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Family myths, family realities
The Abandoned Newborn
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| ___PART ONE OF A TWO-PART SERIES - - - - - - - >>
The Forgiven_____
WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOUR CHILD WERE BRUTALLY MURDERED? << - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY MICHELLE GOLDBERG In a small ranch house in Fresno, Calif., a group of people are eating apple pie and ice cream at a reception for an anti-death penalty performance that night at a local Mennonite church. The performer is Ben Aronoff, a former San Quentin guard who befriended "freeway killer" William Bonin, who was convicted in 1981 of murdering 14 boys and young men and executed in 1996. Aronoff turned against the death penalty and began doing one-man shows to dramatize life on death row. Sam Sheppard will also speak about what it feels like to be a child whose father has a capital case against him. His father, Dr. Sam Sheppard, was falsely imprisoned for the murder of his pregnant wife, Marilyn, in the 1950s; his story was the basis for the TV series and film "The Fugitive." Like the hostess, Donna Larsen, whose son has been on death row since he was 22, many of the people at the gathering are parents of inmates. But one guest, Aba Gayle, holds a unique place in the strange community that springs up around death row. Gayle is the mother of a murder victim, a daughter named Catherine who was killed in 1980 when she was 19 years old. Gayle is here because 12 years after her daughter's murder, she had a religious epiphany, turned against the death penalty and befriended her child's killer, Douglas Mickey. Now she visits death row every week, and her conversation is littered with the jargon of prison culture. She and the others sit on living room sofas and talk about the men they know on death row with the casual, affectionate air of parents chatting about their kids at college. Even among murder victims' families who oppose the death penalty, Gayle is unusual. Many of the 400 members of the anti-death penalty group Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, to which she belongs, are long-time liberals who gain some legitimacy in the death penalty debate after losing a loved one and feel duty bound to use it. They see themselves as living rebukes to the most basic death penalty argument: What would you do if it was your child? However, a small but surprising number in the group do exactly what Gayle has done -- reach out to their child's killer. "It's a small minority of our membership, but a lot more than I expected when I got into this work," says director Pat Bane. "And for a number of others, that is their goal. They say it may take 20 years, but they hope to be able to do it." The people who have reconciled with murderers have remarkably similar stories. Most were turned off by the emphasis on vengeance and anger they found at traditional victim support groups. They were often very religious before the murder or had religious conversions after. Many of them say that the murder created an inextricable bond between them and the killer. "When there is something as huge in your life as a murder, somehow it creates a kind of relationship, whether a hate relationship or a desire to know more about the person who did it," says Bane. Perhaps most significant, they say that years after the killing, everyone is sick of hearing about their murdered relative except the murderer himself. The first time I met Gayle was at a cafe in Larkspur, 15 minutes from California's San Quentin Prison, where she had spent the morning visiting. She was wearing a purple and yellow dress that she calls her "prison dress" because of the restrictions on the colors a guest can wear to visit death row inmates -- no blue, gray, forest green, orange, khaki or black pants, nothing that guards, prisoners or wardens might be wearing. "They want us to stand out from the prisoners so they know who to shoot," she says. "Anyway, I try to wear bright colors, because the men never see bright colors." Gayle is a short 64-year-old woman with a chin-length blond bob, red glasses and pink cheeks. She gushes about many of the prisoners, especially about their art and poetry. I ask her whether any of the serial murderers have committed crimes that are just too awful for her to treat them as friends. "I don't deal with their crime. I don't deal with that part of them. I deal with the God spirit within them, which everybody has. I shook hands with a man today, his name is Ted, he comes from Southern California, and he kills little girls. What he did is horrendous. Horrible. But that's not all he is. He is the most incredible artist." Gayle's daughter Catherine had been staying at a ranch near Auburn with her friend Eric when Douglas Mickey stabbed her 11 times. Mickey was Eric's best friend, but in a drug-induced delusion, he had become convinced that Eric was "stealing his power in some kind of mystical way," Gayle says. He stayed for dinner and even played a board game with Catherine and Eric before murdering them both. Before her daughter's murder, Gayle had never thought one way or the other about the death penalty. "I was a Kappa Kappa Gamma at the University of Wisconsin, raised to be a middle-class suburban housewife. My mother didn't raise me to go visit men on death row," she says, laughing. And for most of the 12 years after Catherine was killed, Gayle would have been insulted if someone had said that Douglas Mickey was a human being and not a beast. "The prosecutors had promised me that he would get the death penalty and that when he did I would be free of this pain, and for years I believed it," says Gayle. "I was an atheist, I was unable to accept the basic teachings of any church at that point and had been for years. Frankly, when your daughter is murdered, who can believe in a God who would let that happen?" While taking her sick mother to church, however, she began dropping in on the adjacent spiritual bookstore, and eventually started attending classes and tearing through books on Buddhism and metaphysics. "You can't read a book a week out of a metaphysical bookstore without something really dramatic happening to you inside," says Gale. "I became very interested in a universal God, a God that is all love. It's a philosophy that doesn't believe in Lucifer or the devil or original sin. And that I could accept. I kind of fell in love with God, I think." She decided to take a class called a Course in Miracles, described in its Web site as "a self-study course in spiritual psychotherapy." On the first day, the teacher showed the group a video about the program. "In it a Jewish man said that after studying a Course in Miracles, he was able to forgive not only the German people in general but the actual guards in the camps who had murdered every single member of his family," says Gayle. "And I thought, if he can do that, I should be able to forgive the man who murdered Catherine." But forgiveness was a struggle. When a student in another church class she was taking suggested that "forgiveness is not real unless you let the person know," she came unglued, incensed at the thought of ever visiting "that scumbag" except on the day of his execution. Then, driving home from class the last day, Gayle says a voice came to her. "It said, 'You must forgive him, and you must let him know.' And that voice was so loud and clear and persistent that it didn't let me sleep that night. It had me out of bed and at my computer at 4 o'clock in the morning, where I wrote a letter to the man who murdered Catherine." "Dear Mr. Mickey," the letter began. "Twelve years ago I had a beautiful daughter named Catherine." She wrote about her daughter and how her death had devastated the family, and about how angry she had been at him until, after studying a Course in Miracles, she found herself able to forgive him. "I said, 'I don't want you to think that I think you're innocent, and I don't want you to look to me to be a political advocate on your behalf, but I do want you to know that you are forgiven.'" She ended with, "The Christ in me sends blessings to the Christ in you." Just talking about that letter, Gayle says, she still feels "a little prickly something" down her back. "The mailbox was a little metal box on the wall, so it made a little click when you put the mail in. I put the letter in, and when I heard that click, all that horrible, ugly, intense anger and rage that I had been carrying around all those years -- all that need for revenge -- was gone. And in its place I was instantly filled with the most incredible sense of love and joy and peace. I was truly in a state of grace. "What I learned in those classes is that we're all one," she continues, "and you and I are as connected as I am connected to my very own flesh and blood children because we're all divine children of God. And I was as connected to Douglas Mickey, who murdered my daughter, as I was to the daughter who was murdered. If I'd never gotten an answer to that letter, it would have been OK." But she did get an answer. "The letter I got back was from someone who was obviously very, very bright and very spiritual, someone who had spent years really studying hard. He wrote, 'The Christ in me most gratefully acknowledges and accepts blessings from the Christ in you.' And he talked a little bit about his life and how he opened my letter with dreaded anticipation, thinking that I was writing to tell him what a terrible person he is and how much I hated him. And then imagine how he felt when he read what it did say." At the end of the letter he wrote, "I would gladly give my life this instant if it would in any way change that terrible night." Mickey sent Gayle a visiting form. It took her 90 days to get permission from San Quentin to visit, and during those months they exchanged other letters. When the day finally came for her to go to prison, she was alone and terrified. "I'd been alone through every stage of this process. For some reason, the people who were supposed to be my support system all disappeared whenever I needed them. Very shortly after Catherine died, my husband told me he didn't want to talk about her anymore and that he did not intend to mourn her the rest of his life. My other two children had both just started medical school, and I certainly couldn't add any burdens to their lives. My mother had open heart surgery soon after Catherine's death and I could never, ever let her see my pain. So I drove down all alone, and talk about butterflies in your stomach. I was just fluttering." When she arrived, her first surprise was the death row visiting room. It looks like a community center rec room, with vending machines and landscape paintings, and inmates and their visitors mingling freely. "I didn't see a single monster," Gayle recalls. "All I saw were ordinary human beings, with their grandmothers and mothers and children and wives and sweethearts. And every place I looked, I saw the face of God." When Mickey came in, he said, "Gayle, you do me the greatest honor by paying me this visit." They talked for three and a half hours. "I cried and he cried. We cried together. He's a very big, very tall, very strong man and he wasn't the least bit embarrassed to sit there, surrounded by other prisoners, and weep openly. We talked about Catherine. No one else wanted to talk about Catherine anymore. Everybody was sick to death at hearing me talk about Catherine, and he would sit there and just let me talk about her. I left there that day, after one visit in that place, and I knew that I would be his advocate. I knew that I would do whatever I could for the rest of my life, whatever it took, to see that none of those men were executed."
N E X T+P A G E: Helping his son's killer get paroled - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE STREETER |
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