Fear of Our Father

by Stacey Kananen

  There are those who just don’t understand the mind games that people like my mom play in their own heads, just to get through the day. Typically, victims convince themselves, “It’s not that bad. We’re still alive. It could be worse.” They build these bizarre little internal worlds where they honestly believe that. They’re gradually eased into these awful scenarios, like lobsters in a cooking pot: “Yes, it’s getting a little hot, but I’m sure it won’t get any hotter.” Before they know it, they can’t escape and they get boiled alive.

  Most important, people who’ve never been abused don’t understand that a woman who is courageous enough to stand up to and leave a severely abusive man is probably not going to get involved with him in the first place. Abusers don’t make it very far into relationships with people who won’t take their crap. It’s a twisted cycle that can’t be understood from the outside, and talking to a therapist who didn’t grow up this way is a difficult and shame-filled process.

  When I saw an article in the newspaper in October 2010, seven months after my trial, about a two-year-old girl who had been returned to her abusive parents after fighting for her life in the ICU, I felt all those years of bottled-up rage that I was not allowed to feel for myself come pouring out. According to the story, “Doctors found fractured ribs, a severed pancreas, bite marks on her buttocks and thigh, and a fork-shaped burn on her knee.”1 She was returned to her home because there was no way of knowing which parent had hurt her! That’s when I knew that I was correct in my decision to share my story to help save kids like me and families like my own. Otherwise, all of our suffering will have been and will continue to be in vain.

  1 Alexandra Zayas, “Child Abuse Case Is Dropped,” St. Petersburg Times, October 20, 2010, p. 3B.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Safe Haven

  Susan and I moved to Hudson, Florida, north of Tampa, in February 2004, several weeks after our lives in Orlando exploded with tragedy and horror. My older brother, Rickie, was arrested two days before Christmas for murdering both of our parents, Richard Sr. and Marilyn Kananen. The murders happened fifteen years apart: Our father’s body was buried under my parents’ garage floor in 1989, after spending several months in a freezer. Mom, who lived just down the block from Susan and me, disappeared in September 2003 and—without my knowing—was buried in my own backyard that same year. I couldn’t bear to live in that house or in Orlando.

  A couple hours west on State Road 50, Susan’s parents, Ed and Ann Kirk, who were embroiled in an ugly divorce at the time, both owned Gulf Coast Resort, a nudist resort in Hudson. This wouldn’t have been my first choice for a place for us to start over, but it was our only option. We needed to go somewhere where at least one of us had family. I couldn’t hold down a job, given the state of mind I was in. I had also just been released from the psych ward after trying to commit suicide—my brother, knowing the police were onto him, had convinced me that I would be implicated in the murder and suicide was our only option. Fortunately, the Orlando police, who were following us, found and rushed me, almost dead, to the hospital where I was treated and Baker Acted (involuntarily admitted for observation). Rickie, who was conscious when they arrived, was taken to jail after a brief checkup in the ER. That night, after Rickie implicated himself in both murders, Orange County Sheriff’s Office crime scene technicians dug up my backyard to find Mom’s body, after they dug up Mom’s garage floor to find our father’s desiccated corpse.

  I needed to move away from the toxic environment I had found myself in, and so we made our way from Orlando to Susan’s mother’s house in Hudson.

  Ann ran the resort from her three-bedroom home in the nudist housing development adjacent to the resort because it was hard for her to get to the office due to a severe case of cervical spondylosis, aggravated by her own injuries from past physical abuse. The disease took over her spine and left her unable to walk. Ann was disabled, physically, but not mentally. She was sharp as a tack and just as prickly.

  Gulf Coast Resort, or GCR, and the adjacent housing subdivision, City Retreat, covered about a hundred acres. The resort had RV sites, rental units, and tent sites. Add a pool, hot tub, clubhouse, the office/restaurant, and lots of live oak trees draped with Spanish moss, and that pretty much describes the park. City Retreat included mostly prefab homes and double-wide trailers, many of which were only occupied when their “snowbird” inhabitants traveled south for the winter. Contrary to what most people think, there was not a lot of excitement, just people living their everyday lives without clothes.

  Until we moved there, I hadn’t spent much time at the resort. I didn’t see anything wrong with nudism, necessarily, but I also didn’t yearn to participate. Susan and I had created a life for ourselves and settled into a beautiful home a couple of hours away, in Orlando, where my mom, sister, brother, and I all continued to reside after my father “left” in 1988. I met Susan shortly after his disappearance, so I had more of a reason to stay in town. Susan and I both found jobs at Disney World, and we liked Orlando, so we settled there. But following my mother’s murder, living in the cute little house in Orlando where we had moved less than a year earlier to be closer to Mom and a couple miles from Cheryl’s family numbed me to the core. I had to get out. I couldn’t bear looking at the backyard or even out the front yard, from where we could see Mom’s house. We had spent so much time fixing up our home and now it was a graveyard.

  The summer before my mom’s disappearance, Rickie, Susan, and I had spent months landscaping the yard. We pulled up the rotted, old boards that made up a walkway around the pool and replaced it with white gravel. It was starting to look just as we wanted, and we hosted pool parties for the family. Because we had such a great time working together, Rickie and I decided to launch a landscaping business, with Cheryl’s husband, Chris. We were just working on starting the business when Mom disappeared.

  Rickie, who helped pay bills by taking on jobs as a freelance electrician, started purchasing the tools and supplies we’d need and opened a couple bank accounts. He handled everything because, as he explained to me, he had experience opening his own business. I was relieved and glad to let him do it because I still had a full-time job and it was nice to have someone with experience taking care of all of the details. We didn’t have any clients yet, but I was excited and hopeful—and incredibly naïve about what Rickie was really doing with those bank accounts. It was all of the money juggling that he was using them for that made the police suspect me, along with him, in my mother’s death.

  On New Year’s Eve 2003, a few days after I was released from the hospital, Susan and I were heading to GCR in Hudson to visit Ann. As we tried to leave the house, we saw news trucks camped out in front, waiting to get some footage or an interview. But as soon as we looked out the front living room window and saw that they had gone to my mother’s house down the block, we hopped in the car. Unfortunately, we had to drive past Mom’s house to get to the freeway, and when they saw us, they hauled ass after us.

  Susan zipped in and out of freeway traffic on I-4, with me screaming at her from the passenger seat to slow down. Once we lost them, I said, “I can’t go back to work at Disney. I don’t want to be in this house. I can’t deal with all this drama.” I needed to quit my job and leave the house that now reminded me of my painful loss.

  She announced, “I already decided, we can move to my mother’s.” During that New Year’s trip, Susan and I agreed to move in February to Hudson, which would give us about a month to pack up our lives and take care of any loose ends. Susan went back to work for a month, and I only traveled from the bed to the kitchen to make coffee in the morning, to my chair in the living room until she came home in the evenings. I didn’t answer the door or the phone while she was gone. I wanted to be left alone. The dreadfulness of the situation brought back old coping mechanisms—shutting down and retreating inward—which were so thoroughly taught to me by my father, whom we kids fearfully referred to as “the monster” when he wasn’t within ea
rshot.

  But even those old tools, which served me well all those years, couldn’t drown out the thoughts that kept screaming out that my mom was dead. “My mom is dead, murdered by my brother. He buried her right there, in my backyard! And I’m the one who brought Rickie back into her life. I’m the one who tracked him down after he was gone for so long and found him living in squalor, after his marriage broke up. It was me who invited him to live with us, to thank him for trying to protect me from our father as we were growing up. God, if only …”

  That same January, Cheryl had a service for our mother, who had been cremated. I asked my attorney, Michael Gibson, whom Susan and Ann hired because Ann insisted on it, if I could attend the service. Michael advised me not to. He asked me, “Do you want to start a scene?” Of course I didn’t, but I wanted to pay my respects and mourn my mother’s awful death. Unfortunately, I also had to consider whether I would be looked at as being guilty if I didn’t attend. Yes, I wanted to keep the peace, but I didn’t want them to be suspicious of me just because I didn’t go to the funeral. He said, “I wouldn’t go. If they come and harass you about it you tell them your attorney said you weren’t going.” Meantime, my father’s remains had been cremated, but neither Cheryl nor I wanted to take them when they were offered to us. I don’t know what became of them.

  No matter how hard I tried to shut out the unbearable agony of what had happened in my own house, within my own family, I just couldn’t do it. Just like I couldn’t protect my mom all those years while my father treated her so cruelly and inhumanely, I couldn’t protect her from her own son, whom I had invited to move in with us when he needed a place to stay. I tortured myself nonstop with “if only …”

  I threw myself into the task of moving, but part of that dreaded process was tackling Rickie’s room, so Susan helped me in the evenings. In his closet, I found four of my credit cards, which I never used—I only had them for emergencies. They had my signature on the back. I put them away and wondered, “What was he doing with these?”

  I ignored the porn that I found and looked through his file cabinets to find out about our business bank account and his own account for Emerald Electric, to which he had added me as a signer. All of the banking information was gone. Then Susan found a handwritten manuscript for a book that he was writing, titled The Scales of Justice. I was only able to read the first few sentences before I became sick to my stomach and had to put it down. It was a dreadfully graphic description of how it feels to choke someone to death and watch the life leave the person’s body. Susan said, “We have to give this to the police.”

  She called to tell them what we had found, and Detective Mark Hussey came by to pick it up. I asked him if the police had the missing bank account records, and he said, “We don’t have any of those records. We thought you were hiding them.” I walked Hussey—an officious, square-headed man with a face like a bulldog—to my kitchen, and I said, “I bet they’re all in that shredder,” which was overflowing. Rickie had been up shredding papers a couple nights before he was arrested for our parents’ murders. I didn’t think anything of it. Susan shreds papers; it’s no big deal.

  Early in January when—thank God—Susan was home, Rickie’s public defender, Gerod Hooper, knocked on the door. Rickie had been in jail for a couple weeks and had stopped eating and taking the meds they were feeding to him. He was being examined to see if he was competent to stand trial and was putting on quite a show: starving himself, smearing himself with his own feces, and claiming to hear our father’s voice. He wasn’t doing well and his lawyer hoped I would help. I couldn’t do it. I could barely choke down a sandwich and wasn’t doing much better than he was. Even if I wasn’t so mad at him, I wouldn’t have done him any good.

  Then, to make matters worse, we got another visit in late January as we were finishing up packing the house, from Detective Hussey. At the time, I was unsure how he felt about me because when Susan and I asked him, weeks earlier, about getting my truck and Susan’s computer back, he wasn’t very friendly. Everything was moving so fast, and I was still trying to figure out what was happening. So when he showed up again, I didn’t know what to think.

  He saw that we were packing and he said, “I see that you’re moving, and I don’t blame you. However, there is no statute of limitation on murder, and I will arrest you one day.”

  I responded to him that I was going to call my attorney, Michael Gibson. He replied by saying that Michael knew he was there. I refused to let him see how his words affected me, but after he drove away, I freaked out and called my lawyer, asking why on earth he would let Hussey visit me like that and not at least give me a heads-up that he was coming. Gibson said, “I don’t know anything about this. If it happens again, don’t let him in the house and call me.”

  Even so, I knew that I would now be living under Hussey’s constant scrutiny. On this visit and during subsequent interactions, he was scary, intimidating, and apparently out to get me. Everything I did or would do in the future would be suspect, and slanted to fit into his ideas of who I was.

  The constant barrage of journalists, the threats and accusations—and, worse yet, my mother’s horrible grave in my backyard—made it impossible to attempt to wrap my mind around what had happened to my family, and thankfully Susan and I were able to get out of there, but not before letting all of the appropriate officials know where we were going, with addresses and phone numbers so it wouldn’t look like we were skipping town. We packed up our things and moved to Hudson.

  Although I didn’t know it at the time, as we were packing up our life in Orlando, preparations for our arrival at Gulf Coast Resort involved the entire staff. One of the rental units, an old one-bedroom mobile home on the lot next to Ann’s house, was not in use because it needed extensive repairs. Up until then, it had been used mostly for storage, so it was close and stuffy in there. There was a bigger place in the park, a small one-bedroom house, that we could move into, but it was being rented until the end of the season when the snowbirds went home, so we were going to stay in the trailer until the house was vacant that spring.

  When Susan and I first arrived at Gulf Coast Resort, I didn’t know about the resort’s gossip grapevine, and that everyone knew everything about everybody. They knew who was screwing who, who was late on their rent, who drank too much—you name it, they knew it. In February, when snowbird season was in full swing, there were plenty of people around to gossip about the news stories and articles that were filtering in from Orlando. And I had just unwittingly become fresh meat, the subject of incredible speculation. They were presented with their very own real-life murder mystery, and I was the unfortunate and unwilling star.

  GCR residents had read and heard about my attempted suicide in their local paper and from Orlando newspapers online. News reports came out on December 23, 2003, the day after Rickie persuaded me, in my fragile state, to join him in ending it all. Unfortunately, resort residents in Hudson had their heads filled with ideas about me and my family before I was able to settle in there. Once they caught wind of what was happening to the resort owner’s daughter’s girlfriend, they checked the online news reports daily. Some even set up Google Alerts to e-mail them anytime my name was mentioned in the news. The Orlando media quoted neighbors and others who just wanted to share their theories on the murders and my family. Some said that my mother didn’t want me living near her and that she felt like I was watching her. In fact, my mother had said these things about Rickie, but when these people were questioned about it with my name thrown into the mix, I was added in to their statements. In the eyes of the media, the public, and my future neighbors, I was already guilty.

  An Orlando Sentinel article called Rickie a “ne’er-do-well” who killed our mother for her money—$250,000, which she had inherited from her father when he died just before Rickie came to live with us. They also said that Rickie had been planning my mother’s murder for weeks before her death.

  Worse yet, they talked about that aborted suic
ide attempt in December. The papers didn’t mention the fact that Rickie walked away from it unscathed and I was hospitalized for days. They focused on one line, taken out of context, that I wrote in my suicide note, “We had a part in Mother’s leaving.” Those words would haunt me for years.

  It bothered me that people thought of Rickie as a “ne’er-do-well.” They didn’t know him as a person and were making judgments about him with practically no information. While I was angry with him in a way that words can’t express for killing our mother and implicating me in it, he was still my big brother, whom I loved. The mixed feelings I felt for him, and still feel for him, are one of the hardest things to deal with.

  He wasn’t a “ne’er-do-well”; he was mentally ill! It had become obvious, since December 2003, that he was deeply disturbed. He spent twelve pages of his manuscript rewriting the strangulation scene, and it just got more gruesome.

  While he lived with me and Susan, we were blind to his mental illness. I didn’t see the signs that he was going off the deep end. “Normal,” to me, wasn’t the same as normal to everyone else. Normal, in our family, was having a father who would make us sit in a chair and throw sharp knives for us to dodge, just for fun, and hold our mother’s head underwater in the pool, in front of us, until she was almost dead. If we dared to interfere we got it just as bad as she did. In comparison, Rickie looked downright saintlike and sane.