Will murders Tess Copeland

Will Radley murders Tess Copeland, his student, and leaves with her after killing her on a university campus. The event is disclosed retrospectively through two connected accounts: Will’s recollection of the killing and Jared Copeland’s later description of witnessing it. Together, they establish the murder not only as a past crime but as a shared, unresolved event: Will tries to reduce it to one among many deaths, while Jared carries the memory into his later confrontation with Will and his conversation with Eve Copeland.

Causes and Background

Before the murder, Will and Tess had spent time together at a university union bar. Will remembers discussing the French philosopher Michel Foucault with her, whose ideas about sex and madness occupied much of her dissertation. The conversation places them in a tutor-and-student relationship, but Tess is also a married woman who has a family life outside the university. Will recalls that she wanted to return to her husband and was uncertain about being out so late with her tutor. The recollection establishes the circumstances of their evening without presenting Tess’s uncertainty as consent to what follows.

Tess’s absence later becomes the centre of Jared’s account. She had told him that she was working late in the library, and he went to the campus to pick her up. When he could not find her there, he searched elsewhere. His account gives the murder a domestic context absent from Will’s earlier memory: Tess was Jared’s wife and the mother of his child. Her disappearance is therefore not an isolated campus incident to him, but the abrupt loss of a person he expected to bring home.

The Killing and Its Witness

Will remembers killing Tess on campus and hearing someone running nearby. The memory returns when Jared identifies Tess by name and explains that he saw Will leave with her. Will’s recollection is brief, but its fragments confirm that the encounter with Jared has broken through his effort to keep the earlier killing at a distance. The nearby runner and the scream are no longer incidental sounds in the memory: Will recognizes Jared as the person who was there.

Jared recounts searching until he saw Will and Tess across a stretch of water. He ran through it and witnessed Will attack and kill her before taking her away and flying off. The account makes Jared an eyewitness, not merely a husband piecing together an unexplained disappearance. It also explains why Will’s departure remains fixed in Jared’s memory: he saw the person responsible leave with Tess, while he himself was unable to prevent the killing. The two recollections meet at the same event from opposite positions—Will’s remembered act and Jared’s remembered failure to stop it.

The Murder’s Return

The murder comes back into the narrative during a later encounter between Will and Jared. When Jared names Tess and describes having seen Will fly away with her, Will is momentarily thrown back into the past. He struggles to answer. His response shows that the name still has the power to unsettle him, even after he has spent a long time pushing away his conscience.

Will then attempts to contain the significance of what happened. He tells himself that he has killed many people and treats Tess’s death as negligible by comparison. He also redirects blame toward Jared, reasoning that Jared failed to keep his wife safe. This self-exonerating account does not erase what Will remembers: he killed Tess, and Jared’s presence connects the crime to a witness who can name him. The contrast between Will’s effort to make the death small and Jared’s insistence on its particular victim gives the recollection its moral force.

Consequences and Significance

Jared’s memory continues to shape his actions years later. In speaking to Eve, he describes going to the campus to collect Tess, searching for her, and witnessing Will’s attack and departure. He identifies the place as the lawn outside the English Department and explains that the event was the source of the story about a monster who had killed Tess. His account had previously surfaced when he was in hospital or very drunk, and he had later denied it, believing that doing so would protect Eve. The eventual telling makes clear that his earlier denials did not mean the memory had gone away.

Jared also tells Eve that Will has come to Bishopthorpe and that he needs to make sure Will is dead. He does not present this as an abstract suspicion: he connects it to the murder he witnessed and to the fact that Will has returned. Eve, however, initially hears the account as another version of her father’s recurring story rather than as a reliable warning. The gap between Jared’s certainty and Eve’s disbelief shows one consequence of the long delay in telling the truth: the witness’s account is difficult to separate from the history of its earlier, undermined tellings.

Tess’s murder thus links Will’s concealed past to Jared’s grief and to the danger surrounding Eve in the present. Will’s attempt to treat the killing as an insignificant entry in a long history of violence conflicts with Jared’s precise, persistent recollection of his wife. The event’s return through both men’s memories makes that conflict visible: what Will tries to dismiss remains, for Jared, an identifiable loss and an unresolved reason to confront the person responsible.