Sarah Harper and Laura Baines's Relationship

Sarah Harper and Laura Baines’s relationship shifts from friendship and admiration to a bond shaped by Laura’s influence and Sarah’s reluctance to resist her. Sarah’s retrospective account makes their closeness central to the aftermath of Joseph Wieder’s murder: although she suspected Laura might be involved, she supplied an alibi that concealed how little she knew about Laura’s whereabouts that night.

Friendship and Early Closeness

Sarah recalled that she and Laura were good friends and shared an apartment until Laura moved in with her boyfriend. Laura, who came from the Midwest, quickly became popular among students and professors; Sarah described her as cultured, free-spirited, and attractive to both men and women. Sarah, by contrast, said that she had been born and raised in the city but was naive and easily swept up by Laura’s charisma. Laura took her under her wing, and Sarah cast herself as a loyal follower accompanying Laura’s ambitions.

The friendship was not simply a matter of admiration. Sarah remembered Laura as someone who could make her feel inexperienced and dependent, even in ordinary choices. When Sarah bought a pair of shoes without asking Laura’s opinion, Laura persuaded her that they were hopelessly ugly and showed poor taste. Sarah gave them away. In retrospect, the incident exemplified a wider pattern: Laura did not tolerate even small displays of independence, while Sarah yielded rather than defend her judgment.

Laura’s Ambition and Sarah’s View of Her

Sarah portrayed Laura as intensely determined and calculating, with a persistent need to excel and receive public recognition. She recalled Laura explaining that she had quit athletics at eighteen after deciding that her earlier prizes would not secure a place on the team for the Los Angeles Olympics, and that four years later she would be too old to compete for selection. Sarah understood the decision as evidence that sport mattered to Laura chiefly as a route to recognition. She also believed Laura did not see herself as ruthless: Laura imagined herself generous and self-sacrificing, Sarah said, even as she treated people who blocked her aims as obstacles.

Sarah’s account of Laura’s other attachments is less certain. She thought Laura genuinely cared for Timothy Sanders, though she qualified that judgment, and believed the relationship between Laura and Wieder was more significant to Laura than her connection with Timothy. Laura, in Sarah’s interpretation, was flattered by the attention of a celebrated professor and felt singled out among the students who admired him. Sarah had heard claims of an affair, but said Laura had never told her of one and treated the rumor as likely gossip. That hesitation matters: Sarah offered a strong reading of Laura’s character, but did not claim direct knowledge of every relationship she described.

The Book and the Breakdown of Trust

Sarah connected Laura’s conflict with Wieder to a book on which Laura had helped him. Laura contributed mathematical knowledge to models intended to evaluate behavioral changes after traumatic events. Sarah believed Laura came to overestimate the importance of her contribution and became convinced that Wieder could not have completed the project without her. According to Sarah, Laura sought co-author credit, and Wieder agreed to it—or at least led Laura to believe he had.

The apparent promise collapsed when Laura found a copy of the book proposal Wieder had sent to a publisher. Her name did not appear. Sarah said this discovery changed Laura’s behavior: rather than erupting in anger, Laura asked Sarah to stay the night and spent an hour or two silently staring into space. She then began planning how to retaliate. Sarah’s recollection thus places her inside Laura’s response to the betrayal, not merely as a friend hearing about it later.

Sarah said Laura exploited tensions between Wieder and people involved in a secret project by making him think that someone had entered his home or was following him. Laura allegedly moved objects and left small signs of intrusion. Sarah also said Laura tried to make Wieder jealous by encouraging him to think she was in love with Richard Flynn, whom she introduced to the professor. In Sarah’s account, Flynn was being used to pressure Wieder to delay submitting the manuscript and return to their former understanding. These claims made Sarah’s own friendship with Laura part of a larger strategy, though Sarah did not describe herself as knowing the full extent of Laura’s plans at the time.

The Night of the Murder and the Alibi

Sarah said Laura came to her apartment at about three in the morning on the night Wieder was murdered. Laura appeared frightened and said she had argued with Flynn, who had taken her flirtation seriously and become obsessed with her. She had collected her belongings from the house she shared with Flynn and left them in her car; Timothy had returned from Europe a few days earlier, and Laura said they would live together again. Laura asked Sarah to say they had been together all evening if anyone asked. Sarah agreed, thinking Laura meant that Flynn might ask about her.

Sarah could not account for where Laura had been before arriving. The timing also sat uneasily with Flynn’s account to the police: the journey from Wieder’s home in West Windsor Township, followed by the time needed to collect her belongings, would have placed Laura’s departure much later than the evening hour he reported. Sarah said she already sensed that Laura was lying, and remembered her as unusually frightened. She made up the couch for Laura, then went back to sleep. By seven in the morning Laura had left, leaving a note that said she had gone to Timothy.

Sarah was on the way to New York with a friend when she heard the news on the radio. On the Jersey Turnpike, she asked the driver to pull over and vomited. She immediately wondered whether Laura had been involved. Nevertheless, after police contacted her between Christmas and New Year, Sarah returned to New Jersey and told them Laura had been with her from lunchtime until the next morning. That statement went far beyond what Sarah had witnessed: Laura had arrived only in the early morning, and Sarah did not know where she had been earlier. Sarah later said she did not know why she lied, except that Laura dominated her and she felt unable to refuse her.

Suspicion and Continuing Attachment

After speaking with the police, Sarah met Laura for coffee. Laura thanked her and said she had asked for the alibi to avoid attention from police and reporters, while insisting she had nothing to do with Wieder’s murder. She also told Sarah that Wieder had finally accepted her contribution and promised to name her as a co-author. Sarah found that claim strange, given that the proposal had omitted Laura’s name and Wieder was already dead. Her continued contact with Laura therefore did not resolve her suspicion; it brought the old imbalance into sharper focus, as gratitude and reassurance arrived alongside a story Sarah could not readily believe.

When Sarah later recounted these events, she said she had the impression that Laura had lied when asked what happened and was still hiding something. Yet the account also preserves Sarah’s own uncertainty: she had helped Laura despite suspecting danger, and her vivid judgments about Laura’s ambition coexist with gaps in what she knew. Their relationship becomes consequential not because Sarah can establish what Laura did, but because dependence shaped what she concealed—and because the friendship that once made Sarah a follower became the means by which Laura obtained a false alibi.