Notes on an Execution

Notes on an Execution is the second novel by American author Danya Kukafka. Kukafka is known for her debut novel Girl in Snow, a national bestseller about the effects of a violent murder on the small town where it takes place. Published in 2022, Notes on an Execution is another modern take on a crime thriller that critically examines a culture’s obsession with violent men.

Kukafka uses the story of serial murderer Ansel Packer to anchor the narratives of three women whose lives have been touched by his violence. As Ansel awaits lethal injection, Notes on an Execution reaches back through time in narratives that expose the pitfalls of consuming true crime as entertainment, explore the lasting effects of trauma, and probe the question of why more media attention is given to killers than to their victims. Along the way, Kukafka deconstructs the modern idea of the serial killer and critically examines the label of psychopath. She reimagines Ansel as a traumatized, cruel, and pathetic man unworthy of public curiosity.

This guide references the 2022 William Morrow print edition.

Content Warning: Notes on an Execution depicts physical and sexual abuse and assault, including the physical abuse of a child, the death of an infant, homicide, and a brief mention of suicide.

Plot Summary

In the novel’s opening chapter, death row inmate Ansel Packer awakens in Polunsky prison on the day of his execution. In second person, present-tense narration, Ansel contemplates his crimes. He is called the Girly Killer after his pattern of targeting adolescent girls. In several hours, he is due to be transferred from Polunsky to the Walls Unit, where his execution will take place via lethal injection. His witness will be a girl named Blue Harrison. Ansel is haunted by a constant screaming in his head, which he attributes to his deceased infant brother, known only as Baby Packer.

Ansel reveals that he has manipulated a recently widowed correctional officer named Shawna into setting up an escape plan. She has slipped her late husband’s gun under the front seat of the transfer van set to bring Ansel to the Walls Unit. Ansel will use the gun as leverage in his escape. He believes that if he gets out, he will never hurt another person.

The following chapters are alternate perspectives between Ansel and three women whose lives are intertwined with his: Lavender, his mother; Saffron “Saffy” Singh, an NYPD police chief who once lived with him in a foster home; and Hazel Fisk, the twin sister of his ex-wife Jenny. The chapters about the women are written in third person. The narrative shifts between timelines from 1972 to the present year of 2018.

Lavender’s chapters tell the story of Ansel’s childhood. She has Ansel at only 17 with an older man named Johnny Packer, who imprisons mother and child on a remote farmhouse in upstate New York. Ansel displays early signs of psychopathy, including a vacant gaze and propensity for harming animals. After the birth of her second child, Baby Packer, Johnny becomes violently abusive to both Lavender and Ansel. One day, Lavender leaves Ansel and Baby Packer alone to lure Johnny hours away from the farm and then calls the police, directing them to rescue her children. Baby Packer dies in Ansel’s arms before help arrives. Ansel is then sent to a foster home called Miss Gemma’s.

At Miss Gemma’s, Ansel meets Saffy, an 11-year-old girl who has recently lost her mother. Saffy is close with fellow preteens Kristen and Lila Maroney; all three are enamored by the handsome and tragic Ansel. Saffy and Ansel begin an innocent romance, but shortly afterward she catches him playing with the maimed corpses of several animals. In response, Ansel places a dismembered fox in Saffy’s bed and threatens her against telling anybody. Saffy keeps the incident to herself and transfers to a different care home. She and Lila soon fall into a haze of partying and drug addiction.

Ansel commits his first murder in the summer of 1990 at age 17, after being humiliated during a sexual encounter with a coworker. As he drives home from work the following day, he spots a stranger named Izzy Sanchez standing in the road. Ansel strangles Izzy and buries her body in the upstate New York woods. Two other victims follow in quick succession, Angela Meyer and Lila Maroney.

The news of Lila’s disappearance shocks Saffy out of her trance and compels her to apply at the local police academy. She interns under detective sergeant Emilia Moretti and is working as a detective in 1999 when the bodies of all three girls are discovered in the woods. Saffy suspects Ansel of the murders but is unable to convince the rest of the police department to pursue him. Instead, she begins a decade-long campaign of surveillance, stalking him first at his trailer in New York and later to a house in Vermont. She often has visions of the murdered girls as women, imagining how their lives would have been if they had survived. Saffy eventually works her way up to captain while keeping a constant eye on Ansel.

The fall after committing the three murders, Ansel begins college at Northern Vermont University. There, he meets the beautiful and outgoing Jenny Fisk. He decides to reform himself and try to be a better person. Jenny brings Ansel home for the holidays to meet her family, including twin sister Hazel, who is regarded as the less attractive and less popular sibling. Hazel is drawn to Ansel and resents Jenny for getting everything she wants. On Christmas morning, Hazel sees Ansel burying something beneath the maple tree in her front yard.

Ansel and Jenny grow closer, and he proposes marriage. Jenny confides in Hazel that Ansel can’t feel emotions, but she goes ahead with the marriage anyway. They move into a house in Vermont. During her continued stalking of Ansel, Saffy witnesses the marriage relationship sour and then become abusive, culminating in Jenny’s flight to Texas to begin a job as a labor and delivery nurse.

After Jenny leaves, Ansel digs into his family history. He learns that Baby Packer didn’t die after all. Instead, he was adopted by the well-off Harrison family and renamed Ellis. Ellis Harrison moved to Vermont, married a woman named Rachel and had a daughter named Beatrice “Blue” Harrison. Ellis and Rachel built a diner, which they named the Blue House. By the time Ansel learns of his brother’s existence, Ellis has died of cancer. Ansel drives to the Blue House and is welcomed in by Blue and Rachel. He spends two weeks there, experiencing the first peaceful and happy moments of his adult life. Saffy, who has followed Ansel to the diner, grows alarmed and resentful when she sees him interacting with his pretty, young niece. One day when Ansel is out, Saffy enters the diner and warns the women that Ansel is a suspected murderer. Rachel promptly kicks him out.

Devastated, Ansel drives to Texas, where he plans to win Jenny’s love back. After he sees her with a new boyfriend, however, he grows enraged. Ansel follows Jenny to her home and stabs her to death with a kitchen knife. He is arrested for her murder. Saffy questions him and extracts a confession to the 1990 murders. She is surprised to learn that he has no explanation for his crimes.

In the 2018 timeline, Shawna foils Ansel’s escape plan by failing to stash the gun as promised. Ansel is taken to the Walls Unit and realizes that he will not escape death. As his final hours tick away, he frantically takes stock of his life and expresses a desperate will to live.

Blue arrives along with Hazel and Hazel’s mother to witness the execution. Ansel is brought into a small room, where he is strapped down to a gurney and offered one last opportunity to speak. He pleads for a second chance, but his words are ignored, and he is injected with the lethal chemicals. As Ansel dies, he feels a dark mass lifting off him and understands that even he has goodness within him.

The novel closes with an epilogue composed of vignettes describing the lives each of Ansel’s victims would have led had they survived.