On Friday, December 8, 1989 there was a knock on my door. (We had moved to our first duty station at Whidbey Island, Washington the previous May, and Erika had been born a month later. We lived in a very tiny two bedroom unit in military housing, and we hadn't had the money to get phone service, so our neighbors let us use theirs when we needed to. ) It was my neighbor, Ellen, and she told me that my mother was on the phone and needed to talk to me.
My mother told me that my grandmother had died. If you have read my blog before this post, you know that my grandmother had Alzheimer's, and that she lived with my mother. She was in the advanced stages of the disease when I last saw her before our move. But she had died three days earlier, on Tuesday, December 5. My mother told me that she hadn't called me right away because she "knew I wouldn't have had the money to come home for the funeral" and thought that if she waited it would save me from having to agonize over it. I was heartbroken, but it made some sense. I didn't know at the time that the Red Cross helps family members get home for funerals of immediate family. I had had no experience with death before.
Fast forward to December of 1991. My son Brandon had been born on December 13th, and it was the week before Christmas. My ex-husband called and told me that he thought he should call me before I heard it on the news - my mother had been arrested for social security and pension fraud related to the suspected murder of my grandmother. Even now, over twenty years later, writing it down hurts almost as badly as it did that day. I don't remember very much of the next few minutes, just the shattering shock that I felt.
The following months were a nightmare. There were calls from prosecutors and defenders alike who tried to lead me into speculative answers about what had been going on in the time leading up to my grandmother's death. I was truthful, but when they tried to get me to cross that line I just refused. They asked if my mother ever displayed abusive actions. So I told them about the night that she tried to push me down the stairs, and how on that same night my grandmother tried to come out of her room in my defense and of my mother slamming her arm repeatedly in the door until she withdrew it and stayed inside. How that was the night I left, sneaking downstairs to say goodbye to my brother and tell him that I loved him. (That night my grandmother came into my room and told me to go, hugging me and stroking my hair as she had done when I was little).
During all of this my then-husband had an affair because he felt he wasn't getting enough attention. I remember how dumb-founded I felt at his reason - I had had a baby in the middle of a move to larger housing , found out my grandmother was possibly murdered, my mother had been arrested - and I was supposed to make him the center of attention somehow. Somehow we worked through it, and for a while it actually seemed to make our marriage better.
The events leading up to my mother's arrest began to come out. The phone call to me three days after my grandmother's death was part of her cover up. She did something similar with my sister, telling her that there would be no service and that my grandmother's ashes were sent to Texas for scattering. And my brother, who actually lived in the house at the time? The day before Grandma died, Mom told him that she thought Grandma might die soon and she didn't want him there to see it, and sent him to my father's house in northern Alabama.
At this point you may be asking what seems to be a pretty obvious question: Why didn't the siblings discuss this and figure out that something was wrong? Because we weren't close enough, that's why. Even then, I had already had a falling out with my sister and we weren't on speaking terms. As for my brother, I always heard about him from my mother. He lived in the same house, so if I called Mom always answered the phone and if I asked about him I got his news from her - he was usually out doing something and even if he was home she always said he was 'busy' and so I rarely got to talk to him. It didn't strike us as odd - that was just the way it was. My mother had built up these walls for years - as it turns out she had done it with a purpose every time. More on that later.
We had relatives in Texas, whom we hadn't spoken with since we had moved away (remember the walls). One of them was my grandmother's nephew, Johnny. Since both of my parents were only children, we had called him Uncle when we were little. Uncle Johnny was very close to my grandmother, and unbeknownst to me, had been staying in touch with my mother as a means of learning about Grandma's health. As her Alzheimer's had progressed and after her death, my mother continued to respond to his letters with news of my grandmother's decline. I have never seen them, but in the fall of 1991 he had begun to grow suspicious of what was actually going on and hired a private investigator, John Dear, to go to Alabama and find out what was happening. This investigator discovered that my grandmother's church had a notation of her death in their books - my grandmother was an avid churchgoer before she could no longer do it, and members had been trying to come by and see her for some time. (They had always been politely turned away at the door.) Somehow my mother had slipped, or perhaps out of some sense of guilt, had notified Grandma's church of her death. Mr. Dear then began watching what was going on at my mother's house. A few days before her arrest he began to become alarmed when he found that she was getting rid of lots of papers, and he contacted the authorities. Her arrest followed shortly after.
My mother was the news headline in the area for quite some time. She had been a pillar of the community in so many ways - always involved in school activities, a formative part of the soccer community when it was still a new sport in the United States, eventual president of the school board, etc. etc. She was so intelligent, and it is so sad that she used that intelligence in the wrong way. The authorities dug up parts of the yard looking for evidence - and of course my grandmother's body. You see, none of the stories she told the various relatives were true. There had been no cremation, no burial. No ashes spread in Texas, or Alabama. The story she told the authorities was that she had had a man named "Johnny" take my grandmother and asked him to bury her under a pretty tree somewhere. "Johnny" had no last name at the time, and when she did give him one finally, he was dead.
To add to this, my brother was arrested briefly as well. As he tried to leave the house a day or two after my mother's arrest, he was accosted by a horde of reporters shoving cameras and microphones into his face, trying to get a reaction. Well, his reaction was to shove one of the cameramen out of his path, and charges were filed. It was let go, thankfully, when the private investigator kindly stepped into the situation and talked to them about what my brother was enduring.
So the months leading up to her trial passed. I had been asked by both sides to testify, but ultimately her defense lawyer felt that nothing I would say would help her, so I would be questioned first by the prosecutors. The trial had already begun by the time I got to Alabama. My sister and brother had already been questioned. I went to the courthouse the day before I was to take the stand and arrived in the outer foyer right before her trial let out for the day. One of my mother's dearest and most steadfast friends came out first, and she saw me and came to me, hugging me. Other people began to file out, then my sister came out with her husband, Rick, Uncle Johnny, Aunt Charlene, and a couple of others. She came straight at me, loudly accusing me of telling lies about her to people, about her doing drugs, stealing, being a liar. She attracted a lot of attention, as I believe she meant to. Then my childhood aunt and uncle intervened, telling her that maybe we should get together later at their hotel and talk about all of it.
Tanya and Rick left, and I was reunited with these two kind people who I remembered so well from my childhood. Before we left Texas we had visited with them and their children often, and I did not know why we had not seen them since. So we went back to their hotel, and their side of the story began to come out. They had stayed in contact with my mother all of those years, and she had dutifully filled them in on all of our news...but never told us about it. If we asked about them as children she always told us that they didn't want to come visit, and we never went back to see anyone. My mother had carefully, almost surgically, cut our ties to what little family we had in Texas and we never knew it.
They asked me questions and told me things about my childhood that began opening my eyes to the things that had shaped my mother and led to the tragedy of my grandmother. They carefully and kindly asked me if I remembered my mother holding a gun to my head and threatening to kill me. They told me that my mother, at the young age of sixteen, had hit my grandmother if she wasn't allowed to do something she wanted to do. They told me how my mother had tried to ensnare my sister's father, her boss, into marriage by seducing him and getting pregnant. It didn't work. My father was next - another boss, and this time she succeeded. He married her. So our lives had moved on, until we moved to Alabama. Then she began cutting our ties. Then my parents divorced. Whatever my grandmother knew about my mother, she was alarmed enough when she learned that my father would no longer be around to protect us that she left everything dear to her in Texas - her sisters, her home, everything familiar - and moved to Alabama to be closer and try to protect us from our mother. We didn't know any of this at the time of course. I just know that I loved spending every bit of time that I could at my grandmother's house. Then, at some point, to make things easier financially she moved in with us.
Then it was time to try to fix things between my sister and I before she got back. My sister, who I now believe to suffer from the same depression that my mother did, had already moved in with her silver tongue and told her story. Somehow she had transitioned her actions to me and convinced them before I arrived that I had been the drug addict and the runaway who had stolen the car at 13 and driven it to Oklahoma, but that I needed sympathy, not judgment. How kind of her. I still remember how flabbergasted I was by all of this. Thank God my brother was there and was able to collaborate my version of events. I did not "slam" her, but I did set the story straight. Very kindly they said that they did not know or understand her motives, but that we should try to work through our differences and help each other. When Tanya and Rick arrived it was hugs and tears all around.
The next morning we arrived at the courthouse. It was my turn. I would have to face my mother in court and talk about her slamming my grandmother's arm in a door, about how scared of her I was as a child. The attorney came in and said that apparently my mother didn't want me to testify and had asked to plea bargain that morning. Everyone was stunned. And why me? Maybe because I was the only one of her three children who had refused to step beyond only those events that I had actually witnessed was she concerned about what I might have to say. That is what the private investigator and the defense attorneys later told me was what they believed.
Her deal? She would cooperate with the authorities in the efforts to locate my grandmother in return for a lesser charge of the check fraud and 'abuse and neglect of an elderly person' rather than outright murder. The prosecutor was rather eager to pursue the more serious charges and I really believe he was disappointed that we agreed to this. But of course we agreed. All we wanted was to know where our grandmother was and to be able to give her a proper resting place. One other part of the deal is that she was not to contact any of her children unless we requested it. We were all so very angry at her. How do you continue to talk to your mother when she is not who you thought she was, but a sad, greedy monster who had done something so awful to one of the most wonderful people in the world?
I haven't explained the financial side of it, but of course she had taken control of my grandmother's social security checks as well as her pension checks from her years as a teacher in Texas. Over the two years after Grandma's death she had received about $24,000. Before that she wrote herself rent checks from my grandmother's accounts in the amount of $800.00 - a pretty exorbitant amount of money for a smallish three bedroom home in the late 1980's.
Her plea bargain made headlines throughout the state. (Her case was the basis for stricter laws related to care of the elderly and handling of their financial affairs, so it did have a positive side to it for others). We expected to hear news of where we could find our grandmother at any time, but a couple of months went by and all we learned was that she would insist that "Johnny" had buried my grandmother under a pretty magnolia tree in Mississippi - but every time she failed the lie detector tests, so they kept after her.
Then came the phone call from my father. It was a Saturday morning, and we were getting ready to go to a mall because my husband wanted to go to a pet store there that handled reptiles. I sat at the kitchen table while my father told me that my mother had been questioned again and this time she told a different story - one that passed the machines they hooked her up to to see if she was telling the truth.
After sending my brother away she sat and waited and watched my grandmother. She insisted that Grandma died on her own, which may very well have been true. Then she says that she panicked, thinking about how she would get by without the extra income from my grandmother's checks. About 3:30 in the morning she had wrapped my beloved grandmother, her own mother, in black garbage bags, put her body in the back of the car and driven out to the Causeway, the old highway over Mobile Bay that connected Mobile to the Eastern Shore. There, she took my grandmother out of the car and dumped her body over the side of the barrier and into the dark, black water below. She stood there, smoking, then got in her car, stopped for a six pack and went home and drank it.
When I heard this I felt a nausea overcome me unlike anything I had experienced before. those words hurt so bad, so deep, that I couldn't even cry at first. Then I couldn't stop. All day, in the car, at the mall (yes, my husband still insisted on going - he said it would help keep me from thinking about it - as if I could.)
So of course we still never did find our grandmother. Somewhere in the swampy, alligator infested waterways of Mobile Bay and its waterways she sunk below the surface. She may have been swept out into the Gulf of Mexico for all that we know, but of course we never will.
I will stop here for now. Re-telling this exhausts me - it brings back all of the emotions and the hurt. It took me many years to be able to think of my grandmother without crying, and now I find myself reliving it all again and it hurts as if it was just last week. I had vowed I would tell this story and now I have begun. I will move to the next chapter another time.
