57 pages • 1 hour read
Danya KukafkaNotes on an Execution
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “12 Hours”
This chapter is written in second person. Death row inmate Ansel Packer wakes up in Polunsky prison on what is to be “the last day of [his] life” (9). Ansel is a serial murderer known as the “Girly Killer” for his pattern of targeting young women. He is slated to die by lethal execution at the end of the day but feels a flicker of hope due to his relationship with a female corrections officer named Shawna. Ansel has been manipulating Shawna into aiding his escape plan.
Ansel passes the morning by listening to classical music and working on a painting. He takes stock of his few prized possessions, including a letter from a girl named Blue Harrison and a photo of a diner called the Blue House. In the photo, Blue’s arm can be seen through a top-floor window.
Shawna slips a note under Ansel’s door which reads, “I did it.”
Ansel reflects on his psychological diagnosis, implied to be psychopathy. He knows that he doesn’t feel emotions the way other people do but wonders if he hasn’t always been bad.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Lavender”
The narration changes to third person. In 1972, 16-year-old high schooler Lavender meets the older Johnny Packer at a tavern. Within a year, she is pregnant with his child. Lavender moves out of her house and into Johnny’s family farmhouse outside Essex, New York, taking only her mother’s locket as a keepsake. The couple lives alone on the large property, which borders a thick and wild forest.
Nine months later, Lavender gives birth to a baby boy, whom she names Ansel. After Ansel’s birth, her relationship with Johnny sours, then turns abusive. Johnny is physically violent to Lavender and refuses to let her use his truck, trapping her on the farm with Ansel while he spends long hours in town. Lavender dreams of escaping to California and seeing the ocean.
Ansel grows into a strange and “ugly” toddler, and Lavender struggles to bond with him. One day when Ansel is three years old, he wanders off into the nearby woods. When Lavender runs to Johnny for help, he rapes her and then leaves. Ansel reappears at night, holding a decapitated chipmunk in his hand. When Lavender takes him inside, she discovers the lock Johnny has put on the pantry so they cannot eat.
Shortly afterward, Lavender falls pregnant again. She plans to leave Johnny and secretly packs a bag of supplies. When the second baby is born, she doesn’t name him. Instead, she calls him Baby Packer. Lavender experiences intense postpartum depression, which leaves her bedridden. One day, after a failed attempt to make her get up, Johnny beats her bloody. When Ansel tries to intervene, Johnny slams his head against the doorframe.
The following morning, Johnny is apologetic and agrees to take Lavender for a drive into town, the first time she’s been allowed off the property in five years. Lavender gives Ansel her bag of supplies and his grandmother’s locket, promising that it will always keep him safe. She asks him to take care of his brother. When they stop at a gas station two hours outside of Essex, Lavender calls the police and directs them to the farmhouse. She hides in the gas station’s supply closet until Johnny drives away. As she crouches, she discovers that she accidentally pocketed the locket she meant to give Ansel.
The following morning, Lavender begins the journey to California. After several weeks, she reaches San Diego and delights in wading in the ocean.
Chapter 3 Summary: “10 Hours”
Ansel recalls the only time he ever saw the ocean. He was 25, driving up the Massachusetts coast with his future wife Jenny. Even now, he’s grateful for the memory.
Ansel receives a visit from his lawyer, Tina Nakamura. She has filed one final appeal against his execution. Though he fakes solemnity, Ansel secretly delights in knowing that he’s only a few hours away from freedom. He ponders his Theory, a document he’s been working on during his incarceration and will leave behind when he escapes. Ansel’s Theory posits that good and bad are not binary concepts and that everyone lives “as equals in the murky gray between” (51).
The only part of the Theory Ansel hasn’t figured out is where his family fits in. Lavender exists for him as a ghost, always in the act of leaving. Every day, he is haunted by a memory of his little brother screaming. The only time the screaming has ever stopped is during the several weeks Ansel spent at the Blue House back in 2012. When he is free, he plans to return there.
Ansel recalls that he was 11 years old the first time he ever hurt another person. He knows that after he escapes, he will never hurt anyone else.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Saffy (1982)”
In 1982, 11-year-old Saffron “Saffy” Singh lives at Miss Gemma’s, a group home for children. Her closest friends are fellow foster children Lila Maroney and Kristen. Lila always wears a huge amethyst ring with a gold band.
Saffy has a crush on fellow resident Ansel. Ansel is a loner who spends his time wandering the wilderness at the edges of the property. At Miss Gemma’s, everyone knows his story: At four years old, Ansel was abandoned at a farmhouse with his two-month-old brother. By the time the police arrived, the baby was dead of starvation. Saffy doesn’t know if this is true, but the image has stuck with her.
Saffy is only distracted from her crush by a recent mystery. For weeks, the decapitated bodies of small animals have been showing up around the foster home. Saffy has assigned herself to solve the crimes.
One night, Ansel invites Saffy down into the home’s basement, where they listen to a Nina Simone record together. Saffy thrills at his closeness and wonders if this feeling is the kind of dangerous love her late mother used to warn her about.
The following day, Saffy walks down to the creek to surprise Ansel, who is sitting by the water. As she walks up behind him, she sees that he is arranging the mutilated bodies of two squirrels and a fox. She runs back to Miss Gemma’s but can’t explain to her friends what she’s seen. Later, Ansel knocks on the door. He gives Saffy two oatmeal cookies and warns her to stay quiet. Saffy and the other girls break into uneasy laughter.
That night, Saffy returns from dinner to find the dismembered fox lying in her bed. She doesn’t tell anyone; instead, she disposes of the corpse on her own. After the incident, she can’t eat for a week and is eventually transferred to a new foster home. As she packs her belongings, Ansel comes to her room and apologizes. He says that he sometimes “[does] things he can’t explain” (69). He put the fox in Saffy’s bed because he overheard the girls laughing at him.
Ansel asks Saffy to forgive him and reaches out for a hug. As she accepts his embrace, she hates herself for the first time, feeling “less like a girl and more like a woman” (70).
Chapter 5 Summary: “8 Hours”
Back at the prison, Ansel is still tortured by Baby Packer’s screams. As he lies on the floor of his cell, he thinks of the detective who questioned him after his arrest. She was a smart woman who tricked him into confessing the entirety of his crimes. When she asked him why he did it, he had no answer except that he wanted to quiet the screaming.
Ansel flashes back to a memory of 1990. He has just graduated high school and has been emancipated from the foster care system. He lives alone in a trailer at the edge of the woods in Plattsburgh, New York. Baby Packer’s screaming consumes his waking thoughts, and sometimes he sees silhouettes of Lavender by the mouth of the forest.
During the summer, Ansel works at a Dairy Queen. One night he convinces a coworker to come back to his trailer for sex, but as she undresses, he remembers the screaming and can’t perform. The girl laughs at Ansel and then leaves, infuriating him.
The following day, the girl ignores Ansel at work. As he drives home, he spots a stranger on the road, another young girl. He brakes and steps out toward her.
The narrative returns to the present, where Ansel sinks into near madness as the screaming continues. He remembers the comforting presence of Jenny, who always comes to him when he “most [wants] to forget” (75).
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Notes on an Execution is written in the style of a crime thriller but deviates from the standard plot in that there is no hunt for a killer. Kukafka introduces Ansel when he is already on death row, awaiting execution for the murders of several adolescent girls. There is no doubt about his guilt, as he admits to his crimes within the first chapter.
Kukafka further subverts the typical structure of a crime novel by introducing two alternating story threads, each one focusing on a woman whose life has intersected Ansel’s: Lavender, his mother, and Saffy, a girl who knew him in foster care.
Ansel’s chapters take place in 2018 against the backdrop of a modern, true crime obsessed society. Kukafka touches on the role of crime-related media in glorifying serial killers. Violent men, particularly those who kill women, are reported on sensationally, pedestalized as twisted masterminds and treated with a kind of reverence. Ansel is aware of the culture that awaits him outside of Polunsky. He jokingly mentions “[making] like Ted Bundy,” (51) one of the most infamous serial killers of all time. Ansel knows how men who murder can become cultural icons to ordinary people, and this knowledge feeds into his superiority complex.
Ansel embodies several of the qualities associated with a glamorized image of a serial killer. He is handsome and manipulative and a diagnosed psychopath, who has tricked correctional officer Shawna into believing in his innocence. He views himself as superior to others, particularly women, believing that he “[knows] how to turn [them] to clay” (73). Ansel toys with Shawna for his own entertainment.
Ansel’s nebulous Theory is a reference to the manifestos written by mass murderers like Ted Kaczynski and Elliot Rodger, documents meant to be circulated after their deaths, whose contents purport to justify their crimes. These manifestos have historically become objects of cultural intrigue. Though Ansel dismisses manifestos as “being for crazy people,” (52) he hopes his Theory will achieve similar infamy. His aspirations show the faults of a culture in which killers are treated like celebrities. Kukafka emphasizes the grotesqueness of legitimizing the ramblings of a killer through press coverage and analysis.
Kukafka delves into Ansel’s past to explore the question of whether murderers are created by nature, through circumstance, or purely by choice. Lavender’s chapters reveal that Ansel had an abusive childhood. He is physically and psychologically abused by his father, culminating in Johnny slamming his head into a door. Lavender leaves her family, and Ansel is left alone on the farm where he witnesses Baby Packer’s death. The lasting trauma of this incident manifests in the screaming that haunts Ansel’s every waking moment. Ansel displays several behaviors thought to be early warning signs for future serial murderers. As a child, he comes across as cold and is violent toward small animals, though it’s unclear whether these characteristics come about because of his abuse or are inborn.
Ansel’s is the sort of tragic backstory often used to contextualize the actions of a killer. Indeed, many real-life serial killers experienced traumatic childhoods. PTSD sustained as a child can follow those affected into adulthood and affect their socialization and decision-making. Abuse survivors sometimes perpetuate similar violence in their own lives in a social theory known as the cycle of abuse. Ansel’s childhood humanizes him, chipping away at the idea of a psychopath to expose the hurt man underneath. Here Kukafka begins to develop the theme of the Different Manifestations of Trauma and its enduring effects.
Ansel’s trauma may help to explain his choices, but it cannot justify them. Lavender and Saffy both have traumatic pasts, Lavender from Johnny’s abuse and Saffy from her mother’s early death and the incident at Miss Gemma’s. Neither woman takes their trauma out on others in a violent way. While traumatic experiences are certainly impactful, moral choices are just as important in determining outcomes. Detailing Ansel’s traumas helps readers understand the context of his actions but doesn’t excuse them.
Kukafka uses different narrative styles for the chapters about the women and the chapters about Ansel. While Lavender and Saffy’s sections are narrated in the third person, Ansel’s is written in second person, using the pronoun “you.” This stylistic choice places readers directly in Ansel’s shoes, giving us intimate access to his inner world. The readers are privy to his fear about death, his own soul-searching about his crimes, and his enduring longing for his ex-wife Jenny. Kukafka forcefully humanizes Ansel through this perspective, subverting the assumption that serial killers are inherently different from other people.
