Victim Impact after 7 years

Last summer I worked on a biography of my dad for the online journal

http://palaeo-electronica.org/splash/index14_3.html. Its November, 2011 issue was dedicated to my Dad. It contains a comprehensive review of his life and his profound impact on several different branches of paleontology. He continues to be deeply missed by the scientific community.

Now I have been invited to contribute to a very different kind of review: the parole hearing of one of the 5 people who ended his life. What relevant contribution can I offer to a parole hearing? It seems to me that what I have to say can best be expressed in an open letter to Ms. K.

Dear Ms. K,

Just over 7 years ago, you had a home and my dad was alive. Then, just after New Year's in 2005, you sat at your kitchen table while your husband and his associates plotted to ransack my father's home for drug money. I heard you took notes.

Mr. S claims that he told your husband and his friend to go at a time when my ailing father was not at home. This is ridiculous since he was mostly housebound. So they chose to go in the middle of the night. They succeeded in ransacking the house and savagely murdering my father.

Here we are 7 years later and I have been invited to write a Victim Impact Statement for your parole hearing. I don't know you. I don't know what the last 7 years have been like for you. I doubt that living in a Women's Correctional Institution has taught you much compassion. Perhaps you have learned to respect other people's property. Compassion and respect for others are the two qualities you need to learn. If you had either, you would never have participated in this inexcusable and horrific crime.

I understand you didn't know that my father had been murdered by your husband and his friend until a few days later. But the basic point is that you do not have the right to take other people's things just because you need more money for drugs. If you and the others had understood that basic fact, none of you would have planned to go over to his house that night in the first place.

But this is supposed to be a Victim Impact Statement. I am only one of the victims of your actions. Let me tell you a bit about what the impact of that night has been for me and for some others.

A large number of paleontologists are also victims of your rash deeds. They still miss him badly. You robbed the world of science of a unique and brilliant man.

My brother still worries everytime he goes out in public with his small children. He has become aware, thanks to the five of you, that the world is not a safe place and that he is helpless to protect the people he loves most from crazy, drug addicted people like the five of you. He copes with terror.

As for me, every year about this time, I have a very strong reaction. Sometimes I don't consciously remember that this is the anniversary of the murder, but my body remembers. I feel horribly sick or I have a night when I am utterly awake and jump at small sounds. Or I feel strangled and suffocated.

I saw the photos of what your husband and friend did to my dad and I heard the description of what it was probably like for him while he died. For a long time, I would dream it was me that it happened to and I would live through his last few moments over and over. I felt horribly guilty that I allowed him to die alone and by violence. It was his worst nightmare. I think I felt that, since I wasn't there for him when he was murdered, I could at least face the horror of his death and stand witness to it.

I think you knew that he was a WWII soldier since you wanted his Nazi memorabilia. Maybe you didn't know he had PTSD. He often had flashbacks of being a POW. I know he expected to die in POW camp. I wonder if, as he lay convulsing and suffocating, he hallucinated that he was back in the Stalag and dying. I imagine he did.

About a year after the murder, our landlady needed some work done on the roof of the building and insisted that I stay home in case the roofers needed anything. All I could think of was that the people who planned my father's murder were roofers! The first day I spent quivering and sobbing in a little ball in the corner of my living room as they pounded on the roof. I was sure they were coming in to murder me. The next day I told the roofers my fears and they assured me that I didn't need to be home for them. I spent the next few days at Starbucks.

This was about when I decided maybe I needed therapy. I have been in therapy ever since. My therapist has helped me let go of my fears, for the most part, and I rarely dream of my father's murder anymore. But only a year ago we needed a new furnace and the man who came to install it reminded me of Michael M. I completely paniced all over again. I called everyone I knew and talked to them loudly so that the installer would know that I was not alone. A good friend came over and stayed with me until he left and that really helped. But I still had trouble sleeping for the next 3 weeks because I was afraid they were going to come back in the night and murder my family the way you all did.

Any day I get mail from the Colorado State Department of Corrections is an automatic signal for my husband to order pizza because I will be in no condition to cook dinner. Yet I can't feel safe unless I know that they will keep me updated on the 5 of you.

We pay for the most expensive burglar alarm system we can afford. It connect directly to the police and fire departments and it has a “panic button.”

7 years ago, I was a confident, cheerful, happy woman. Most days I still appear to be that person. But a hard kernel of fear and mistrust has taken root inside me. It will bloom into full scale panic from time to time unexpectedly. I miss who I used to be.

I am a Catholic. Every week during Mass we say, “Forgive us our tresspasses as we forgive those who tresspass against us.” And every week when I say that one of your faces pops up in my minds eye. There is no one who has tresspassed against me more than the five of you. And I am supposed to forgive you. This makes me angry.

In the last 7 years, I have come to realize that you hurt me badly and damaged me (perhaps permanently) by your actions. But that was a one time act. As I allow myself to relive it, I am hurting myself over and over again. Some of that I can't help, but some of it I can stop by trying to forgive you. As I let go of my anger and grief and learn to forgive the five of you, I can slowly put an end to the nightmares and the terror. I must forgive the five of you so that I can stop the memories from hurting me any more. I have made some headway in forgiving the five of you for damaging me and my family so badly, but I still have a way to go. My father managed to forgive his captors and become a brilliant scientist in spite of his PTSD. I imagine he would want me to finally forgive the 5 of you so that I can be free from the damage you all did to me. 7 years has not been enough time for me or my family or the scientists to completely move on from that day.

I have no idea whether or not 7 years is enough time for you to be sufficiently punished or whether you deserve parole because I don't know what you have done with yourself while in jail. I am grateful that it really isn't my decision to make. I hope, if they allow you to move to a halfway house, you will manage to live a better life. I hope I never need to hear your name again.

No Escape

For the past few weeks I've had the honor of helping to write my father's biography.  I think that's something I'll blog about soon.  But the point at the moment is that I have been reading a huge stack of his letters to me and thinking about him a lot.  He's kind of been around the house.

And right on schedule, as we polish off the story of his life, the killers show up.  How apt and ironic.  I got an email from brother Bil updating me that the "best crack cook in Denver" has launched an appeal to get his trial overturned.  The prosecutor doesn't think there's even a remote chance that he will succeed, however the judge did give his position a hearing.  The only other appeal by one of the infamous five killers didn't even get that far.  The Victim's Advocate told me that inmates spend a lot of time submitting appeals that a panel of judges reviews.  Usually they reject the appeal without even giving it a hearing.  Kind of like the dark side of a PhD dissertation review.

Well this one made it past the first hurdle and I freaked.  I do this from time to time.  It isn't logical, it isn't controllable, it just has to be endured as lightly as possible.  The first time was pretty soon after the murder.  We lived in an apartment on the top floor and the landlady hired some guys to fix the roof.  The guys who killed my dad were roofers.  I spent day one of the repairs huddled in a corner of the living room listening to the roofers and crying and jumping at every boom.  It felt like living in a horror movie and the blood smeared nightmare was slowly beating down my door.  All day.  The next day and every day after until they finished I left the house and sat at Starbucks.  I also was particularly careful to check all the doors and windows at night for the next few months.  Charley's response was, "They aren't the SAME roofers."  Well, I know.  Those roofers are in jail.  The sentence for 3 of the 5 was life without parole.  (Expected date of release: December 31, 9999)

This doesn't have anything to do with logic.

I am supposed to be informed by the Victim's Advocate office when something occurs with the killers, like an appeal or a parole hearing.  I can't bear to NOT know, but whenever I get a letter from JeffCo Department of Corrections it's an automatic signal to order dinner delivered.  I can't cook or do much of anything for the rest of the day but knit and watch romantic comedies.  ("America's Sweethearts" and "No Reservations")

The second "episode" was almost a year ago.  You'd think I'd be saner.  He was murdered January 5, 2006.  Get OVER it already.  Our furnace died and we had a bunch of fully licensed, bonded, vouched for, insured and checked out guys come out to give us estimates.   Charley went to work and Sam and I entertained them.  This was hard.

They were all very nice, but then so were the killers.  My dad knew them and gave one of them a giant clam shell big enough for a small Venus to stand in.  One of the worst ways my Dad's murder has impacted me is that I am afraid to trust in my own instincts about who is nice and who is not.  I'm always trusting new people and then fearing they are planning to sneak in and murder me.

I got through the estimate phase of getting a new furnace pretty well, not too crazy.  But the day they were going to install it, I begged Charley to stay home and he pointed out, correctly, that I was being nuts.  I felt the panic rise and called a friend who agreed to drop everything and come over.  Then the installers showed up before she could get there and one of them kind of looked like the lead killer and crack cook!  I showed him the basement and was once again back in horror movie mode.  I called Bil and sobbed frantically, I called my friend whose sister was brutally murdered.  They told me they understood, (which made a huge difference) my friend arrived, the furnace got installed and works great.  And it's been almost a year and the Sears installers haven't returned to kill me yet!

Which brings me to yesterday.  After all these weeks of calling up my father's ghost, suddenly I'm reminded of the actual people who killed him.  And Charley is out of town.  He doesn't get back until Monday.  I seriously and calmly considered the fact that there is no real reason Sam and I have to leave the house until it is time to go get him.  In fact, he could take a taxi home.  I turned on the alarm and the tv, started a new knitting project and heated up left overs.  We stayed up watching "Music and Lyrics" and "27 Dresses" until way past midnight.  As we watched, I struggled with myself.  We are out of milk and batteries.  I really ought to go outside and buy more.  We have a chiropractor's appointment today.  There's mass on the weekend.  The killers don't even know my last name or what state I live in and, honestly, if they did get out, the LAST thing they are going to want to do is find me.  They are going to want to forget all about that January night.  They are going to want to move on with their lives.

No good.  There's just a part of me that KNOWS they are coming to get me. I wonder if prison is scarring them as much as they scarred me?  It wasn't full blown horror movie, but I could hear the creepy background music getting louder.

Finally about 2 AM I went to the internet.  Did you know that you can look up inmates and get their status?  And a recent photo.  The Darth Vader version of school pictures.  All five of them are still firmly in jail for the moment.  I thought one of them had been released, but she's still in there.  The two who will be out some day have failed at least one parole hearing each.  One of the killers who cried at his trial seems to have gained weight in prison.  He looks a lot less like a weasel now and a lot more like a killer.  The guy who got the clam still looks adorable.  This seems so unfair.  He's going to get out someday and charm someone else's dad.

But for now they are all in prison.  I have a plan.  I'm going to go out in the backyard and water my vegetables.  If that goes okay, I'll probably wake Sam up and go to the chiropractor.  I will not take along photos of the killers.  I have this urge to show them off like a crazed version of grandma showing off photos, "See how much they've grown in six years?  And look, this one's cut his hair!"

I will go to the store and buy milk and batteries.  They are in prison.  I am not.

Murder Most Foul

Ok it's been 6 years and 6 weeks since the murder.  I'm mostly back to normal.  But with glitches.  Charley fell down the other day - slipped on some slopped dish water on the kitchen tile.  He's sustained some bruises and for some reason felt that an elastic bandage might help the pain.  So he walked over to CVS and bought one.  So far so good.  

Well, he didn't actually use it, he just left it on the counter.  Enter me, early morning groggy, to find an elastic bandage box on the kitchen counter with a picture of an entire leg wrapped up ... like ... a ... mummy.


ZAP
Suddenly I am transported back 6 years and I'm sitting on a hard pew in a courtroom.  This isn't memory, it's a sci-fi flashback.  I could feel the hard wood beneath me.  To my right and up a few rows is a very sullen Richard James Kasparson.  A few minutes from now, there will be a break while the jury deliberates and he will turn an glare at me without blinking for several minutes.  Glaring with hate and menace in his eyes as if I am to blame for the fact that he is sitting there, awaiting the verdict of his peers for the charge of murdering my father.  I don't blink either.  When the jury comes back, several security guards with lots of weapons will enter the room.  Two of them will stand near me.  The night before Kasparson had bragged that if the jury said he was guilty he was going to "make a break for it."  I will feel safe with these burly commandos standing near me.

But right now the prosecutor is doing his summation.  "15 minutes.  That's how long it took for Charles Repenning to die.  7 minutes of seizures before he became unconscious.  I am going to talk to you about that death for 7 minutes so you can understand what the defendant put Mr. Repenning through."  And for 7 minutes he gave detail after detail of the my father's horrible death while huge slides flash on a wall of the courtroom.  Slides of the murder scene.  Slides of the lesions where he was bound with the telephone cord.  Slides of the bruises on his neck where someone tried to strangle him.  Slides of his body, naked except for boxer shorts and the elastic bandage wrapped over and over and over around his neck and face and mouth and ears and eyes and head.  

 It was the longest 7 minutes of his life and probably mine.

Six years ago I came home and threw away every elastic bandage I had saved over years of repeated sprained ankles.  I knew I was being crazy, but they looked to me like murder weapons.  Dangerous things to have in the house.  I gave myself permission to throw them away because, I reasoned, I was in shock.  I have walked carefully and refrained from high heels ever since so that I do not require another elastic bandage.  I haven't really thought about it since.  If I had, I probably would have thought that I was "over" that particular phobia.  I mean, really.  It's been six years.  Life goes on until you are murdered.  You have to move past the rough spots.  Right?  Apparently not.  Some things have changed about me permanently.

My reaction to that box yesterday was the same as it would have been if I found a rattlesnake in the kitchen.  Namely: don't panic, think calmly and protect your family by carefully getting rid of the dangerous thing.
I apologized to Charley and threw it away.

I feel much better, and foolish. 

Veteran's Day, 2010

My father, Charles A Repenning - World Famous Paleontologist and WWII Hero - (at least according to the Denver Post) requested in his will that he be cremated and suggested that his ashes be either thrown off the California Coast to sift down among his beloved Elephant Seals or encased in plastic key chains and sold as souvenirs at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting.  He suggested that this latter method was probably the only way we, his offspring, were going to make any money off his demise.

Knowing how opinionated, controversial and downright cranky the old guy was, I have my doubts as to how much money his remains would net us even if the key chains were gold plated.

The former idea, however, has a lot of merit.  The elephant seals that come ashore on California's beaches are extremely crabby beasts.  Off shore there is a party going on that is the elephant seal version of Spring Break on Florida beaches.  The guys who come ashore are the ones who can't find a partner in the mating game.  Dumping his mortal remains out among a bunch of sex-starved, grumpy males just seems so right. They were kindred spirits, so to speak.  I could add details, but won't.

However, 5 1/2 years after his murder, his ashes are still in my Chicago garage.  I haven't been able to arrange or afford a trip to California to dump him.

This morning we woke to discover that Veteran's Day was going to be beautiful.  Warm, sunny and fall colors everywhere.  It just doesn't get better.  And Charley wanted to get out into nature, but had an errand to do in Oak Park.  I suddenly remembered that the park where my Dad spent his childhood was a couple blocks from the place Charley had to go.  Somehow it just seemed TIME.  So while Charley did his thing, Sam and I walked over to the park.  I've been there a couple of times in the last 5 years, thinking about Dad.  This park has a few animals in cages: a red fox, a coyote, some birds of prey.  It had the same animals, apparently, 70+ years ago when my Dad was riding his bike to this park.  This is where he learned to love nature and rocks.  He and his best friend spent every spare moment in this place getting really dirty and I think it is still pretty much like it was then.  Sam and I walked around a bit and then we found a pretty remote place beside a fallen tree.

I opened the urn I had purchased for Dad and poured out his ashes.  The urn is made of a single piece of agate.  I figured, while waiting to get thrown off a cliff, he'd be happier encased in a rock like that than in the plastic box the funeral home put him in.  I had forgotten, but I also had put in a fossil mouse jaw and some of his dog's hair.  I poked those in among his ashes.  We sat there in the sunshine a little bit and thought about Dad as a little boy - full of wonder and curiosity.  Dad had come a full circle back to innocence, back to the place where he was happy before the war, before disillusionment and disappointment and bitterness.  Instead of letting him drift among rejected suitors, I laid him to rest in a place of possibility and wonder and I gave him fossils and dog hair.  He's with the places and things he loved most in the world.

 And I felt more peaceful than I have felt in 5 1/2 years.

Rest in peace, you old goat.  I love you.