We Are Not Such Things (27 page)

When Linda was nine years old, she met a boy named Peter Biehl at Sunday school. They went to cotillion together, she in her dress and white gloves, he in a suit with his hair slicked. In high school, Peter headed to boarding school in Connecticut, at prestigious Choate. He got in trouble for brewing liquor in the bathtub of his room, was kicked out, and transferred to another school. But every summer, Peter would return to Geneva, and he and Linda would share fries and Cokes at Rex’s drive-thru.

While at college at Whittier in California, Peter performed in a production of
Bye Bye Birdie
. Linda was studying at a different college, but she traveled to see Peter onstage. At the cast party, he surprised Linda with a ring, and she accepted the proposal. They married between their junior and senior years, and Linda transferred to Whittier. They lived in an apartment near campus, where Linda was miserable and lonely, a condition made worse by the fact that their place didn’t even have a telephone. In 1965, the newlyweds graduated and settled in an exquisite apartment owned by Peter’s parents on Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive. Peter worked first as a business consultant and later as a marketing consultant, and Linda wandered around the city’s art galleries as her belly grew. Soon, she gave birth to Kim.

While Kim was still a baby, Peter was transferred to Los Angeles. Just seventeen months after Kim was born, while the young family was living in Brentwood, Amy was born. Linda took the two girls to the beach and the playground every day. By the time they had moved again, to Palo Alto, Molly had arrived on the scene: three yellow-haired girls, only a few years apart. While Peter traveled for work, Linda ran the household and, in her spare time, took ballet lessons.

Soon after they’d settled in Palo Alto, the Biehls again relocated for Peter’s job, this time to the dry heat of Tucson. By the late 1970s, Zach had joined the family, the only boy, and Peter decided to leave the crush of the corporate world. The Biehls moved to Santa Fe, where they started a small Native American art gallery, situated above a bookshop on the town square. On the sidewalks below, Indians sat on colorful blankets and sold handicrafts.

By 1985, Amy was set to begin her freshman year at Stanford and Kim was already at college. Peter decided to return to consulting to help pay for his kids’ higher education, and the family moved to Newport Beach, California, blocks from the Pacific. By 1993, her three girls grown and working, Linda had secured a job selling gowns to wealthy women at the local Neiman Marcus. She got herself a white Mustang convertible, and amassed an impressive designer wardrobe. She also tried to attend every single one of Zach’s baseball games.

Then, one afternoon in August 1993, Linda took sixteen-year-old Zach shopping for the new school year. She rolled the top of the Mustang down and the two breezed around Newport Beach, collecting clothing and school supplies. Peter was on a business trip in Oregon, where Amy’s boyfriend, Scott, was studying law. The two men arranged a dinner date, and Scott planned to ask, then, for Peter’s permission to propose to Amy. Amy was due home in two days and everyone was excited for the reunion, which would take place, invariably, over tacos and margaritas at Mi Casa. The family hadn’t seen Amy in ten months, though Amy and Scott had, a few months earlier, met up for a romantic week in Paris. Linda and Peter had been on holiday in Europe at the same time, and Linda had toyed with the idea of heading to France.

“I wanted to surprise her. But I didn’t. Now I wish I had.”

The phone was ringing as Linda and Zach walked into the house, their arms weighed down by shopping bags. Nobody had cellphones in those days. Linda answered. Kim was on the line. U.S. government representatives had tried the Biehls’ home and office, but with Linda out on the town and Peter away on business, neither parent had picked up. Finally, an official reached Molly at her desk in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a congressional intern.

“Are you Amy Biehl’s sister?” the official sputtered.

Molly called Kim, who lived near her parents in Newport Beach. Kim received the news and had subsequently been dialing Linda’s number for nearly an hour.

“You better sit down,” Kim said. “Are you sitting down?”

Linda lowered herself onto a chair.

“Amy’s dead.”

In contrast to the fractured PAC, the ANC boasted a smooth public relations machine that had immediately taken control of the narrative: Amy had been one of theirs, and they would simultaneously honor her and discredit the PAC. In reality, on August 25, 1993, both PAC-aligned students and ANC-aligned students had been marching down NY1. The PAC had announced that 1993 was the Year of the Great Storm around the time that the ANC announced Operation Barcelona. “Barcelona” had a circuitous meaning: it referred to the city in which the 1992 Olympics had been held, which in turn referred to the Olympic flames, which symbolized the order for ANC student members to threaten to burn government vehicles and property. Barcelona, flames, it all must burn. The march, and quite possibly the murder scene, had almost certainly included students from both political groups.

But despite an ANC element in the crowd that killed Amy, the ANC managed to quickly and successfully distance themselves from the violence and align themselves with the victim. The ANC has traditionally exercised rank-and-file rule, allowing for no dissension within the party. At a September 1993 rally in Khayelitsha, before thirty thousand supporters, Mandela himself spoke out against Amy’s attackers.

“It is not military action to kill innocent civilians,” Mandela said. “The people who killed Amy Biehl are no longer human beings. They are animals.”

“ANC told their members to do Operation Barcelona, but when PAC youth killed Amy, the ANC went, ‘Tsho tsho tsho!’ ” Rhoda Kadalie said, snapping three times, township style. “They said, ‘Lucky they weren’t us! Lucky it wasn’t ours!’ ”

Within a day, the ANC had sent Tokyo Sexwale—then a just-released political prisoner and ANC heavyweight, now an oil-and-diamond magnate with possible presidential ambitions and a season’s experience hosting the South African version of
The Apprentice
—to the Biehl household in California to express the party’s sincerest condolences. Sexwale drove over from Los Angeles, where he was visiting at the time. He knocked on the door, and then sat in the living room in his tracksuit, awkwardly expressing sorrow while a flabbergasted and grief-stricken Linda offered him coffee. Many years later, Sexwale would meet with Linda again in South Africa, in more pleasant social circumstances, and she would say, “It was one of the most amazing days of my life. He told us more about world history than I could ever imagine.”

To counteract the terrible international publicity South Africa had garnered from Amy’s murder and to boost their reputations, the ANC and the white mayor of Cape Town arranged for the Biehl family to visit South Africa on their dime in the fall of 1993.

The Biehls had never been to the African continent before. Amy’s memorial had been held in California. On September 1, 1993, less than a week after Amy’s death, Amy’s roommate, Melanie, had flown to Los Angeles clutching Amy’s ashes. Melanie, a poor colored single mother, and her teenage daughter stayed in an apartment donated by a friend sympathetic to the Biehls, where she ran up a $500 phone tab. Melanie was wearing a pair of expensive jeans that Linda had bought Amy; Linda suspected that Melanie had rifled through Amy’s luggage, picking out a few select goodies, before the suitcases were returned to the Biehls.

“People in South Africa—and I’ve learned this the hard way—feel that they are entitled to things,” Linda said dryly. “That money, if it’s lying around, can be theirs, too.” But Linda kept in touch with Melanie for years anyway.

At the memorial service, held on September 3, the Biehls walked in procession down the aisle at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, the pews full of Amy’s American friends, colleagues, teachers, family members, admirers. Linda led the procession, outfitted in a green skirt suit with a silk scarf knotted around her neck. She walked stiffly before the crowd, her face rigid, her arm hooked in the pastor’s. Peter, Kim, Molly, Zach—the remaining Biehl clan—and Amy’s boyfriend, Scott, followed to the somber notes of an organ.

“We are here in the memory of Amy Biehl, who was committed to carrying out these biblical instructions,” the pastor said to a crowd of mourners. “Born April 26, 1967…” He paused. “That’s not very long ago, is it? And died August 25, 1993, in Gogo…gogo-ghetto township in South Africa.”

“I pray for you, Amy,” Melanie announced to her fellow mourners. “Please also pray for my country.”

Two months later, the Biehls were headed to Gogo-ghetto township in first-class seats—courtesy of the city of Cape Town—on a South African Airways jet. They traveled for twenty-three hours and emerged into instant celebrity on a cold and rainy night, greeted by senior ANC officials and the white mayor. They were quickly arranged on cream-colored sofa sets in a large, carpeted room. The mayor stood before them and announced, to a throng of journalists, that the city of Cape Town wished to show the world “that there is a movement towards peace and democracy.”

Next, the Biehls were chauffeured around in a convoy of sparkling new Mercedes. They attended a memorial talk at the University of the Western Cape, packed with students who had been drawn in by flyers plastered around campus, announcing
AMY BIEHL’S FAMILY SPEAKS.

“Welcome to the Struggle, family,” senior ANC official Allan Boesak said as he introduced the Biehls. Boesak and his comrades, all black and colored with funky facial hair, raised their fists in the ANC salute, as Peter and Linda stood stiffly nearby, hands by their sides. By 2000, Boesak—a preacher and activist—had been sentenced to three years in prison for stealing $400,000 in donations made to his charity by Paul Simon and other anti-apartheid supporters.

Throughout their trip, when they walked the streets, the Biehls were followed and photographed ceaselessly, a mass of striking blondness: Linda in her designer skirt-suits; Peter with his big throwback glasses; beautiful Molly, as apple-pie as the popular cheerleader in a teen drama; glum Kim, who tended to escape the attention of the photographers; young Zach, a high school football player with teenage vernacular and acne; and Scott, Amy’s boyfriend, a gangly Stanford basketball player and law student who wore her necklace around his neck and his pants belted high at the waist.

Early on during their visit, the family was led by Amy’s old mentor, Dullah Omar, to the spot where Amy had died. It was, according to Peter Biehl, “obvious manipulation…he’s got an agenda.” Once there, the Biehls were surrounded by the press. The photographers ran around to get the best shots, crouching and standing on tiptoe. Amy’s UWC friends and colleagues sobbed. Molly, tears streaming down her face, whispered, “I love you, Amy.” There were microphones everywhere, no avoiding them.

Linda’s face betrayed nothing until she laid some white lilies on the ground. “Rest in peace, Amy, okay?” she said, her voice breaking. But within minutes she had composed herself and was talking to the press about how the family intended to give back to the community and that they had high hopes for the nation. From the beginning, at least in public, Linda was impossibly composed.

“You can’t fall apart, you can’t take Valium and let it all seem like a blur,” Linda told me, her voice edged with bitterness. People were often looking at her askew. Her stoicism was suspect. What kind of a mother doesn’t wail once in a while? “People encounter horrible things all the time, and the way it is approached in society is so awful. They want to know: why don’t you show more emotion? Well, you have to keep a degree of privacy and integrity. I’m not some stupid idiot! Amy would not want that.”

On that first day in Gugulethu, Peter and Kim stared at bystanders, people who gathered together and craned their necks from their front yards to see what the ruckus was about. Many of these same people, Kim and Peter believed, must have seen Amy chased down and beaten. Back in the States, they had always imagined that the site of her death was more isolated. It had not occurred to them that so many people had been so close to Amy, in such a central space, but had done nothing to save her.

“How could they just watch that?” Kim, standing on NY1, asked one of the many reporters eager to get a sound bite. “Just like they were watching us is the way I imagine them watching my sister being killed.”

“My God,” Peter said softly. “Why didn’t somebody help her?”

Everyone placed bouquets of flowers on the dry grass—irises, carnations, and native South African bird-of-paradises: the vibrant, spiky-petaled, rainbow-colored flowers in the shape of a bird in flight were Amy’s favorite. She’d always hated roses. The torn lock of Amy’s hair had been cleared away long ago, but the white fence was still stained with her blood. The smears looked like handprints.

On that first visit, South Africans of all colors had approached the Biehls to offer condolences. Then, almost inevitably, they followed up with a request for help.