But that was not all. I felt anger at the fact I had been abducted in my church parking lot after braving a storm of biblical proportions to make it to choir practice.
Most troubling of all were the conversations with Mr. K. How could someone claim to love God yet commit such an evil act? I felt foolish about assuring him of God’s all-encompassing love. Finally, the significance of my cross necklace disappearing seemed too poetic, too metaphoric in meaning.
But when the counselor asked my parents, with my permission, if it would be okay to publish, Mom made it clear he had grossly overstepped a boundary.
It was a damn good draft though.
In Which Charles Grows Busy with His Social Life
Omaha, 1978—Three days passed. Charles was bored, bored, bored. And then Mark and Dean surprised him by stopping in to welcome him home. He hadn’t seen them in the two weeks he’d been out of the Kearney Youth Development Center. They both wanted to do something to celebrate, mark the rite of passage, as they say, so he suggested they drive over to Godfather’s Pizza and take advantage of his employee discount. After lunch, they drove Mark’s car to the arcade at Westroads and played Skee-Ball. It was as if the year he’d been away hadn’t happened at all.
They dropped by the next day and took him to services at the Center Baptist Church, just like old times. Afterward, they headed back to Godfather’s to join a few more kids. Charles felt like he was hosting a new social club, he was that popular.
Later, they drove over to Mark’s house and hung out in his room. Mark played the guitar and sang a few of his own songs that he had worked on over the past year. He wanted to become a musician someday. Charles liked that about him.
On Monday and Tuesday, Charles went to school and then worked his shift at the restaurant. Life was good. Nothing to report. On Wednesday, Charles pulled up to Mark’s in a tan ’78 Buick with cool spoke wheels. He told Mark it was his sister’s car. Mark didn’t seem to worry where he got it. As they cruised around, Charles asked Mark if he’d heard about the story of that fourteen-year-old girl and how the police were trying to catch the guy. Evidently the kidnapper had taken her over to Norris, their junior high school. “Want to go check it out?” “Check what out?” Mark asked. “Let’s drive on over to Norris,” Charles said.
As the school came into view, Charles started feeling his adrenaline pump. He got the urge to tell Mark. It was too exciting to keep to himself. “You want to see where that girl was raped?” Mark said okay—but without too much fervor, Charles noticed.
They drove around to the football stadium and pulled up behind the baseball diamond pit. Charles thought he’d test the waters a bit. “The papers don’t say so but I know this is where the guy took that girl.” Mark didn’t seem too interested. They sat in the car in silence for a few moments. Mark suggested they go to the Center Shopping Center to play a few games. Charles wasn’t going near the Center Shopping Center. “Let’s go to Westroads instead,” he suggested, feeling after the enormity of sharing his secret that he and Mark were now even closer, like brothers.
Driving toward Westroads, Charles asked Mark if they could stop at the used car lot next to the Rosebowl on Saddlecreek Road. There was a Corvette he wanted to look at. When he pulled up, Mark said he would wait in the car. “Sure,” why not, Charles thought. It would give him more range in the conversation to work the sales guy.
Charles went in, asked the salesman if he could take the Corvette out for a test drive. “Sure,” said the salesman, “if you have a license and a credit card.” Charles felt for his back pocket. “Ah, no, I must have forgot it. My friend out there can vouch for me, though. And that’s my car. I can give you the keys.”
The guy looked out at the Buick. Saw a kid in the passenger’s seat looking bored.
“Sorry, I can’t let you go without a license and credit card.”
“I understand. You have to a job to do,” Charles said, being friendly. “Do you mind showing me the car anyway? Maybe starting her up so I can see how she runs?”
The guy grabbed the keys, and they walked toward the vehicle. As they crossed the lot, Charles glanced over and noticed Mark hunting around in the Buick’s glove compartment. Very unlike Mark. He never cared before if a vehicle was hot. He’d find the papers, figure out it wasn’t Charles’s sister’s car, but that’s not what worried him. What worried him was the ski mask in the glove compartment. It was an item listed in the description of him in the newspapers.
He said thanks to the guy, but sorry, just remembered, gotta get back for something, and he headed toward the Buick. Got in. Mark was shutting the glove compartment. They both acted as if the moment had no significance. Charles pulled out fast, laying rubber down on the road, the tail of the car swerved. He laughed, looked over at Mark’s face to see if he was impressed, and Mark laughed too, said, “You’re a madman.” Charles started to relax again.
He knew that Mark would be honest with him if he was bothered. He was that kind of friend. Didn’t have the nerve to be a Judas. Wasn’t the betraying kind.
A couple of days went by, and Charles started enjoying his new routine. On Friday, December 1, eight days after the crime, he picked Mark up after school in the Buick. They discussed going to pick Dean up at church, but Mark said he wouldn’t be available for another hour, and suggested they head over to his house to fill the time.
Charles pulled the Buick into Mark’s driveway. Instead of getting out, Mark turned on the radio, and they started talking about the song. Then Charles noticed Mark glance out the window, followed what he was looking at. Noticed the guy next door run out the door to the car in his driveway. Something was going down.
Charles watched as the neighbor backed his car out into the street and suddenly understood, as the car pulled up behind him, that he had just been trapped. He looked at Mark. Then he heard the police sirens.
In Which Eyes Prove to Be the Mirror of the Soul
Omaha, 1978—I looked at my mother, who was looking at me with something clearly important to convey. They had a suspect at the police station. I didn’t have to go. Why wouldn’t I go? I felt like I was traveling in some weird virtual travel machine with the sound turned down. Of course I would go. I wanted to be helpful.
My parents and I arrived at the police station just as the potential suspects were being marched down the hall to the lineup room. One of the officers yelled at them to stop so our paths didn’t cross. My parents rushed me into the identifying room like we were trying to avoid a collision at a train junction.
We watched through a mirrored window as the men were brought in for the lineup. I knew him as soon as I saw his eyes, fourth from the left. I said that’s him. I could sense the four adults in the room with me stiffen. And it was only because of their looks that I understood, perhaps there should be an emotional response from me? But the boy in the lineup. That wasn’t Mr. K. Mr. K had on a mask. No, that teenager was a stranger in a crowd—just someone whose eyes I would never mistake. The officer asked me if I was sure. I said yes. He asked me again, looking at my parents, who were looking at me. I said yes again. I heard him tell my parents that the boy was the same one the previous witness had identified.
Everyone relaxed, the reduction of tension lightening the atmosphere. I wondered who the previous witness might be. I then heard, but pretended not to hear, as is polite when it’s clear you are not a part of the conversation, that it was a security guard at the pickup spot where Mr. K turned up to meet Dad. So! Mr. K had gone to meet my father. My brain recorded that fact in the file, and it disappeared into the stacks seconds later.
After we had finished at the police station, we drove home and pulled into our driveway. Dad turned off the motor. In the ten days since the kidnapping, his soul seemed to have sunk further.
Mom asked if we should talk a few moments before we went inside. I said sure. She offered her pack of cigarettes to me. I thought it was a test of some kind, this strange twist in permission, but she told me just to tak
e it and enjoy. So I did. And I remember what a cool thing I thought it was to smoke that Benson & Hedges menthol cigarette in the car.
“We need to check in,” she said. “How do you feel about that?”
I thought she was referring to the cigarette. She was talking about the lineup. “Fine,” I said.
“It would be okay if you were scared, you know.” She assured me I had picked the right man. I said I knew it was the right man. I wasn’t intentionally shutting her out. I was enjoying the smoke rings I was puffing, though.
“Now that he’s caught, the problem is the state of Nebraska’s,” she said, “so let’s put it behind us.” If there was any emotional reaction from Dad I didn’t see it, and so you might say I adopted the same dissociative flat emotional response.
So there. So not.
In Which Charles Ponders the Meaning of Friendship
Omaha, 1978—Charles was sitting in his Douglas County jail cell when he received the interview request from the Omaha World Herald. He had two more months to go before his trial and not a chance of getting out on bail, which had been set at one hundred thousand dollars.
The journalist was upfront, mentioned that he was a member of the First United Methodist Church where the girl and her family attended services, but assured him there would be no conflict of interest. He wanted to write a “soft piece.” Charles didn’t mind. It’s not like he had anything better to do with his time. It turned into a pleasant afternoon, and the reporter promised he’d send Charles a copy of the article.
It was a story about a friendship. The journalist painted a nice picture: of Mark and Charles going out for pizza together, playing pinball machines, hanging out at each other’s houses, said that Mark had even bought a television for Charles to watch while he was in his prison cell. The article mentioned Charles’s pride in Mark’s musical abilities, and quoted Charles when he said he felt that Mark was the closest friend he’d ever known, that he was like a brother, that Charles felt no ill will toward him. “He didn’t have to explain anything,” Charles was quoted as saying about Mark. “It wasn’t like he was turning me in. He really was trying to help.”
The journalist even told the story about the time Mark got into a fight with a guy who made a racial slur about Charles, shared that Charles had pulled Mark off the guy. For Charles, it was no big thing—but Mark, not used to hearing a racist so comfortable in using such language, had been offended.
The article finished by saying that if Mark received the three-thousand-dollar reward, he might give it to the victim or use it to help pay for his college education. Charles thought the article cast him in a positive light and hoped that the judge would read it before sentencing.
But if the judge had read the article, it wasn’t helpful. On April 1979, Charles and Judge Murphy were meeting once again. He pleaded guilty to kidnapping and first-degree assault. His defense lawyer had told him that confessing was his only hope for a lighter sentence, given the irrefutable evidence he’d left: the call to the girl’s father, the van with evidence of blood, the number of police he involved, witnesses, the hospital report—not to mention the original statement he gave to the police. Charles could tell, as Judge Murphy worked himself up to deliver his closing speech, that things weren’t going to go well.
“The family is the bedrock of our society. Kidnapping is an attack on the very existence of love between parents and children,” the judge started. He would like to have the “luxury” of passing a sentence that would be in Goodwin’s interests, but he had “a duty to protect the people of this community and to ensure that their children are not kidnapped and raped again.”
And with that, Charles, not yet eighteen, was sentenced as an adult to two six-to-ten-year terms for kidnapping and first-degree sexual assault in the Nebraska Penal Complex.
In Which We Cross the Pond
Oxford, 2001—When our children were two and three years old, my husband and I found ourselves with a coinciding break between jobs—the television station we jointly managed had just run out of money, so we decided to revisit the list of pros and cons of raising a young family in England versus the United States.
If we were to move, the disruption would be minimal. We thought a couple of years of downsized living while the kids were small would be terrific. America had the advantages of plenty of sunshine and a national park system with huge benefits for outdoor enthusiasts. After a good deal of research to identify the perfect community, we decided on Shepherdstown, West Virginia, an idyllic, small historic town, sixty miles outside Washington, D.C. It was close enough to the city that Thomas would have a chance to establish himself as a journalist if that’s what he wanted to do, and I could go back to work in D.C., the city that had been my professional home for ten years. And we’d have the natural beauty of West Virginia at our doorstep to enjoy as a family. It looked perfect.
Despite all the dysfunction and pain of the past, when I told my parents we’d made the decision to move back to America, they responded with such enthusiasm, even Mom, that I couldn’t help but get caught up in their joy.
We had a few practice visits from my parents in England that had been pleasant and easy. Mom, who didn’t help with the babies, had managed to make herself so absent in her presence that I never had to worry, and Dad was as great with his grandkids as he had been with us.
It felt good—Mom’s excitement at my return—like she had discovered some need for me, some pride in me for the first time in my life. I felt a vestige of hope that maybe we still had a chance, maybe she would heal the open wound I still had, the hole in me I was desperate for her to fill. She’d see who I was, a daughter who needed her love, and we could start making up for lost time. It might be this new chapter could work, that the storm had passed. That now that they had retired from being parents and were now grandparents, we could become an all-American family.
Dad suggested that we fly into Indianapolis so he could gift us with an old Jeep Cherokee he was no longer using, and I said yes, thanking him. So on June 11, 2001, we closed the door of our cozy cottage in England for the last time and twelve hours later landed at Indianapolis International Airport.
Thomas and I couldn’t help but smile at each other when we heard Neil Diamond’s song “America” so loud we assumed it was being piped through the airport speakers. Once we arrived at the gate, it turned out it was playing just for us. My family was there in force, dressed up in professionally rented costumes: Dad as Uncle Sam, Mom regal as Lady Liberty with a torch, Vivian as Pocahontas in a leather dress and moccasins with a feather headband, my eight-year-old nephew Taylor, dressed as a football player, and Gayle in charge of a huge boom box sitting next to them, conducting tech support. A performance that would have them hauled off by security these days, but before 9/11, was damn good public entertainment.
We drove to their neighborhood, first making a stop at Dairy Queen. Dad was so natural with the kids, so straight in with the play, so happy in being a grandfather that I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic.
We stayed with Gayle and Taylor, who lived across the street from my parents. It was in large part due to Gayle that I had overcome my fear of being a parent. She was six years ahead of me in the journey, a swap from her younger sister role. She clearly loved being a mother and adored her son. And it wasn’t as if her road had been smooth. After graduating from the University of Iowa, she had moved to Los Angeles and obtained her dream job in no time, working at Universal Studios. She couldn’t have been happier, until she dated a man twenty years her senior who totally misrepresented himself. Fast-forward two years later, and she moved back home with Mom and Dad, with her one-year-old son, saddled with forty thousand dollars of debt her ex-husband had spent in her name.
A couple of months after she moved in, Mom tried to kick her out of the house in one of her rages. Gayle found a women’s shelter that would take her and her toddler. Dad intervened and implored her not to leave.
After living with Mom and Dad for more
than two years, she had saved enough money to buy her own home. When Dad realized she and his grandson were not only leaving but moving several miles away, he went to Des Moines and summoned up an early inheritance from Katherine and Arlo to help Gayle with a down payment to buy a house right across the street.
Gayle was in great shape now. She was making a decent income in Dad’s business selling industrial manufacturing products. I admired the setup they all had—it seemed to work. My nephew had not only Dad across the street but Vivian too. And Mom in her new form seemed to be in check.
Mom and Dad were both incredibly generous in supplying us with basic household goods, and after enjoying a few days in Indianapolis, we set off in the jeep to West Virginia.
In Which Charles Conducts a Moral Inventory
Lincoln, 1980—In his second year inside, Charles was assigned a new prison counselor. He knew this guy would have only limited information on his case.
Charles told the counselor that he wasn’t guilty of the crime he was serving jail time for, that his girlfriend’s father trumped up the charges of rape because he was racist, and that Charles was advised to accept the plea bargain by his public defender.
Worse than that, after Charles was arrested, his girlfriend’s father moved her to Iowa so no one would ever know about them. Charles didn’t even have a forwarding address for her, nothing, no way to contact her. He was feeling suicidal, he missed her so much. He knew she’d be as desperate to hear from him, and he had no way to write her.
When Charles finished, he could tell the guy felt so bad for him that he figured it was safe to ask him to get the girl’s address in Iowa. The guy said it was the least he could do. His story was almost as tragic as Romeo and Juliet.
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