Killings

by Calvin Trillin

  The doctor who treated Melisha at eleven months—treated her for a black eye and bruises of the back, thighs, chest, and face—was a pediatrician named John Appling, who for ten years had been trying to persuade people in Cleveland that more had to be done to prevent child abuse. At his instigation, the Jaycees had raised enough money to construct a child shelter for temporary care, and a district childcare committee had been established. Before Appling had gone far in his crusade, though, it was clear that many people in town would have been happier if he confined himself to the quiet practice of pediatrics. Cleveland, its boosters often point out to visitors, is not some backward village in the southeast Tennessee hills, but a steadily growing city with the advantages of diversified industry and a location right on the interstate, between Chattanooga and Knoxville. Appling and others have argued that the very jobs Cleveland is so proud of generating are bound to attract the sort of displaced workers who, lacking the support of family and friends they had at home, may turn on their children from the stress of the first layoff. But Cleveland people tired quickly of being told that they lived in a center of child abuse. Cleveland has always been a place strongly bound to fundamentalist Christianity—a place where Baptists are likely to be found in church on Wednesday evenings as well as on Sunday mornings, a place that serves as international headquarters for two large Pentecostal denominations, a place that has grown from a town into a middle-sized city without allowing bars or even liquor stores. There was some feeling among Cleveland residents that the sort of incidents Appling kept haranguing them about could not happen in Cleveland—a feeling reinforced by the fact that the confidentiality imposed on the court handling child-abuse cases caused most of them to go unreported in the press.

  Appling—a man who had treated hundreds of abused children like Melisha Gibson, a man who claimed that six to ten children in Bradley County died every year from child abuse—could not stop the harangue. He can talk about national studies and generally accepted theories on child abuse—about the special risks, for instance, faced by children of teenage mothers and by illegitimate children and by children perceived by the family as being different in some way—but he tends to drift toward specific cases. When he discusses the details of a child-abuse case, he occasionally pauses to take a deep breath, as if willing himself under control. “I’ve gotten too emotional with it,” Appling has said. “I see all these children in the emergency room beat all to hell, and then I see them back in the emergency room beat all to hell. The people seem like ‘This child here is mine. He’s my property. I can maim him. I can kill him. It’s none of your business.’ ” People in the agency officially responsible for processing child-abuse cases in Bradley County—an agency recently renamed Human Services, but still referred to by just about everybody as Welfare—considered Dr. Appling an interfering zealot whose method of protecting children was to keep them away from their parents forever. The policy of the state happened to have the opposite emphasis—reuniting the family whenever possible. Once, a welfare-department county manager reacted to Appling’s refusal to discharge a child from the hospital without additional reports on the child’s home by threatening to have him arrested for kidnapping.

  There was no question of releasing Melisha to the care of Ronnie Maddux and Wanda Gibson, who were then awaiting trial for beating her up. When she was discharged from the hospital, a welfare worker took her to a foster family; when that family moved away three months later, the worker placed Melisha in foster care with Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Hawkins, who live on thirty acres at the end of a country road seven miles south of Cleveland. Gilbert Hawkins, who works in maintenance at a chemical plant near Cleveland, built his own house a few years ago, with the help of a nephew—a solid brick ranch house that looks as if it has never missed a day’s cleaning. The Hawkinses, both of whom grew up in the country within a couple of miles of where they live now, are active members of the Goodwill Baptist Church. Mrs. Hawkins has known Ronnie Maddux’s sister for years, but she tends to speak of Ronnie and Wanda Maddux as if they belonged to a different race of beings. “They just don’t think like we do,” she said not long ago. Mrs. Hawkins sometimes uses “love” as a synonym for “hug,” so she can say that when foster babies are in the house, it is not unusual for even her eighteen-year-old son to “pick them up and love them.” The Hawkins family loved Melisha in both of the ways they use the word. They called her Missy. She grew into a lovely-looking blond little girl—shy with strangers but apparently talkative at home. She was subject to high fevers but otherwise healthy—an agile child who loved to do acrobatics. She lived as part of the Hawkins family for nearly three years—until it came time, last May, to return her to Ronnie and Wanda Maddux.

  —

  The Madduxes had been sentenced to what people in Tennessee call eleven twenty-nine—eleven months and twenty-nine days in the county jail, the maximum sentence for a misdemeanor. After some delay for appeal, they served six months. When they were released, in November of 1974, they settled down to what their social worker saw as a considerably more stable and sober life than they had led before. They eventually rented a tiny house, planted a vegetable garden, and even made a pass at sprucing the place up. They got by mostly on the Social Security payments Wanda Maddux drew as the beneficiary of her first husband. Apparently, Maddux hoped to make a big killing from a lawsuit in which he claimed to have suffered a back injury from falling down some stairs. A woman who lived across the street, Mattie Sue Riggs, said not long ago, “He’d say, ‘Now, Mattie, anyone comes around here asking about me lifting anything heavy, don’t you go talking to them.’ And I said, ‘Ronnie, I’ve not never seen you lift nothing no heavier than a dinner plate.’ ”

  The Madduxes wanted the children back. By last February, the four older children had been returned—at different times, according to the normal welfare-department procedure. The children seemed content and reasonably well cared for, but the social worker, Judy Hampton, was still concerned about returning Melisha—the one child who was known to have been abused. Maddux had denied from the start that he and his wife had beaten Melisha; he even wrote a letter to the local paper denying it publicly. Still, Mrs. Hampton tried to talk Wanda Maddux into putting Melisha up for adoption. She refused. Mrs. Hampton waited until the end of the school year, on the theory that the presence of the older children at home would be a safety factor for Melisha. Then, with the consent of the juvenile court, she took Melisha back to her family.

  There was nothing at all unusual about taking an abused child back to the family that had abused her. One alternative—legally terminating parental rights so that the child can be put up for adoption—is difficult practically to the point of impossibility under Tennessee law. Even children who have been beaten up are often eager to return to their own families, and their parents are often eager to have them back—an eagerness that may be affected in some cases by the fact that Aid to Families with Dependent Children payments represent the only form of welfare money available in southeast Tennessee. In the welfare department, there was a natural bureaucratic pressure to close cases and get children out of temporary foster homes. In theory, the interagency Child Protection Team that was organized a year ago in Cleveland by David Sweitzer, the regional coordinator from the state’s Office of Child Development, was available for consultation about how to approach any child-abuse case, but the welfare department regarded the Child Protection Team mainly as a vehicle for Dr. Appling’s interference. Routinely, a welfare worker—often overburdened with cases and paperwork, almost never having had any significant training in child protection—would recommend that a child be sent back home, the recommendation would be approved by the welfare department’s chain of command, and the juvenile-court judge would order the child sent home. The judge’s assent to the welfare report was considered so automatic in Bradley County that some foster parents who had become concerned about sending children back to homes they considered unsafe approached a local legislator last summer to a
sk whether it would be possible to have the judge impeached.

  The Hawkinses were not among the protesting foster parents, but they were concerned all last summer about Missy. On trips to Cleveland, they found themselves detouring through the Madduxes’ neighborhood to catch glimpses of her playing in the front yard. Finally, in the fall, Mrs. Hawkins called Ronnie Maddux’s sister to ask if Missy could use a winter coat. The Madduxes relayed an invitation to bring the coat by, and, stretching the rules about visiting former foster children, the Hawkinses accepted. They were greeted cordially. Mrs. Hawkins took Missy’s measurements so she could make her some dresses. Mr. Hawkins, who had been uneasy about the visit, could sense nothing amiss. Even Mrs. Hawkins had difficulty putting her finger on any specific indication that Missy was not well cared for—although she said later that when she was about to leave, “Missy looked up with those beautiful brown eyes and said, ‘Mommy, can I go back out to your house?’ ”

  On her regular visits, Mrs. Hampton often found Missy being fussed over by her older sisters. The neighbors considered the Maddux family pleasant enough, although Ronnie Maddux seemed strict with the children about such matters as returning promptly from errands. He also had a tendency to let out a prolonged howl occasionally for no apparent reason. “Like none-none talk or people speaking tongues,” Mattie Riggs has said. “I’d say, ‘My Lord, Ronnie, you crazy?’ And he’d say, ‘I must be, Mattie.’ ”

  —

  On the night of October 11, about four weeks after the Hawkinses’ visit, Ronnie Maddux got angry at Melisha. Apparently, the trouble started when she would not go to sleep, and was aggravated when, in the early hours of the morning, she wet herself. On the morning of the twelfth, Maddux began making Melisha walk back and forth between the kitchen and an organ stool in the bedroom. “I wanted to tire her out so she would sleep,” he explained later. “I got some hot sauce and made her take a tablespoon of it. She threw it up on the floor….She began to slow down, so I told her to get on her toes and trot. A while later, I gave her another tablespoon of hot sauce, and she threw up again….I was drinking whiskey. I made her keep walking back and forth all day to try to tire her out so she would sleep that night….She asked me for a drink of water. I got a glass of water and told her if she would take the tablespoon of hot sauce I would give her a drink. She swallowed the hot sauce and I drank the glass of water.” Maddux said he continued to make Melisha walk back and forth after supper, hitting her with a stick as she passed him. That night, he got her up and put her in a cold shower, apparently because she had wet her mattress. On the morning of the thirteenth, when he tried to wake her up she didn’t respond. He began to rub her with alcohol, trying to bring her around.

  That morning, Mrs. Hawkins was hemming some corduroy pants she had made for Missy when the telephone rang. It was her sister-in-law, saying, “There’s something wrong down at Missy’s house.” A moment later, the doorbell rang. “It was two of my welfare workers,” Mrs. Hawkins said later. “I knew the minute I saw them. ‘Did he beat her up again?’ I said. They said, ‘Mrs. Hawkins, it’s worse than that this time.’ ” Melisha had never awakened. The next day, Ronnie and Wanda Maddux were charged with first-degree murder and held without bail.

  —

  Investigations were launched. Committees were formed. The state commissioner of human services disciplined three members of the Bradley County office, and almost everybody else in the office joined in a one-day walkout in protest—arguing, rather persuasively, that the workers involved were being scapegoated after handling the case more or less the way it would have been handled by any welfare worker who followed normal state procedures. The commissioner announced a moratorium on returning abused children to their families and speculated on the possibility of easing the procedures available for terminating parental rights. Members of a Teamsters local picketed the Governor’s Mansion, urging that Ronnie and Wanda Maddux be given the death penalty if found guilty. Hank Snow, the country-music singer, wrote the governor, “I’ve heard countless people say that if these radicals were burned in the electric chair or even lynched in the city square, it would start some of these lowdowns to giving some serious thought before committing these gruesome crimes.” There was some talk about sterilization as a way to prevent child abusers from producing more children to abuse. Those in the child-protection field who believe that reform should concentrate on prevention of child abuse rather than on punishment of abusers found themselves grateful that the state legislature will not be in session until spring.

  In Cleveland, a thousand people attended Melisha’s funeral. The Sheriff’s Department decided it would be prudent to hold the Madduxes in a jail outside the county—presumably not the state penitentiary, where Melisha’s natural father is serving time for armed robbery. Welfare workers complained of harassment and even threats. There are people in Cleveland who believe that the intensity of reaction there can be traced to some acceptance of guilt for not having heeded the warnings of Dr. Appling long ago. Appling and David Sweitzer, who blame Melisha’s death partly on rigidity and secrecy in the welfare department, used the public outcry to exert pressure for interagency cooperation and improved training, although in one of his first meetings with the human services commissioner, Appling found himself unable to get away from the subject of three children who had been returned that day to a home he considered potentially unsafe. Appling and Sweitzer finally won agreement that every child-abuse case in the county would be referred to the Child Protection Team—a team that now includes not only a psychiatrist and a pediatrician and a social worker but an attorney to represent the child’s interests in court. The public outcry had a different meaning for the forces fighting a referendum in the November election which would have permitted liquor stores in Bradley County: they pointed to Ronnie Maddux’s behavior as an example of what drink could lead to, and they defeated the referendum easily. Hank Snow came to Cleveland for a concert to benefit the fund that local people are raising to enlarge the Child Shelter, which has been renamed the Melisha Gibson Child Shelter.

  Family Problems

  * * *

  Manchester, New Hampshire

  JULY 1978

  Hank Piasecny, like a lot of people in Manchester, worked his way up from the mills. The banks of the Merrimack River, which cuts right through Manchester, are still lined with the massive old red-brick buildings that once drew people like Hank Piasecny’s parents from Poland and his wife’s parents from French Quebec and thousands of other people from Ireland or from the rocky farms of upper New England. The buildings on the banks of the Merrimack were once filled with shoe factories and foundries and the Amoskeag Mills—a textile operation that employed more than twenty thousand people before it went under in the thirties. Hank Piasecny, one of seven children of a shoe-factory worker, started working in a shoe factory himself at fourteen. When he came home from the Second World War, he opened a corner grocery store, and then a filling station that later branched out into hunting and fishing equipment. He was a hard worker, and he was fortunate enough to acquire the New England distributorship for Arkansas Traveler boats at about the time the aluminum-boat market was beginning to expand. By the early sixties, he was the proprietor of a thriving sporting-goods store called Hank’s Sport Center. He sponsored a Golden Gloves boxing team that included his own son, Terry, as one of its stars. He had an attractive wife and a teenage daughter who seemed to be talented at anything she turned to. He often joined his customers on deer-hunting trips, and people who discussed his skill as a hunter sometimes said, “Where he goes, the deer follow.” In the southern part of New Hampshire, public officials who were also outdoorsmen were likely to be friends of Hank Piasecny. He was an outgoing, rough-talking man—known to have a temper that could transform rough talk suddenly into violence. “He’d give you any damn thing he had,” a close friend of Piasecny during that period has said. “But he didn’t mind having a fight—I’ll tell you.”