Suzan’s parents offered to settle for a mere $936 [down from $1,500,000], on one condition: that Kevin pay the amount by sending them a check for $1, made out to the deceased Suzan Herzog, every Friday for the next eighteen years—one for every year Suzan had been alive. The penalty seemed like he had been let off easy (again), but soon the burden of guilt proved too much for Kevin to bear.

In the early hours of Friday, January 1, 1982 the seventeen year-old Kevin Tunell made the biggest mistake of his life. At a New Year’s party near Washington DC, he got very drunk; his friends urged him not to drive but he insisted, “Nothing will ever happen to me.” On the road, he lost control of the wheel, and smashed into another car, instantly killing eighteen year old Suzan Herzog. After pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter and drunk driving, Tunell was sentenced to three years probation and one year of community service.

But Suzan’s parents, understandably, didn’t feel that this was sufficient punishment. They sued him in civil court for emotional distress, and won a ruling for $1,500,000.

Then quite unexpectedly, Suzan’s parents offered to settle for a mere $936, on one condition: that Kevin pay the amount by sending them a check for $1, made out to the deceased Suzan Herzog, every Friday for the next eighteen years—one for every year Suzan had been alive.

The penalty seemed like he had been let off easy (again), but soon the burden of guilt proved too much for Kevin to bear. He tried to present the Herzogs with two boxes of pre-written checks, dated each week through 2001, a year longer than required. The couple refused to accept them.

After seven Sisyphean years of the weekly purgatorial ritual, Kevin began to miss a few payments. The Herzogs promptly dragged him back into court. Giving an account before Judge Jack Stevens, a teary Tunell admitted that the agonizing guilt he felt each time he filled in Susan’s name had become unbearable.

You get to a point where you kind of snap—and you say, it hurts too much… I used to, like, lie in bed, and if I heard … noises, I used to think Susan was going to come to visit me.”

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