And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434)

by Spungen, Deborah

  We were wary of showing affection for one another, for fear that Nancy would get jealous. She needed all the love we had. She needed everything we had. This, too, was a problem.

  So was the fact that Suzy and David now expected us to do the same things for them that Nancy had forced us to do for her—send money, for example. They resented it if we wouldn’t or couldn’t give them what we’d given Nancy. It was necessary for us to explain to them that Nancy had been the exception to the rule. Then we had to tell them what the rule was.

  Our problems as a family were by no means solved overnight. But this was a start.

  Unfortunately, in my own case, I found it hard to concentrate totally on the family’s problems. I still needed to solve my own. The major one: finding something new to build my life around. Furnishing our new townhouse wasn’t enough. Nor was my one day a week of work. I still felt purposeless. I still had trouble getting out of bed in the morning. I had no drive.

  One morning I just decided to stay in bed. I was feeling a bit under the weather anyway. I turned on the TV set and crawled back under the covers with a cup of coffee. I flicked around, settled on the Phil Donahue show, then into the pillows. Four couples were on. They all belonged to a group called Parents of Murdered Children. As they talked, I sat up abruptly in bed, moved closer and closer to the set until I was no more than a foot away, hanging on their every word.

  I was not alone.

  Bob and Charlotte Hullinger, POMC’s founders, were on the show. Bob is a Lutheran minister in Cincinnati. Their daughter had been bludgeoned to death by her boyfriend while the two of them were exchange students in Germany. The family had been devastated. Bob, a clergyman, said he had been unable to find any words of comfort for them. Their son, who was David’s age, began to cut classes and stopped doing his term papers. Charlotte said she had felt totally isolated from everyone.

  “My biggest wish,” said Charlotte on the show, “was to find another mother to talk to who’d gone through what I was suffering.”

  So she contacted one whose loss she’d read about in the newspaper. They spoke several times on the phone. The families met to comfort and support each other. And they kept at it. That’s how POMC began. Chapters were now sprouting up all over the country. Wherever children were murdered.

  One couple on the Donahue show had launched a chapter on Long Island. Their teenage son had come home from school one afternoon to find robbers in the house. The robbers stabbed him. The boy stumbled onto the front lawn, cried for help. The robbers pursued him, stabbed him again, this time fatally. The men were apprehended, tried, convicted, and sentenced, but the boy’s mother said she could not rid herself of the fear that they might come back and “finish the job.” It took her a long time to convince herself that she wasn’t going crazy.

  Donahue asked them why they decided to start a POMC chapter.

  “We felt a responsibility,” replied the boy’s father. “We managed to survive, so we were obligated to show other parents how.”

  An Arizona couple spoke about what had happened to their nineteen-year-old daughter. A stranger had followed her home from a shopping center, shot her on her front porch—right in front of her father—then fled. The girl’s mother said she had had so many bizarre thoughts over subsequent months—paranoid thoughts, thoughts about suicide. She’d seen a therapist, she said, but therapists didn’t really and truly understand what the parents of a murdered child were feeling. Only other parents of murdered children did.

  I could not believe what I was watching. There were other families out there who had gone through what we’d gone through, felt the same feelings. Ordinary people, good people, who had joined together so they wouldn’t feel so alone in the world, so marked.

  At the end of the program the Hullingers gave their phone number in Cincinnati in case anyone wanted to call about joining the group. I dove for a pencil and wrote the number down, excited.

  I called. I spoke to Bob Hullinger for about ninety minutes. I told him how remarkable it had been to hear the couples talk about things on the program that I thought nobody else had experienced except us. I asked him if there was a POMC chapter in Philadelphia.

  “Not yet,” he replied. “Would you like to start one?”

  I said I didn’t know, I’d have to think that over. A few days later I phoned the Hullingers again and spoke to Charlotte. There was a remarkable bond between us, a kinship between two strangers. Both of us had suffered so many of the same emotional problems, and felt totally alone in doing so. I’d finally found that other mother who’d survived. I felt like I’d found a sister. She, too, asked me if I wanted to start a Philadelphia chapter of POMC.

  It was a hard decision for me. I had never been the sort of person to get involved in causes. I was not a joiner. Furthermore, we had at last found the measure of privacy and anonymity we craved. Starting a POMC chapter would mean losing that. It might mean losing a piece of myself, too.

  Then I remembered what that Long Island father had said on the Donahue show: “We felt a responsibility. We managed to survive.”

  I was a survivor. I still had troubles, but I was going to make it. It was incumbent upon me to be there for the others so they wouldn’t have to go through that private hell. After all, nobody else understood.

  I sat down with Frank and we discussed it. He was with me. We were committed.

  Shortly after that, Charlotte Hullinger called me to say she was about to appear on a local Philadelphia talk show to speak about POMC.

  “I don’t want to pressure you,” she said, “but would you like to go on with me as the representative of the new Philadelphia chapter?”

  “Yes,” I said without hesitation.

  I met Charlotte at the TV studio. We embraced each other like long-lost relatives. Then we went on the air. It was not easy for me. I had hidden from the cameras and bright lights; now I was seeking them out. The talk show host didn’t make it any easier by introducing me as the one mother in America “who knows the most about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” But I steered clear of the circus elements surrounding Nancy’s murder. I talked about what pain and isolation our family had gone through, and how valuable it was to reach out to someone who understood.

  I perspired freely and my voice quavered, but I did it. It was important. It needed to be done. I gave out Frank’s office number at the end of the show. He got seven phone calls from local parents of murdered children in the first hour, another ten throughout the day. I couldn’t believe there were so many in our own town. Frank took down their names and numbers and said I’d phone them back.

  And the Philadelphia chapter of POMC was in business.

  It was difficult for me to call these parents. Each was sharing their pain with a kindred soul for the first time. I felt their pain over the phone. I invited each of them to a meeting at our house. Most of them were eager to come. Only one woman said she wasn’t ready for that kind of thing yet. Her daughter had been murdered in 1964, but her husband still would not discuss it or release his grief. He got very angry at her when she cried about it. He would not attend such a meeting.

  “If you have any literature or anything,” she said, “please send it to me. You’ll have to send it unmarked, or my husband will throw it away. If you don’t have anything, it’s okay. Just knowing you’re there and I can call you is enough to get me through the day.”

  She wept. I wept with her.

  Then Frank came in and wondered if I was ever going to knock off.

  “Why?” I asked, finding the next number on the list to phone.

  “You’ve only been on the phone for something like seven hours,” he said, grinning.

  I wasn’t tired. I’d found my old intensity again. My energy was back.

  Seven couples came to the Philadelphia chapter’s first meeting. Like us, they were ordinary middle-class couples. Some were blue collar, some were white collar. One of the couples was black.

  It happened to be raining partic
ularly hard that night.

  “God is crying for us,” someone said.

  We all put on nametags and milled around the living room, having coffee and cake. Nervous with one another, we weren’t quite sure how to get started.

  We ended up sitting in a circle and sharing our experience, one couple at a time. As each story unfolded I realized the Spungens did not have the market cornered on suffering.

  One couple had been on vacation with their two children. Their nine-year-old son was grabbed by a man in the motel corridor when he went to buy a newspaper. The man, who turned out to be an illegally discharged mental patient, dragged the boy into a room and slit his throat over the toilet. The couple had cried over it every night for five years. They still could not get over it, could not get on with the rest of their lives. Nor could they overcome their fear of letting their remaining child out of their sight.

  One couple’s sixteen-year-old son had turned up missing. A disemboweled body was found in the woods twelve days later. They read about it in the newspaper. It turned out to be their son. No one was ever arrested for the crime, though there had been a suspect—the mother’s uncle. As a result, the family had been torn apart while it grieved. The damage was irreparable.

  An older couple had had their son, daughter-in-law, and one of two grandchildren murdered. Now they were raising the surviving grandchild—a girl who had witnessed the murder of her parents and sister.

  Another couple’s son had been murdered. Their other son then went out and murdered the murderer. Now he was serving a jail sentence. In effect they had lost both sons.

  The room was very quiet as we listened to one another’s stories. There was just the rain pattering against the windows. And the sound of many of us crying for one another’s pain.

  When it was our turn Frank and I told our story. I mentioned this awful pain that had developed in my chest, a pain that wouldn’t go away. Three other mothers spoke up as one. They had felt the exact same pain.

  Though Frank had been able to purge himself more easily than I, he still harbored great anger toward Sid. He worried that he would never be free of it. He talked about it openly and discovered that his lingering anger was felt by others as well.

  This was the key. This was why it was so therapeutic to be with others who had suffered. We didn’t feel like freaks anymore. We didn’t shock each other, didn’t find people getting embarrassed, looking away, trying to change the subject. We could mention our dead children’s names without feeling set apart, without having to hear platitudes like “You shouldn’t still be dwelling on that” or “So often the good die young.”

  We had found refuge in one another. We felt safe enough to share, to cry, to laugh.

  We have stayed together. Our refuge has grown. There are now fifty couples in the Philadelphia chapter, thirty such chapters around America. We are there for one another.

  We don’t just sit around airing our grief. We reaffirm life. We say that we are ready to live again and what we want is to find out how.

  We help one another cope. Each of us must find our own way. I cannot tell others how to cope. I can only say I’ve survived.

  Taking a cue from Women Against Rape, we’ve launched a court accompaniment program in Philadelphia. A phone network connects all POMC members. When the suspected murderer of the child of one of our members comes up for trial, we go to the trial with the parents. We go with them to help give them the strength to endure it. I hadn’t wanted to go to Sid’s trial. The thought terrified me. But I would have been wrong to hide from it. I now realize it is crucial for us to go to our child’s murder trial, and to bring as many relatives and friends as possible. Our presence reminds the judge and the jury that there was a victim, a victim who can no longer speak but who nonetheless has the right to see justice done. It reminds them that a crime was committed, and that the appropriate price should be paid by the one who committed it. Going to the trial is the one thing—the last thing—we can give our child. For our presence does make a difference. Judges and juries do think twice before they administer a mere slap on the wrist when we are there.

  In addition, our chapter has mounted a concentrated effort to spare future parents from the wounds inflicted on many of us by the outside world immediately after our losses. So much of the nightmare Frank and I went through was caused by our own ignorance of the legal system and by the ignorance and insensitivity of the people we had to come in contact with. For the parents, we at POMC are presently assembling a handbook of victims’ legal rights. This way, they will know what’s going on around them each step of the way. They will know their role and their options—whom they need or need not talk to, where they do or do not have to go. And they will know why. For the others, we are putting together a sorely needed sensitivity packet, which we will distribute to district attorneys, police officers, medical examiners, radio and TV news directors, newspaper editors, and therapists. The packet will, we hope, give them a better understanding of exactly what parents of murdered children are feeling. It might convince them to show more humanity in the future. No one should have to hear his or her child called “the body.”

  Meanwhile, a major victory for the rights of families of murder victims was recently scored in a New York City federal court. A jury awarded $40,000 to the parents of Bonnie Garland, a Yale University music student who had been beaten to death several years before by her boyfriend, Richard Herrin. The award came as a result of a civil suit the parents had filed against the convicted killer for payment of their daughter’s medical and funeral expenses, as well as their own suffering.

  A legal precedent has been set. Parents need not absorb all of the cost of suffering themselves. Now the killer must, literally, pay the price.

  At the time of Nancy’s death our lawyer advised us that we could try to file suit against Sid in civil court for such damages. We were opposed to the idea because we feared—correctly so—it would only bring us more publicity. I applaud the Garlands for their courage in filing suit. I pray their victory will prove to be a victory for all parents of murdered children.

  I have found a mission. I’m trying to spare others from the nightmare. I’m trying to get the word out. This book is part of that mission.

  In addition to our involvement with POMC, Frank and I have kept Nancy’s fund at Eagleville Hospital alive. To date we’ve raised $20,000. That’s enough for a three-bedroom suite in the women’s wing. Maybe one of the young women in one of those beds will overcome her drug or alcohol dependency and go on to lead a useful life.

  It has taken time. But by helping others, I feel myself healing. I know my work is having a positive effect on people’s lives and on the system. The fear and anger and feeling of powerlessness are leaving me. A sense of purpose is replacing them. My life is forming again. I am rebuilding.

  I am not the same person I was before. My priorities have changed. Success has a new definition for me. Personal achievement—doing well in school and in business—used to be a major factor in my life. I was always driven to accomplish something. A big title and salary seemed important. They don’t anymore. Making a positive difference in the lives of other people—my adopted POMC family, my own family, my friends—is now how I define accomplishment. That’s what makes me go.

  I am much more serene than I used to be. I value peace and quiet. I used to get so upset by a leaky faucet, and then by the inefficient repairman who came late to fix it, and didn’t. No longer. I have perspective now. I ask myself if anybody’s going to die because of it. If not, it isn’t worth getting steamed about. That’s my bottom line now—if anybody will die. From where I sit, there really isn’t that much to get upset about. When I’m stuck in a traffic jam, I look around at the people honking and screaming in the other cars, and I wish they could see that being five minutes late to a meeting isn’t significant.

  I think I value life itself more now. I am more aware of its gifts than I used to be. A beautiful sunny day makes me soar with happiness. Bitin
g into a ripe peach is cause for ecstasy. On the other hand, a gray day can fill me with more sadness than it once did. I guess I just feel more than I used to. I feel the joy of others and the pain of others. My tears continue to flow freely. I don’t try to stifle them. I’m not ashamed to feel compassion.

  My healing is not complete. I still jump whenever the phone rings—somehow I still instinctively feel it’s my child calling for help, help I cannot give her. I still have hurts. It hurts that my Nancy suffered so and brought suffering to my other children. It hurts that her gifts went for nothing: it’s not as if we have too many brilliant, compassionate people in this world. It hurts that we couldn’t save her. Some wounds will never heal. I know that as long as I live, Nancy’s birthday will be a bad day for me. So will the day of her death.

  Frank has changed, too. He doesn’t push himself at work like he used to. It isn’t important to him anymore to be a big shot. He is content to do less and to enjoy it more. We have both learned to savor life. Recently, I noticed him sitting on the deck in the sun reading the paper. He sat there like that for hours. He didn’t used to be able to do that. He is also more communicative. He used to get moody in the old days, withdrawn, closed off. Now he is much more open. He airs his feelings.

  We crave each other’s company. We’re like newlyweds together. We share and talk and love with incredible zeal. We enjoy doing things together. We take long walks together, work out at a health club together, cook nice meals together. We finally took our first trip to Europe.

  We truly enjoy Suzy and David and appreciate their individual gifts. We love their company. At the same time, we enjoy the fact that they’re basically on their own now. Independence is as wonderful for us as it is for them. I think that Suzy and David, both of whom are now older than Nancy ever lived to be, understand that.