After a little more research I got some basic facts about the story in the below post, which is still somewhat wild, book-worthy, but now a little clearer.

One aspect of it is that my friend, the new-age woman whose only son committed murder-suicide, was already planning to move to New Mexico when it happened. She did not, as I'd surmised, go there to get away from mean Iowans. But if she was already planning to go, and he was steadily working in a place in town (Cedar Rapids) - then it would be possible for her to blame herself partly for his demise. After all, he was losing his mother, and then his girlfriend, who had apparently rejected him. She was coming to his house to pick up furniture, and had actually brought her son, thinking she'd be safe if that son was with her. Wrong.

What made him snap, kill her, kill the dog, and kill himself? I have a hard time blaming psilicybin mushrooms, though I think they've been mentioned as part of it. Mushrooms alone wouldn't make you violent. Or maybe they would. So there's a mystery there, where did that violence in him come from? Not her, I'm sure.

The other real reason has to do with the book. The author went on to be a professional writer in the big leagues, as if having the right degrees was pushing her in that direction from the start. This was one of her early works and was personal; she'd known the guy and considered him like a father, sympathetic as I am, wanting to show that something, maybe Iowa itself, drove him to it. Well I also saw him in his better days, as a sweet innocent kid, and I can still say that whenever someone goes over the edge there's always a dozen people who can't believe such a mild-mannered gentle spirit could do such a thing. We all could do such a thing, if pushed just the right way, and who knows what else was in his life that we didn't know about? I still haven't located his father, for example, don't know a thing about him.

Back to her book. She knew him as a kind of father figure, was sympathetic, went and talked to the boy (that he had locked out of the house when he did it), and the book was panned. Some very important people thought it was garbage and said so. Now I don't even ask people like that what they think of my books, because I already know what they'll say. But to her, it was a blow. She had to do better next time. She had to even eliminate all evidence of her previous failure. That's my explanation.

There's no one deliberately hiding information about what happened; it's findable though it's not easy to find it. I don't see a coverup or suppression of news articles, just news articles that are hard to find and getting harder to find every day. And I think my conclusions are right if only in a general way about her book and why I can't just read it. As a writer I consider taking on personal situations (like this one - I met the kid) - and that's a hazard of doing it. I could write a book about a writer, I think - that might be somewhat wild - but these things have to go somewhere. If it doesn't go to a grisly murder-suicide or to the mother's sad and pitiful demise, where does it go? Make the writer fictional and let it go where I take it, I suppose. Or let her just be successful, still alive, left alone, but haunted, as the rest of us are.