Local author’s race to solve a mysterious family tragedy

By Amy Hines | Manor Ink Mentor

Livingston Manor is home to impressive lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer creativity, talent and enterprise. And New York is the birthplace of Pride Month, celebrated each June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan, a cultural, political and legal turning point in the movement against gay and lesbian discrimination.

To especially recognize Pride Month, Manor Ink reached out to Wayne Hoffman, a professional journalist and acclaimed author living in the Manor and Manhattan. Hoffman and his husband Mark Sullivan have owned a home on Old Rte. 17 since 2005, and have borne witness to the hamlet’s growth and change.

Hoffman has written three novels. Hard and its sequel An Older Man are both published by Bear Bones Books, while the Stonewall Book Award-winning Sweet Like Sugar is published by Kensington Books. He is also a contributor to several anthologies.

A murder in the family

His latest book is a true story about his great grandmother’s mysterious murder, The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer’s to Solve a Murder.

“When I was a kid, my mother used to tell the story that her grandmother was brutally murdered when she was a young mom,” Hoffman said. “The story went that my great grandmother was nursing her baby outside on the front porch in the winter in Winnipeg, when a drive-by sniper shot her dead. I never believed the story, but I never called my mother out on it, because it was entertaining and she told it very well.”

In 2009, Hoffman’s mother was diagnosed with dementia, and he realized time was short to learn more from her about the murder. As a veteran journalist, he decided to dig into the event himself.

“I spent almost a decade researching what happened. What really happened is nothing like the story my mother told. It wasn’t winter. It wasn’t outside. It wasn’t a drive-by sniper. She wasn’t breastfeeding. It wasn’t daytime. None of those details is true, except for one, which is the main one – my great grandmother was brutally murdered.

“It was front page news across Canada, in English and Yiddish newspapers, and it was the only murder in Winnipeg in 1913 that was never solved.”

A race against the disease

Hoffman drew on his vast experience as a reporter and author to write the book. First, he videotaped his mother recalling her life. “Over the years, as I started digging into this investigation, my mother’s condition kept deteriorating,” he said. “She couldn’t remember what I told her, then she couldn’t remember the original story she’d heard as a child, then she couldn’t remember who I was, then she couldn’t remember who she was.”

When his mother could no longer help him on his journey, he took a different tack. “I went online and tried to find relatives, tried to find distant cousins who I’ve never heard of and never met. I wound up finding about two dozen, all over the world. I went around the world to meet them to see what they knew about family history, to see if they had any more insight as to what really happened to my great grandmother.”

Research for the book began in Livingston Manor when Hoffman’s parents would visit. “This race against Alzheimer’s to find out what really happened all started in the Manor around my dining room table while my mother herself was slipping away,” he said.

By day, Hoffman is a journalist. For 25 years, he has been an editor and publisher. “When I was in college, I started writing for The Washington Blade, which was and is the LGBTQ paper in Washington, DC, where I’m from. And my editor there is now my husband 33 years later. So I’ve been a journalist since I was 18.”

In 1997, Hoffman and Sullivan founded the NY Blade, New York City’s LGBTQ paper, now defunct, and Hoffman worked there full time. He is currently executive editor of Tablet, an online Jewish magazine. His cultural reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Village Voice, The Nation, The Forward, Billboard and The Advocate.

Associate Editor Michelle Adams-Thomas conducted the interview for this article.