I walked out the front door and into the wall of Ohio’s summer humidity. Even the newspaper felt sticky just minutes after its release from the deliveryman’s car. A clap of thunder woke the baby. I looked toward the blackening cloudscape. Great. Another day in paradise. I dashed for cover, ahead of the deluge about to pour for the sixth day in a row. God, I was homesick.
The storm rumbled over the house while I rocked my crying eight-month-old daughter, Brie. “I’m with you on this one, baby,” I nuzzled against her ear. “One more week and we can go home.”
I stretched out on the couch with the paper, only to have a headlined photo jolt me upright. KEEP KILLERS JAILED, SAYS SLAIN ACTRESS’S MOTHER. Captioned below the picture: “1969, Sharon Tate’s mother, Doris, and youngest sister, Patricia, mourn the day of the funeral.” Hot coffee splashed out of my mug and onto Brie. She cried, I blotted, and my day hit rock bottom, all by 6:30.
For almost three years, my marriage had entitled me to a new name, a chance to start over, and a means to abandon the depressive persona of Patti Tate.
I had effectively become an outsider. I was now a traveling young mother, married to a pro–ball player whose name was the only one appearing in the papers—under the sports section. We were just a couple who mundanely settled into various suburbs with each trade to another city’s team, socializing with a renewed circle of friends who didn’t have a clue about the wife’s sordid family history. At least that’s the way her husband designed things to be.
Long ago, I traded in the drugs for a calming glass of wine, or usually a beer—I am my father’s daughter, after all. These days, my childhood memories, good and bad, were well secured in a cavernous cellar that I seldom unlocked. On the occasions when I did work up the courage to open the cellar door, I stayed for only seconds, and I never dared pass the threshold to explore the gloomy catacombs, frightened of finding the bogeyman himself lurking, poised to attack with the ammunition of my childhood days.
God knows I love Sharon. But memories of her life brought sadness beyond repair; visions of her death, fear beyond comprehension. And so for emotional survival I’d packed only one thing from the past that I couldn’t seem to let go of, my high school boyfriend’s parting observation as our six-year relationship ended in 1978: “I don’t think you’ll ever allow yourself to be happy, and I can’t live my life that way.”
He may have been right; however, a coo from my daughter, or the feel of her tiny fingers frailly holding mine, had since brought me joy I couldn’t have dreamed possible.
I cradled Brie on the right, as I held the phone on the left. “Mother, why are you doing this to us?”
“Doing what to you?”
“Stirring up this mess again. You turned in over ten thousand petitions, now for God’s sake, leave it alone.”
“You’re beginning to sound like your father, and I’ll tell you the same thing I told him. It’s not a mess, it’s justice for your sister.”
“Justice? What are you talking about? All you’re doing is making Manson newsworthy again.” I read the article for the tenth time. “And what does this mean, ‘Mrs. Tate has joined forces with Parents of Murdered Children as a victims’ advocate?’”
“It’s nothing. The group heard about the petition drive, and asked me to give a speech at their next luncheon.”
“About what?”
“Surviving grief.”
I laughed. “Who are you to lecture about survival? What are you going to do, compare shrinks? Lithium doses?”
“Why are you getting ugly, Patti?”
“I don’t want my children growing up with this stain.”
“I’m sorry you think of your family that way,” she said, and then hung up on me.
Doris
My hand still rested on the phone; next to it was a pamphlet about Parents of Murdered Children. Beneath the abbreviated title POMC, their motto read, GIVE SORROW WORDS.
P.J. came around the corner. “I take it Patti saw the AP Wire?”
I nodded absently, turning the page to their timeline of the grieving process: The first stage is numbness, a defense against being overwhelmed by trauma.
“I don’t know why you refused to warn her about it,” he pestered. “I could have told you she’d blow a gasket.”
“She called us a stain.” Next comes the most frightening and painful stage, called disorganization. Parents are covictims, and many of them get worse when the legal process is finished. Now, they begin to pine for their child in earnest. They realize he’s never coming back. They have to reconstruct their whole belief system because the assumptions about the decency of humanity, the security of social order, and justice are all shattered.
“She’s just rebelling, like the rest of us.” He tapped the booklet. “We’d all be better served if you’d remember that you have children that are alive.”
I swiped his hand away. “How dare you? I held this family together through days that I barely had the will to breathe. For thirteen years, I’ve taken care of everyone but me. I’ve listened to psychiatrists, priests, friends, and family tell me, ‘Move on. You’ve got to get past all this. Start fresh.’ I listened and I tried until I thought I was losing my mind because I couldn’t forget.” I waved the POMC leaflet under his nose. “This group understands me. It vindicates my emotions—I’m a normal grieving parent. What in the hell is wrong with sharing that experience?”
“Because it’s none of anyone’s goddamned business what goes on in this family.”
“You’re being ridiculous. I’m not airing our dirty laundry. I’m getting help.” I stood to face him. “This is my journey, P.J. Come along or not. Either way, do it quietly.”
Patti
Eight days of silence from my mother was all I could take. In front of my parents’ house, I unhooked Brie from the car seat. “Not exactly the way I imagined our homecoming. Wish me luck.”
An arm reached around, tickling my belly. Then Mom leaned in closer until we were cheek to cheek. “Breezy, honey, tell your mama she doesn’t need luck, just some lovin’.”
I turned into her embrace with a renewed appreciation for being a needy child instead of a responsible parent. I snuggled against her chest. “You smell like a bakery.”
“I’ve got cookies inside,” she cooed to Brie, “and if we hurry, we can get some before Papa eats them all.”
“Too late,” Dad said with a mouth full. “Where’s that grandbaby of mine? The swimming pool’s calling our names.”
Like a million other California homes, my parents’ backyard held a swimming pool, adorned by orange trees and night-blooming jasmine, all concealed behind a high fence of privacy. It was strange watching my father and daughter playing together. “He’s good with her.”
Mom handed me a glass of iced tea. “He was good with you, too, only you were too young to know it. Try not to resent him so much. He did the best he could under the circumstances.”
“I love him; I just wish he wasn’t so detached.”
“Fleeting as they are, he has his gentle moments. You’ll never catch him saying it, but he loves you with all his heart. So you all better start figuring out how to talk to one another because he may be all you have someday.”
“You wouldn’t dare leave me alone with him,” I joked.
“Keep talking the way you did last week, and I might,” she smoothly coursed us into our shallowly buried argument.
“I’m sorry for the cracks I made, but I haven’t slept through the night since I saw that article. The whole thing scares the shit out of me. Every time you make the news, it’s like a billboard advertisement to come kill the rest of us.” I rubbed my tired eyes and pressed the frosted glass against an oncoming headache. “When all this started you told me to let God take care of it, yet here you are taking revenge.”
She took my hand and pulled me up. “Come with me.”
Inside the cabana, she pointed at the wall. “What do you see?”
I looked up and then ave
rted my eyes. “A poster of Sharon.”
“I know you don’t like to think about these things, but look deeper.”
I needn’t look at it again, for the answer freshly lay on the tip of my tongue. The larger-than-life portrait was a long-standing friend of my youth that had quietly listened to countless confessions in Sharon’s absence. Try as I may to erase painful memories, the dark honeycombs of my mind preserved every intricate detail of this photo that revealed my sister’s essence.
When I grudgingly glanced up, tears brimmed over to rest on my cheeks. “Her eyes twinkle with the faith of her dreams.”
“Yes,” Mom whispered. “And when the ones that stole that from her go to meet the Lord, I’m sure He’ll have something special for them. In the meanwhile, we have to do our work here.” Her lips snubbed my tears. “It’s not revenge, darlin’, it’s the price they must pay within the laws of man.”
“All right. But here’s the deal, not another word or picture of me or my family to the press.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “But tit for tat, in two hours I’m due to speak at that POMC luncheon and I could use the crutch of a friendly face.”
It sounded like a miserable afternoon, but she caught me in a weak moment.
Dessert remnants and coffee littered the banquet tables. “Guess we missed lunch,” I said, folding my arms protectively over my chest, half-expecting to find brain-sucking aliens within a group that gathered to talk about murder.
“Mrs. Tate?” One of them approached with blond hair, endless legs, and a nametag that marked her president of POMC. “I’m Connie. I was afraid you weren’t going to make it.”
“I’m sorry. I had car trouble. This is my driver, Gayle.”
Speechless from her easy lie, I cleared my throat and smiled.
“There are two open chairs in the back. Lauren is speaking now, then you’re next.” The woman handed us a program before she flitted away as quickly as she’d come.
“Your driver?” I whispered out the side of my mouth.
“Shhhh,” she nodded toward the petite woman whose head barely cleared the podium.
I scanned the leaflet. Lauren, single parent, whose only child, Holly, was beaten to death in 1980.
I looked toward the front of the room, where the microphone hardly amplified the voice of the once-doting mother. “Holly had just left home after dinner one evening. She ran out very happily on her way to meet a friend, and that was the last time I ever saw her. Through the long night I tried to convince myself that nothing was wrong, until a call came through from a detective who said, ‘We think we have her body.’”
Mom wrapped her arm around my waist, and I slid closer into the shield of her girth while I reflected on a parallel diary. I looked around at a group that proved murder was unbiased in its pursuit. Deterred not by age, race, or social order, it hunted rather like a child: eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Watching these parents’ haunted eyes, I knew what I’d do if it happened to my child, and it wouldn’t be sitting in one of these meetings, nor would I ever attend a parole hearing—except for my own.
Lauren dabbed at her nose. “Her face was destroyed. They were unable to tell what color her eyes were. There were no teeth; her brains were out. . . . I desperately wanted to let go and go with her. I haven’t had the guts. I really don’t enjoy wallowing in self-pity. I’d been a mom for a long time. I still wake up in the middle of the night screaming, convinced for the moment that I have witnessed my daughter’s murder. There’s a terrible feeling of failure if someone kills your kid, because you didn’t protect her. Nothing is easy anymore, but everyone here has helped me to bear the burden. Thank you.”
Connie picked up her lead. “Bob and Charlotte Hullinger formed POMC following their daughter’s murder in 1978. After their ordeal, they courageously set out to help other parents in need of emotional support and practical advice. Today, I’m proud to announce another courageous parent and first-time visitor, Doris Tate.”
Mom didn’t take the cue, in fact her arm anchored tighter around me. I nudged her with my elbow. “You’d better get up there before people start wondering why you’re hugging your driver.”
“What did you say this morning about being scared shitless?”
It was obvious only to me how nervous she was; especially noticeable when she used a ploy that I hadn’t seen since my teenage couch lectures, as I used to call them. Then and now, she painstakingly rubbed her glasses clean with a tissue while she organized her thoughts. Scrutinizing her work, she put the lenses up to the light before placing them on her nose. “There, that’s better,” she smiled at her audience. “My daughter Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson and his gang in 1969. It’s taken me thirteen years to speak those words. God and the Blessed Mother give us the gift of denial, and I fluctuated between denial and panic for all these years. What Sharon went through the night she was murdered will never leave me. But now I have to be strong, because her killers have become eligible for parole.”
She searched the diverse faces until she found Lauren’s. “Your feelings are the same as all our feelings. We’ve all met the same challenges both personally and judicially. The dilemma is, what do we do?”
Mom shrewdly gazed at me. “The two questions I find myself asking lately are, when they’re paroled, does my daughter come back to me? Does the punishment fit the crime? No. Your case, my case, it’s all the same case—we’ve lost a child. And we’ve got a lot of work to do here to ensure that their justice prevails. Thank you.”
A nurturer at heart, Mom milled through the group with a sympathetic ear to anyone who approached. I lagged far enough behind her to remain anonymous, and unfortunately, close enough to hear the shared stories. “At the morgue, I stepped off the elevator and walked right into my son’s naked body lying on a gurney in the middle of the corridor. . . .”
“There I was, next to a chute, and like a side of beef, my daughter slid down in a plastic bag so I could identify her—although there wasn’t much to go by. No one warned me that her face had been blown off. But there was a tattoo. . . .”
“It was so cold the night Nancy was murdered, and the boy that killed her left her with only one sock on. It rips at me to think of her dying all alone in the cold darkness. The police found a blanket five feet from her; if that boy had only thrown it over her, I don’t think I’d hate him so much. . . .”
“I stood up in that courtroom and asked, ‘What about Ginny’s rights?’ And do you know what that judge told me? ‘Mrs. Thomas, Ginny lost all her rights the day she was murdered. . . .’ ”
“You’re not really her driver, are you?”
I turned cautiously to see who was bold enough to address me.
“That’s okay; you don’t have to answer. I’m John Mancino—probably the only one here who hasn’t been victimized.”
“Listen, I’m really not interested in talking to a reporter—”
“No worries.” He smiled. “I’m with a group called Citizens for Truth. We’ve done a lot of work with keeping high-profile criminals behind bars. Mrs. Tate looks pretty busy, and I have to leave. Would you give this to her?” He handed me an oversized envelope. “My number’s in there if she’s interested. And don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.”
FIRST THE MEETING and now gridlock traffic. I inched the car forward through the rippling heat that almost glowed above the freeway and gave me a craving for an ice-cold beer. Mom picked through the envelope Mancino gave me. “Who’s the Onion Field Killer?”
“I don’t know.”
“This group raised twenty thousand signatures against his release. Same thing with Sirhan Sirhan. What was this guy Mancino like?”
“Didn’t talk long enough to find out.” My patience thinned.
“It says here that his group is looking to ‘find solutions to our criminal justice system by electing to office officials committed to challenging the government into showing more compassion for the victims.’ Listen to this, there’s a vi
ctims’ bill of rights—”
I put my hand over the page. “Mother, I can’t listen to another word. I just spent two hours eavesdropping on stories about girls having their heads bashed in and mutilated bodies dumped in rock quarries. I’m so depressed I want to puke.”
Moments passed in air congested with everything but conversation. I turned on the stereo. She turned it off. “You know, all these killers, they get to speak up and tell everyone how badly they want out of jail. Or how they’ve earned a degree. Or how they’re a better person now. Their victims, including your sister, will never have that second chance. They’ll never be able to say how much it hurt to die. We’re their only outlet and damned if I’m not going to be Sharon’s.”
“I don’t think she would want your life to revolve around her murder.”
“You may be right, but she’d want to help others, and I can do that because her case is so famous.”
“God, you’re stubborn.”
“And don’t you forget it, my dear,” she said, patting my knee before flipping the radio back on.
Doris
Later that night, I crawled into bed with John Mancino’s packet. I shuffled through the papers until I found what had earlier piqued my curiosity: The Death Penalty Manual.
The California Public Defenders Association promoted the ten-page article as a guide filled with tidbits on achieving a victorious trial outcome.
Delay: A prosecutor usually wants to try a case when emotion is high. Time is a healing force. However, if you don’t think you can delay it to a better disposition, then decide when you think the best possible time is to try the case; perhaps December, around Christmastime.
Engage in Paper War: Motions are trouble to respond to and prepare for. File a lot of motions in every case. You can even make motions challenging the configuration of the courtroom.
Rehabilitate your client: You need to be prepared to present all the good that can be said about your client and all the bad that can be said about the victim. District attorneys recognize that some victims need killing and if you can show that the victim in your case needed killing, even a little bit, this could be a real help.
Restless Souls Page 17