My Brother's Keeper

Tony Rehagen: It was a bright weekday in mid-September and the Cormier boys—thirty-one years old, identical twins, best friends, incorrigible malcontents—were coming home. Their sixty-two-year-old father looked out his living room window as a U-Haul rumbled into the gravel drive. Bill Cormier did a double take. A U-Haul?

Bill had never known what to expect from his boys, William and Chris. Before they'd turned five, the brothers had burned down Bill's house in New Orleans after taking turns playing with a cigarette lighter. William, older by five minutes, sounded the alarm: "One of the beds is on fire. And I didn't do it!"

But if they had not been model sons, neither was Bill an exemplary…