So, when the topic of that year’s annual September birthday cruise came up, I was exhausted and begged off. I just couldn’t go that year. I had taken off so much time, between moving in March and Laureen’s visit, that I didn’t have any more vacation time left. But Ann wasn’t taking no for an answer from Susan, so the two of them went without me and I was fine with that. She and I were having some relationship issues anyway, so the time apart was welcome. “Go,” I told her. “Go with your mother and have a fun birthday.”
That decision would haunt us both, in the years to come.
Susan went to Hudson to get Ann and her dog, Sadie, on Wednesday, September 10, and returned to our house the next day in preparation to leave for the cruise on Saturday. I was going to dog-sit.
I found out later, when the evidence in Mom’s murder was gathered, that while I was at work on Wednesday, Rickie purchased a Taser from the Spy Store on Colonial Drive.
Mom also went to work on Wednesday, and probably got home at her usual time, about 6:00 P.M. Her routine never varied: in bed by nine-ish, up very early, maybe 4:00 A.M., drink some coffee, read the paper, get a bite to eat, clean the house, take any morning trash—including coffee grounds and the newspaper—out to the can, and head to work. She was planning on going to Boston on Friday, so she would have been particularly meticulous with her schedule.
On Thursday evening, September 11, Cheryl called to ask if I had talked to Mom that day. I told her that I spoke to her on Tuesday, but not since then. She said, “Well, I talked to someone at her work. She didn’t come to work today.” That was unusual, because Mom never just didn’t show up. She was extremely reliable. However, because she was going to Boston the next day, I told Cheryl that I would check to see if she left a day early.
Instead, Cheryl called the woman with whom Mom worked at the airline, to check, and called me back to say, “No. She didn’t leave a day early.” So I got Rickie and we went right over to Mom’s house. Her car wasn’t in the driveway, and he had to let us into the house. He had the only key, because he had just changed the locks after Laureen’s visit.
I walked in the house and noticed that some of Mom’s things were missing: some of her clothes, jewelry, her suitcase. Some pictures were gone from the wall, there were papers on the kitchen counter, the coffeepot was left out, and her Oil of Olay was on the bathroom counter. Mom never, ever, ever left a mess like that. Never. Not even a coffee cup drying in her sink. You could walk in there any day of the week, with no notice, and showcase that home to sell it. Other than the dents and holes in the wall from my father, it was immaculate.
On the kitchen counter was a letter from Social Security stating that our father’s presence was requested, to update their records on him. The counter was covered with all sorts of financial papers, which was also not like my mother at all. She was always extremely private about her finances and personal information. Rickie called Cheryl and said, “The nightmare is back! You have to get over here right away!” She was there within five or ten minutes. It wasn’t a very long drive from her house to Mom’s.
Cheryl and I went through the house. We were in the kitchen and she was standing by the refrigerator. She had a strange look on her face, and I asked, “What’s wrong?” It was so bizarre—she opened the freezer door, looked at the food in it, and said, “I know where Mom is,” and closed the freezer.
She recalled the story a little differently, in her deposition. She remembered getting goose bumps, looking at her arms, and saying, “Something has happened. Something is terribly wrong,” but I distinctly remember her opening the freezer door and saying, “I know where Mom is.” At the time, I thought she was nuts, wondering what the hell she was talking about, but maybe she was having some sort of a psychic vision, because the evidence showed that Mom’s body was put in a freezer before she was buried.
The police were called, and Cheryl took charge. She sat down to file the report with the officer, who made it clear that only one of us should do the talking and Cheryl was doing just fine. She told him that Mom’s car and personal things were not there. She noted that Mom’s work clothes were gone, instead of her leisure clothes, which is what she would have taken with her if she had left on her trip. Cheryl used to borrow Mom’s clothes all the time, and she knew which closet held which kinds of clothes. Mom kept her work clothes in her bedroom but the leisure clothes in the spare room closet.
She also put down on the report that, because of the family history of domestic violence, we believed Mom might be in danger and that she may have left, involuntarily, with our father in order to protect her grandchildren because he might try to abduct them or kill them.
The report said, “Ms. Bracken said, fifteen years ago her father told her he promised he would return and he would kill her or hurt her in a way she would never forget. She stated their family suffered from an extreme history of domestic violence, including verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. Ms. Bracken said one incident included their father breaking their mother’s arm while she was pregnant at the age of seventeen. She stated they also witnessed their mother being kicked about her head and stomach area several times by their father. Ms. Bracken said their father often used knives or a gun to create fear and rule the home.”
Cheryl found Mom’s address book and told Rickie she was going to call each and every number in there, but he took it from her and said he’d take care of it because she had a job and kids, and he had more time. Mom’s coworkers told Cheryl, later, that Thursday morning when Mom didn’t show up, they checked her work voice mail and found a message left by my brother at approximately 7:30 A.M. asking, “Where were you last night? We missed you for Buffy night. Oh yeah, Stacey says hey.” They thought it was strange, and so did I, because Mom never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was not a Buffy fan.
Rickie went to the DMV on Friday to change his address from our house to Mom’s and drop the “Jr.” from his name on his driver’s license, so—he said—he could pass as our father and access Mom’s bank accounts to track any activity. Susan left on Saturday, with Ann, for the birthday cruise. She asked if I wanted her to stay behind, but Ann was adamant that they go. “She’ll be fine.” Ann insisted, “The police are doing their job, and those tickets are nonrefundable!” Reluctantly, Susan went with Ann, but she promised to call from the ship before it left the dock. On Sunday, I went back to work and just hoped that something good would happen. There was nothing I could do, and I had to go to work. We had bills to pay, and sitting around the house wasn’t finding Mom; it was just giving me more free time to worry.
Monday we met Cheryl at Daniel’s football practice, and Rickie brought a legal pad with him. He told us that he had met with the IRS and Social Security that day, and that he had discovered that there were warrants for Mom’s arrest for tax evasion. He said that the IRS was going to seize her house, and Social Security was going to prosecute her for all of our father’s checks that were in her account, which still had his name on it. He wouldn’t let either of us see what he had written on the pad, even though Cheryl kept trying to take it from him and read it. He kept saying, “No, I have it all right here,” as if that was an answer. Then he said that Mom had given him power of attorney over her affairs before she disappeared, which Cheryl had a real problem with, because as far as she knew, she had power of attorney, and Mom had never advised her otherwise.
When he started taking stuff out of Mom’s house, saying that he was removing her things before the IRS could seize it, we believed him. He told Cheryl that he didn’t want either of us involved because he would be the only one with his hands dirty.
While Susan was away on her cruise, Rickie was emptying Mom’s house by the van load. Mom’s neighbor Steven saw him carrying out countless black plastic trash bags, some of them for the weekly trash pickup, but many more were put in his van and driven away. We found out later that he only kept things with a monetary value. Everything else, he just pitched: all of our family photos, yearbooks, memora
bilia—gone. He made a point of taking a few things out of her house and bringing them to my house. He took her fridge and some DVDs for the kids.
My birthday was a few days later, on September 19, and I didn’t feel like celebrating. To be honest, I didn’t expect any sort of celebration. Cheryl was still mad at me because of the Daniel incident, and now everyone was upset about Mom. I thought my birthday would just sort of come and go without notice. But I was surprised when Cheryl, Chris, and their three kids dropped by to bring me a gift. I had to hurriedly lock Ann’s dog in her room because Sadie didn’t like kids and I was afraid she would bite someone. Daniel needed to use the restroom, and started heading to that room, but because the dog was in there, I directed him to the other bathroom.
At the time, I didn’t give these mundane events much thought, but Daniel told me something about the way Rickie acted that day, years later after the trial was over, “I looked in his eyes and knew he did something. I didn’t know what, I couldn’t put it together, but I knew because he was looking to see how much I hurt.” I can understand how a twelve-year-old wouldn’t know what to do with that, but I wish he had said something to me about it then. He just held on to that feeling; he just knew Rickie had done something.
Daniel knew, at the time, what Rickie had said about killing our father, and didn’t say a word. It wasn’t until Mom was missing for over a month or so that he told Cheryl. He didn’t say a word to me, eight days later when he walked in my house and he sensed that Rickie knew more than he was telling.
I also didn’t find out until years later that Rickie sent an e-mail to Senator Bob Graham, on September 20, demanding an investigation into Mom’s accounts because he believed that she was defrauding the government. He started the investigation nine days after she died. He was going to need letters to show to me and Cheryl.
No one but Rickie knows for sure when exactly he moved Mom’s body from the house to the storage unit freezer, and then from there to the grave he dug in our backyard. I’ve checked Susan’s meticulous calendar for clues, and the only time that looks likely is two weeks after Mom disappeared. Susan finally got home from the cruise on September 20, and Rickie took us out to dinner and a movie on September 24, 25, and 26. That was the only time that entire year—before or after Mom’s death—that the three of us went to dinner and a movie three nights in a row. This would have given him three full days to dig that hole in the backyard during the day, and a way to distract us away from using the pool in the evening. Hindsight surely is twenty-twenty.
CHAPTER 22
A Family Divided
It seemed like, after Mom’s “leaving,” there was always something odd going on. One day Susan was coming out of the bank and, to her frustration, noticed that her license plate was missing. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another! She reported the plate stolen and had to go get a new one. We were wondering if our weird luck would ever change.
The month of October was pretty much a blur. Susan and I kept busy at work, Cheryl and I still weren’t speaking, and Rickie kept emptying Mom’s house and reporting his “progress” to us. Every couple of days he’d tell us about an appointment or phone call he had with this official or that, and we were grateful to have him taking charge. I assumed, because he had updated Cheryl about the IRS and Social Security at Daniel’s game, that he was keeping her in the loop. Once again, hindsight was to show me later that he did not. But since she and I weren’t talking, I didn’t know that at the time.
More hindsight showed, in the form of trial evidence, that Rickie was in and out of his rented storage units an awful lot during October. In the meantime, he also started playing around online with Mom’s bank accounts. He left a voice mail for Cheryl saying that he had come into some extra money and wanted to put it toward payments on her car. He set up online banking privileges so he could “billpay” out of Mom’s account to four recipients: himself, me, his business—Emerald Electric, and our new landscaping business—Green Acres. In early November, he began sending out checks, much like he did with Catherine Crews’s fire insurance money when he sent funds to Mom and Mary.
The $2,500 Christmas check, written to me, is the one that would come back to bite me later. I don’t recall ever seeing that check, and the endorsement on the back said, “Stacey Kananen.” I always, always sign my name Stacey M. Kananen. I don’t know why; I just do, and always have. When Toni dug up ten years’ worth of paycheck endorsements from Disney, she was able to prove that. Yes, the handwriting looked rather like mine, but I will go to my grave not remembering ever seeing that check.
In early November, Daniel finally told Cheryl about his conversation with Rickie about his killing our father. Cheryl, of course, immediately contacted law enforcement (she neglected to tell me and Susan), and they turned the case over to the Homicide Division, who assigned it to their newest rookie detective, Mark Hussey, as “busy work.” Hussey, who became a cop because of his admiration for the TV show Dragnet, took the ball and became so gung ho that he was unable to tell when he ran it out-of-bounds.
Hussey and Cheryl began communicating on a regular basis, tossing ideas off of each other, and their suspicion of me began to grow—again, without my being aware of any of this. I didn’t even know that the case had been turned over to the Homicide Division until late December. The detective told my sister to invite us all over for my niece’s birthday that November, to see if she could discover anything—he put her in the position of being his sleuthing sidekick—but told her to make sure that she had someone armed in the house. She invited a friend of the family, who attended the event, armed with a gun. When I found out about this, much later, I was devastated that they knew Rickie had told Daniel that he was a murderer but didn’t do anything to warn either me or Susan about the fact that we might be living with a killer.
I thought we were invited over because Cheryl was maybe trying to patch things up. They did, after all, come over on my birthday, and we did have our missing mom in common. Now was not the time to be mad at each other over the whole August incident. I had been leaving the occasional voice mail to check in, but we really didn’t talk other than that.
It was a week later, in mid-November, that Susan and I had our garage sale. It’s become such a point of contention that there is no way to talk about it without sounding guilty or like I’m making excuses. But people have garage sales all the time and there is nothing wrong with that. We had a garage sale, and in addition to a lot of other excess household items, yes, we were selling some of our Disney collectibles. We had hundreds of them, many of them duplicates. Detective Hussey, on his day off from his first days on the case, decided to mosey by that day. We didn’t know him at the time, and he recognized me from my driver’s license picture. He saw that we were selling Disney items and called Cheryl, telling her that we were selling Mom’s things.
Before I knew it, the phone was ringing. It was Cheryl, absolutely unhinged, saying, “Who the hell do you think you are and what have you done with Mom?” I was more than a little pissed by her accusation and said, “If you bothered to come over and check for yourself, I’d prove that I’m not selling Mom’s stuff.” She hung up on me and never came over. That was pretty much the end of all communication with my sister. I don’t think we’ve spoken since that day.
So now it was just me, Susan, and Rickie, who kept saying that he was on top of things, that he was taking care of business. He was getting Mom’s affairs in order, clearing the house of her stuff, and talking to the IRS and Social Security, taking care of the charges and warrants against her so she could come back home. I was on my way home from work one day when I saw him at Mom’s house, with the garage door open, and he was talking to a man inside the garage. I stopped to see what was going on.
He introduced me to the gentleman and told me that he planned to take the carpet up from the garage floor and put a nice, clean covering of river rock down, the kind they use for pool decks and patios. He told me that if the IRS and Social Security f
orced us to sell the house, we’d get more money for it, because the cement under the carpet was cracked and damaged.
Once again with blinding hindsight, I now realize that he needed to make sure there was a new finish on the floor because if somebody bought the house and decided that they didn’t want carpet in the garage, they’d take the carpet up and see the steel plate that covered my father’s concrete grave. Silly, naïve me, I just said, “Sounds good. Go ahead.” And he did.
In late November, Rickie came home with good news: he had won the Fantasy 5! He played the lottery frequently and was happy to report that he won a large chunk of money. Neither Susan nor I asked the exact amount, because you don’t ask other people about their money if they don’t volunteer the information. When he offered to make a couple mortgage payments or pay off Susan’s car—our choice—in exchange for free rent since we were running out of renovations for him to do, we gladly took him up on it. He also helped me with a down payment on a new truck, which I badly needed. I traded in my old truck and got a gorgeous new one. I loved my new electric blue Nissan pickup. The payments were affordable enough, even if it would be tight with the house payments, and I was content. Rickie apparently had enough lotto winnings left over, because he bought himself a new Dodge Ram and paid it off in full.
There were a lot of things going on under the surface that I didn’t find out about until years later, while preparing my legal defense with Diana. For example, by early December, Detective Hussey had started looking into my mom’s bank accounts. The account was frozen, and if anyone called about it they were to be given instructions to call Hussey.
About a week later, Detective Hussey brought Cheryl and Daniel into his office for an interview, and Daniel told him some fascinating things. Even though he had previously told Cheryl that Rickie admitted to killing our father—which I also did not know about—that day Daniel told Hussey, “Uncle Rickie told me another way to kill somebody. You Taser them. He told me he had a Taser.” The boy added, “A whole week before my Grandma’s disappearance she was talking about dividing all my grandfather’s stuff up and giving it away. The money, the stuff and everything. [Uncle Rickie] also mentioned that he was gonna write a book when everything was coming to an end.”
Fear of Our Father Page 16