A Mother’s Promise

by Lee Barnett

  EARLY MORNING AT HEAD COUNT I WAS HANDED A SLIP OF PAPER saying that once the doors opened I needed to go to reception. What was all this about? I asked myself.

  Getting out of the fenced-in area surrounding our units was always a thrill. Gee, I stopped to think. Since when did such a tiny thing become such a thrill? Perhaps I was becoming institutionalised. When I entered reception they told me that I needed a trolley. A trolley! This must mean all the transcripts had arrived.

  And they had. There were five large office boxes with matching lids and Barnett-E25324 written across them. When I got to the officers’ building I checked in and asked how my application to forego work so I could concentrate on my evidence was proceeding. The good news was that it had been approved. Bernadette gave me a schedule for the education room and told me that I would receive a new one each week. My dear friend Kelly from the unit below me had offered to help me with the boxes. She was one of the few girls I trusted.

  I opened the box that had #1 written on it. Sitting on the top of the papers was a copy of a GQ magazine article written about me eighteen years earlier; I had been gone about a year at that time. The author was a man named Peter Richmond, a classmate of Harris’s during the one year he had attended Yale. Titled ‘Harris Todd in Hell’, the piece was well written and emphasised the beauty of Charleston, somehow tying Harris’s ancestors into the first shots of the Civil War. And by that I mean literally linking the crappy little creek that ran along the property he had bought (only a few years before this piece) all the way to Charleston Harbor where the first shots of the Civil War were heard. Nice job, Harris would have been pleased! When I turned to the second page a chill shot up my spine: there was a photo of Harris lying on the floor with his dark, hooded eyes staring at the ceiling. His fingers were laced across his chest. It could have been a picture of a cadaver, but I was certain that the pose had been carefully contrived to indicate his intelligence, thoughtfulness and to generate public sympathy for this man who had suffered at the hands of his crazy wife. On the far wall was an empty antique crib, and just above Harris’s head were two legs of what must be a Raggedy Ann doll. The photo had Harris written all over it, martyr to the end.

  I asked the girls in my unit what they thought of it without any prompting from me.

  ‘Oh God, what the fuck is that?’, ‘Why are you showing us a picture of a creepy fucking paedophile?’ were the kind of responses I heard. Later at dinner, I was made to show the picture to the girls who had missed out earlier, and the chatter around the table was that no one was going to sleep well.

  The article mentioned that Harris dropped out of Yale one semester short of his degree. At least Harris didn’t pretend he was a Yale graduate as he did with most people. He sure milked the one year he did attend for all it’s worth! Peter Richmond also included a couple of Harris’s poems. One of them mentioned a crying baby, a manic wife and a platter-sized hole eaten into an oriental rug by my dog. I laughed to myself – Harris had watered his pot plants without a protective container underneath and that was how the hole came to be. What dog would eat a perfectly round hole? Harris also apologised to Richmond for a broken toilet seat, saying that I had broken it in a fit of rage. Aha! Now a letter I had received from my childhood friend Lorraine made sense: she had mentioned this article but had written that she had broken the seat during a visit.

  Richmond also described the private detective, who was actually a bounty hunter, who Harris had hired. I knew that Susan Poag in particular had endured frequent stalking and threats by this private detective.

  The next part of the article turned to Faye Yager from the Children of the Underground, who claimed she had spirited us away. Both Peter and Harris were sure that she held the key to our whereabouts. Such was their conviction that when they met her, Faye actually offered to return us to Harris under the condition that I didn’t go to jail and lose custody. So fully believing that this lady knew of mine and Samantha’s whereabouts, Harris, who had told Peter I was dangerous and would harm his daughter, turned around after an agonising year of searching and told Faye, thanks but no thanks! Another surprising find on reading the piece was for me to learn that my third lawyer, Hans Paul, had committed suicide shortly after I had fled.

  As I neared the end of this ten-page article I found the lengthy quote that friends had told me about after my arrest:

  It had not occurred to me, as I went about trying to find Savanna, that he might not be willing to do whatever had to be done to get her back … I do not tell him that a court pronouncing him the fitter parent does not necessarily make it so … I do not tell him that his poets and philosophers and judges and lawyers and law officers are no substitute for the real world … I do not tell him that in turning his back on the chance he’s being given to get his family back, he is going against a force of nature, against the natural order of things, the order I thought he understood so well. I do not tell him I wish I’d never given him the chance.

  Peter Richmond had understood the situation. He had understood the psychology of the man behind the lies.

  The following day I was off to the library again, carrying volumes 1 and 2 of the transcripts from the custody and divorce hearing. Inside the box were my only vices, a family-size block of Cadbury’s white chocolate from my weekly buy-ups, and a Diet Coke.

  I handed over my ID card and entered the educational room. Carefully I spread out my notepads, pens and highlighters, then opened the huge volume marked #1.

  Susan Poag was up first. She spoke about our long and lasting friendship spanning some twenty-nine years, and mentioned that even though we lived in different states we were in constant contact with each other and shared everything. On being asked if she felt our family was dysfunctional, she disagreed with that description, saying that as a child I had a good relationship with my mother and brothers, and that she saw no signs of dysfunction. She was asked whether I was angry or violent, both of which she strongly denied, having never, ever seen me seriously angry.

  Susan said she had called Harris when I was having my miscarriage scare because she had wanted to organise a second opinion: ‘He was very curt. He seemed very distant and unconcerned, and he said, “I will let Lee make a decision about that.”’ She also said she found Harris was cold and uncaring when she had expressed her concern for me. And after I had seen the doctor Susan had found for me, she recalled how thrilled I was to hear the heartbeat. She recalled that soon after that phone call I had rung her, crying, saying that Harris had left me. Susan had been shocked by this.

  Susan was cross-examined by Graham Sturgis, who claimed that Harris had organised the appointment with Dr Rumble after my possible miscarriage. That was simply not true. Not only had Harris nothing to do with that phone call but he had also refused to go with me to Dr Rumble’s the next day. There were many many lies set down in these transcripts of the hearing and I was only at page 77 – out of over 3500.

  Susan then told a story about when she had first met Harris, and how he had told us all about his journey through Africa on a motorcycle, only to find out later that it had never happened. Susan ended her testimony answering questions about Mom, a woman she had always regarded as a second mother. Susan said how much she felt my mom had changed over the past year, how she now exaggerated and lied about the truth, and how Susan felt the root cause of this was her involvement with Harris.

  It was tough reading my testimony, not least because I didn’t sound confident and saw how they had worn me down over the months, trying to convince me that I was mentally ill, and that because of my supposed ‘cognitive slippage’ I could not be believed.

  On the stand I retold the story to the judge, just as I had to the psychiatrists and psychologists, about the time I slapped Harris when we were in Bonaire. I also told the judge how I had pleaded with Harris to let me buy baby stuff from our joint account, and that he had refused even though half of the orginal $20,000 was mine.

  I told the judge about the times Harris an
d his brothers John and Richard were out at the house on the weekends. John would often have his two children. Everyone would drink too much and Richard, Harris’s youngest brother, would throw his young niece and nephew into the back of his van, with no seat belts and drive home drunk. I remembered Richard with sadness. He had always seemed such an angry man who freely expressed this, and he seemed to positively loathe women. Even with John’s very small kids present he would threaten to ‘blow his fucking brains out’, shouting it over and over like some sort of bizarre mantra. I had told Jania repeatedly, and everyone else I could at that time, that this was another reason I was scared for my daughter. But I was not listened to, and instead they determined that my reasons for saying so were due to my ‘mental illness’ and that I had made it all up. After my arrest, while in Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre, I heard from others that Richard did in fact sadly commit suicide.

  So much of reading the transcripts brought back the anxiety and stress of that time. I easily recalled Harris’s torturing me, telling me over and over no one loved me and that I was insane. I also thought back long and hard at how I started to become a little bolder, and to dig deeper for clues as to why this was all happening.

  Harris had become such a monster. So I began to dig into his past to find out why. In his home office on Johns Island I discovered all manner of strange jottings of his. Some were clearly just bizarre rantings, but there were odd poems and all manner of other notes and scribblings. I found poems identical to the ones he said he had written specifically for me, but these had dates on them that were way before our relationship.

  As I dug through these large amounts of papers, some consisting of scraps or coffee-stained cards and letters, I stumbled across notes for his autobiography which included:

  A self-pleasing, self-cultivated delightful nonchalance.

  Being a very good actor.

  A relative lack of interest in either sex of people in general.

  It was increasingly clear that I really never knew the man I married.

  On the witness stand I recounted to the judge the night I found Harris’s 8mm ‘Good Eating’ movie, and its creepy contents. And I also found a dream-like letter featuring fellow students of his from Andover/Yale college days, numerous strange postcards from his friend Pierce to Harris always signed ‘Love Pierce xxoo’ or ‘Suffice to say I love you’ or ‘Hope to be bumping into you again real soon’. Harris wrote about Pierce’s red pubic hair which in itself I found rather strange. Later at the hearing and on the witness stand, Pierce denied having any homosexual relationship with Harris, but he did admit to drug use. Interestingly, though, that admission had been struck from the record. The reason for that I could only surmise was that he was Barbara Bush’s nephew, and Judge Mallard had made it plain, almost from the outset, that he was an admirer, even saying at one point, ‘Do tell Barbara I said hello.’

  Everything I told the judge and all the evidence I showed him was shot down with further accusations that I was mentally ill.

  As I continued to plough through the evidence, I thought that the efforts of the first person we went to for marriage counselling, Fred Sosnoski, to remember the details as accurately as he could were damn near heroic. He had said that I had come to see him because I wanted to save the marriage, though he was not sure why Harris had come. And when cross-examined by Graham Sturgis if he had called Dr Bjorksten (the psychiatrist we would later go to for marriage counselling and who’d said ‘Lee was neurotic and gets excited’), Fred denied that conversation. Sturgis pressed him, asking Fred if he had found me to be a very excitable person, one easily excited. Fred’s response to that was: ‘I would not describe anything I saw as excitable.’

  Next, though, was the really interesting part – Fred said that Dr Bjorksten had called him before Harris and I went to see him. ‘Okay,’ Fred said, referring to a note he’d made about the call from Bjorksten:

  He was telling me about … that Harris had been to see him, that Harris is thirty-nine years of age, married ten months, and he said, ‘I think his wife is coming to see you.’ He said, ‘She has a bad temper and that Harris has moved,’ and my note to myself says, ‘I may need to send Lee to Oliver Bjorksten.’ I’m not sure at this point whether he suggested that or not. I think maybe that he did.

  Fred was next asked if he knew whether Dr Bjorksten had seen Harris and myself professionally sometime prior to 22 October 1992 when he had that conversation. ‘I don’t think he had seen Lee at that point. He had seen Harris at that point.’ Then he was asked where the information referring to my having a ‘bad temper’ came from. ‘Well, if he [Bjorksten] had not seen her, it would have to come from Harris, I guess.’ For the purposes of itemising my visit through my airline medical insurance claim, Fred then explained that he had reported ‘adjustment disorder’ as a diagnosis so I would be covered. On being asked if that was a mental illness, Fred had responded no. On being asked if I needed to be hospitalised, he said no. And whether I needed medication was also given a no. His diagnosis had been made purely for insurance purposes.

  Next, I read through Jania Sommers’ handwritten notes from when she had interviewed Fred. He stated that he never found me to be emotionally unstrung (as Harris had portrayed). Furthermore, he said he found me to be a perfectly sensible person and thought I would be a good parent. Fred reported Harris to be like a block of wood, and testified that he had signs of repressed anger.

  After a long and depressing day I was about to leave the library when I heard, ‘Hold off for a few minutes, we have movement,’ from the officer.

  At last the intercom buzzed that I was free to leave and I heard the familiar click releasing the locked doors.

  The officer Bernadette entered the building just as I was leaving. ‘Barnett, can I have a quick word?’

  We stepped back inside the education room and she asked me who was in my unit. I listed the girls and after a pause she said, ‘You know you’re in a unit with one of the most dangerous women in the country?’

  ‘Julia?’

  Bernadette nodded. ‘She’s the only person I know who has a life sentence for not murdering someone.’

  ‘Not murdering? I thought she knifed a guy in a nightclub that she owns.’

  ‘She didn’t kill him. She thought she did but he survived – he’s paralysed but he’s alive.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I reckon I know my narcissistic psychopaths, after all I was married to one, but for her to lie about killing someone doesn’t make sense. What’s in it for her to lie?’

  ‘Those types don’t need a reason to lie, they just do it. In her case she probably wants people to respect her.’

  I thought about that for a moment. I saw how that could be true for the girls in Protection, but the girls on our side, even those in for murder, still had a strong sense of right and wrong.

  ‘Anyway,’ Bernadette continued, getting to the point, ‘I don’t think you should have your papers in her unit, so we’ll probably be moving you again soon.’

  Oh well, here we go again, I thought to myself.

  16

  Cape Town, South Africa

  November 1994

  WHILE WE CIRCLED HIGH ABOVE CAPE TOWN WAITING TO LAND, Samantha and I gazed down on the grand, flat-topped mountain that overlooks the entire port city, with its stunning blue-green water crashing against the land.

  On leaving the aircraft we headed towards the immigration queue, and my heart began its familiar pounding. Deep breaths, I repeated to myself.

  Samantha wriggled about in her stroller – she really wanted to get out and run around so I decided to let her because I could have a clear view of where she was. She had been so good on the flight, apart from complaints about still being in a diaper, something she felt was unnessary. I stopped to check that I had all the documents for the officers at the head of the queue, and my eyes were off her for just a second. Suddenly I heard a big burst of laughter and turned to see a crowd smiling at Samantha who had now
ditched her diaper and was naked from the waist down. Normally I wouldn’t have worried, but her passport, which I was to present to the officials in only seconds, had her gender as male. With an exaggerated show of embarrassment, I scooped her up in my arms and off to the bathroom. After putting on a fresh diaper and pleading for her to keep it on we were back in line. And a few minutes later we were safely through.

  It was an exciting time be in South Africa. Four years earlier, Nelson Mandela had been released after twenty-seven years in prison and was now president. And only months before our arrival, apartheid had come to an end. The overall feeling in the air was a combination of excitement, hope and unity. We settled into the southern suburbs of Cape Town with a wonderful family, who thanks to Samantha’s magnetic personality made us feel we really belonged.

  Some weeks after moving in, I went for a run while Beauty the maid looked after Sammy. While out on the streets I got the distinct feeling I was being watched. I was some distance from the house when out of nowhere I heard a helicopter. I turned away from the parklands area I’d just passed, in order to avoid open space, but then the helicopter changed course as well. And it seemed that no matter what I did, it mirrored my movements. After quite sometime, and now pretty tired, I slowed to a walk, reasoning that if they were going to get me then they were going to get me. But I made sure to stay well away from the house, hoping that if I did get caught they wouldn’t know where Samantha was. Suddenly, though, the helicopter veered off in the direction it came from, which was indeed towards the house. I belted home, picturing a hysterical, red-faced Samantha howling at being wrenched from the arms of her kind maid. But when I got home, there was none of that. There was no sign of the FBI, police or for that matter anyone, just Samantha playing with the puppy under the watchful eye of Beauty