Obsession (30 page)

“What are you getting at?” she wanted to know.

Whildin explains, “Things were adding up. There was something about Rob. His relationship with his girlfriend was a little funny; not the best. That’s giving us little clues about his personality.”

In his confession, Miller told police that Destiny had found him in the house and threatened to tell her mom. He couldn’t let that happen. He admitted picking up a heavy jewelry box and hitting her on the side of the head with it as she was walking away. Whildin questioned him about whether he had been sexually involved with Destiny and posed a scenario that had her finally threatening to tell her mother about his
molestation or improper attention—if true, would be whyhe had killed her with such rage.

“When we confronted him with the possible sexual end of it, he became very agitated, very upset, very angry that we would even say that,” Whildin recalls. “When I said, Rob, I think you sexually molested her and she was going to tell her mother that day,’ he jumped. He stood right up, right out of that chair. So he was real agitated and he wouldn’t sit still and he wouldn’t let us keep prodding that way.” He denied the allegation.

Later, when Katie was cleaning the basement, she found pornographic books wedged into the cushions of the love seat and sofa. She called Whildin, who came by and picked them up from her.

Between the day of the murder and the funeral, Becky did not communicate with Katie.

Despite the tension between them, Katie could hardly believe that she received so little support from her own sister. “And that was it for me. As far as I was concerned, she couldn’t have been my sister.”

Becky moved back to Pennsylvania, where their father saw to her needs. When Katie asked him why he hadn’t looked out for her the same way, she remembers him saying, “You didn’t need me. You’ve always been the strong one. She needs me because she’s always been the weaker one.”

“And I said, ‘Well, even the ones who have their heads on straight still need love, need to know you’re there.’”

Katie’s mother lived another two years after Destiny’s death. She went to the hospital one evening with pneumonia and died, alone, the next morning. “My mother and I weren’t very close,” Katie comments. “I often asked myself, if we had met on the street, would she ever have been my friend? But I did vow to myself that if she ever became ill or couldn’t make it, that I
would take her in and take care of her. So there wasn’t hatred for my mother; there were no feelings. And it felt bad because I could go up to my aunt and give her a hug and a kiss, and my poor mother would be standing there and that would make me feel so guilty, but I just couldn’t go over and do it. But had I known she was ill, I might have gone up there. No one told me.”

Before her mother’s death, Katie had continued to maintain some relationship with her, but she couldn’t do that with her father. “He felt sorry for Becky, the fact that she had to raise a daughter on her own now. He specifically said that to me, and I said, ‘Well, at least she has a daughter to raise.’

“In fact, probably about three or four days after it happened, he said I had to get on with my life, to put this behind me. He still to this day cannot understand why I’m having emotional ups and downs.

“I met with my dad a couple of times and I said to myself, ‘I can’t be part of this family anymore.’ So I shut myself off from that side, except for my aunt, who was the one I had lived with when I was fifteen. To this day, my father doesn’t understand … never had and probably never will.”

Less than a month after Destiny’s funeral, Becky filed suit against Katie for Rob Miller’s possessions, which she claimed should be valued at about $7,000. Included in the two-page enumeration of “Household Goods Detained at Kathleen S. Souza’a House Without Permission” was one “handmade jewelry box” valued at $20.

Stunned and angry, Katie countersued, stating that Becky and Rob had used her credit cards and check-book, leaving her $17,000 in debt. Ultimately, she had to file for bankruptcy.

“My father said, ‘How can you do this to your sister?’”

The case against Katie was dismissed.

When Katie moved, she refused to give her father or Becky her new address.

The last time she saw Becky was when their mother died. “She acted as if I’d just seen her last week. She was there with another ex-con. She was living with this character.”

After the funeral, Becky and Katie had to go back to the house to deal with their mother’s possessions. “All I wanted,” Katie recalls, “was my mother’s books, so I could figure out who she was, because based on what people read, you can kind of figure out something about them.”

There were only a few other things she wanted. “Her religious medals, because she had converted to Catholicism when she quit drinking and had changed her life and I knew that was very important to her. From the kitchen, I wanted her cutting board, and the one pan that we used to get hit with all the time.”

We asked if that was because it symbolized finally taking control, of not allowing others to beat or abuse her any longer.

She thought about this a moment, then smiled and shook her head. “No, I had just done a lot of cooking with it over the years.”

Carroll Ellis and the entire Victim-Witness Unit stood by Katie as Rob Miller’s trial approached. The case was highly publicized because of the age and innocence of the victim and the sheer brutality of the crime. This wasn’t the kind of thing that was supposed to happen in peaceful, upscale Fairfax County, Virginia. District Attorney Robert Horan said it was the most brutal attack on a child he had seen in his twenty-five years as a prosecutor.

Before the trial began, though, in February 1991, Rob Miller pled guilty. Carroll, Sandy, and Katie all
had several theories about this, most having to do with trying to avoid the death penalty.

Katie and Carroll were relieved in one sense, but in another, they felt Destiny had been cheated out of the chance to make her killer pay the ultimate price for his actions. And without a trial, none of the vital answers Katie had sought for her own closure would be forthcoming.

Virginia is one of the states that allows victims or survivors to submit an impact statement to the court prior to sentencing. I think this is a critical step forward in the area of victims’ rights. The defense gets to bring up every mitigating factor they can think of, from childhood attention deficit disorder to what a wonderful adult the convicted killer’s been (except for that one unfortunate incident, of course). It only stands to reason that the truly innocent party should have the right to tell the court what this person’s actions have meant.

Carroll Ellis worked extensively with Katie to craft a proper victim-impact statement. She came over to Katie’s house and the two spent long hours getting it in order. One of Carroll’s strongest memories of that time was Katie’s showing her the photograph of Destiny lying in her coffin before the funeral.

They talked about Katie’s relationship with this only child, after waiting through the anguish and disappointment of so many miscarriages. Katie was back living in her own house now, and this was the first time Carroll had been there.

“The house was immaculate,” she recalls. “A light, bright place where you would find a single mom and her little eight-year-old daughter living. Katie was then, and is now, the kind of mom who buys marvelous, wonderful things for her kids: the right clothing, the right toys, and lots of them. And everything is always kept perfectly. So here she is in this delightful-looking
place, but for the fact that her daughter has been murdered down on the lower level. She took me down there and raised the rug to show me the bloodstains. It was a new experience for me. I wanted tobe strong for her and I didn’t want to offend her—whatever it was she wanted to show me, to be attentive to it. And I did it.”

It was a little later that Carroll realized how serious Katie’s emotional condition was at that time.

“She called me one day, and she said she just didn’t know what to do. She was never in a position that she didn’t know what to do. She was always in total control over what to do and how to do it. And I think saying to me that she was not, that was a key for her—being able to admit that fact to someone and not have that person either condemn her or take advantage of her.”

Destiny’s father, who was living in California, sent his own victim impact statement. Perhaps most touchingly, so did Destiny’s classmates at Newington Forest Elementary School. Katie and Carroll worked with the principal, who felt the school should do something in this extraordinary situation. The children had been grieving, and it was only fair that they should have their say, just like the other victims, that they should have some resolution and closure, too.

In Virginia, victim impact statements are presented in writing. This is fine for some people and some situations, but I would prefer the victim or survivor had the opportunity to stand up in open court and let the full emotional weight of her statement ring forth. In any event, though, Katie came up with an eloquent statement, several pages in length, chronicling her loss and the difference in her life. She included two photographs: Destiny as she had been, full of life and laughter and love, then Destiny in her casket. The effect, to Carroll at least, was devastating. The thrust of the
message was “Why?” Why did you kill her? What could she possibly have done to provoke you? Carroll feels that Katie set a standard from which the courts could not retreat.

Fairfax County Circuit Court judge Johanna Fitz patrick sentenced Robert A. Miller to life in prison for first-degree murder, which in Virginia at the time meanthe would be eligible for parole in thirteen years—on July 7, 2003, to be exact. The sentence ex-ceeded the recommended guidelines, which would have called for a maximum of sixty years (which, of course, means a lot less in real life). The judge rejected a defense plea for leniency based on the assertion that Miller had been drinking and therefore had lowered inhibitions. Assuming (which I do not) that Destiny had “mouthed off” to him, how much do a 170-pound man’s inhibitions have to be lowered before he’ll fracture an eight-year-old girl’s skull, rupture her lung and liver, and stomp on her back in an attempt to break her spine? And then tell me whether, regardless of his motive, regardless of his subsequent behavior in prison, you ever want this man near your children. I can tell you I don’t want him near mine.

Carroll and Katie were both in the courtroom, and they heard Judge Fitzpatrick cite Katie’s moving and powerful impact statement, then turn to the defendant and say that this mother wanted to know why. She asked him directly if he had any response to her. He did not.

It is now part of the Victim-Witness Unit’s responsibility to track him (he was moved from a Virginia prison to one in Pennsylvania) and keep Katie informed of his progress toward parole. Katie and Carroll will both do whatever they can to see that he is never free to prey on innocent children again.

I wish more judges, mental health professionals, and parole boards understood as well as Katie. I wish
fewer of them were strongly swayed by such considerations as “good behavior” in prison, which is relatively meaningless as an indicator of future violence compared to the details of their previous crimes. As we’ve indicated in this and previous books, a lot of these guys do fairly well in the structured, restrictive prison environment, then pick up where they left off as soon as they’re let out. My personal preference for killers like Robert Miller is that they be safely put away six feet underground. Short of that, it is unthinkable to take a chance on letting someone like this out on the street again until he’s physically too old to prey on others.

Dr. Stanton Samenow, who is as realistic as anyone I know on the subject, clearly states that there is no hope for a criminal turning himself around until he honestly admits, and believes, that there is a problem with the way he thinks.

I’ve often said that each violent crime claims many, many victims. Carroll Ellis thinks of it as a rock thrown in the water, with rippling waves that go on and on and finally out into the community as a whole. In the case of Destiny Souza, one of those victims wasn’t even alive yet at the time of her death, but the impact upon him was tremendous nonetheless. Tyler was born just days after Rob Miller pleaded guilty to murdering Destiny. This turned out to be an overwhelmingly stressful event for Katie, and she was dismayed that she didn’t feel a strong emotional connection with Tyler.

“It was as if I was a little girl who’d had a doll for eight years. That doll got lost and they tried to replace it with another one. That’s the way I felt when he was born. When they brought him to me the first time and put him on my belly, it felt like an alien. I said, ‘Get him off of me.’

“I could not bond with him. It took probably a year
and a half or two years. I took care of his physical and medical needs, but I kept an emotional distance.”

In spite of this, Katie was self-objective enough to acknowledge that had the baby been a girl, it would have been even worse for her. It would have seemed a cosmic joke, of one baby replacing another. Katie worked hard to overcome her problems regarding the new arrival, and she readily confesses that attending to his needs made her realize that she had to go on living and functioning, that she couldn’t give in to despair.

Having worked through those agonizing months, though, Katie realized that Tyler could give her something she hadn’t had since that one horrible afternoon: joy.

One year after the murder, on September 17, 1991, Katie went back to Newington Forest Elementary for a memorial service in honor of Destiny. With six-month-old Tyler smiling in Katie’s arms, a plaque was dedicated and helium-filled balloons, each with a message written on it by a student or teacher, were released into the air.

Katie also wrote a poem, published in the fall 1992 issue of the Victim-Witness Unit newsletter,
Sharing and Caring
, which sums up a mother’s love and loss as well as anything I’ve seen. It is entitled, simply, “Destiny.”