize that the intruder fleeing the bed-and-breakfast hopped over the back fence just as Helen opened the kitchen door. As the man barged into the house, Helen struggled with him, her screams waking Paul.

She saved our lives, he told himself.

An ambulance arrived. They got in.

Helen was buried in the cemetery beside her grandfather, Pop. “Hers was hardly a typical funeral procession,” reported the Columbia State, Helen’s hometown paper. “A parade of her brightly garbed friends (ancient plaid suits, motorcycle boots, striped stockings) walked from the Nickelodeon to St. Paul’s on Bull Street.”

Friends from Helen’s Cal Arts years flew to Columbia for the funeral. So did friends from Cambridge, Halifax, New Orleans, New York, even Korea. Paul, Poppy, and Elijah Aron wore seersucker suits in honor of Helen. Always a southern girl, she had loved seeing men in seersucker.

Back in New Orleans, public anger exploded over a surging homicide rate. On the day of Helen’s death, the city would reel from six murders in 24 hours. “Killings bring the city to its bloodied knees,” cried a Times-Picayune headline. Days earlier, violence also claimed Dinerral Shavers, a 25-year-old snare drummer for the Hot 8 Brass Band, a popular local band. An anti-violence protest on January 11 drew 3,000 people to City Hall, calling for the resignations of Mayor Ray Nagin, District Attorney Eddie Jordan, and Police Superintendent Warren Riley.

No resignations were forthcoming; the deeper problem was endemic poverty feeding a vicious drug culture, running rampant in a city whose defenses had been torn apart by Katrina. The city’s police department had lost its crime lab in the flood and was severely understaffed. As drug thugs fought for shrinking turf, armed robbers roamed the poorest streets with impunity—Marigny had been known as a safe enclave before Katrina.

Months later, there are still few clues to the identity of Helen’s killer. Hopes ride on a $5,000 reward and national attention; 48 Hours and America’s Most Wanted have filmed interviews with Paul and the family that are expected to be aired in September. “I’m in frequent contact with the New Orleans police,” Helen’s brother, Jake, says. “I’m painfully aware of how overwhelmed the system is. They’re 300 officers down, they've just gotten the crime lab back. But I’ve had good, extensive meetings with men on the case.”

Like Paul and the rest of Helen’s family, Jake struggles with his reaction to her murder. “Helen lived up to her principles,” he says. “Paul, Kevin, my mother, and I have to put our principles on the line. I’d be the first to argue against the death penalty—Helen didn’t support it. I just hope the son-of-a-bitch is caught and put in prison forever.”

“Helen coined a term for herself—a ‘romance-activist,’” Paul says. “She believed that the key to a lasting, healthy relationship was not to fall in love at first sight—you should develop a friendship first.”

The words come as Paul sits in a vegetarian restaurant in Vancouver’s west side, a neighborhood of storefront cafes, clothing shops, restaurants, bars, a left-wing bookstore, and a multi-ethnic vibe one finds in Greenwich Village, Cambridge, or the French Quarter.

There is a disarming sweetness about Paul Gailiunas. He speaks with the gentle manner of a physician curious about a patient. To questions about his own life, he answers that he is moving slowly. “I still have nightmares, waking up and thinking about safety, checking doors. I still have some muscle problems,” he says, extending his right hand, which shows a sunken space in the web between thumb and forefinger, tissue damage from the bullet. “But my therapy is coming along pretty well.” (Both father and son are seeing therapists.)

He apologizes as his cell phone rings—a physician returning his call about part-time work. He leaves the table. On returning, he says: “The only reason to go back to New Orleans would be to try and make it better, and I don’t have that in me.” He pauses. “I have to take care of my son. I think the furthest-case scenario would be a guy from New Orleans hiring someone to track us down, but I’m not ready to move out of here.”

Paul and Francis Pop are living with his mother in a part of Vancouver he calls “safe—I’d rather not say much more. It’s a nice neighborhood, and my son is doing as well as can be expected. He is such a sweet, good little boy.”

At night he shows Poppy, who is three years old, photographs of Helen. “I tell him his mother is with the angels.” His eyelids flutter. He nods, gazing at the street in thought.

“Helen and I lived in a little bit of a dream world,” he says.

He remembers her in countless ways, but one of the most tangible and insistent is her work, which told so much of her own story. Probably her finest film is called Mouseholes. Helen made it in 1999 as a tribute to her grandfather, years after his death. She had been finishing graduate work at Cal Arts when Pop, then 91, was hospitalized with kidney failure. Helen made several trips home, taping bedside conversations with Pop on a cassette player. The screen shows cutout figures of the white-haired old man in a bed. Deliberately sounding like a girl of 12, Helen narrates: “My grandfather got smaller each day.” Cut to a home-movie scene of the young siblings, with Jake’s voice as narrator: “Pop had a car collec- tion, and he built model airplanes.”

Helen’s voice continues: “Where are we going?”

The viewer hears Pop answer. “Just roaming around,” he says.

“Hey, Pop, tell me. Where are you?”

“Anywhere.”

“At the funeral,” Helen says, “I thought about what my mind could not imagine."

Pop floats down through heavenly clouds to a table set for tea. A sonorous voice—that of the pastor from Pop’s funeral—quotes St. Paul: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, what God has prepared for those who love Him."

Helen Hill was 36 and just achieving prominence in her field when she was killed in her beloved New Orleans. Her alma mater and her loved ones are trying to make sure that her work is not forgotten: The Harvard Film Archive has made new master prints of her films and digitized them onto DVDs that circulate at festivals, classes, and private screenings.

But not all of Helen’s work is finished. The dresses of Florestine Kinchen, which her mother brought to Columbia, hang in the closet of Helen’s childhood bedroom. Paul is committed to finishing her film, The Florestine Collection, about the maker of those dresses; he has the script, animated sequences, and file footage with him in Vancouver. At 20 minutes, this will be Helen’s longest film, and arguably the most personal—a young artist’s quest to find, in the creations of that mysterious seamstress, an essence of the place where Helen Hill chose to make her life.

As the images his wife left behind float across the screen in his editing sessions, Paul knows that he has a career to rebuild and a son to raise. He is determined to ensure that “my son is healthy and happy, and respects Helen’s ideals.”

But these days, Paul himself struggles to believe in those ideals. “There is nothing redeeming about her death,” he says flatly. He admits that his view of the world has changed. He used to think about living in a place to help make it better. Now he is determined to stay away from that place—to think only about himself and his child.

But working on Helen’s film helps. Once she hoped that her work would help bring life to New Orleans; now it helps to bring life back to Paul. He sees it as way to fend off disillusionment, to counter the darkness that has taken up residence in his soul.

“I have to fight not to isolate my son and myself from the world,” Paul says. “That’s not what Helen would want.”

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