by Sue Russell
With Britta gone, Lori also sensed that Lauri had lost some of his steam. He barely reacted when he found out she smoked. There was no outburst. He simply told her not to smoke in front of him.
‘I don’t know what was in his head. He was an angry sort of person, period,’ she muses. ‘It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, but he was always temperamental. He always had to be right. It seemed to me he got a little bit more quiet and sad and lonely after my mom died. Maybe he dreaded what he did.’
Lori moved with him for a while to Utica nine miles away, into a little house next to Barry. Aileen and Keith were who knows where. But at eighteen, Lori felt trapped by Lauri’s demands that she stay home with him night after night to keep him company. And he got upset when she refused. So when he moved up to rugged northern Michigan where he had family, envisaging a remote cabin in the woods, she declined to go with him. She still loved her father, but it was time to forge her own life. When her friends, the Richeys, left Troy for the Mancelona ski resort area, Lori, who was anxious to break away from drugs and partying, went with them.
Lauri was lonely. Like Aileen, he wasn’t gifted at making or keeping friends and his bad temper seemed to isolate him. Having trouble making ends meet, he eventually moved back down into Barry’s home. If Lauri was disappointed in Diane, he’d also been let down by Barry who dropped out of college after three semesters. Lauri, who’d staved off unemployment with a number of unskilled jobs over the years, working as a janitor, cab driver and bus driver, wanted something better for Barry. Barry had joined the Air Force but as soon as he came out, Lori and her friend fixed him up and Barry married Judy in September 1970. He was 25, she 19. Lauri was not pleased. He was also angry because they didn’t visit more often with their baby, Becky.
As a boy, Barry had shone at golf. He and a friend, John Majestic, lifted weights together and often rose at 4 or 5 a.m. to caddy at the Rochester Golf Course, where they were rewarded with free golf. Practising in the back yard, he hit balls into the field out back, then took the family dog to help retrieve them. His golfing talent became family legend, but he didn’t pursue it as a career. John Majestic thought the way Lauri rammed it down his throat didn’t help. Instead, Barry moved into clerical work in a factory.
10
It was so long ago that Lori couldn’t pinpoint when it first struck her that Aileen was just plain different from all the other kids. It was just something she felt she’d always known. Aileen did try to fit in, she really tried, but she simply couldn’t. It seemed beyond her capabilities. By the time she was eight, she was constantly falling out with other kids, despite Lori’s frequent counselling to be nice and not lose her temper. If Lori invited Aileen to join in with her friends, she soon regretted it. Inevitably, Aileen whined that this or that was unfair. Then she’d blow up, making everyone else angry and embarrassing Lori. She seemed unable to sustain her ‘good self’ for extended periods of time, and sometimes, to Lori’s chagrin, her friends didn’t mince words: ‘We don’t want to go if Aileen’s going too.’
Aileen could be nice, but Lori always had the curious sense that the niceness was fake, a veneer. It registered even then that her sister’s mannerisms and smiles lacked authenticity; her mood and sociability seemed phony and forced. It was as if she knew that she didn’t fit and tried hard to tailor her personality to something she thought people would like and accept. But then, in a split second, her temper erupted and it was all over. No one wanted to be around her. Lori felt sorry for her, but she couldn’t sacrifice her own life and friendships.
Lori believed Aileen was troubled not by the way she was treated at home, but by something inside her. Something in her personality. And with her chemical abuse, the temper worsened. Aileen’s rages were a sight to behold. Her fury would sweep over her, turning her red in the face and unleashing a torrent of ugly verbiage. She didn’t seem able to control herself.
Lori was eighteen at the time of one particularly frightening altercation, when Aileen, heavily under the influence of alcohol and downers, popped in to see her at the Kretsches’ where she was babysitting. Infuriated by her embarrassing intrusion, Lori yelled, ‘You’re crazy!’ A grave tactical error since ‘crazy’ and ‘nuts’ were adjectives that struck a sore personal chord with Aileen. Hearing them was guaranteed to send her into an absolute rage, and she ran into the Kretsches’ kitchen, grabbed a skewer, and rushed back into the living room, wielding it like a weapon. Brandishing it a quarter-inch from Lori’s throat, she launched into a tirade saying she hated her and should kill her. Lori was scared and mad and shouted at her to leave her alone. ‘I started bawling and crying, then she backed off and I ran out of the back door.’
From that day forth, Lori never quite trusted Aileen again and if they ever had occasion to sleep under the same roof and Aileen went to bed angry, Lori barely slept a wink. She couldn’t help wondering what she might do for revenge.
As a kid, Aileen had sorely tried Lori’s patience. As an adult, nothing changed. Periodically, Aileen called or visited Lori and her husband Ervin Grody, and lived with them briefly three times, once when they were living in Colorado before their wedding. They never made it past two or three weeks without getting into a major blow-out argument. It was usually Aileen’s loud music, or her unwillingness to help with chores or contribute to the rent, that set it off. Lori felt she and Erv were being used.
Lori often ached to help Aileen, particularly when she called from a hospital in another state and announced that she’d tried to kill herself, but nothing worked. A woman affiliated with a church telephoned Lori soon after, saying that they were buying Aileen a plane ticket so she could fly to be with Lori and Erv. ‘We couldn’t be civil to one another for too long, no matter when or where it was.’ On one occasion, Lori seriously thought of having Aileen committed and discussed it with Barry. What stopped her was her fear—if Aileen had ever found out she was behind it, she’d be ‘dead meat’.
Eventually, the dramatic calls merged and blurred in Lori’s mind. Was that the time Aileen overdosed on pills and had to have her stomach pumped? Or the time she shot herself in the abdomen? Aileen seemed hell-bent on sabotaging Lori and Erv’s efforts to help by making herself downright impossible to live with. She paid lip service to a dream of having a regular job and a regular life, but in reality destroyed anything good. If she had a job she’d lose her temper with someone, then quit or get fired. She even stole from friends or the very people who’d taken her in (including Barry and his wife), then took off. She hardly helped herself.
There were clues everywhere to Aileen’s deep anger. Once she went after Keith with a knife. It was imperative to Keith to hold his own with Aileen. He couldn’t let her get the upper hand. He wasn’t violent by nature, but neither was he afraid to fight. And things often turned physical with Aileen. It was he who gave Aileen a black eye when she drunkenly totalled his car after careering through the Richeys’ front yard, knocking down the mailbox, hurtling into a ditch and finally coming to a standstill amidst the trees. She was only about sixteen at the time.
Aileen once threatened Barry’s wife, Judy, saying, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll kill you!’
‘Oh yeah, right!’ Judy retorted.
‘Well, I’ve already killed somebody and chopped them up in little pieces and put them out in the field,’ Aileen shot back.
Dawn had her turn with a threat with a cue ball, but when they went head-to-head and actually fought, Dawn came out on top, flipping Aileen over a car. Afterwards, they shook hands. Dawn’s brother once bore the marks of Aileen’s fingernails as the result of some name-calling offence.
Lori was overwhelmingly thought of as being sweet with a sunny disposition, Aileen was thought of as mean. ‘A number one bitch, she was too hard to cry. She was always pissed off at everyone,’ recalls one neighbour. ‘Maybe one time out often she’d be in a good mood.’
Her neighbour, Jean Kear, saw Aileen as ‘rather unsavoury, that’s putting it mildly’, but also as v
ery troubled. ‘She was unloved, unwanted, and always in the way, and I think it gave her one hell of a chip on her shoulder. If you walked down the street and didn’t look at her, she’d give you a mouthful. And if you did look, she’d say, “What the f*** are you looking at!”’
Cheryl Stacy saw something else. ‘If you look into her eyes, you see she’s been crying for someone to love her. Someone to care about her.’
Aileen was rarely viewed with such sensitivity. She struck one local boy as being hard, with a ‘motherfuck this, motherfuck that, fuck you’ attitude. ‘She’d fly off the handle and get upset over trivial bullshit.’
He described her as ugly. While Aileen didn’t wear makeup or pretty herself up like the other girls, it was clear that it was her aura rather than her physical features he meant. In the face of even dire provocation, she never showed her vulnerable side. Never cried.
‘A lot of her peers treated her like shit,’ said Dawn Nieman, remembering the time Aileen was in an unusually super mood having decided to throw a party in the old family home which sat briefly empty after Lauri moved up north and before the new tenants moved in. Aileen was elated at the prospect of playing hostess.
‘They’d have to stop calling her a sleazebag whore and everything, ’ was how Dawn interpreted her thinking.
But Aileen seemed to attract such abuse like a magnet.
As usual, she tried to buy the companionship and relationships she craved, using her wages of sin to gather people together, then to include herself. Indignant at the unfairness of it all, Dawn recalls the common outcome.
‘She’d go get money for liquor for a party or whatever, then the others would end up kicking her out of her own party because they knew what she did [sexually]. She’d give blow jobs or whatever to buy the stuff, and they hated it and treated her like shit. Like dirt.’
Watching while Aileen was thrown out of one of her parties, Dawn looked on helplessly, afraid to go out on a limb for her friend.
‘It’s terrible she was used in that way,’ agrees Lori, who also felt powerless to stop the maltreatment. She herself once called the police when a party got out of hand. Someone had stuffed a beer can down the toilet which was overflowing.
‘One time Aileen was coming out of the store and these guys hit her with their car,’ Dawn recalls. ‘Not enough to hurt her, but they just knocked her. Aileen was emotional, but she never sat there and cried to have people feel sorry for her. She’d get pissed off. That way, they didn’t feel sorry for her. They hated her even more for getting mad.’
Another time, another party. As Aileen arrived in the field bringing in beer supplies, someone accidentally knocked her down with a car door, but no one even bothered to check and see if she was OK.
Blissfully free of school, Dawn and Aileen hitchhiked all over, living the low life and the high life, running into a bad part of town to buy drugs, or swanning off to the racetrack. It was while on one of their famous hitchhiking jaunts that in 1973 Dawn met her husband, Dave Botkins, whom she married a year later. It was another abandonment for Aileen.
11
Keith found a lump on his neck roughly a month after successfully passing his physical and enrolling in the Army in 1974. It was diagnosed as cancerous. After surgery, the doctors reassured him that they had removed all the insidious cells.
That they were wrong became glaringly apparent when at a party one day he took a drunken fall down a short flight of steps. His leg broke because his bones were so brittle. Back at the hospital, he learned that the cancer he thought he’d beaten had begun a slow but unstoppable spread and was ravaging his body. There was a period of remission, but the disease continued to gain on him and he spent eighteen months in Veterans Hospital, south of Detroit, being treated with chemotherapy.
This turn of events did nothing to improve things between him and Lauri, the old adversaries who once came to blows, with Keith almost knocking Lauri to the ground. Lauri did visit Keith in Veterans Hospital, but it wasn’t long before they got into an argument, and Lori admits: ‘I don’t know if my father loved him, or if he went to see him knowing he was in bed, for the spite of it.’
Keith was dying at the tender age of twenty. But first he was determined to fulfil his own prophecy and outlive Lauri.
Lauri, meanwhile, was living in the basement of Barry’s home in Rochester where he spent most of his time watching TV, glued to war movies in particular. He had his own room, complete with couch and chair, but took his meals upstairs with the family. He no longer worked and was plagued by poor health, brought about by diabetes and his alcoholism.
Seemingly in the grip of a depression that never quite lifted after Britta’s death, there were days when Lauri, once so proud of his well-groomed appearance, didn’t even bathe.
His death when it came was, like Britta’s, disturbing. Lauri’s father had committed suicide, hanging himself in an aircraft hangar, and Lauri had once tried to kill himself by going into a basement that was flooded with water after torrential rain and standing up to his ankles in water, then turning on an electric switch. It didn’t work.
On 12 March 1976, he was successful. Barry had gone to work and Judy had gone back to bed when Lauri went out to the garage, turned on his car ignition, and omitted to open the garage door. He passed out from the toxic engine fumes and his son found him hours later, after pulling his car in alongside, lying across the front seat. At first the family thought he’d had a stroke because the car had run out of gas and stalled. But the death certificate said carbon monoxide poisoning and intoxication. Generally, the family accepted it as suicide.
Maybe there wasn’t much to live for any longer. Perhaps he wanted to be with his wife. Just because he deliberately failed to save Britta’s life, so ran Lori’s rationalisation, didn’t mean he hated her, or didn’t care about her, or didn’t love her.
Aileen did not attend her hated grandfather’s funeral. Nor did Keith, who was then clinging to his own life by a fragile thread. Keith had waged his battle against cancer for two years but by then the cancer had spread throughout his throat, brain, lungs and bones. His drug-dealer friend, Ducky (since deceased), took Keith’s cheque and brought drugs into his hospital room, feeding them right into his intravenous drip when no one was looking.
This was also the year Aileen married Lewis Gratz Fell. A curious match, to describe it in the most moderate of terms. Fell, with his reputable Philadelphia bloodline, was 69 years old, she twenty. They met when he spotted her hitching and offered her a ride. Interestingly, they married in Kingsley, Georgia, less than two months after the death of her grandfather. At 65, Lauri had been younger than Aileen’s beau. And what would Lauri have made of it?
Most who knew Aileen viewed this union cynically, finding it impossible to judge it as anything other than a purely mercenary move. Obviously, the unwitting Lewis Fell had no idea what he was letting himself in for. Erv Grody saw it this way: Fell wanted a young blonde on his arm, and Aileen was after his money.
‘He wanted the prize—and they both got the prize, all right. Surprise.’
Early in July, she and Lewis rolled into Michigan in a spiffy, new, cream-coloured Cadillac and checked into a motel. Aileen had sent Lori and Barry newspaper clippings of their wedding announcement from the society pages of the Daytona press, complete with a photograph of a man who looked old enough to be her grandfather, describing Fell as the president of a yacht club. Mailing it to Barry, to whom she’d never been close, she was merely milking her big chance to show off. She told Lori she was blissfully happy.
Arriving back in her hometown, apparently unembarrassed by the vast age difference between her and her spouse, the girl who had always wanted to be a movie star proudly displayed her silver-haired husband and her valuable diamond engagement ring, not necessarily in that order. He had more money than anyone she’d ever known and a plush beachside condominium. And just as she had always wanted, she was the talk of the town.
But Aileen was quickly torn. Her de
sire to get drunk and hang out in bars bubbled so close to the surface that it rapidly broke through the token marriage. To Lewis’s fury, his young wife went out at night, bar-hopping, exactly as she’d done when single.
Calculating or otherwise, whatever Aileen’s hopes and intentions were, she didn’t seem able to stick to them and her fleeting marriage was immediately in dire straits. After just one month of this less-than-love match, Lewis took to the hills before Lori and Erv had even got to meet him. Back in Florida, he filed a restraining order against his estranged wife, claiming she had beaten him with his walking cane.
The divorce decree stated: ‘Respondent has a violent and ungovernable temper and has threatened to do bodily harm to the Petitioner and from her past actions will injure Petitioner and his property … unless the court enjoins and restrains said respondent from assaulting … or interfering with Petitioner or his property.’
Not for the first time, Aileen simply inverted the facts, flipping over this story and accusing Fell of doing what she herself had done. Repeatedly, she claimed that he beat her, but at odd moments, the truth broke through. She admitted it to Lori, who was appalled (particularly by her addendum that she’d made Lewis fall by taking away his cane, then fallen about laughing). She also told the truth to Diane, during one of their rare meetings. It was an anecdote that only exacerbated Diane’s fear of her daughter, which had been building steadily with every horror story she heard about Aileen’s anger.
‘Why would you do that?’ she asked in astonishment. ‘This man’s a multi-multi-millionaire and he can take care of you, and he must evidently care about you!’