In cold blood II

Brooks Douglass was 16 years old when two drifters entered his family’s Oklahoma farmhouse, killed his parents, raped his sister and left him for dead. He survived, and passed a law allowing him to watch his attacker be executed. But it took 30 years, and making a movie reliving the tragedy, to bury his demons, writes Lois Romano

WHEN I first met Brooks Douglass 15 years ago, he was a restless 32-year-old state senator — the youngest ever elected in Oklahoma. Outside of politics, his life seemed to be a treadmill of small-time deals, but he was barely hanging on financially.

His first wife, a childhood sweetheart, had finally thrown in the towel when he sold their home, promising grand plans for a better one — plans that never panned out. He was trying to unload a garage full of latex gloves, another one of his get-rich-quick schemes, when she finally decided she’d had enough. He had remarried, but the same unfocused energy would ultimately contribute to the collapse of that union, too.