Obsession (33 page)

Another way to state it is through the four stages outlined by psychologist William Worden, upon which the group also relies: adjustment to the shock; accepting the reality of the loss; working through or “leaning into” the pain and adjusting to a world where the loved one no longer exists; and finally, bridging the gap back to community.

The message here is a tough but hopeful one: you will forever be changed, but with love and help and courage, you’ll be able to deal with it, and your loved one will always be with you and a part of you.

None of this is to suggest that there won’t be set-backs along the way and reversions to previous feelings; there probably will be. I know from my own experience how many times I’ve been out with my kids, say, near a river or in a park and I’ll have a flashback to a scene similar to the setting we’re in, and I’ll visualize what it was like when a body was pulled from the water or taken from under a tree. Imagine how much more intense this feeling must be for the families of victims of these violent crimes. What we’re talking about is nothing less than post-traumatic stress disorder, a medical and psychological condition whose manifestations have been well studied in wartime. And as I’ve said, this is a war, too. We shouldn’t be surprised to see similar symptoms.

“It’s always so difficult,” says Sandy, “to watch it with a new person in the group and to just know I’ve heard this before and how it has to evolve, to know where she’s going, to hear something like, ‘It just hurts so much!’ or ‘Why does it hurt so much?’ It’s almost a rite of passage you have to go through. But the group will embrace you and help you through it.”

And share their own journeys.

John and Louise Ireland were among the first to begin coming to support group meetings, and they still come. They were already into middle age, retired from
the Army and living in Springfield, Virginia, when Dana Marie arrived, after a somewhat unexpected pregnancy, on December 12, 1968. Their daughter Sandy was already practically grown.

From the beginning, Dana was a beautiful, special child, sweet and gentle and loving, but with a strong independent streak and capable of standing up for herself when the situation demanded. She had a close and warm relationship with both John and Louise, who took to this second round of parenthood with a newfound enthusiasm and delight. Dana also had many friends and adored animals, often bringing home strays. She released her pet hamster because she couldn’t stand to see it caged up. When she got older, she made a habit of stopping her car on the highway if she saw a wounded creature.

Always a good student both at West Springfield High School and then at George Mason University, Dana was also a gifted athlete, into soccer and hiking, surfing and scuba diving. When she got out of college, she began searching for her life’s work, which she knew would be an adventure. With her sister, Sandy, whom she idolized, she had traveled throughout the South Pacific and was strongly considering joining the Peace Corps. Everyone who knew Dana described her as a joy.

It was while she and her parents were visiting Sandy and her husband, Jim, for the holidays at their home in Kapoho, Hawaii, that Dana Ireland died. It was Christmas Eve, 1991. She was cycling along a rural road near Hilo when she was spotted by some men in a car. They ran into her to knock her down, then abducted her, raped her, and when they were finished with her, left her to die along the roadside. She was discovered by a passing motorist, who called for help. It took the ambulance so long to arrive that Dana
bled to death from her injuries. She was twenty-three years old.

“John and Louise were living the American dream, and then without warning, these demons came along and their entire world was turned upside down,” says Sandy. In fact, they had been model citizens, living the good life after working hard for many years to earn it. Suddenly, though, everything was wrong. Their beloved Dana had died, they were not getting answers as to why, there had been no arrest, and as far as they could tell, not nearly enough was being done in working the case.

So John, in his late sixties, transformed himself for the sake of his daughter and the other innocents like her. He became an activist, an investigator, a lobbyist. He became the modern equivalent of an Old Testament prophet, demanding truth, honor, and justice. His sense of mission was fierce and inspiring. He flew back to Hawaii and made repeated trips after that, all at his own expense, pressuring the media and the police to do something. He secured legal assistance. He filed a suit against the county where the crime had occurred for negligence in not coming to Dana’s aid sooner after emergency services were called. He demanded to see the governor, who met with him and heard his grievances. As Sandy says, “He demanded that the case be kept alive.”

But John’s work and passion went far beyond Dana’s case. He lobbied the Hawaiian state legislature for victims’ rights and raised the sensibility of the entire state. Among the things he was more or less directly responsible for were items as diverse as the use of victim impact statements in sentencing violent offenders and the installation of emergency telephones at remote locations like the one where Dana was attacked. In Washington, he pursued a similar path to that of his fellow support group member Jack Collins,
going up to Capitol Hill, knocking on doors, testifying before Congress on victims’ rights legislation, and demanding to be heard. His message was always the same: we desperately need to change our laws. He was one of the key advisers on the Department of Justice-funded project on impact statements, “A Victim’s Right to Speak.”

At the same time, John and Louise also set up the Dana Ireland Memorial Scholarship Fund at Dana’s alma mater, George Mason University, for residents of Virginia or Hawaii who are the children, spouse, or sibling of a homicide victim. It was originally funded with proceeds from the settlement of their civil suit. John, an avid golfer, also staged yearly golf tournaments to benefit the scholarship fund. Like Jack and Trudy Collins’s establishment of the Suzanne Marie Collins Perpetual Scholarship for the children of foreign service personnel, as Suzanne herself was, John and Louise’s endowment for Dana is a beautiful living memorial to an extraordinary young woman, and the achievements of its recipients will grace Dana’s memory long into the future.

But it was in the survivors support group that they felt comfortable venting their true feelings—feelings of grief, of anger, of frustration by the appalling lack of closure. Only in the past month since we write this has there finally been an indictment in the case, and I believe that would not have happened at all had it not been for John’s efforts. Victims themselves should not have to be responsible for this, but the effort and dedication put forth by John and Louise and an increasing number of others across the country signal a new and, to my mind, positive trend. Victims are demanding justice and saying, in effect, “We are not vigilantes; we will not take the law into our own hands. But we will watch you and follow you and help you, and if you do not take our interests to heart,
we will hold your feet to the fire and we will not go away.”

Perhaps most impressive of all is the Irelands’ connection with others in similar situations. Sandy reports that they are always extremely supportive, particularly of “new” people who have just recently experienced the horror. They counsel, they go to trials and hearings with them, they share the power of their consolation and their anger.

And that is one of the things that has impressed us most about this group, and Carroll and Sandy as well. They are, by turns, compassionate, nurturing, spiritual, philosophical, practical. But they have not lost their anger or their outrage. They understand human frailty and human heroism, and regardless of what has happened to them, they have not given up on the notion that if we are to have a civilized society, there are certain absolute standards that we must demand and we must never turn away from them.

The loss represented by this group spans the entire continuum of life, from the Moyers’ infant son to Katie Souza’s eight-year-old to the Collinses’ nine-teen-year-old to the Irelands’ young adult, all the way up to Audrey Webb’s mother.

Laurene Dekle Johnson was eighty-five when she was stabbed to death in her home in the Buckhead section of Atlanta on May 27, 1991. When Audrey couldn’t get her on the phone for several hours, she became concerned and called her mother’s neighbor and close friend, Jeanette Cox, who called another neighbor, Nadine Shank. Both Jeanette and Nadine had known Laurene since the 1930s. A third neighbor, Mike Wheeler, and Mrs. Shank found Mrs. Johnson’s body on her bathroom floor. Laurene died a year to the day after her husband, John Wesley Johnson, had passed away from a heart attack. At that time, they had been married for sixty-one years.

Police charged twenty-two-year-old Terry Dale Redd, whom Laurene had hired to do yard work, with murder and robbery. He confessed to Atlanta police in early June when confronted with the thumbprint he had left on a vase in the house, as well as other physical evidence. He subsequently pleaded not guilty, claiming his confession was coerced. But after that, another witness emerged who testified how Redd had described to him the same evening how he had committed the crime.

Audrey Webb and her husband, Dick, had both been extremely close to Laurene. They were devastated, overwhelmed by her murder. What kind of monster could stab an eighty-five-year-old woman twenty times?

After repeated delays, trial was finally scheduled for March 1993. The assistant district attorney handling the case assured the Webbs that it was such an open-and-shut case that a guilty verdict was inevitable. As a result, the Webbs feel he was not adequately prepared.

“It was a travesty of incredible ineptitude on his part,” they wrote in an open letter to their friends. “He was ill-prepared and yet so arrogant and cocksure he had a guilty verdict in the bag, no matter what happened.”

But on Tuesday, March 30,1993, the Fulton County jury found Redd not guilty. To the Webbs, to Mrs. Cox and Mrs. Shanks, to the prosecutor’s office, to the Fairfax Victim-Witness Unit, and to all of the members of the support group who had been following the investigation, the evidence, and the trial so closely, the verdict was an inexplicable shock—nothing short of a revictimization of this gentle lady and her adoring daughter and son-in-law. It seemed, in fact, nothing short of jury nullification of a just and fair outcome to this case.

When one juror granted an interview and said that questions about the confession and whether it had been coerced played a part in the acquittal, Atlanta police chief Eldrin Bell declared, “I’m outraged. The credibility of our homicide squad has not, to my knowledge, ever been placed in question.”

Even Redd’s attorney, Robert Maxwell, told the
Atlanta Journal and Constitution
that he was “really surprised” at the verdict because the evidence “was overwhelming against him.”

Dick Webb wrote an eight-page letter to the prosecutor, expressing his and Audrey’s anguish and anger over the result. He cited all the things he and his wife had done to help the case along, including noting the out-of-place decanter on which Redd’s fingerprint was found, which became a crucial piece of evidence. And Dick Webb decried all of the mistakes of strategy and oversights he felt the prosecution had made during the trial.

I was not there, so I cannot form an independent judgment of that. But I have reviewed some of the evidence, and whether the jury was confused or simply did not want to convict, it does appear to have been a serious miscarriage of justice. Dealing with the possibility that justice might be miscarried was not something the Fairfax Victim-Witness Unit had spent much time contemplating until the Johnson verdict.

Sandy says, “We were just completely blown away and felt extremely irresponsible in not having sat down with Audrey and saying, ‘What do you think you’ll feel if this happens?’ You have to accept the fact that we don’t have a perfect justice system.”

As devastated as they were, as deep and pervasive as the pain was, and is, the Webbs did not let this ruin their lives, which are active and full. They continue coming to group meetings, at this point mainly so they can support others who need their guidance
and perspective and can learn from their experience. Not only was Audrey’s mother a professional at a time when fewer women were, she was also a generous, giving, and loving person, and Audrey and Dick have certainly been honoring her memory by doing the same.

“What we need more of in this country,” Dick wrote, “is a clearer vision of what is the truth and what is the reality. The more passion we as a people have for truth, the closer we will come to better justice for defendants and victims and security for society as a whole.”

When offenders do admit guilt, or when the admission is thrust upon them by overwhelming evidence and a perceptive jury, another issue can emerge, and that issue is forgiveness. It is one that understandably comes up over and over again in victim-survivor circles. My own view is that, given the individual circumstances, it is sometimes possible to forgive a violent offender. Personally, though, I find it difficult to think of forgiving a murderer. As I stated in
Journey into Darkness
, the only one truly capable of forgiving the killer is the murder victim herself, and by the very nature of the crime, that is not going to happen in this world. Yet forgiveness must be a case-by-case issue and an individual decision. Some survivors may be able to move forward better if they offer it. Others need to see final justice executed before they can even consider it, and I have equal respect for both points of view.

As Carroll says of the group, “This table includes many people who are located at varying places along the road to recovery. Forgiveness may be the way to go for some, but it may not be for others.”

Carroll has defined the meaning and purpose of the homicide support group in terms of four initiatives, as she calls them.

“The group allows us to make victims safer. We can’t make people absolutely safe; that’s a myth, but we can help to make them safer.