A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (10 page)

Terryl would hide the saxophone. In the bathtub, a cupboard, her bedroom. Danny would wake her, demand it, berate her, threaten her. Her beatings for the most part had stopped. This was the new psychological warfare. Sometimes he’d find the sax. Sometimes she’d get the sleep her body craved, that she knew she needed, even though she wasn’t trying to stand out at school, just survive it. Somehow she got A’s and B’s.

IN HER DIARY, SHE
graded her days. Most were D’s and F’s. But there wasn’t much to be done about it. Terryl remembers Danny making the stakes clear: If Kathie left, he’d take Mitchell. “The threat of him kidnapping Mitchell was constantly held over our heads,” Terryl says. The cops were no help. Sometimes Terryl would call them, or a neighbor did, but she felt hopeless, and, like Danny, had it covered: He told the officers that it was a family matter.

Terryl also felt that Kathie was accusing her of being an instigator. Terryl thought she followed most of the rules: Don’t mess up the house, stay outside, and don’t answer the phone. She wasn’t sure why she wasn’t supposed to pick up the phone, but that was the rule.

Terryl felt like her mother blamed her for antagonizing Danny, and making things worse.

And there was the threat of gunplay. Her dad sometimes flashed his Magnum. Terryl remembers him also carrying a brown bag filled with painkillers, which he washed down with vodka.

Sometimes, when Danny was wasted, he would tell Terryl and Michael that he wasn’t their real father. In the morning, Terryl would ask her mother about it and Kathie would tell her that Danny was drunk and to ignore him.

Terryl knew better than to invite any friends over to the house. But once, she invited the daughter of the bishop at her local church to visit her when Terryl was visiting her maternal grandparents. It was a sleepover, interrupted. In the middle of the night, Danny showed up hammered, and threatened to take Mitchell. Same old, same old, at least for Terryl. But she looked over and saw the bishop’s daughter, Julie, tucked between the edge of the wall and the piano, sobbing. They took her home the next morning, a day earlier than they’d planned, and the girl never spoke to Terryl again.

TERRYL’S FIRST ESCAPE HATCH
had been books. She took a more concrete step when she was sixteen. She went to a local youth employment program in Downey and got a referral to a mom-and-pop accounting business.

It was in a small office plaza in Downey, in a nondescript two-story office building owned by Mark and Millie Mandel. They were an older couple, both CPAs, on their second marriages. They had eight children between them—all grown, all college grads. Terryl earned $2.25 an hour answering phones and filing papers. She bought Mitchell a new pair of sneakers, sometimes a toy. She purchased a dirt-cheap, used red Ford Pinto with fake-wood paneling.

At the firm, she worked quietly, trying to be friendly but invisible, just like at Warren High School, where she tried not to fall asleep conspicuously. She reminisces that she managed a 3.2 GPA at Warren but that she felt like the “trashiest girl in school.”

In her senior year, Terryl tried out for the cheerleading squad. One night, she went over to the house of Nanci Smith and her husband, Rich, the family’s close friends from way back, and showed off the cheers she was working on. Terryl was so excited. Then Danny came over and was drunk, or on the pills, and just started ripping into Terryl, telling her she was nothing. “He slammed her verbally, up one side and down the other,” Nanci remembers. “He crushed her like a little bug.”

Nanci thought that maybe this big drunk went after Terryl because, in his own way, he was intimidated by her. “She could outthink him. She was smarter than him, always two steps ahead of him,” Nanci recalls. It frustrated Danny that “she wouldn’t cave in. He couldn’t destroy her with words.”

Nanci remembers that Terryl was the one in the family who would dump out her dad’s booze. Not Kathie, because she knew what Danny would do if he found an empty bottle or cup. “The you-know-what would hit the fan,” Nanci said Kathie would tell her.

Nanci believes Kathie didn’t leave Danny because he did provide for the family financially. When Danny was sober, things were pretty good, Nanci remembers. “They never went without.” Besides, “Kathie was good people but she didn’t have much education to fall back on.” It was a different time; wives just didn’t up and leave husbands. Plus, Danny generally would never abuse anyone in public, not physically, at least, making it his word against the families’. The cheerleading incident was the rare time when he lashed out while people were watching. “He was very shrewd that way,” Nanci says.

Others saw only mean. Another family friend, Patricia Dian Hauser, says Danny would be drunk by ten in the morning, yelling, threatening violence. “Kathie was a mess so many times at my house,” Patricia recounts, and she remembers Danny using Mitchell as a pawn, threatening to take the boy, or refusing to let Kathie take him when she sought escape.

Michael, Terryl’s older brother, had trouble going against Danny, Patricia recollects. Less so for Terryl. “Terryl fought back,” Patricia says. “She was the fiercest little person.”

For his part, Mitchell, Terryl’s younger brother, remembers things differently, although he was a baby at the time. Looking back years later, he recalls his dad as a great guy. “My hero,” he says of Danny. Yes, Mitchell says looking back, “there were problems,” but he remembers them stemming from marital strife and tension between Kathie and his dad, not any cruelty on the part of his father.

In her senior year in high school, Terryl wound up making the cheerleading squad and got two rewards: a royal blue, gold, and white outfit, and, along with the library books she voraciously consumed, another escape route. She went to practices in the morning and after school. She was out of the house. She cheered for football and basketball players. She tried to be bubbly.

MIDWAY THROUGH TERRYL’S SENIOR
year, she says her mom had finally had enough of Danny and went to Norwalk Superior Court to officially get a divorce. She took Terryl with her. Terryl dressed nicely, with a white blouse and a Peter Pan–type collar. She was proud of and pleasantly surprised by her mom’s courage. But there was a much bigger surprise waiting in the courtroom.

Partway through the hearing, Terryl remembers, the judge asked Kathie: “Does the biological father pay child support for the minor daughter?”

He meant Terryl.

She says she looked at her mother: “What biological father? What biological father?!”

That was how she found out that Danny wasn’t her real dad.

Terryl pestered her mother for details but got few. Terryl wasn’t told her father’s name. She learned only that he’d been a high school sweetheart who was long gone.

“He doesn’t want you, and he’s not interested in being a father,” Terryl says Kathie told her.

Terryl felt relief that Danny wasn’t her blood. He didn’t totally define her. But she was angry, too. There was another man out there who was her father “who didn’t care about me.”

FOR ALL THAT, IT
wasn’t until high school graduation that something happened that hadn’t occurred in years: Terryl cried. Sitting in her cap and gown, a sunny day, she let it go. It wasn’t sadness, exactly. It was determination.

“I knew I never wanted to see any of those people again,” she says, looking back. “It was one of the only times in my life that I’ve cried.”

THE TRASH CAN HELD
a pile of refuse, and a woman, upside down. Dead. Her blood-slick feet stuck out of the top of the garbage.

“What is this doing in an advertisement for shoes?” demanded Terryl.

She stood on a small stage at Cypress College, her second year there. On the screen behind her was the image of the dead woman. Not a crime scene, a shoe ad. Terryl was doing a command performance for her debate team, arguing about the deleterious impact of violence in advertising.

Terryl’s high school guidance counselor didn’t consider college an option, urging the young woman to go to a trade school. But Terryl found a community college, feeding off encouragement from the Mandels, the family she worked for at the accounting firm, and her own raw faith that she could change her circumstances.

She recalls she got further encouragement at Cypress from a communications professor named Pat Ganer. She was heavyset, dowdy, strict, seemingly old to Terryl, though she was only in her thirties, and a caring talent scout.

“Terryl, what would you think about joining the debate team?”

She posed the question not long after Terryl arrived at Cypress, a few months after high school graduation. The professor saw drive and strength in the young woman, the voracious reader with the discipline, Terryl recounts.

Terryl, starved for such encouragement, lapped it up. She stayed for hours in Dr. Ganer’s office, getting help with homework. She spent even more time with the debate team and at tournaments, once arguing in the persuasive category in favor of child support. For the first time, she drew power from her personal experiences; she’d hidden and run from her home life. Now it was also serving as a source of drive, even inspiration.

She told Dr. Ganer a bit about Danny. The next year, the professor suggested Terryl do her persuasive address on violence in advertising. She leapt into it, finding numerous examples she’d show on the screen during her talks, like the one where the husband led the wife around by a leash, she on all fours like a dog. It was an ad for a department store.

TERRYL HAD TAKEN A
job at Disneyland as a ride operator. She worked on Space Mountain, proudly wearing the uniform, a red, white, and turquoise polyester jumpsuit. She met lots of young people, many attending college at nearby USC. They joked in the break room, they laughed. As advertised, Disneyland, to Terryl, was the happiest place on earth.

Encouraged by Dr. Ganer and the young people she met from USC, Terryl applied after two years at Cypress to a bunch of colleges: George Washington and Georgetown, the University of Kentucky, UCLA, and USC. She got into every one of them, which, still highly uncertain of herself, she silently attributed to the fact that she was poor and filling someone’s quota. But she was still elated, particularly when the envelope arrived from USC, which was attended by all those happy, privileged kids from Disneyland.

At USC, she took a class in criminal psychology, which she thought would fulfill a credit but wound up touching her deeply. She knew well how “bad men” acted, after years of living with Danny. She started thinking about becoming a prosecutor. She took classes at the university’s Annenberg School for Communication. It was interesting stuff, but it also felt practical. She might not be able to afford law school, she thought, but she could always make a living doing public relations. She liked having a glass-half-full outlook and was adept at putting a good face on things.

She got scholarship money to live in the dorm. Her roommate was a music major, which meant Terryl got to attend music events. She joined the “Helenes,” the smiling, effervescent greeters at USC sporting events. She told no one about her past, her home life, and they didn’t seem to care. She felt safe. The dorm had a guard. She could sleep without keeping one eye open, as she had to do at home.

Danny, though, would not let her go. Far from it.

One late afternoon in the summer after her first year at USC—her junior year, given all her Cypress credits—she took Mitchell to the movies at the Cerritos mall. Mitchell was now six, and a sweet little guy. The pair left the theater through the back doors. By now it was dark. In a vivid recounting, Terryl says she didn’t see Danny until it was too late: He was standing right next to them, wearing the familiar blue work pants and shirt, literally stinking drunk.

“Terryl, say good-bye to your little brother,” she recollects him saying.

She looked at him. What did he mean?

“You’re never going to see him again!” Danny grabbed Mitchell by the arm.

“No! No! No! Help! Help!” Terryl screamed.

She grasped Mitchell by the other arm. She pulled, and Danny pulled. And then Danny, so much bigger than Terryl, swung Mitchell away.

“That’s when I lost him. I didn’t have a grip on him anymore. Danny grabbed him and ran away and threw him in the truck and they drove off.”

Terryl remembers running to her Pinto after the confrontation with Danny. She climbed in. She became paralyzed. Tears poured from her, hysteria. It was the days before cell phones—she couldn’t call her mom. She didn’t know if she should call the police. What could they do? What had they ever done?

She sat in the car for a long time. Still hysterical, crying the way she hadn’t in many years, maybe since high school graduation. In that state, she drove home, blind with anger and helplessness. It nearly cost her dearly. She was so consumed that, driving on the highway, too fast, she rounded a curve and the Pinto swerved; she lost control, and then, at the last second, recovered.

Danny returned Mitchell unharmed, but another scar was left on Terryl, the seeds of a recurring nightmare. Whenever she slept at home, she’d have it: her dad taking Mitchell, threatening that Terryl would never see the boy again. And, in the nightmare, she never did see her brother again.

Mitchell, looking back, remembers the incident differently. He says his dad came to get him because Terryl had him out too late. His dad, Mitchell recalls, never got out of the car, and only got upset when Terryl wouldn’t hand him over and resisted. “She was always mouthie,” Mitchell recalls, suggesting Terryl provoked Danny. And he says his dad took him right home that day to Kathie. His memory underscores some differences in how the children saw their parents, and the strife. But Mitchell does concede there were family problems, to the point that he says that when he was in third or fourth grade, after his parents split, he asked to live for a year with his babysitter “because of the drama.”

“I kind of threw down the gauntlet as much as a little kid can, and told them ‘I don’t want to live with either one of you,’ ” he recalls.