I finished reading that page and was no less amazed than I was the first time I’d laid eyes on it. I’m not the kind of person who hears the voice of God around every corner or is always going around saying to people, “God told me to do this.” But I believed with all my heart that in that burned scrap of paper, I was holding a message from God to me.
As far as I was concerned, God was saying, “Yes, Terry, I took your family. And I know it hurts so much you can hardly stand it. But I’m not going to explain My purposes to you. You have to trust Me even though you can’t understand what happened. I’ve kept you alive for a reason: There’s still something I want you to do. Rest in Me, child, and let Me take you to where I want you to be.”
As I looked at that page, peace flooded over me. God had indeed preserved my life, and I now believed that I could go on. He had a purpose for me.
My problem now was that I had no idea what that purpose was.
TYLER’S BIRTHDAY
Although the discovery of the burned page was a major turning point in my life and recovery, it didn’t mean that all my grief and emotional pain automatically vanished. It is said that holidays and birthdays are the most difficult times for people who have lost loved ones in some way. I was about to discover just how true that statement was. In mid-April, I was facing a three-and-a-half month stretch that included Tyler’s birthday, Bubba’s birthday, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Penny’s birthday, and Erin’s birthday. April 18 was Tyler’s birthday. Tommy and Helen must have known how difficult it would be for me, because they suggested that we take a little trip to Broken Bow, Oklahoma.
It’s about a three-hour drive from Emory to Broken Bow, so we got up early on Friday the eighteenth and headed north. We spent several hours sightseeing and enjoying the attractions. I welcomed the distraction but discovered that it wasn’t so easy to put my son’s birthday out of my mind.
We’d taken the kids to Broken Bow a few years earlier and had packed a picnic lunch. It started raining at lunchtime, so we decided to have lunch under a covered pavilion near one of the museums we’d visited. By the time we sat down to eat, it was pouring.
Tyler couldn’t resist jumping in the puddles. After every few bites, he ran out into the rain and found a good puddle or two to jump in.
I could still see his utterly joyful face as he came down with both feet in those puddles, splashing water everywhere while the rain poured down around him. Penny’s voice broke into my memories as well: “Tyler, get in here. You’re going to get soaked.”
Tyler would come back into the dry pavilion for a few minutes, but it wouldn’t be long before he ran out again and took a flying leap into a new puddle. He was never one to leave a perfectly good puddle unjumped-in.
He would have been nine that day.
MOVING AGAIN
I stayed almost three weeks with Penny’s parents, but I quickly became restless again. Although I had a very nice room at Larry and Virginia’s, it still wasn’t home. Just as my sister had been, Larry and Virginia were a great blessing to me when I stayed with them, and I’m sure I could have stayed as long as I wanted to. But I’m a private person and don’t like to feel that I’m putting people out. I also knew that I couldn’t stay with friends and relatives forever. Sooner or later, I would have to face life on my own.
I had talked about this when I was staying with Mary and Mike.
We’d discussed the possibility of my renting an apartment or a small house, but I didn’t think I could manage it. The problem wasn’t the expense involved. I was simply afraid to be alone. I didn’t think I could live in a place that had a hallway or an extra room where an intruder could hide. I needed to be able to see the whole place at once. I finally decided that an RV would be the best solution. There would be only one room, so I’d be able to see all of it at once, but it would still have a bed, a kitchen area, a bathroom—everything I needed.
My sister’s husband, Mike, found a thirty-foot RV on Craigslist for about seven thousand dollars. A friend put up half the money, and I paid the other half out of a special fund that had been set up for me.
We parked it behind Tommy and Helen’s house. They had a lot of extra space, so the RV wouldn’t be in the way, but I’d still have my own place. I’d also be living within walking distance of my own property. I could go there anytime I wanted without having to get in a car.
When I had moved my few belongings into my RV and sat by myself in my own place for the first time, I felt as if I’d taken one more step toward a normal life. I wasn’t all the way back, but I was closer. I lived only a few hundred yards from my property now.
I wanted to move back there someday, but I wasn’t ready.
Not yet.
ARKANSAS
God has a purpose for me, but what is it?
That thought had been nagging at the back of my mind ever since I found that burned page on our property. There was one obvious answer, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to accept it.
It was mid-April, and that was supposed to be a time of great importance for me. Ever since Penny and I had married, I’d been involved in ministry one way or another. We’d been youth leaders at two churches, and I had spoken in churches and at camps. For quite some time, Penny and I had talked and prayed about the possibility that God was calling me to ministry. I approached Todd McGahee in the summer of 2006 and told him that I believed God had called me and I would like to be ordained. He brought my request before the church, and they set a date in April 2008.
After the murders, the ordination was postponed, and I hadn’t given it any serious thought since then. It’s hard to think about serving God when you believe that He’s abandoned you. But ever since I found the page and became convinced that God still had some purpose for my life, the idea of ordination began to creep back into my head. Did He want me to serve Him in this way? Was I still called to ministry?
I was thinking about those questions late one Thursday afternoon when I went to visit Erin. Visitation didn’t begin until seven o’clock, but I usually arrived about an hour early to get a place in line. Visiting was first come, first served, so there was usually a long wait before I got in to see her.
Because we weren’t allowed to talk about the case, Erin and I spent most of our visits reminiscing and talking about the good times our family had had together. That evening our conversation drifted to our frequent family trips to Petit Jean State Park in Arkansas. We talked about how much fun we had and how it was our favorite getaway because it was one of the few places that didn’t cost much more than the price of the gas it took to drive there.
“I love that place,” Erin said. “It’s so beautiful.” A wistful look came over her. “We were going to go up there right before all this happened.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember y’all asking if we were going to hike down to the bottom of the canyon. And one of the boys said we’d have to leave Mommy behind ’cause she fell the last time.”
We talked and laughed and cried together.
As I drove home, I found myself depressed and distraught, as was often the case after I visited Erin. I loved visiting my daughter, but each time I sat across from her with a pane of bulletproof Plexiglas between us, it reopened the wounds that were only starting to heal.
My mind kept going back to our talks about Arkansas and Petit Jean State Park, and I thought about how much fun we’d had and how special that place was to us.
I need to go up there for a visit.
The more I thought about the idea, the better it sounded.
As I drove toward Emory, I remembered a weekend we’d spent there. We had planned to go home on Sunday, and there was a church near Hot Springs that we wanted to visit. But we overslept on Sunday morning and wouldn’t be able to make it to the church in time for the morning service. So instead, we all went up to the scenic overlook on the mountain, near Petit Jean’s grave. It offers a majestic view of the Arkansas River valley.
On t
hat weekend, we sat down together, near the cliff but safely behind the railing, and I read from the book of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
“Why do we like coming here so much?” I asked the kids.
“It’s just so beautiful,” they replied.
“Yes, it is,” I said. “Just think: God made all this beauty just for us to enjoy. And we should always take care of it so that it will be here for others to enjoy, too, right?”
They agreed.
We had a wonderful time enjoying the beauty of God’s creation as a family.
As I drove now, I remembered another trip where our more adventurous and mischievous sides came out. Somewhere I’d heard a legend about how, if you went to Petit Jean’s grave after dark, you could sometimes hear her calling out for her fiancé.
One night when we were there, I told the kids about that legend. It was about midnight when I said, “Let’s go up to Petit Jean’s grave and see if we can hear her.”
The kids were all excited and ready to go.
Penny reminded us that park rules said no one was supposed to be up there after ten o’clock at night. “I’m not going up there,” she said. “And if a park ranger arrests y’all for trespassing, don’t expect me to come bail you out of jail.”
The kids and I decided to go anyway.
Our campsite was about a quarter of a mile from the gravesite, so we drove up to the ridge and got out of the car. After we’d walked around for a while, I stood a little ways off from Erin and the boys and started to make spooky sounds: “Woooooooo.”
That was all it took. Erin and the boys were spooked, and we hightailed it back to our campsite. As soon as we got there, the kids ran to Penny shouting, “We heard Petit Jean! We heard Petit Jean!”
I started to laugh, and Erin turned around and looked at me. “That was you, wasn’t it?”
I just kept laughing and played dumb, as if I didn’t know what she was talking about.
Petit Jean State Park, and that ridge in particular, were ingrained in my family’s life and in my memories of them. I decided that I would go up to Arkansas and visit the park that weekend. It was a place of good memories, and it was a place where I believed I could talk to God.
I arrived back at my RV early in the evening, but I was restless. I paced around and tried to settle down, but nothing seemed to work, partly because I was still thinking about Arkansas and partly because I was still trying to figure out what God wanted me to do.
Was He asking me to continue with my plans to become a minister, or was He trying to tell me something else?
I tried to go to sleep, but I just lay there staring at the ceiling. Finally I decided that I needed to meet with God and find out what He was trying to say to me. And I knew exactly where I wanted to go to do it.
It was already past midnight, but I didn’t care about the time. I threw some things together, hopped back into my rental car, and headed for Arkansas.
The drive from home to Petit Jean State Park took almost six hours, so I drove all night and arrived on the ridge just at daybreak. I went to the scenic overlook and climbed over the protective railing. There was a large boulder overlooking the cliff, and I wanted to sit on it as I prayed. To get to my perch, I had to jump a three-foot cleft between two rocks and climb up on the largest rock overlooking the Arkansas River valley.
The sun was just coming up when I sat down on that rock. Fog blanketed the valley, and mist swirled through the trees on the mountain as I sat there and watched the sunrise. I held my Bible in one hand and raised my other hand toward heaven. My emotions swelled, and tears rolled down my face as I poured out my heart before God.
For a while I just sat there and wept, but finally I said, “God if You want to use me, here I am. I’ll do whatever You want me to if You’ll just open the doors. But You’ve got to make it clear to me. What is it that You want me to do?”
As I sat there weeping and praying, I heard a car drive up. Up to that point I had been the only person there because it was so early. I glanced over and saw a maroon Ford Explorer in the parking lot. It sat there with the engine running for several minutes and then drove off. I didn’t want to be distracted, so I paid no attention to it. I just continued to pray and weep before the Lord.
About five minutes later, the Explorer pulled back into the parking lot. But instead of stopping in a parking space, it pulled right up close to the walkway. A few seconds later a woman got out. She came quietly up the walkway, all the way to the railing I had climbed. Then she just stood there and watched me for a while. Again I tried to ignore her. I had come there to meet with God and seek His face, and I didn’t want to be distracted.
Eventually, the woman turned and walked back to her SUV, and she and her husband drove off. It didn’t occur to me until later that they might have thought I was about to throw myself off. After all, I was beyond the safety barrier on a rock overlooking a high cliff, and I was weeping. Evidently, though, the woman got close enough to hear me and realized that I didn’t intend to jump.
I was probably on that rock for about an hour, but it was enough time for me to do what I needed to do. I had gone there to lay my life and heart before the Lord and to seek His face and His will for my life.
He had spared my life on the night when by all logic I should have died. I still didn’t know exactly what He wanted me to do, but I trusted Him to open the doors as He saw fit, in His own time and in His own way.
I drove back to Emory with new resolve and purpose—that I would live my life for God’s honor and glory.
Chapter 17
Starting Over
His anger is but for a moment,
His favor is for a lifetime;
Weeping may last for the night,
But a shout of joy comes in the morning.
—PSALM 30:5
I WAS DOING THE UNTHINKABLE—starting over. It had been only about two months since the attack on my house and family. Two months since my world had been destroyed. In those two months I’d experienced an incredible range of emotions and feelings. I had gone from almost total, suicidal despair to a grudging decision to live—although I prayed every night for God to take me. I’d gone from feeling that my life was over to believing that God still had some purpose for keeping me alive, although I still had no idea what that purpose was.
I began to read the Scriptures like never before. Before the murders, I had regular daily devotions, as many people do, but now I was devouring the Bible like a starving man. I spent almost every spare minute reading. I started with the book of Psalms, studying and underlining. I felt a strong kinship with David and the other psalmists. They were men who had known pain and who had also made God their stronghold in the midst of suffering.
After I finished studying the Psalms, I went on to the New Testament and worked my way through it repeatedly. I used to spend a lot of time watching TV. Now I used that time to read and study God’s Word. Before long, there was hardly a page in my Bible that didn’t have passages marked and underlined. But despite my newfound hunger for the Scriptures, I still battled depression. It wasn’t unusual for me to pray before going to bed and ask the Lord to take my life during the night.
I knew that a rough road still lay ahead of me. The investigation was continuing, and I knew it wasn’t looking good for Erin. I hadn’t seen any of the evidence yet, but I knew that time was coming. Back in March I had met with Robert Vititow, the Rains County district attorney, and Lisa Tanner, an assistant with the Texas State Attorney General’s Office. A capital case of this magnitude was too big for Emory, so the county had requested assistance from the Texas State Attorney General’s office in prosecuting it.
Mr. Vititow and Ms. Tanner told me up front that they wanted to ask for the death penalty for Charlie and Charles, and I was fine with that. As far as I was concerned, I wanted to see them dead. In fact, at that point I would have been willing to save the state of Texas some money. All I needed was ten minutes alon
e in a room with each of them. I was so filled with anger and hatred toward Charlie Wilkinson and Charles Waid that I would have been more than happy to kill them. So I was fine with the prosecutors’ plan to go for the maximum penalty with the men and with Bobbi Johnson, too. The problem was that they also wanted the maximum penalty for Erin. Because she was a minor when the crime was committed, they couldn’t ask for the death penalty, but the prosecutors made it clear that they did want to request a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
Erin was still in the juvenile detention center, incarcerated as a juvenile, but there was already talk of having her certified to stand trial as an adult. I hoped and prayed she would be tried as a juvenile, but I couldn’t find out much because William McDowell, Erin’s court-appointed attorney, seemed reluctant to give me any details.
At first, I couldn’t understand why he was keeping me out of the loop, but then I realized that I was not only Erin’s father but also one of the victims. Mr. McDowell evidently didn’t want to risk confiding in me because of the possibility that I might be subpoenaed to testify against her.
I appreciated his desire to protect Erin, but I was also frustrated because I felt caught in the middle. Normally the prosecution represents the victim or victims of a crime, but because of my desire to support Erin, I found myself at cross-purposes with them.
Once again Bryan Roe, my boss at Praxair, came to my rescue, and the company hired a criminal defense attorney to represent me. It seemed strange at first. After all, I wasn’t charged with anything. Why would I need a lawyer? But they explained that he was there to answer my questions and safeguard my interests.
Praxair didn’t hire just any criminal defense attorney; they hired one of the best in the state of Texas: F. R. “Buck” Files Jr., from Tyler. I liked Buck from the moment I met him. He had close-cropped gray hair and a beard, and he was all business. The first time I met him, I called him “Mr. Files.”
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