One late night a few summers ago, I was buying some cleaning supplies at a Wall Mart where I met a woman working there who helped me find what I needed to clean my house to get ready to sell. She told me about her family’s house up north that was for sale. They had problems selling it over the years because whenever they were about to close, a neighbor lady would show up and tell the wife the story and the couple would back out of the deal.
I could tell that she was on some sort of medication that caused her to slur her speech and from time to time she would begin to fall asleep on her feet. She said that ever since the tragedy she has been taking medication to help her cope with the pain.
As I asked her about the story, she gave me bits and pieces of information, almost like she was recalling it from a dream. She was a teenager. She said that her dad killed her mom, her boyfriend, the baby and the boys. Her little brother got away. Then she spoke in a childlike voice: “Then the men came … in suites. They put on boots and took shovels and were digging holes everywhere.”
She was in the metro area, staying with her aunt on the cold March night, when her father drove up to their home town and found his wife with her boyfriend. He became livid with anger and rage and went out to the car and got his revolver and came back and killed them, along with the baby. He then brought his son and a couple of his friends outside and made them stand on the back of a truck and tried to shoot them, but his gun jammed, so he told them to wait. He went to get another gun and came back, but they ran. He killed two of them, but his son got away as he was chased by his dad through the night along the thick row of pines and over across the cold muddy field of ice and melting snow to the neighbor’s farm, where he found refuge until the police came and arrested his dad.
I asked her about the men with the shovels. This traumatized her as much as the first incident. Here she stood, a young trembling teenager, at the house, on a cold rainy day, with her aunt and her little brother. She lost her mom and the baby she loved so much. The boys were dead, and her brother was curled up in a blanket on the floor, staring at the wall in a state of shock. Life had stopped for her and her family. Suddenly, with no explanation, a group of government agents showed up and put on their rubber boots and took their shovels out of their car trunks and began to dig holes all over the property. They asked her all sorts of questions -- questions for which she had no answers. They kept asking and repeating themselves as if she knew something. They did the same with her aunt and her little brother, but to no avail. She had no idea what was going on and they wouldn't tell her.
I did a bit of research. They were looking for the ransom money from an infamous kidnapping case. Not long before, they found the wife of a famous financier tied up to a tree in the nearby forest, in the late stages of hypothermia, barely alive. They never caught the kidnappers nor found the money, but there were a number of clues that led them to this property.
I went to look at the place. It had been sold, but the new owners were out of town. I walked around, up along the row of pines and imagined the father calling out to his son, telling him that everything would be ok. I thought of the terror and confusion that raced through the boys mind as he frantically tried to escape, knowing that his father was close behind, trying to kill him.
There is more to the story. Sometime later, a police officer quit his job and bought the place. He spent all of his time for a couple of years digging holes all over the property, looking for the lost ransom. He eventually went bankrupt and abandoned the site.
In recent years, I heard that a high ranking official in law enforcement bought a run-down shack on a patch along a creek lined with other old shacks, within eyesight of the property. He was seen visiting from time to time. I was never able to, nor interested, in verifying this part of the story.
The person who informed me of this also said that around the time of the kidnapping, the man, who had murdered his family and the other children, made some alterations to the property -- unusual and costly alterations for a man who had no money, nor any concern for the upkeep of his place. For some reason, this information was never revealed in the investigation.
I looked up the man and found the prison where he was incarcerated. I wanted to know because his daughter believed that he would soon be out and would come for her and make her life better, for she missed her dad. I even thought of visiting him as a chaplain, but I passed as I realized that I would have been crossing her boundaries without her permission.
He was an inmate with a number, in for a life sentence with no chance for parole. They couldn’t disclose if he had any contact with his daughter, but I got the impression that he never had a visitor.
I came back to the store a month later or so, in order to look for the woman who told me her tragic life story, thinking that I could help her somehow, but she was gone. She had been laid off from her job and moved on without leaving forwarding address.
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