If the revelation was meant to help the troubled Landon, it failed. He became convinced that he was infected with "bad blood," and even as he professed to hate his father for his crimes, his own life careened in the same direction.
At 2 a.m. on Sept. 6, 2001, 19-year-old Landon and a friend forced their way into the Ephrata home of a school principal and her husband. The couple were duct-taped, stabbed, shot, bludgeoned with a claw hammer, and smothered.
With a Lancaster County jury's guilty verdict against Landon in December, the two Mays became the first father and son on death row in Pennsylvania, and one of only a few such pairs in the country.
Was it a fluke that their paths had intersected in capital crime? Or had they shared the same road all along - a perverse pedigree that extended back beyond Freeman May to his father, Sidney May, who beat his sons and raped his daughters, and by some indications, back beyond even him?
Having shielded Landon from any knowledge of his paternal lineage for most of his childhood, his maternal family "never, ever thought he would turn out anything like Freeman," said Landon's aunt, Donna Huyett. "We still don't understand why this happened."
No one does. The existence of "bad blood" has long been a hotly argued question in criminology. Researchers have sought to settle the debate - the age-old nature vs. nurture - through statistical studies, typically of twins or adoptees. They have produced some evidence pointing to an inherited tendency to violent behavior, but nothing approaching a conclusion.
That could change as science explores the human genome.
A decade ago, Dutch researchers said they had identified a mutant gene across an extended family of criminals that made them prone to aggression. Last year, a study of 442 New Zealand men reported that those with the same genetic mutation, combined with early-childhood abuse, were more likely to be violent than those without it.
