Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
I
N JUNE 1980, IN
a room with bedsheets tacked up as curtains, a slight high schooler with brown hair was fast asleep when she recalls she was awakened by yelling: “Get out of bed! Get in here! I want you to see this.”
It was the summer after Terryl Danielson’s ninth-grade year in Downey, California, a town near Compton, not far from Los Angeles. A tough neighborhood, but no tougher than what happened inside the walls of the three-bedroom house with overgrown ivy in the front yard that Terryl, her mom, Kathie, and older brother, Michael, had given up trying to groom.
“Get in here!” Terryl remembers her father yelling as she fought to get her bearings. She could see the .357 Magnum in his hand.
“I’m going to blow your mother’s fucking head off.”
THINGS HAD BEEN LEADING
to this moment for a long time, a slow-motion wreck starting in August 1962 when Kathie, who was chunky and adorable with short blond hair and had just graduated from high school, gave birth to Michael. He was a big kid but passive. Less than a year later, Kathie delivered again, this time with twins, Terryl and her sister, Kerryl.
Several months after she was born, Kerryl died. They chalked it up to pneumonia.
Dad was Byron Lloyd Danielson. He built driveshafts at a local garage. He was big, six-foot-two and 220 pounds. He was clean-shaven and kept his brown hair cut short. He was good-looking. He could be really sweet. There was this one time that he and Kathie and a bunch of their friends went to an Elvis concert in Long Beach. There weren’t enough tickets for everyone, but he managed to score a really great one for one of Kathie’s best friends, a better seat than anyone else’s in the group. Then things began to change for Danny—as the family called him—when he hurt his back at work. He started taking painkillers. And he drank. His personality changed. When he was drinking or popping pills, he’d go from “Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde, from Joe-Mr.-Nice-Guy to a real a-hole. You couldn’t believe it was the same guy,” recollects Nanci Smith, a close family friend. She remembers Danny always having guns, keeping one stored beneath the driver’s seat of his car.
TERRYL’S MEMORIES OF TERROR
start early. In the year before she started kindergarten, she was asleep in the family’s previous house in nearby Lynwood, in a room with yellow walls that she shared with Michael, when she was yanked out of bed in the middle of the night. “My mom’s face was bloody.” They ran across the street to a neighbor’s house. “It was my first memory of violence.”
The family called Byron “Danny” after his last name, Danielson. Sometimes Dad, but often Danny. They stayed as far away from him as they could, as their tiny house would permit.
There wasn’t much of anywhere else to go, given the gangs and toughs who roamed the streets. Terryl retreated into books. Anything she could get her hands on. She loved the Bobbsey Twins.
Kathie was a Mormon, and she would sometimes take the kids to a nearby LDS church. But Danny, not a Mormon, wasn’t a fan of the activity. Terryl remembers that Danny, to make sure church wasn’t an option, would sometimes take the distributor cap off of Kathie’s long, chocolate brown Cadillac, disabling the aging sedan.
Kathie tried to keep up outward appearances at the Lynwood house. She would borrow a lawn mower from a neighbor, and she and Terryl and Michael would groom the front yard.
One afternoon when Terryl was in the fourth grade, she remembers finding a cup of orange juice in the kitchen. She took a sip and discovered it wasn’t orange juice, or, rather, not just orange juice. It was what her dad called a screwdriver. Orange juice mixed with the vodka that made him crazy and violent. She dumped out his bottle of vodka. Come what may for Terryl, the smallest girl in her class.
“He came in screaming, and he grabbed me by the arm. He dragged me to my room, and he spanked me with a belt. He was in a rage,” she recalls. It hurt, a lot. It didn’t stop her.
“Every time I could throw out his vodka, I did.”
She learned very early on to disassociate herself, to lock out the emotions. She says she didn’t cry when he beat her. Her brother Michael cried, but not Terryl.
Each morning and night, Terryl knelt beside her bed. Every night, the same prayers:
Why couldn’t I have been born into a family where my parents loved each other and were happy for their kids?
She begged God to help her mother leave her dad.
Terryl recalls that Kathie had a different plan. She decided there was a way to make things better: relocate to a new place. So when Terryl was nearing the end of elementary school they moved to a three-bedroom apartment in Whittier, another tough city, and they lived in the rough part of it. And now the liquor store wasn’t a few blocks away, it was directly across the street.
Terryl had her own room and so did Michael. Now they had a little brother, Mitchell. The kids didn’t leave the apartment because they feared the gangs. Terryl didn’t leave her room because she feared her dad. She escaped further into books. Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys.
There was a mild mystery in the house. Terryl says she was told not to answer the phone. She didn’t think too much about it. It was just a rule.
Don’t answer the phone, Terryl
, and she didn’t. Better to follow the rules, take them on faith, not upset the delicate balance more than it would get upset on its own.
During that period, she kept a diary. She had a looping cursive that stood straight up. The entries would juxtapose the mundane thrill and confusion of being a young girl with the terror of living with Danny. On November 16, 1977, a few years before the gun incident, she wrote: “I talked to Greg Hertzberg yesterday, it was so good to talk to him! I really love him! I failed a math test today but hope to get a good grade on the test tomorrow.” And a few sentences later: “Mitchell can walk at nine months now and tonight we took movie films of him walking. Last night, I only got four hours of sleep. Dad got drunk and started playing Michael’s saxophone and would not stop. It was dreadful, he woke everyone and said that the reason he was playing it in the middle of the night was because that was the only thing or person or whatever that understood. Mom said she was glad something did. Tonight, it is hidden under my bed.”
The months wore on. More fights. In January, she scribbled, “I am writing this in the dark because I’m afraid of what Dad will do if he sees that the light is on.”
MICHAEL STARTED TO GET
into drugs, Terryl explains. Pot, when he could get it. When he couldn’t, Terryl watched him sniff gasoline. After taking a big whiff of the gas, he’d pass out. The cycle of addiction was beginning to take hold. And Terryl felt the other ignominies in her life, such as sometimes showing up at school without a lunch.
“Do you have anything left over?” Terryl recalls asking classmates in the cafeteria. “Can I have some of your chips?”
Terryl and Michael sometimes would get silver dollars from their grandparents. When they were flush with a silver coin or two, they’d go to the local convenience store and buy food for breakfast or dinner, often splitting a pack of Hostess donuts.
One evening, when they were living in the new apartment, Danny came home loaded, in a rage. He threw Kathie and Michael out of the house. Then he came for Terryl.
“You drunk son of a bitch. You are worthless!” she remembers screaming. He chased after her and grabbed her. She kicked and punched. “You are not getting me out of this house without a fight!”
He got the better of her, bloodied her, put her out with the others. Terryl wrote in her diary: “This man cannot be my dad. I can’t have come from someone this evil.”
She was furious at her brother, too.
“Go fight back!” she says she implored Michael. He was a big kid. Not Danny’s size, but big for his age. “When he comes after you, fight back.”
Her impression was that Michael and Kathie were peacemakers who wanted to stay under the radar. And that her mom felt she could change the dynamics by again changing the circumstances and the setting. She had a new plan: move to Downey, a new community. A new start.
It was the summer after Terryl’s ninth-grade year. Her room with the sheets tacked up for curtains also had a built-in desk, a chest of drawers, and a record player given to her by her grandparents. She had a Steve Miller album, but she wasn’t much into music.
Now she was an even more voracious reader. In fact, she’d gotten herself into trouble for the first time. The reason: She’d checked out too many books. Her favorites were
The Diddakoi
, the story of an orphan girl who faces persecution, and
The Secret Garden
, where a girl and a boy, who is sick, escape to a beautiful garden. She loved mysteries. She hated teen romances. She’d started to get into Stephen King. From the Downey library, she would take out armfuls of books, fifteen or even twenty at a time. She didn’t always return them on time. She got a fine: $300. She couldn’t pay it.
But for as much of an emotional escape that reading provided, it couldn’t protect her from the physical threats. It was not a sufficient one on that summer night when Danny burst into her room with a gun.
“GET IN HERE. I
want you to see this!”
She was wearing a nightgown. She and Michael followed Danny’s orders. Michael had come from his room and started to cry. Mitchell, their baby brother, was back in Michael’s room, sleeping through it all, as he’d learned to do. Terryl and Michael followed Danny into their parents’ small bedroom. It had hot-pink walls. Kathie lay on the bed, her face streaked with mascara. Danny walked over to her. Terryl and Michael stood in the doorway. Now Terryl was crying, too.
“Please, please put the gun down.”
Terryl remembers her dad standing over her mom and pointing the gun down at her. Pushing it toward her mouth.
“Please,” Terryl says she and Michael begged. Kathie sobbed.
Danny took a step back. He lowered the gun.
A
FTER A HARROWING DAY
, it was Rindlisbacher’s habit to talk about it, not bury it deeper. Things were so-so with his wife, Judy. He’d not been able to give the marriage quite the attention he’d have liked, having spent so much time in the military, traveling, and otherwise in and out of the home. Two of their kids were grown and out of the house. But, that night, he sat down with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Allison.
“Please slow down. Please wear your seat belt. Please don’t be stupid when you’re driving a car.”
That night, his mind was racing with the events of the day. After he’d taken Reggie to the hospital, he’d escorted Kaiserman and the farrier’s wife back to the scene. Then he’d driven the Crown Vic ten minutes to the Cache County Sheriff’s Office, a new building that housed the local law enforcement, and was next to the jail. In the third-floor offices, Rindlisbacher typed in the witness statements. He loaded the photos from his personal camera to revisit the scene. In the photos, Jim’s head lies back, his eyes closed, a crisscrossing of red blood across his head more suggestive of a bar fight than a fatal wreck. He’s got short-cropped brown hair and a goatee. He looks to Rindlisbacher to be at peace.
Not so much Keith. He’d taken the brunt of the impact from Kaiserman’s load. In the photo, Rindlisbacher could see Keith slumped forward, a hint of male pattern balding on top of his head. And there, in the back of the Saturn, a mass of pink and gooey stuff that had been sprayed on impact. Keith’s brain.
As Rindlisbacher retired for the night, he was juggling things he couldn’t get out of his head: Kaiserman’s statement that Reggie had crossed the yellow divider several times prior to the crash; Reggie’s texting during the ride to the hospital; Reggie’s inability to offer any other explanation for crossing the yellow line.
“If he’d said he was tired, I might have left it at that,” Rindlisbacher says, looking back. “He could’ve lied to me and I’d have had nothing to refute it.”
“I WANT TO SEE
him.”
“Ms. O’Dell, why don’t we take care of this paperwork first?” the mortician said. It was the day after the wreck. Leila had slept little, despite taking a sleeping pill around eleven p.m. During the day, she’d been inconsolable, barely able to speak to the family members who came by, sobbing with her daughter, Megan.
Megan left in the evening. She had previously signed up for doing roadside security for the Top of Utah Marathon, which was being held the next morning. But she had to be at her post that night, spending much of it guarding runners’ possessions.
Still, when Leila got to Allen-Hall Mortuary the next morning, she was hoping to see Megan. But the young lady had slept in. Even absent the marathon, it was Megan’s habit to stay up late, often playing video games, and then sleep late.
Leila was determined to see Keith’s body. But the staff was clearly trying to stall, and even distract her. She complied with their request and gave them particulars, like Keith’s Social Security number and a bunch of dates and names she rattled off. She selected a casket, something in a medium-colored oak that she thought Keith, a fan of natural wood, would like. She picked sunflowers, which she thought was like Keith, not roses or carnations.
They asked when she’d like to have the funeral. It was Saturday. They decided: Wednesday. And they decided to do it the same day as Jim’s funeral—one following the next—because they had so many friends and colleagues in common.
Leila asked again to see the body. Someone made it plain to her why she couldn’t see it. Keith, her true love, was broken beyond anything imaginable.
A man handed Leila a Ziploc bag. It contained a broken cell phone and a GPS, his watch, his car keys on a chain with a small compass on it, and the brown leather wallet he had made in his high school shop class and carried ever since. In another bag, she received his black lace-up shoes and his dark socks.