One Light Still Shines: My Life Beyond the Shadow of the Amish Schoolhouse Shooting

My Life Beyond
the
Shadow
of the
Amish Schoolhouse Shooting

Marie Monville
with
Cindy Lambert

To Dan, Abigail, Bryce, Carson, DJ, and Nicole —

I cherish you.

You are vibrant proof of God’s great love for me,

and on the hard days,

your presence reminds me why I breathe.

Title Page

Prologue: The Secret

part one

darkness falls

1. The Call

2. Invasion

3. Threshold

part two

night vision

4. The Milkman’s Daughter

5. The Promise

6. The Canvas

7. Mosaic

8. The Holy Exchange

9. The Wait

10. Wall of Grace

part three

dawn’s light

11. Home Fires

12. Tapestry

13. Breakthrough

14. The Giving Tree

15. Whispers and Shouts

16. Laughter

17. The Basket

18. The Question

19. Seven Candles

20. Release

21. Father of Light

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Copyright

About the Publisher

I’d like to tell you a love story.

I could tell another story instead. I could recount a gruesome, premeditated murder. I could describe unspeakable acts. I could take you behind the scenes into the shielded private world of my Amish neighbors as they mourned the horrific losses of their daughters, granddaughters, nieces, sisters, and friends. I could speculate about secrets deeply buried in a troubled heart. I could attempt to decipher the clues of brokenness and irrational, twisted thinking as the man I loved, the man I thought I knew, descended into a silent madness.

I’ve been asked to tell those stories time and time again. But those stories are not mine to tell.

I was not at the crime scene. I was not privy to murderous plans. I cannot violate the privacy of my beloved Amish neighbors who showed me nothing but tenderness and grace when their own hearts had been shattered. I did not know there were dark secrets inside my husband, Charlie, nor did I know there were clues to watch for. And I simply cannot fathom the darkness that invaded Charlie’s head or heart.

The only story I have to tell is my own. Although an unspeakable tragedy invaded my life and thrust me into a sudden storm
of darkness, my story always has been and continues to be one of miraculous love.

It has taken me years to find my voice to write this story. Not because I couldn’t find the words — I never lacked for words. But because, until recently, I was unable to see the
reason
to write my story. In fact, I could not comprehend why my story would matter to anyone but my family, closest friends, and a few local church groups still feeling their own way through the aftermath of the tragedy.

If the “outside” world wanted to know about the Amish schoolhouse shooting, the Internet had far more information than I would ever know. And apart from the shooting, I knew there was nothing about me that was remarkable in the least. In fact, I’d led a thoroughly unremarkable life, and since the shooting I had done my very best to avoid the media at every turn. When headlines about “the shooter’s wife” still surfaced two, three, four years after the shooting, I’d cringe at the label that had stolen my name and shake my head in disbelief that anyone could still be interested in the woman in the background.

It wasn’t until the fifth anniversary of the October 2, 2006, Nickel Mines Amish schoolhouse shooting that I realized the importance of telling my story to the world, when once again the anniversary brought the spotlight back on my family. Rather than diminishing, the level of interest in my story, along with invitations to speak, was increasing. The questions I was asked were shifting from the details of the event itself to questions about how I’d emerged from such a tragedy with joy and wholeness. How, after Charlie’s heinous acts, had I been able to trust my heart to a man again, enough to actually remarry? Where had I found the strength to blend my family with another? How had my faith survived such a horrific ordeal? How had the tragedy changed me?

For the first time, I understood that the hunger of those interested in hearing my story was not
really
about me at all — it was about the experience of loss or pain or struggle or mystery in the lives of my listeners.
Their
lives were also filled with sudden storms and dark places. What they were searching for within my story was the secret to navigating through their own darkness.

They were hungry for a story of hope. What they knew of my experience had been so abhorrent, so incomprehensibly shocking and shattering, that they longed to discover how I’d managed to go on breathing, much less walking and living and even loving again.

And
that
was a story I could tell, not because I was at all remarkable, but because the secret to go on living — and more than that, to go running toward life, laughing and singing and loving, vibrantly alive even when every circumstance threatens to drown you in darkness — was remarkable news I had to share. I’d been given a precious gift in my darkest moment. I could not keep it to myself.

Once I knew the reason to tell my story, I found my voice to share it.

I won’t keep you in suspense. I’ll tell you right now, before you even have to turn the page. The secret is this:

Step into my story and I’ll show you how to see that light.

As a little girl I loved swinging. There was no feeling quite like drinking in a sun-kissed day with the freedom to soar as high as I wanted, imagining I could touch the clouds. What was up there beyond the blue ceiling over my world? Sometimes when the sun was caught just behind the clouds, its dazzling rays caught my heart and I thought I could almost see heaven. Then, just as I was sure I’d flown higher than I’d ever flown before, the earth’s invisible arms would slow me and pull me back earthward once again.

Maybe on the next swing I’ll get closer,
I’d think, as I tilted my head back, dark curly hair flying in the wind of my ascent, legs extended straight as an arrow in front of me. I worked to gain momentum for the next rush toward heaven. I was like the pendulum on my aunt’s antique grandfather clock, rocking from earth toward heaven but always back again.

Of course, I had no way of knowing that I would grow into an adult with an even deeper longing to peer into the glorious heights of that homeland of heaven — where some of my most beloved people now live. I was just a little girl living in the peaceful village of Georgetown, Pennsylvania. If that name calls to mind images of
its D.C. namesake, try instead to imagine the polar opposite. Try swapping the ding-dong of closing Metro doors for the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, and you’ll have a more accurate soundtrack for my quaint little hometown of six hundred.

My dad was the neighborhood milkman, just like Grandpa and Great-Grandpa before him. As I swung in the backyard of our little yellow house, all I could see in every direction were rolling hills dotted with farms and barns and silos. Maybe that description wouldn’t seem so out of the ordinary if my childhood years had been in the early 1900s when the agrarian life was the national norm, but I was a child of the 1980s, born in ‘77, and even at a very young age I realized how unique it was to have next-door neighbor girls who wore bonnets and rode in horse-drawn buggies, who read stories by lantern light after dark, and whose fathers and brothers plowed their fields with the leather strap of a horse-drawn plow tight across their muscled backs.

It’s a challenge even to locate Georgetown on a map unless you live in the area. Residents of Georgetown may have any one of four different zip codes, corresponding with Bart, Christiana, Paradise, or Quarryville. As a child, my street address was Quarryville, while my grandparents up the street were in Paradise. Yet when my family walked the one-third of a mile to visit them, we’d pass the post office labeled Bart. It’s all rather confusing for an “outsider” but makes absolute sense to those of us in Lancaster County.

The neighborhood is composed of as many Amish as English residents (
English
being the term used by the Amish to refer to everyone else). This means cars on the road often make way for horse-drawn buggies, and the closest thing we have to a local celebrity may be Antique John, the area Amish bishop who’s so well known that many refer to him as the mayor.

For my entire life, right to this day, Georgetown truly has been an idyllic country setting. In this rural town, early each morning and again in the evening, you can hear the hum of diesel motors powering the cooling systems for the milk tanks. (Yes, my Amish neighbors do use diesel motors for this purpose.) The cows are milked twice a day, with the warm milk being collected in large, wheeled cans or piped to the milk houses. It’s collected in a tank, where it’s cooled and then kept at around 35 degrees Fahrenheit. An agitator (a long arm with paddles) continually stirs the milk to speed the cooling process, creating a familiar, predictable melody that permeated my childhood. Like a bedtime lullaby, it assured me that all was right in the world.

And for twenty-eight years I thought it was, until I received the phone call that shattered my world.

How could I know, on that pristine Indian-summer morning of October 2, 2006, that in mere moments my world would cave in?

Sunlight bathed our family room, and the vivid blue sky was perfectly framed by the French patio door leading onto our porch. The tree just beyond was ablaze in vibrant crimson and amber; the leaves were especially beautiful that year. I had opened the windows a few inches and was enjoying the gentle breeze dancing around me as I tidied the kitchen. Eighteen-month-old Carson, my youngest of three, was taking his morning nap, right on schedule. He and I had just returned from the prayer group I led at a nearby church, where our team of moms had spent the morning praying for our children and the staff of the public elementary school in our district.

That morning around 8:30, Charlie and I had walked our two
oldest, Abigail, seven, and Bryce, five, to the bus stop. Afterward, he’d left for a work appointment in my grandfather’s blue Chevrolet pickup, since Charlie’s Jeep wasn’t running.

I had just poured myself a cup of coffee when the phone rang. I picked it up in the kitchen. It was 11:00 a.m.

“Marie, it’s me.”

And that was all it took for me to sense some unfathomable evil lurking just steps away. I’d never heard Charlie’s voice sound like this before, not in almost ten years of marriage. Something was horribly wrong.

“Charlie, what’s going on?” My entire body was suddenly alert, my heart racing and my hands trembling. Had something happened to my dad? The kids? An accident? His voice was tense with … with what? Grief? Pain? Fear?

“I’m not coming home.”

Have you ever felt a depth of cold so bitter it leaves you feeling hypothermic — stunning your soul, leaving your body shivering in confusion? In such a moment, the heart has little time to contemplate or question; it’s struggling merely to grasp the devastation. I felt life being pulled from my body, as if by a vacuum. My breathing, which had stopped, resumed in shallow, ineffective breaths, which left my lungs screaming for air. Every sense, every nerve ending, was on full alert.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “What do you mean you aren’t coming home?”

There was something he needed to do, he said. Something he should’ve taken care of a long time ago, and he was going to do it today.

There was almost no way to respond to the words he spoke or the dark, threatening implications behind them. The years we’d
shared, memories made, and promises spoken flashed before me, and my heart began to crumble. Could this be real?

Most of the things he said in our brief conversation made no sense.
Why
wasn’t he coming home? Then he told me that the police were already there — but I had no idea where
there
was. Even so, my pulse quickened with the fear that our lives had just changed forever. I struggled with all of my senses to understand what was going on, to find words to stave off some disaster that I couldn’t grasp.

“I left a letter for you,” he said. “It’s on top of the dresser, under a magazine. I’m sorry it has to be this way, Marie.” Charlie’s voice was so odd, so flat and lifeless.

“Charlie, whatever it is, just come home. We’ll talk about it and figure it out.”

My plea went unanswered. The last words I ever heard from him were assurances of his love for our family and me. And then, abruptly, he hung up.

I ran to the bedroom, lifted the magazine, and grabbed the letter scrawled in Charlie’s small, tight handwriting on three pages. My hands were trembling.

My heart lurched. Elise had been our firstborn child. She had died in our arms only twenty minutes after birth, nine years ago — just one year after we married.

I turned to the second page, this one rambling and confusing to me: first, tender, loving words about me, followed by painful words trying to express Charlie’s confusion, anger, and shame. Each word I read made me dread the next word more.

I turned to the third and final page — afraid to read on, afraid not to — and then I ran for the phone again. I dialed 911.

“Yes, my name is Marie Roberts. My husband just called me on his cell phone and told me that he wasn’t going to be coming home and that the police were there and not to worry about it. I have no idea what he is talking about, but I’m really scared. I don’t think he’s coming home.”

“What makes you think he’s not coming home?”

“Because he left me a letter and I think it’s a suicide note.”

I suspected, by the questions the dispatcher asked, that he knew more than I did — that he had information he wasn’t sharing with me. He had me read the letter over the phone. I concentrated on calming myself, remaining composed, as I read the final paragraph aloud.

At some point the dispatcher transferred me to the state police dispatcher, who had me describe the GMC pickup and asked more questions. Our conversation lasted minutes but felt like hours. I just wanted to hang up in case Charlie tried to call back. I didn’t want to miss the chance to hear his voice, to influence whatever was unfolding. But the dispatcher kept saying that he needed to keep me on the phone.

Finally, he let me hang up. I stared at the silent phone until a suffocating feeling drove me outside to the porch. Sirens began to sound in the distance, and then helicopters passed directly overhead. They were low, clearly preparing to land not far away. I knew it was bad, and instinctively I knew it was about Charlie. But that was all I knew. An overwhelming sense of dread was mounting within me. I’d never known such tension, as if every molecule of my being was stretched beyond capacity, suspended, awaiting the snap that would surely break me into pieces.

I found myself praying. The pleading that had gone unanswered by Charlie was now directed to one who, I knew, heard every word. I simply asked God to help; I could find no other words.

At that moment everything I knew about my life changed. My quiet “normal” existence ended, and I was faced with a choice — a crisis of belief. Would I throw myself into the arms of my Savior, believing that everything I’d heard, read in the pages of the Bible, and experienced with him up to now was true? Or would I succumb to fear, believing my life was over and accepting this as the end?

It occurred to me that this was my moment to “walk on water.” Even though I couldn’t see anything to stand on, I felt challenged to trust that God would meet me in the midst of this outward
storm and inward sinking. I went back inside our home. Everything looked so normal.
A family lives here, children, a husband, a wife
, I tried to assure myself. Yet two worlds were colliding, one fighting in opposition to everything I had known, believed in, and trusted. As I attempted to absorb this contradiction in the quiet solitude of my living room, I stretched my arms out wide, open to the heavens, and I re-surrendered my family and myself to God’s care.

“Oh, God, whatever you can do with this situation, in any place you can bring good from bad, wherever you’ve declared a victory, let it be.”

I knew that the enemy would believe he had the victory through whatever losses those sirens were now rushing toward. But I decided that this would
not
be the end for me or for my children. Satan would not triumph. We were not going down in defeat.

Suddenly I found myself standing with a boldness and confidence I had never known. I began declaring Bible verses of God’s promises of care and protection over my household. I called out for the provision of the Lord and told him I trusted his ability to bring good out of any situation. I felt like the teenaged Mary, who yielded herself to an unknown future by saying, “May your word to me be fulfilled” (Luke 1:38).

I had no idea what was unfolding with Charlie, but in a moment of sacred stillness as the world raged around me, I vowed this would not be the day that my children looked back on in the belief that it had destroyed their lives forever. This was not the end. We would not be victims. I did not know how he would bring it about, but God filled me with an absolute assurance that we were going to be victorious.