CHARACTER
The Life we Buryby Allen Eskens

Douglas Lockwood

Douglas Lockwood

Quick Facts

  • Role: Stepfather of murder victim Crystal Marie Hagen; father of the true killer, Dan Lockwood
  • First appearance: Thirty years after Crystal’s murder, when investigator Joe Talbert tracks him to his rural farmhouse
  • Key threads: Misreading of “DJ” in Crystal’s diary; false alibi; violent confrontation to protect his son

Who He Is

Bold, immovable, and rotted from the inside out, Douglas Lockwood is the story’s chilling study in how loyalty can curdle into evil. Introduced as a likely suspect—after the diary’s “DJ” seems to point to him—Douglas ultimately emerges not as the killer but as the man who chose to bury his son’s crime for decades. He becomes a lens on the themes of Family Dysfunction and Responsibility and Truth, Lies, and Perception: a father who weaponizes scripture and respectability to excuse what cannot be excused, and whose “duty” to family twists him toward monstrous choices.

Appearance underscores this decay. When Joe finds him, Douglas is unshaven, sour with alcohol and sweat, and living amid filth in a collapsing farmhouse—his environment mirroring the secret he’s entombed. The man we meet is already a ruin; the plot only knocks down what’s left.

Personality & Traits

Douglas projects piety and control, but his faith functions like armor—thick enough to deflect guilt and blame, thin enough to crack when threatened. His persona—religious superior, family patriarch, small-town businessman—hides a capacity for sudden violence and sustained deceit.

  • Hypocritically religious: He wields scripture to police and condemn Crystal, and even to excuse his own vices. As Andrew Fisher notes, Douglas is a “real wing nut” who used the Bible to defend behavior like visiting strip clubs.
  • Violent and volatile: When Joe threatens the secret, Douglas explodes—smashing a bottle over Joe’s head, strangling him, and preparing to dispose of his body. The speed of the escalation exposes how terror, not righteousness, drives him.
  • Deceptive and calculating: His most consequential lie is the false alibi claiming he and Dan were at the dealership on the night of the murder, a deceit he sustains for thirty years.
  • Tormented yet self-excusing: He quotes scripture about doing “the very thing I hate,” revealing real inner conflict—but he still chooses self-preservation over confession.
  • Fiercely, fatally protective: His moral compass points unwaveringly toward his son. That devotion costs him his marriage, integrity, and, by implication, his life.

Character Journey

Douglas’s arc is less transformation than revelation. At first, he occupies the narrative as a shadow—“DJ,” the feared predator hiding in plain sight. The twist repositions him as accessory, not killer: a father who discovered his son’s atrocity and decided to bury truth instead of expose it. Across thirty years he maintains the lie, misdirecting justice and letting an innocent man pay the price. When Joe reopens the past, Douglas’s façade fractures. He careens between scripture and savagery, between guilt and rage, trying to push the truth back into the ground. In the end, the cost of his secrecy appears to devour him; paternal love, bent out of shape, becomes a doom he cannot escape—a living emblem of the Burdens of the Past.

Key Relationships

  • Dan “DJ” Lockwood: Douglas’s world orbits his son. He forges the alibi, terrorizes threats, and ultimately yields every moral boundary to keep Dan safe. Their bond—love warped by fear—suggests that Douglas may even be silenced by Dan himself once exposure looms, a final proof that his sacrifices only fed the monster he protected.

  • Crystal Hagen: As Crystal’s stepfather, Douglas polices her with religious judgment and blame. Though not her abuser, his decades-long cover-up transforms him into the architect of the injustice that follows her death, compounding the harm done to her memory and to the community’s sense of truth.

  • Joe Talbert: Joe is the existential threat—curious, persistent, and unwilling to accept the official story. Douglas never sees Joe as a person, only as a crack in the dam, and chooses violence to stop him, proving that his “repentance” ends where his son’s exposure begins.

Defining Moments

Douglas’s life is built on a single decision—to protect Dan at all costs—and every pivotal scene either extends or detonates that choice.

  • Creating the alibi

    • What happens: Douglas lies that he and Dan were at the car dealership during the murder window, sending Carl Iverson to prison.
    • Why it matters: This lie is the engine of the novel’s injustice, revealing Douglas’s willingness to pervert law, faith, and community to preserve his family’s image.

  • The confrontation with Joe

    • What happens: Faced with the decoded diary and the collapsing “DJ” misdirection, Douglas ricochets from scripture to violence.
    • Why it matters: The scene strips his religiosity to its function: not moral guidance, but a tool to rationalize terror and silence truth.

  • Kidnapping and attempted murder

    • What happens: Douglas knocks Joe unconscious, chains him to cinder blocks, and loads him into a trunk to dump in the St. Croix River.
    • Why it matters: Secrecy escalates to murder. Douglas crosses a final line, proving that his paternal devotion has become indistinguishable from evil.

Essential Quotes

“It is better to live in a desert than with a quarrelsome woman. Proverbs 21:19.”

Douglas deploys scripture as both shield and cudgel, reframing conflict as women’s fault and sanctifying his control. The verse doesn’t reveal faith so much as it reveals strategy: he uses the Bible to relocate blame away from himself and onto his targets.

“What happened to Crystal was God’s wrath. She brought that on herself. ‘On her head was the name, a mystery: Babylon the Great, the mother of prostitutes and of earth’s abominations.’”

By casting Crystal as a biblical symbol of corruption, Douglas practices posthumous victim-blaming. The grandiosity of his citation masks a smaller, uglier truth: he needs theology to make the unbearable—his son’s crime—feel righteous.

“‘I do not understand my own action,’ he whispered. ‘For I do not do what I want… but I do the very thing I hate.’”

This confession hints at genuine torment, but it also functions as a moral loophole. Douglas wants the comfort of remorse without surrendering the secret; the verse frames his violence as tragic inevitability rather than deliberate choice.

“People don’t understand love. They don’t understand that children are a man’s reward from God.”

Here Douglas names his core belief: love justifies anything. By sacralizing his bond with his son, he elevates protection above law and conscience, turning “love” into the very rationale for cruelty.