On Pain of Boredom

"My mother goes to work every day and comes home tired all the time; so does my father, and he is sick at his stomach with ulcers. It seemed that everyone was always tired; that we were always getting up, going to work and school, coming home, eating, cooking meals, washing dishes and going to bed and getting up again. It seemed that it was too much for all of us, and that we were always tired. So I lay there in bed and planned how I was going to kill us all. I wanted to kill everyone quick, so we wouldn't have to suffer any more."

So Diana Daye Humphries, 16, explained things to the Houston police one afternoon last week. Her stomach was upset, so she stayed home that day from Reagan Senior High School, where her 142 I.Q. and hard study made her a teacher's pet even though shyness kept her from being as popular with the boys

("They don't interest me") as a cute blonde ought to be. Home was a $15,000 brick ranch house in the Oak Forest section of town, a standard three-bedroom unit furnished with the standard new appliances from the combined incomes of her father, an oilfield-equipment salesman drawing disability pay from the Navy, and her mother, an airlines reservation clerk. But whatever it was they thought they were working for, Diana found it boredom on the installment plan.

Diana got out her father's old rifle, bought a box of .22 short shells at the Seven-Eleven Store around the corner, methodically test-fired it into her mattress. Then she went to her father's den, turned on the big console television and waited, cool enough, while she thought over her plans to dispatch other members of the family as, each on tedious schedule, they came home from school or work. ABC's American Bandstand, the 4 p.m. teen-age dance show, had been on a couple of minutes when Diana's sandy-haired brother, 14-year-old Bobby, slammed the front screen door, stomped familiarly back through the kitchen into the den. Resting the old gun on the TV, Diana took aim and shot him through the forehead, dropping him without a murmur amidst his scattered books.

Because Bobby's blood made a stain on the soft green wall-to-wall carpet, Diana dashed into his bedroom for a quilt to cover his body. Then, rifle loaded for the next shot of planned mercy, she sat down and waited until her mother drove up half an hour later and started up the walk. "I saw then that there was no way I could shoot her without her seeing me, and I didn't want her to see me shoot her, so I yelled at her not to come in the house. I didn't want her to see Robert.

"She came over to me and said, 'What's the matter with you? You must be joking.' I told her no, it was true. She pulled the cover off and started trying to clean his face and blew air from her mouth into his mouth and said that he was warm and that she knew he was still alive. She was crying, and said she didn't know what had gotten into me. She asked me if we had had a fuss about anything, and I told her no. She said she didn't know what she was going to do; that they would probably put me in jail. We stayed there and waited for the police to get there."

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