Obsession (31 page)

The most I miss you is late at night

When I want you there to hold me tight
.

I think of your tender finger tips

And when you reach my soul with your loving kiss
.

Then as I retire myself to bed

And as on my pillow I lay my head
,

I turn away and start to cry
,

And I think of you when you said goodbye
.

Knowing we’re apart just makes me blue;

Every time I close my eyes I think of you
.

So sweetheart since you have gone away
,

I have thought of you both night and day
.

To me you will always be a part

And I will always hold you in my heart
.

I love you for all eternity … Mom

No homicide victim story ever has a happy ending. Katie knows she will never be as she was. But this story is at least happier than might have seemed possible a few years before. Katie is remarried to a sensitive, devoted, and caring husband. She has a handsome, charming son and a lovely baby daughter named Casey.

Finally, she felt ready and comfortable with a serious male relationship. “A lot of it has to do with self-esteem,” she observes. “I would never allow myself to get serious because I was afraid of getting right back into the old pattern again. And until I lived with me and was happy with me and was independent and knew that I didn’t need anybody or anything else other than my child, and felt strong that way, I wouldn’t repeat the pattern. You’ve got to figure out who you are first.”

Katie Hanley finally knows who she is. So does Steven Hanley. In fact, he probably understands his wife as well as anyone—her needs, her strengths, her fears. Even though they haven’t been married long, they’ve known each other for many years. They met when Steven was stationed with Katie’s uncle. He used to baby-sit for Destiny and his sons—one two years older and the other two years younger—played with her. He was overseas when she was killed. Katie’s uncle called to tell him.

“When I first met Katie,” he states, “one of the things that struck me was her independence. I mean, she didn’t need anybody; she didn’t need anything. She always had everything together. But after we got together, I realized it was a wall and that was for everybody else. Inside the wall, there’s a very hurt kid who lives there and doesn’t understand why things occur the way they do.”

Steven has two teenaged sons from his first marriage, and when they fight or argue with each other or pick on six-year-old Tyler, as normal teenagers do, Katie has trouble dealing with it because of her own background—because her experience tells her, despite Steven’s reassurance, that any kind of argument leads to serious violence and long-term emotional hurt.

Tyler is proud of his progress in karate. As of this writing, he had just graduated from novice blue belt to upper blue belt, and he expects to work all the way up to black belt. At one class, he was named Student of the Month. In the car on the way home, Katie was singing his praises, telling him how much he had accomplished. But when they got home, she thought hejust “didn’t seem right.”

She asked him, “What’s wrong, honey?”—at which pointhe broke down and cried.

“Mommy,” he said, “I wish Dee Dee was there. I’m so mad at Rob for what he did, that he took my sister away from me.”

Though she had never actively talked about Destiny around Tyler, Katie had always sensed that the spirit of the sister he’d never met was always with him. As soon as he could speak, he would point to pictures of Destiny on the wall and say, “Dee Dee.”

“My son is very, very sensitive and always brings her up.”

“Honey, she’s there,” she told him. “Through all the important times of your life and through all the
sad times. Through times that we couldn’t even possibly imagine.” She fears, though, as Tyler gets older, Dee will become less his spiritual companion and more simply a vague memory of loss. “The other day he said to me, ‘I wish she could’ve been here for this.’”

Katie reports that Tyler is just as good and loving with his baby sister, Casey, as she’s sure Dee would have been with him.

In the months after the funeral, Katie visited Destiny’s grave frequently. She hated to think of her little girl lying in the cold winter ground, wanted to be there with her and was concerned that the grass be cut regularly and the area well-tended. She was touched when Dee’s school friends would visit. Sometimes they would leave flowers or even some of their trick-or-treatcandy. One little boy who remembered Dee’s rock collection left a colorful rock on which he’d painted, “I miss you.”

But Katie hasn’t been back to the grave in the last four years, even though she planned to and even has a collection of things she’s meant to bring out. She even bought the plot right next to Destiny’s so that she could be with her daughter forever.

She’s not sure exactly why she’s been unable to go back, but she thinks it has something to do with a dawning realization for her that that is not really where Destiny is. “And basically, anything I’ve ever had to say to her, I’ve said before I got there.”

Everybody deals with it in his or her own way.

Katie faces her emotional challenges with the rare heroism she has faced all of the other adversities life has thrown her way. “I have my good days and my bad days. It takes me by surprise when they happen, and sometimes I don’t realize it’s sneaking up on me until it does, and then it’s like I should have seen it coming,” she says.

Perhaps as a result, Katie has few specific memories
of Destiny, which she thinks may be a way of protecting her system from emotional overload. “There are a lot of things I just don’t know about her that I wish I did,” she says. “But in another way, I’m kind of glad that I don’t because it would probably eat at me even more.”

She pauses, then adds, “I just wish I did have a moment with her again.”

Carroll was always amazed that despite Katie’s volatile personality and controlling manner, she displayed little raw anger, even toward God.

Katie replied, “Some people are very angry and have a lot of hatred, blame God, what have you. But how can I be angry or hate Him? This was not God’s doing; this was Rob Miller’s doing.”

In prison, Miller actually put Katie on his visitors list, thinking she would want to come to see him. But she was not interested.

“If I ever did meet up with Rob,” she says, “and I’ve thought a lot about having a meeting, the only question I would ask is, ‘Why?’”

“
W
hy?” is a question they grapple with over and over in the meetings of the homicide survivors support group.

It is one that is ultimately unanswerable in any way that makes human, moral sense, and one that has so many other questions agonizingly buried within it, perhaps the most sublime of which is, Where was God the day Meredith Mergler was murdered … or Dana Ireland … or Robin Anderson … or Tommy Neu … or Rosie Gordon … or Laurene Johnson … or Suzanne Collins … or Destiny Souza … or any of the others—so many others that the enumeration of their names would require many pages of this text.

Various members or veterans of the group might offer differing possibilities. Jack Collins, whose brave and lovely nineteen-year-old daughter died at the hands of one of the most horrifying and sadistic murderers I have ever had to deal with, is a devoutly religious man. He would tell you that the most significant gift God has given man is free will, and that once it is given, He cannot, or chooses not to, take it away. This is not an indication of indifference, Jack believes; God is always present, even at the moments of horror.
He was there weeping and agonizing over Suzanne’s pain. Yet He cannot stay the hand or stop the bullet. But then, afterward. He is forever available as a source of empathy, compassion, and strength. Jack, a tireless champion of the victims’ rights movement and advocate of judicial reform, will also tell you that even with his strong faith, he and his wife, Trudy, have ached in sadness for Suzanne’s loss every single day since July of 1985.

Carroll Ellis would say, simply, “I’m angry with God from time to time, and I would love to talk to Him about it. Because if you’re talking to a mother whose eight-year-old is gone because of mankind’s in humanity to man. I need an answer that lasts a little longer and does a little more than what I’ve come up with.”

What both Jack’s and Carroll’s beliefs underscore for me, though, is that power of choice. We can debate and deliberate about where it came from, but all of my research with repeat offenders has led me to the same conclusion about the free will to commit—or not to commit—violent crime.

The Fairfax survivors support group was begun a year after Destiny Souza’s murder, as a means of providing a “safe and trusting place where survivors are free to express their feelings.”

Katie Souza, who had been serving as a consultant to the unit in defining what their long-range plans should be, was one of the first members. Carroll remembers, “She had a specific agenda of what she wanted to get from the group, in terms of something that would help her toward resolution of all of her feelings of anger and guilt at not being able to do anything for her daughter.”

So the group became a journey of sorts, with every member searching for individual goals, but with the support and companionship of other people who truly
could know what they were going through. There was no attempt at one-up manship; they each came to the table with the realization, as Carroll put it, that “nobody’s ice is any colder than anybody else’s. It isn’t a matter of, it’s worse if you lose a child or a parent or a spouse or whomever. Death is death, and homicide is homicide. I don’t care who was murdered. It doesn’t matter; it shouldn’t have happened.”

The other two original consultants were Mary Alice Mergler and Lucy Bhatia, whose eighteen-year-old son, Vinay, the second of five boys, was murdered on September 9,1989, while voluntarily working an extra late shift at his job. His killer, George Wiggins, now known as Raheed Muhammed, was convicted of first-degree murder in March of 1990 and sentenced to life in prison. He will be eligible for parole in July of 2002.

“What we effectively said to these three,” Carroll recalls, “was, ‘Listen, we’re strangers in a strange land. We don’t know what we’re dealing with. Teach us. Tell us what it is that we need to know in order to be able to help you. And if backing off or closing the door and getting out of here is what will help you most, we’ll do that, too. But right now, tell us what we need to know to be effective.’ And they did. That’s why I say that everything I know about homicide, I learned from a homicide survivor.”

What she and Sandy learned specifically was that there was no special place, no focus, no gathering point, for victims of homicide to come and openly talk with each other about how they felt, and that people in the mental health professions needed to realize how lacking they were in the provisions of special services. As Carroll put it, “Homicide was an underserved crime category.”

The people who were doing anything at that point were largely the families themselves. Roberta Roper, whose daughter Stephanie had been horribly murdered,
was spearheading the effort in Maryland and created the Stephanie Roper Foundation. Lula Red-mond was doing something similar in Florida, and we were seeing the emergence of effective groups such as Parents of Murdered Children. But the official, system response was generally slow and hesitant.

Carroll’s own chief goal is to bring comfort and so-lace to her clients, who also become her friends. But she would be the first to admit that she seldom maintains a professional detachment from the subject of violent crime. She understands well that it can destroy the spirit, even when it doesn’t destroy the body. Her anger, her outrage, come through loud and clear, as when she speaks about a recent case that has come to her:

“A typical situation,” she tells us, “we had a rape the other weekend of a forty-six-year-old Vietnamese woman. She’s raised two kids, she’s got a job, she’s got a town house. She’s a good citizen; she’s living her life. Then somebody came into her town house in the middle of the night and put a knife to her throat and raped her and sodomized her. That angers me. That makes me so mad. He had no right! How dare he! She didn’t invite him in, she didn’t ask for it, she didn’t want it. And how dare he do that to her? I’m angered as a citizen. I’m angered as a woman. I’m angered because what are we doing with the likes of him and how can we catch him and what can we do with him once we do catch him? You can’t imagine the times that we’ve spent together as a staff conjuring up things to do to those people who would hurt all the good people. Part of your reaction comes out as raw anger and part of it comes out as hurt. You’re hurt so deeply because other people are hurt and afraid and vulnerable, and you know that, but for the grace of God, there go I.”

But her most righteous indignation is reserved for
homicide, for those monsters who feel it is their right to take the gift of another life simply because they feel like it.

“We had the case of a man who was murdered down there at the University of Virginia. He was a doctor. He was working on some kind of cure for a disease and was well into his research. He had gone down for a game or something, was eating in one of those little restaurants right in front of the campus, and some guy who’d had a bad day with his live-in, or whomever he was associated with, came in and took his life. And I can’t get over the insult of that: that this was a worthless good-for-nothing who did that because he was having a bad day! He had no job. He had nothing. But yet he took the life of a man who was making a difference for so many people in this world. Senseless, unnecessary, cruel … for a man of that stature who had made such a contribution to lose his life at the hands of a worthless son of a gun. He insulted this human being by deciding on his own that he would take this life. He made the decision that he would do this. And what he’s left behind is unbelievable. It’s a miserable way to leave this life, at the hands of this worthless person.”