Before the massacre, no one could remember hearing Donn Kilgore use the word “nigger,” with one exception: a discussion of Mark Fuhrman and his effect on the outcome of the O.J. Simpson trial. In fact, Chait recalled, blacks—and black American culture—mystified Donn. Once they were walking down South Street and a throng of black kids in their teens or 20s were shouting at each other in street English and Donn stopped in his tracks. “Why?” he asked rhetorically. “Don’t they know that 90 percent of the country doesn’t talk like that and they are setting themselves up for failure? It’s terribly, terribly sad. I don’t understand it.”
    Another time, Hendon recalled, he and Donn came out the Wawa convenience store on Head House Square just as a Jeep Wrangler with the top down and crowded with young blacks careened around the corner onto Lombard with the radio blasting porno rap at deafening volume. Donn winced. “I could get mad,” he said sadly, “but the fact is those kids will lose their hearing by the time they’re 30, so we have the last laugh.” He added, “Only this isn’t anything to laugh about.”
    He said those words in the same subdued tone of voice another time when they passed two girls—oh, maybe fifteen or sixteen—on South Street puffing on cigarettes and doing their best to look cool. “I watched my father die of lung cancer,” Donn said. “He gagged and wheezed and finally drowned in his own bodily fluids. He literally croaked. It was not a pretty death. If I approached those girls and described to them how my father died, they’d think I was crazy. ”
Where Donn was mystified by black American culture, he did have other racial prejudices.
His neighbors three houses away on Mowbray Street, Alton and Theo Gibbs, remembered a dinner party for eight or ten when somebody said to Donn, “You have been all over the world. Where do you have no interest in going.”
    “Australia.”
    “I went to Australia last winter,” someone said. “I loved it.”
    “To me Australia is like an eighty-five-year-old pussy,” Donn said with a roguish grin. “I know it’s down there, but I have no interest in exploring it.”
    Outraged shrieks and hoots of laughter. “Where else do you not want to go?”
    “Germany, Japan and China,” Donn replied without hesitation.
    “Why Germany and Japan?”
    “Because I grew up in World War II and I remember the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March and the liberation of the concentration camps in Poland and Germany.
    “That was over 50 years ago. Why are you so angry 50 years later?”
    “The History Channel.”
    “What?”
    “I work at home and when I go down to the kitchen for coffee or lunch I go around the dials to see if there is any breaking news and I look in on the History Channel. Every day they are refighting World War II and I get pissed off all over again. Over 400,000 Americans were killed by those bastards. So were 20 million Russians and six million Jews. I see this every day in black and white and color. The color of spilled American blood is very red. I believe the Japs and the Germans, given half a chance, would do it all over again. Not enough generations have gone by to eradicate those genetic flaws.”
    “Why don’t you want to go to China?” someone asked. “The human rights issue?”
“Human rights is their business,” Donn said. “No, my problem with the Chinese is the state-sponsored murder of girl babies.”
    “Wait a minute,” Sheila Donnelley snapped from across the table. “I’ve been to China five times and have a Masters in Oriental Studies.”
    “So....”
    “You have to study China—and actually go there—to understand the situation. They’ve got a billion and a half people. They live cheek by jowl. They have no privacy. They can barely feed themselves.”
    “That gives them the right to murder little girl babies?”
    “Nobody murders little girl babies,” Sheila said, her voice dripping with disdain. “The government doesn’t come through the countryside ripping girl babies from their parents’ arms and killing them.”
    “What happens then?”
    “They’re abandoned.”
    Donn erupted. “That makes it okay? It’s okay to have a child and then abandon it?”
    “You don’t understand,” Sheila persisted. “If you don’t have a boy child... It’s a cultural thing with the Chinese. For centuries they have believed that if you don’t have a male child the family line will cease to exist.”
    “So what. In three marriages I’ve never had children and it doesn’t bother me,” Donn snapped. “I wake up every morning and thank God I’m sterile.”
    “Everybody in Philadelphia wakes up in the morning and thanks God you’re sterile,” Bruce Smith snapped. The tension was broken as everyone in the room dissolved in laughter, Donn the loudest.
    “It’s a cultural thing,” Sheila repeated. “The government is trying to cope. They’re putting up billboards saying it’s okay if you don’t have a male child. They’re really trying to do something about it.”
    No one at the table spoke.
“You want my prediction of the future—say the mid-21st century,” Donn said rhetorically. “By the year 2050 there’ll be what?—two billion Chinese?
    “Something like that,” Sheila said.
    “And an imbalance of men to women—say, 10 percent more men than women. That’s two hundred million Chinese men without women. China will be awash in testosterone. Those two hundred million horny men will threaten such internal upheaval that the Chinese government will launch the mother of all wars so these guys can get laid. Do you know the expression, ‘A hard cock has no conscience?’ This isn’t about getting oil or rubber or steel or water. This is about hard cocks. In World War II, the Japs abducted 250,000 Korean teenage girls and turned them into whores—they called them ‘comfort women’—to take care of the troops. That was nothing to what the Chinese are going to do to the world. I call them the Dong Wars of the 21st century.”
    “Is there anything we can do about it?” someone asked.
    “Die.” Donn sat back and looked around the table. “My philosophy,” he said quietly, “is that the 21st Century will be a grand time to be dead.”
    This series of exchanges was etched in the memory of everyone at that dinner party and turned up in grand jury testimony the following year. At that dinner party, Donn Kilgore had instantly changed from being charming, erudite and amusing as hell into a volatile, outspoken, opinionated curmudgeon. But no one had ever heard him turn on blacks that way.
At least not until after the Mowbray Street Massacre.