KINGSTON, N.H. — Her nickname was “Beanie.”
She grew up here in her family’s 1740s farmhouse not far from the town’s center, an idyllic New England backdrop of general stores, ice cream shops, and the historic home of Josiah Bartlett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
By all accounts, Nancy Jean Champion — or Beanie, as her high school yearbook calls her — had a charmed upbringing. Her mom was a school nurse. Her brother became a town police officer. And after she married her sweetheart in 1981, becoming Mrs. Peter J. Lanza, the couple built a house next door to her childhood home.
“They were very nice people,” said the owner of the local pizza shop here. “They are from a lovely family.”
In 1988, the couple welcomed a baby boy, Ryan. Four years later, another baby boy arrived: Adam. Nancy, who worked in the Boston financial district to put her husband through college, became a stay-at-home mother increasingly focused on the challenges of her youngest.
Last week, Adam shot his mother four times in her bed, authorities said, killing her. Next he gunned down 26 other people, most of them not much older than he was when he bounced around the grassy family homestead as a little boy.
While investigators don’t know or haven't said why Adam Lanza went on a horrific killing spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a clearer portrait of the family that raised him is emerging through interviews around the country with friends and family and in divorce documents sealing the end of the Lanza’s marriage three years ago.
From the outside, the Lanza family portrait was one of wealth and privilege, of jobs landed at marquee corporations — he at General Electric, she briefly at John Hancock. They moved to a hilltop home in Newtown, a village exurb of New York City.
But it was their difficult second son who came to dominate the family’s time and collective psyche, especially Nancy’s. He had few friends, had trouble in schools and had difficulty reaching the steppingstones of normal teenage life. At age 20, he had only recently begun to drive.
As time passed, the family fractured and broke apart. Around the time of the divorce, Ryan Lanza graduated from college and moved to work in New York. Adam stayed with Nancy Lanza, and her life took on strange habits. She didn’t let visitors into their home. She collected powerful weapons. And she began to bring her increasingly troubled son to “multiple shooting ranges,” officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Monday, to practice using those guns together.
“She wasn’t afraid to be there for her kids,” Marsha Lanza, who is married to Peter Lanza’s brother Michael, said at her home in Crystal Lake, Ill. “She was involved. That’s why, when I heard that he shot her, that floored me. That just didn’t make sense to me, because your mom did all this stuff for you. What the hell were you thinking? Why did you take your revenge out on her? What did she do?”
Nancy and Peter moved to Newtown in 1998. Peter commuted to New York City to work as a vice president for GE. Nancy had health problems — multiple sclerosis — for which she sought treatment in New York, according to her former sister-in-law.
In 2009, the couple filed for divorce, saying their 28-year marriage had “broken down irretrievably,” according to court records. What led to the breakup is unclear. Peter has remarried, to Shelley Rae Cudiner, a librarian at the University of Connecticut.
Nancy was a stay-at-home mom when they divorced, listing no income in court papers. Peter made $445,000 a year and agreed to pay $240,000 a year in alimony and child support, according to court records. That sum was set to rise in 2012 to $289,800.
Adam had Asperger’s syndrome, the parents told Paula Levy, the family therapist who was their divorce mediator, Levy said in an interview with the Associated Press. The parents were unified in their commitment to meet all of Adam’s needs, Levy said, and gave few details about his condition.
The generous settlement, said John Aldrich, a family law attorney in Connecticut, “could have been, they took into account that with a special-needs child, the mother was going to be more hands-on, require more money for her son. There is no magic percentage.”
The couple agreed to joint custody of Adam and of their partial set of Boston Red Sox season tickets. Nancy got the house and the rights to final decisions about Adam.
“They always stayed civil,” Marsha Lanza said. “They always stayed friends.”
Caring for Adam took time and patience, and educating him presented challenges.
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