Obsession (28 page)

“And then I remember her telling me how she went to the mortuary in the days before the funeral and she insisted on seeing her child’s body. And she went over every inch of that little girl’s body because it was her baby and because she wanted to see and she wanted to know how she had been hurt and where she had been hurt. I can conjure up a vision of that even to this day, in terms of the pietà, Christ and Mary and going to the tomb, and the wrapping of the wounds and the pierce in the side. I still see in my mind this Madonna with child in this private moment, seeing her child’s wounds with her own eyes.”

The funeral home was called Money and King, a well-established and respected one right on the main street of Vienna. They had strongly resisted Katie’s request and tried to talk her out of it, offering the excuse that they had just received the body and hadn’t
had time to prepare it yet. Her friend Richard, the husband of the friend she was staying with, also urged her not to go through with it.

“Don’t tell me what I can and cannot handle,” Katie snapped. “I want to see her. Bring her out.”

So they wheeled out the naked body, covered only in a sheet, from the refrigerated storage where it was being kept and into a viewing room for Katie.

“I wanted to see what was done to her,” Katie says.

With the funeral director standing next to her and Richard standing back behind her in case she needed him, Katie began examining Dee’s body, inch by inch.

“We went from head to toe. And the funeral director told me that there was a barrette that had been lodged in her skull. He showed me her ear, he showed me her teeth and her mouth and all the bruising. I looked at her fingernails. He didn’t want me bringing the sheet down, afraid of what I’d see. And I said, ‘I don’t care what I’ll see. I have to know.’

“So I pulled the sheet down. And the thing that amazed me the most was when I got down to the arches of her feet. I said to myself, ‘My God, how in the world could he have bruised the arches of her feet?’ Because she had had sneakers on. What in the world could he have done? And I was just amazed by it.”

From his own perspective, Bill Whildin confirms everything Katie saw and felt that day. “At the medical examiner’s office, we couldn’t figure out what the little dot-dot-dot dot-dot-dot marking was on her head. And it was where the plastic barrette she was wearing had been driven with such force that it crushed down into her skull, leaving those indentations.

“At the crime scene, over on the wall where the light switch was, there was a portion of the wall that was broken in—pushed in. And it had a little yellow
mark on it. And we couldn’t figure out at first what the yellow mark was from. Destiny was doing her homework and she had put the yellow Number Two pencil behind her ear. And he had picked her up and threw her into the wall. Her head went into that wall. And that little yellow Number Two pencil left an impressionin the drywall. We put that together.

“How do you summarize for a jury or a judge the violence that he did?” Whildin poses. “How do you summarize in words the emotions that Katie had when she came home and found her daughter lying there? Those are the things that I physically see. I can close my eyes and see that, it leaves such a lasting impression.”

Katie stayed with Destiny’s body in that room in the funeral home for about forty-five minutes, trying to understand, trying to take the little girl’s pain onto herself.

Days later, Carroll sat with her, enduring her chain-smoking and seeming addiction to diet Pepsi, just listening.

“She was very, very persistent,” Katie says. “If she hadn’t have been, I wouldn’t be here today.”

To begin with, Carroll just listened. Then she asked Katie what she wanted, and after Katie told her about her visit to the funeral home, Katie said she wanted to see the autopsy report, to talk to the emergency room doctor, to know, step by agonizing step, exactly what had happened. Had Dee cried out for her? Had she ever regained consciousness? Where had she actually died—in the basement or in the emergency room or on the trip between the two? All the individual nuances; she just had to know as much as she could from whoever might have information or clues.

“Are you sure?” Carroll asked quietly.

Katie was sure. So Carroll made it happen. She called the medical examiner, who expressed predictable skepticism at the request. “This is a very determined
person,” Carroll explained, “and this is how she processes information. This is what’s going to help her.”

Katie recalls that the resulting session was probably emotionally harder on the doctor than it was on her. “I was in shock. For me, basically, it was as if I was dealing with another individual. But this was the way I had to get through it.”

There was a lot to get through and no obvious way to do it. “I went to Carroll and I said, ‘There’s no place for me to go. There are no experts out there on how to deal with people like me.’ There were no experts out there to help the survivors get through it. There were no experts out there to help the siblings or the children of the people who had been hurt or killed.”

So Carroll Ellis became an expert.

Katie and Carroll saw a lot of each other in the weeks and months that followed. “I could call her day or night,” says Katie. “We walked through the system together. She saw my outlook and what I needed to get me through it, and she’s now experienced other survivors’ needs and knows that everyone’s different. And when I approach new people that are now going through it, I say to them that whatever they’re feeling is valid and they’ve got to deal with that.”

Katie was shocked and appalled to find out what many victims come to realize—that she had little, if any, official standing in the system. “I called the prosecutor and asked him when he wanted to talk to me. He said, ‘Why do we need to talk? This is a case of Robert Miller against the state.’ If I had it to do over again, I think I’d hire my own lawyer to look out for Destiny’s interests—to protect the integrity of the system.”

Carroll admits she was driven, too: “I took it home and I involved my entire family at that point. At that
time my son was in high school. I couldn’t sleep and my husband, Claude, became very much aware of what I was going through. I kept thinking, ‘If I’m not in there providing this help and doing something, who will?’ She had my beeper number; she had my home telephone number. I was there for her anytime she needed to call. She was a smoker, she still is, and we had hard and fast rules about smoking in the police cars. But I let her smoke in the car, because for me, it was, whatever gets you through the night. If that puff on that cigarette is going to give you some kind of comfort and relief, then smoke on.”

One of Carroll’s primary concerns was to make sure that Katie received proper medical care. She was four months pregnant and Carroll became worried that, along with all the cigarettes and caffeine from the diet Pepsi, Katie wasn’t sleeping, eating, or gaining weight. And as their relationship developed, as Carroll accompanied her to various doctors’ appointments and counseling sessions and legal interviews, Carroll did become bolder in trying to tell Katie how to take care of herself. For her part, Katie says that two things saved her life that year, curbed her impulses toward self-destructive behavior. One was the knowledge that if she destroyed herself, she would be killing her unborn child. The other was Carroll’s intervention in her life, and she readily acknowledges that the two were related.

“I know that if I had not been pregnant when my daughter died, I probably would have been in the bars every single night. I know that I would have ended up in the gutters or I would have committed suicide. I know that’s what would have happened to me.”

It was at least in part the realization of what her behavior would have meant that saved her life. “Rather than my own health or safety, I was more afraid that if I killed myself, what made me any better
than Rob Miller? I would have been killing my own baby, and God would have looked down on me for that.”

“We had quite a bit of arm wrestling back and forth on various issues,” Carroll admits. “During those days, she was priority in my caseload, so that whatever was going on, when Katie called, everything stopped because I believed that she needed that kind of protection and service from me.”

Carroll spent hours just listening to Katie talk about Destiny: about her joys of being a mother and her frustrations over Destiny’s lifelong struggle with a learning disability that made it difficult for her, despite her intelligence, to read and write.
Destiny
was not a name Katie selected capriciously or happened on by chance. She had had nine miscarriages, and when this little baby survived, she considered it a gift from God, the reason she now understood she had been put on earth. Even now she is grateful for the eight years they got to spend together.

Among the issues Carroll helped Katie sort out was her sense of guilt at not being there at the moment her child needed her most. This is a common reaction among parents of violent-crime victims. “I should have been there,” Katie kept saying. “I just absolutely felt horrible that she had to go through the pain that she went through and that I wasn’t there to protect her. And if I had come home while it was going on, he’d have been the one lying in the morgue, because there would have been no stopping me!”

Throughout the process, Carroll had to face her own reactions to the horror she was seeing. “That was another big issue for Sandy and me, that we always avoided saying ‘I understand” and ‘I know.’ Because unless you’ve been through it yourself, you
can’t
really know or understand, but I felt some of it. And that was that the aftermath of homicide was something
very, very different from the reaction to any other kind of death experience. It was shocking. It was sudden. It was unnecessary and uncalled for. It was unjust. It was as though there were no place else to go, no way to hide. It was the end of something very important in her life—stability, normalcy, call it what you will. But her life would never be the same again and I knew that. I knew that as sure as I was sitting there.”

It would be difficult to imagine a sadder or more traumatic scenario. As the mother of one of Destiny’s schoolmates said, “Destiny did everything that you tell your children to do. She didn’t let a stranger into the house. She came right home after school. It’s the worst possible situation to try and explain to your children. They don’t understand how this could happen to one of their own.”

Katie showed Carroll photos of Destiny lying in her coffin, photos that would eventually become part of the victim impact statement. Despite advice against it, Katie had insisted on an open casket at the funeral, and the body was positioned so that most of the damage did not show. She told Carroll of her discussions with the principal of Destiny’s school over whether her classmates should be allowed or encouraged to attend the funeral. Katie firmly stated her opinion that, like adults, children mourn and handle grief in individual ways, and that, therefore, those who wanted to come would be welcomed, and those who were uncomfortable about it should be allowed to say goodbye in their own way. She asked the parents of those who did want to attend to let them come up to the casket, but first to explain that Dee would not look exactly the same as when they had last seen her: that her face would be a little fatter, that there would be some black-and-blue marks around one eye and on her arm; and that if they wanted to touch her, that
was fine, but that they should probably touch her cheek, because Katie knew it would feel the most life-like to them. And if there was anything they wanted to bring her, Dee would like that very much, too. By the time the casket was finally closed for good, it was completely packed with gifts and mementos. “Stuffed the whole way up around her,” Katie remembered, “so that the only thing that was showing was her face.”

She reminisced, “I remember Destiny always coming to me and saying, ‘Mommy, so-and-so—he’s picking on me,’ or, ‘He lifted my shirt up,’ or, ‘He pulled my hair,’ or this, that, or the other thing. And I’d say, ‘Dee, that’s because you’re beautiful and they like you. That’s just a first-or second-grader’s way of showing you. They don’t even know they like you; they just do it.’ And when I saw all those little boys at the funeral, just crying their eyes out, I said to Dee, ‘I told you so. I told you that these little boys liked you a lot. Do you believe me now?’”

Principal Robert Holderbaum and his school reacted sensitively and impressively, arranging counseling for both students and parents. It was an agonizing time for area parents in general. The community was still reeling from the murder of ten-year-old Rosie Gordon and the disappearance of five-year-old Melissa Brannen, both of whose cases my unit worked on. As their own memorial, Destiny’s classmates insisted that her desk remain unoccupied for the rest of the school year.

Carroll and Sandy committed themselves to making sure there was a place in the system for each victim to turn to, whenever and for whatever that victim felt he or she needed. “With one victim, we may spend five minutes in a phone call,” Sandy comments, “and somebody else we may spend literally hundreds and hundreds of hours. It’s very complicated when you’re
looking for funding and you’re trying to explain to people who don’t understand that it’s a very long, complicated process to provide assistance to victims. You can’t really come up with an agreeable definition of what success is in this business, or what mental health or mental stability is after something like this has happened.

“The goal is to stabilize people and get them to a
new
normal level of functioning, and try to explain to them that whole process, that they’re not going to be who they were before. And part of being able to do that is getting them to deal with what’s happened to them. The thing is that you don’t quit. You continue going with them as long as it takes.”

Of course, this is never a simple process, nor was it with Katie. “Not from day one was anything simple with Katie Souza,” Carroll declares. “And it still isn’t. She’s still a compelling person in terms of all the complexities in her life, that generally date back to her early childhood. Lots of old baggage has come to the forefront.”