Journey into Darkness (38 page)

Alley’s mother, Jane, tried to bolster the mental health argument, testifying in her son’s behalf, tearfully telling the court that “there’s always been something wrong with him.” After Debra Alley’s death, she and her husband had been granted custody of Debra and Sedley’s two children. Lynne Alley had left him by the time of the trial. In fact, she’d left town and did not testify.

No one else was able to provide any testimony establishing believable evidence of multiple personalities in Alley prior to his arrest for the murder of Suzanne Collins. As Williams recalled, “No one could come up with anything worth a flip to support him having MPD as a child. What kept coming out instead were examples of his antisocial personality.”

In the end, Alley chose not to testify. If he had, there is little doubt in my mind that we could have systematically taken him apart, showing him up for what he really was—a mean and sadistic sociopath who was willing and able to take another human life simply because he was frustrated and felt like it.

By the time of the trial, Alley had slimmed down and cleaned himself up. I’ve found this to be very common. In fact, I often joked that by the time the case gets to court and you look over at the defense table, it’s often difficult to tell which one is the accused killer and which one is the attorney. It’s very important for the defense to get across the nonverbal message “Now this doesn’t look like a vicious killer, does it?”

Though Alley never spoke before the jury, throughout the trial he sat with his elbows on the arms of his chair, paying close attention and passing notes to his lawyers. He seemed neither cocky and self-confident nor pathetic and ineffectual.
He seemed to be a guy unhappy about being on trial for his life.

During closing arguments, Bobby Carter said to the jury, “You’ve observed him for two weeks now, and he’s been able to control his behavior.”

He concluded, “The time has come for the excuses to end and for him to pay for his behavior.”

For his part, Robert Jones tried to convince the jury that this must surely be the “act of a maniac.” The crime was so horrible that it had to be “an act of a person who’s clearly deranged.”

While I’d be willing to admit that Alley certainly fits the nonlegal definition of a “sicko,” the systematic overpowering and disabling of a physically fit female Marine, transporting her to a more secure location, torturing her, then staging the crime was the act of a brutal and self-centered sociopath, not someone who is deranged. From the testimony of the guard at the base gate, it was clear that after Alley rendered Suzanne unconscious, he sat her in the front seat next to him and rested her head on his shoulder as they drove out to make it seem that they were lovers.

Throughout the trial, my heart went out to Jack and Trudy Collins. They looked devastated, exhausted, lost, dazed, and empty. I knew they’d viewed the crime scene photos and I could hardly imagine parents being able to get through them. I’d heard Jack’s testimony and thought it heroic.

When it became certain Alley wasn’t going to testify, I prepared to leave Memphis and go back to Quantico. The next morning I took the Collinses to breakfast and we talked a long time. In spite of the testimony and their extensive conversations with Hank Williams and Bobby Carter, they still couldn’t grasp the motivation—why would someone do this to their daughter? I tried to explain to them what I thought had happened, just as I’d explained it to Williams’s team.

Before I left Quantico to come to the trial, I’d stopped by to see Jim Horn, one of the early members of the Investigative Support Unit who had since, along with Jim Reese, become one of the two top law-enforcement-related stress experts in the Bureau. I asked him what I could do to help
the family if the occasion presented itself. Horn is a very sensitive, empathetic guy and he told me the main thing I could do was listen and be sympathetic, something Hank Williams was already doing very well on his own. Jim also suggested I have them get in touch with the Parents of Murdered Children organization and several other support groups and I passed this information along to them. I liked the Collinses right away, but had no way of knowing at the time how pivotal and valuable they themselves would soon become in helping and counseling others who experienced similar tragedy. These were my real soul mates. They were the reason I did the work I did.

While the jury was out deliberating, Jane Alley saw Trudy and came over to her. “I’m so sorry about what happened to your daughter,” she said. She didn’t go so far as to acknowledge her son had done it, but it was something.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Trudy replied. “I feel sorry for you as a mother and for me as a mother. Your son has caused two mothers untold grief.”

After six hours of deliberation, the jury of ten women and two men found Sedley Alley guilty of murder in the first degree, aggravated kidnapping, and aggravated rape. After two additional hours of deliberation on sentencing, jurors recommended death by electrocution. Judge Axley set execution for September 11.

Jack and Trudy think the world of Hank Williams, as do I. He is one of the true heroes of our legal system. He has equal praise for them.

“They were more involved than any family I have ever dealt with in a case of violence. And they kept up that involvement, becoming leaders in the victims’ rights movement.”

What none of them knew at the time was that rather than ending and bringing closure with the jury’s verdict, the ordeal had only just begun.

In October of 1988, Jack was having a problem with a tooth. He went to his dentist, who examined him and said he needed a root canal.

“Okay, fine,” Jack replied, “let’s do it,” and the procedure was done.

Before he left the office, the dentist said, “You’re going to be having some pain from this, so I’m going to give you some medication to take when the novocaine wears off.”

Within a few hours, the novocaine had fully worn off and the pain was becoming intense. “Pretty serious, front-line pain,” Jack recalled.

Trudy saw how much distress he was in and reminded him that he had the pills the dentist had given him.

“I’m not going to take them,” Jack told her. “I want to fully suffer this pain and then offer up the pain for Suzanne.”

Trudy asked, “What do you mean?”

Jack explained his reasoning. “As bad as this pain may be—and I hope it gets much worse than this—I’m going to ask God to add it all up and then go back to that night when Suzanne was being beaten and tortured and murdered, and to subtract an equal amount of pain from her so that her suffering will become a little bit less.”

“Jack, you can’t go back in time,” Trudy said.

“Well, yes you can,” Jack replied. “God doesn’t work in time, he works in eternity.”

Trudy had never been as sure of this as Jack, but this practice has become a constant act of devotion for him. “Now, ever since Suzanne died, every distress I experience—pain, tension, frustration, anxiety, loss, whatever—all of those things I offer up for her sake. I ask God to apply their merits back to Suzanne at the time of her final agony and terror so that her pain can be lessened by that same amount.”

I asked Jack what, if anything, he felt Suzanne’s horrible suffering at the hands of Sedley Alley accomplished.

“In and of itself, it accomplished nothing,” he said, and there were tears in his eyes. Eleven years later, this is no easier to talk about. “An innocent girl died because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a monster needed to vent his rage. But on another level, it accomplished a tremendous amount. It caused us to become much better people, more caring and compassionate. It also inspired us to become active in a civic and political way—fighting for justice for crime victims and their families. It made us reach out to help others whom we might never have helped before.”

I commented that it seemed to me as though they must have been pretty good people to begin with.

“We worked at it, but one can always do better. Now, every time we hear about somebody or something that we can help with, we try to help. Steve had asked me once, ‘How could God let something so terrible happen to Suzanne?’ and Trudy answered him by saying, ‘There’s evil in the world. Some people try to deny it, but evil walks in this world and we have to address it. We have to counter it every chance we get.”’

“I really feel strongly about that,” Trudy added. “If we let evil prevail, even incrementally, it saps us all. Pretty soon it’s up to your nose level, then your eye level, and then you get so used to it you don’t even realize it’s prevailing.”

As Stephen has said, “You’ll never find a closer couple than my parents.” And the one thing they were determined to do was hang together as a family.

“If we fell apart,” Trudy said, “then Sedley Alley’s victory would have been more complete. We did not want to let
evil win. I didn’t know if we were going to win or lose, but I knew we were going to be in that battle all the way.”

Like most people who have suffered terrible loss, Jack and Trudy came to grips with Suzanne’s death in stages.

Trudy explains, “The first reaction I had was, ‘Okay, God. I prayed to you to take care of her. How come you let us down?’ But then you get realistic: You know, God didn’t do this.

“Other people will tell you, ‘Oh, this is terrible; there must have been a reason.’ I say, ‘No. There’s no reason. There was an evil person who wanted to do an evil deed.’”

Her next reaction was one of acute vulnerability. She felt anxious and nervous all the time. She privately committed her thoughts to paper several times in a spiral stenographer’s notebook:

What if Steve is hurt, taken from us, what if Jack gets sick, what if I’m sick—fatally—who will cope? Why has this been visited upon us? Did we care too little, do too little—overlook needs? Or are we the “chosen” to share with Jesus his Cross, and endure regardless? Shame on me for questioning. After all, until now, it was grand, wasn’t it?

Was it? Did we have our
share
of hardship? Maybe not enough. Why didn’t we think ahead? What of the future? Would retirement fill us with enough for our future? Would being idle be acceptable—bearable—once the “horrible” occurred? Did we once think about the possibility of something so horrendous? Now what’s to become of us? What worse occurrence could there be than losing our only daughter? Losing our only son?? If you didn’t want us to have them, Lord, why did you give them to us?

She became very protective of all those around her. One of Suzanne’s best friends still lived in the neighborhood and used to jog alone after dark. When she came over to see them, Trudy said, “Please, promise me you won’t go out jogging—even in our neighborhood—after dark. It’s just not
worth it; it just isn’t. Do your exercise in the morning, or with other people. Please.”

Eventually, Trudy says, you have to reach the final stage, and that is acceptance. Still, though, she and Jack knew that the most important thing to them was to “go the entire distance” with Suzanne, and until they can do that, says Trudy, “We have unfinished business.”

They want to see the murderer of their daughter pay the ultimate price which the people of Tennessee imposed upon him.

They are religious people and not vengeful; they say they do not even hate Sedley Alley, that he is beneath such a human emotion. Though I personally feel that vengeance within the context of the law can have a useful and morally uplifting power, they are content to leave the issue of vengeance to higher authority than ours. Their interest, pure and simple, is to see justice done for their beloved daughter.

Like many, if not most, people who’ve been personally associated with or seen close-up the effects of violent murder, the Collinses favor the death penalty. But if there were such a thing as life imprisonment without possibility of parole, that would at least assure society that predators like Alley would never again be able to destroy other lives.

“As long as there was absolutely no parole, no
hope ever
for parole,” Trudy says. “But we know in this country, that’s ludicrous.”

“The so-called life-without-parole laws can always be changed,” Jack states, “either by court decision or by legislative action whenever a new set of politicians comes into the statehouse. Also, a governor has the power to pardon or commute a sentence. As it is, even with a death-penalty conviction, we’re terrified the conviction could still be overthrown, as long as this thing has dragged on. In any event, the nature of the deed demands a response more severe and definitive than life without parole.”

Since the trial and verdict, Jack and Trudy simultaneously and continuously have fought two battles: the battle to keep their lives intact and Suzanne’s memory alive and her presence felt, and the battle to see justice done for victims of violent crime and their families. They are not unique in either of these respects; many others have joined the fight and
there is ever-growing strength in their numbers. But they are representative of the good people who are beginning to say, in Jack’s words, “If society is not serious about responding strongly and effectively to the worst crimes, then how can we expect its citizens to act? How do you expect to have a society with any set of reasonable moral rules and standards about how people should treat each other if the crime is not followed swiftly and surely by meaningful punishment?”

They began counseling other victims of loss, and they became activists. Their message to other families was simple: You will never again be the same and you will never again be whole, but you can get through this, you can go on, your lives can still have real value, and you can keep your loved one’s memory alive in a happy and positive way.

“Fundamentally, we share our experience with them,” says Jack. “We say, ‘We’re making it, we’re not so special. You can make it too.’

“But it’s really not so much what you say; there are no magic words. It’s simply letting your compassion show through, and they’ll know you understand. You might just put your arm around them and simply say, ‘God, I’m sorry,’ and give them a hug and look into their eyes. And don’t be afraid if tears start falling. We’ve learned so much about ourselves and about grieving since this happened to us.”