Obsession (32 page)

The support group began meeting in 1991, to deal with, in Carroll’s words, “the complicated grief associated with homicide.” Those present could vent, rage, cry, or laugh, all in the presence of other people who shared a similar journey. In fact, the only guideline was not to be rude or intentionally hurtful.

Additionally, they also invited as guests the people members would be dealing with as they worked then-way through the system—police officers, district attorneys (known as Commonwealth attorneys in Virginia), judges, and even defense attorneys. At the request of some of the members, they once even invited a psychic.

Having guests was a two-way street. The visitors could give group members some sense of what they did, and they, in turn, would get some education and appreciation for what victims and survivors went through. To gain trust, and to make sure everyone was candid and straightforward, it was also established early on that everything said in the meetings would be considered privileged and confidential.

From the outset, Carroll and Sandy strove to deal with both the immediate and long-range problems of the group members—how were they feeling, what were they going through, how were they dealing with their lives on a day-to-day basis? But what they missed by doing this—and it is so obvious to them in retrospect—was that this was not the main concern of the members themselves. As Carroll and Sandy were focused on them and their needs, they were focused on their murdered loved one: what he or she went through, how afraid were they, what were they thinking and feeling. All of the things Katie Souza had taught them.

“What we realized,” Sandy admits, “is that we were dealing with the aftermath of the homicide. The survivors needed to deal with the event itself before they could go on and integrate it into their lives.” As a result, they started facing the same hard, cruel issues that Katie had taken upon herself. In a sense, it is the same type of victimology that my colleagues and I practice when we develop a profile or analyze a particular crime: What actually happened between victim and offender at the scene? And neither we as profilers nor the survivors themselves can move on until we deal with that issue.

Since the beginning, the group has met on alternate Wednesdays. As a result, alternate Thursdays can be bad days for Carroll and Sandy. “You’re exhausted, drained from the meeting,” Sandy explains, “and a lot
of times what happens is the people who don’t want to talk Wednesday night, they’ll call you first thing the next morning.”

And inevitably, the stress and anguish take their toll. “I don’t think you can live around this kind of pain and not suffer some yourself,” says Sandy. “Part of my coping mechanism—because I don’t want to go home and talk to my husband and make him completely insane—is that we spend a great deal of time debriefing each other.”

Sandy’s husband, Paul, has always been extremely supportive of her work and accommodating of her schedule in terms of taking care of the children. When the homicide support group first started, roughly around the time their daughter Emily was born, the sessions would often go well into the night. Sandy notes, “When we got done, when the last person finally dragged him or herself out, we were numb and needed to talk to each other. So we would talk about each case and go over what we could do, and commiserate, and cry, and we really needed that time before we made the trek to our homes and families.”

And Sandy adds, “If you’re a fake, if you aren’t sincere, they’ll smell you out in a second.”

Carroll calls it “coming from your gut. And that’s pretty much how I view life and how I view the work that we do. And if your gut tells you something—if you feel something so strongly there—then you have to be honest about that and react to your feelings about it.”

Carroll and Sandy coined an unofficial slogan for the work of the Victim-Witness Unit, which could work equally well for other aspects of this business: “It’s not easy, it’s not simple, it’s not fun, and it’s not for everyone.”

By the same token, I can tell you from personal experience as the father of three that you can’t be
involved with this kind of work without having it affect your perceptions of your own children’s safety and well-being. Sandy and Paul have two girls and a boy, ages five to eleven, with the nine-year-old boy in the middle. “On the one hand,” she says, “I want them to have the freedom they need to learn to be independent. But seeing what I’ve seen, it scares the hell out of me. I think that my perceptions of what I’m afraid of change as each one of them gets older and moves into a different area of life.”

She admits, “It’s hard because I’m very controlling of them, I know, in terms of needing to know where they are and what they’re doing, much more so than parents of some of their friends. When I get home, I have to concentrate on stepping back and trying to be a mom and not this person who I am here at work.”

It is particularly hard when Sandy thinks of Kimberly Moyer, one of her early, intense cases, though more appropriate words come to mind, such as
client
and
friend
. Kim Moyer’s infant son, Christopher, was killed in 1992 by a day care provider. It was June; he would have been a year old in October. Sandy had just come back from maternity leave from her third child a week or so before it happened.

She recalls, “Carroll and I went to see the Moyers at their house up in the mountains. And this young family was about the same age as me and my husband, and all I could remember thinking at the time was, ‘These people were doing everything right. They’re professional, they waited for children until they could give them the best of life, they moved out here to give their lives a better quality. And all of a sudden … they get the worst news that you can ever bring to someone’s door.’

“I felt as if Kim brought me to my knees. She was breast-feeding at the time; I was breastfeeding. I would think about how her milk was drying up because
of the fact that her baby’s been ripped from her. They had had a lot of trouble having children. Then they had a little girl and they hadn’t expected to be able to have this son. I’m here with this woman whose baby was killed in day care. And I started to question my own values, like, God, maybe I shouldn’t be here. Maybe I should be home with my baby. All of those things started working, and professionally, in my own mind, it was a turning point for me right there. I decided that the only way I could emotionally cope with continuing to work in this job was to really begin to understand that this is a calling, but that it was also a job, that I had to learn to turn it off when I went home.”

With that self-examination, Sandy was able to commit emotionally for, as she puts it, the long haul. Kim Moyer has channeled her grief into impressive good works, including child advocacy and lobbying for compensation for victims. But like the others, her agony can never be fully erased. She wrote a searing and poignant letter to the editor in Christopher’s name, which was printed in the fall 1992 issue of
Sharing and Caring
, the survivors group newsletter. It talks about what would have been and what now will not, all from the perspective of her murdered child. And without a doubt, Kim Moyer speaks for every bereaved parent.

I want to stress the importance of the victim-witness unit being part of the police department—specifically the Criminal Investigations Bureau, or CIB—rather than the district attorney’s office, as these units are in many other jurisdictions that even have them. Carroll calls it “being in the belly of the whale.” In jurisdictions where the unit is part of the DA’s office, it can be weeks or months—in fact, sometimes not until the case is ready to go to trial—before the victim or witness has any contact with a coordinator or counselor.
By then, the emotional wounds may be even deeper, at least in part because there has been no one to try to heal them.

What makes the Fairfax County program work so effectively, and why it should be a model for other programs throughout the country, is the human relationships. That’s what it’s all about—between police and the unit, between the unit and their clients, between the unit members themselves.

As Carroll notes, “If we’ve had any success and if there is anything novel in our program, it has developed out of the relationship that Sandy and I had shared in working together, and the shared commitment to what we’ve done, over seven years, really. Dealing with homicide, it was something very special that happened to us, that evolved between us, and we clung together. It was as though we had entered a dark forest and we were groping along together.”

The strength of the unit was, and is, that it could give each survivor the individualized service, attention, and support that he or she needed. But when the homicide survivors support group began, Carroll and Sandy soon learned that some things were common virtually throughout the group membership, and Katie Souza’s experience and observations turned out to be accurate guidelines to this.

They wanted to know how, when, and why. Specifically, they all wanted to know about the last harrowing moments of their loved one’s life. Sometimes those answers are forthcoming. Sometimes there is no way to obtain them. And when that is the case, the support group has to deal with that, as well.

But they also learned something profound in the process. As Carroll put it, “I have since come to learn that homicide survivors are so much stronger than I am and most people are—that they don’t need that kind of smothering and protection. They need information
so that they can process it and go forth and do what it is that they must do as they move along the path.”

While no one’s ice is any colder than anyone else’s, there are many nuances that come under discussion in group meetings. For example, how is it different if a child has been murdered than an eighty-five-year-old man or woman? This was something the group had to get past, and they did.

“They had to,” Sandy comments. “I mean, that’s part of the education process, too. You’ve earned a place at the table because of this horrible thing that’s happened. But beyond that, if it’s your brother or my father or her daughter, we’re all grieving and we’re all on a journey.”

When Carroll and Sandy began the homicide victims support group, most of the killings in the county were relationship murders: people in the same family, or who otherwise knew each other. Sometimes these were domestic arguments that got out of control. Sometimes they were just as horrifyingly tragic in a different way. Sandy had to deal with a Cambodian woman refugee married to a Vietnamese man. She had been a survivor of one of the notorious Cambodian political prison camps. She was mentally unstable, delusional, kept hearing voices. She strangled her two children, ages two and four—and left them in a closet. Later, she hanged herself in the hospital mental ward where she’d been taken.

Another woman was stabbed thirteen times on her doorstep by her estranged husband. She had a court restraining order against him. We’ll talk about the issues surrounding restraining orders in the next chapter.

As time went on, while the percentage of acquaintance and domestic homicides remained high in the county, they were seeing a lot of different types of scenarios, including the particularly fearsome stranger
murders. As the Washington suburbs became more culturally diverse, so did the patterns of homicide.

Regardless of whether the murder has been committed by an acquaintance, a family member, or a total stranger, one of the most painful things for Carroll and Sandy to experience—in fact, for all of the “veterans” of the support group—was the acute pain they saw and felt just about anytime someone new came in.

Through their own experience and the writing and research of other experts, the victim coordinators came to recognize several distinct psychological stages following victimization.

The first is referred to as the
impact
stage, also as the shock, acute, or immediate stage. This can last for hours, days, or even weeks, during which the victim is still reeling from the event, feeling numb or paralyzed, unable to make decisions. He or she will be extremely vulnerable and easily confused, possibly extremely lonely, helpless, or in despair. Coping with anything challenging may seem all but impossible. Some people manifest this stage by feelings of withdrawal or detachment. Others may refuse to believe what has happened. Still others will react understandably with out-and-out horror.

The
recoil
stage will be associated with anger, severe depression, resentment, even denial. Great mood swings are likely and can be triggered by small and insignificant Stressors. There may be uncontrollable crying, feelings of rejection, loss of identity or self-respect. The victim can experience insomnia or night-mares, or a cycling between the two. She may go back and forth between blaming others and blaming herself for what has happened to her loved one, which means she is likely to take on the baggage of unwarranted guilt. And this is the time when the big question of “Why?” is likely to keep intruding into a corner of every waking moment.

A poignant example from Sandy:

“Kim Moyer called me one day about four months after her son was murdered. She had pulled over on the side of the road and she was sobbing, that crying we all know so well. That place where people, I think, are really raging inside, grappling with the decision about whether they’re going to continue to live or whether they’re just going to die. She said to me, ‘It just finally hit me. The reality just finally hit me that he’s gone.’ Who else could she call to be able to say that? And I had to be able to stay on the line and understand her and be able to tell her that she wasn’t going crazy.”

But because of people like Sandy Witt, the individual struggle and journey does continue.

The
resolution
stage is the one in which the victim-survivor gains some perspective and begins to integrate the experience into daily life. He realizes he and life will never be the same as they were before, but they can both go forward. The anger, the rage, the fear, might still be there, but they can, with time, diminish in intensity, and emotional energy can now be directed toward other activities and other people. I have found with some of the most heroic survivors—Jack and Trudy Collins and Katie Hanley certainly among them—that their murdered loved one becomes a virtual presence in their daily lives; they can talk about her and think about her for what she was and what she still means to them, not merely as an unfortunate murder victim. Katie talks to her son, Tyler, about Destiny and how happy she would have been participating in all the events of his life. Jack and Trudy have taken to going out to dinner each year to celebrate Suzanne’s birthday. This final phase may be years in coming, and it may take more years to evolve. The important point is that the loved one is never forgotten, but remembered in a richer and fuller way.