Either way, Le Roux was born in a time when the shadow of vio- lence had unmoored communities. "Life was lived in the moment," the relative said. Laws guarded the privacy of mothers who gave children up for adoption, allowing hospitals to issue short-form birth certificates containing only the adoptive parents' names. The "long certificate," containing the birth parents' information, was filed away and meant to be kept confidential. On Le Roux's long certificate, his first name was listed as "UNKNOWN." A month after the birth, an official addendum was added: "Child to be known in future as: Paul Calder Le Roux."

His adoptive parents, Paul Sr. and Judy Le Roux, had been un- able to conceive. They had spent six years on adoption lists, endur- ing endless rounds of background investigations, requests for character references, visits from the welfare department. When Judy called family members to say that a baby boy had finally ar- rived for them, she was so overcome with emotion that her grand- mother at first thought someone had died. They resolved not to tell the younger Paul that he had been adopted.

Paul Sr. worked as a manager at the Gaths and Shabanie asbes- tos mines, which at one point churned out 154,000 tons of the stuff a year. ("It's not the bad asbestos," said a childhood friend of Le Roux's. "You have the long fiber and the short fiber. We had the short fiber.") Paul Sr. had moved up the ladder of the mine, and the Le Roux family lived in a safe suburb, along a row of identical three-bedroom brick homes. Social life centered around the pool, bowling, and snooker tables at the Gaths Mine Club, and the young Le Roux was a friendly but quiet kid, uninterested in sports or typical boy antics. "I was in the neighborhood gang," the child- hood friend said. "We were thugs, smoking and spray painting the walls and getting into trouble. He was maybe a little bit young, to be fair, but he was absolutely nothing like that." Le Roux lived in a disciplined, meticulous household but not a severe one. He was doted on by parents still grateful to have been given a child at all— much less two, when they were later able to adopt a girl.

The war finally sputtered to an end in 1980, and elections