My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

by Joyce Carol Oates

  So strange! To look around, Skyler’s narrowed eyes, Skyler’s withheld breath, and Bliss was not there.

  And the wicked thought came to Skyler that, the last time Mummy, Daddy, and Skyler had been alone together like this, without Bliss, had been long ago: before Edna Louise was born.

  In a faint voice Mummy was saying: “—this man! I know this man. I’ve seen him at Bliss’s skating competitions. You get to recognize their faces. His face!—I know him. He was very aggressive, videotaping Bliss. Videotaping us. The first time I’d seen him was years ago. At a skating rink here in Fair Hills where I’d taken Skyler—not Bliss, Skyler—he can skate, too!—and there came this stranger, pushing close to us, such eyes! such hair! and around his neck a bright-colored orange or red scarf—and he asked if my child was ‘a beautiful little girl or a beautiful little boy’ and I said, ‘Skyler is my son.’ And years later, when Bliss won her first title, Miss Tots-on-Ice 1994, she was only four years old, and there came this same man up to us, with a video camera pushing in our faces, I remembered him at once, that red hair that doesn’t look like a normal man’s hair, and that wet rubbery smile, and around his neck he’d tied a bright crimson silk scarf that was nothing a normal man would wear, and he said: ‘The first time we met, Mrs. Rampike, you had a beautiful little boy-skater with you, and now you have a beautiful little girl.’ Oh God! I was putting my own children at risk, in the presence of a pedophile, and I had no idea.”

  Bitterly Mummy began to cry. And now Daddy moved to comfort her, stiffly like a man rousing himself from a stupor. For all this while, Daddy had been sitting silent and stony-eyed staring into a corner of the fluorescent-lit windowless interview room chill as an autopsy room as if he wasn’t listening to anything that was being said. Before entering the police station (what an ordinary building!—single storey, resembling a dental clinic, on Charity Street sharing quarters with the township clerk’s office and a small windowless courtroom of no more interest or intrigue than a classroom at Fair Hills Day) Daddy had stood on the steps outside staring at the sky smoking a cigarette, smoking in swift pleasureless drags, Skyler did not remember Daddy smoking anytime before this and so it seemed strange to him, and wrong. And it seemed strange to Skyler, and wrong, that Daddy seemed not to see him but to look through him as if Skyler was a ghost!—not Sky-boy, not Big Boy, or son, but—a ghost! And now Daddy roused himself to comfort Mummy but with a look of strain and distaste as if you might comfort a wounded or diseased creature at whom you could not bear to look, Daddy’s hand on Mummy’s shoulder and Mummy shivered not turning to Daddy as Mr. Kruk spoke quietly in Mummy’s ear. Poor Mummy!—so stricken by it. Who would never recover from it. Who’d been taken by ambulance to the emergency room at the Fair Hills Medical Center when she’d fainted and fallen to the floor of the family room striking her head hard and waking not knowing where, hooked to a heart monitor and made to breathe pure oxygen and an IV needle in the crook of her right arm where an ugly bruise of the hue of rotted bananas had begun to bloom and where was Bix? where was Bix? where was her family? what had become of her family?—but now it was the following day and Mummy had been released from the medical center and here was Daddy beside her, and Morris Kruk was beside her, and Mummy was eager to cooperate with Fair Hills detectives who’d been so kind to her and Bix, in their somber faces you could see how shaken these men were by the terrible thing that had happened to Bliss, a “home invasion” here in Fair Hills, a kidnapping, or attempted kidnapping, a six-year-old child murdered in her very home while family members slept unknowingly in their beds: the stuff of nightmare! of frenzied tabloid headlines! Assigned to the case were senior detectives Sledge and Slugg,* longtime “veterans” (as journalists would note with varying degrees of respect/irony) of the tidy little suburban Fair Hills Police Department where the usual arrests were for traffic violations, drunk driving, underage drinking and drug sales (pot, “uppers”) at Fair Hills High; and where no one could recall a homicide investigation, still less claim to have been involved in one. And so, Detectives Sledge and Slugg moved about the Rampike household with the clumsy caution of dumfounded cattle being urged to the slaughter, fumbling to take notes in small spiral notebooks, as they’d been trained; both took pains to address the grief-stricken Rampikes with respect for clearly these were prominent Fair Hills citizens, obviously very well-to-do; Bruce Rampike was, it seemed, a “high-ranking executive” at the mega-corporation Univers, Inc., Betsey Rampike was a member of the Village Women’s Club; both belonged to the ultra-exclusive Sylvan Glen Golf Club; they lived in a beautiful Colonial in a very expensive residential neighborhood; they belonged to the Trinity Episcopal Church, and were close friends of Reverend Higley and his wife; still more impressively, the Rampikes were friends with the Morris County district attorney Howard O’Stryker, for whom the Fair Hills PD worked; they were friendly with Chief Justice Harry Fenn, and their lawyer was the “brilliant” and “controversial” criminal defense attorney Morris Kruk. And the murder victim herself: here was no “casualty” of impoverished/drug-addled parental negligence/abuse in association with the notorious incompetence of the New Jersey Child Welfare Bureau: no six-year-old child “of color” discovered abused, strangled, broken in an elevator shaft in a Newark tenement, or in a Dumpster behind a WaWa in Trenton. Here was a Fair Hills child. A Caucasian child. A six-year-old famous child! For already, to the distress of Detectives Sledge and Slugg, the normally idyllic Village of Fair Hills was beginning to swarm with intruders: TV camera-crew vans, journalists and photographers, brash emissaries from the “media” world with the terrible power to expose, humiliate, vilify the merely competent, the well-intentioned-but-inexperienced veterans who’d made their fairly frictionless way through the ranks of a small-town police department looking to retirement and generous public-service pensions and so if the unspeakable thing that had happened in the Rampike house was a kind of fire, it was a fire only just beginning, a fire on the verge of exploding into a conflagration, how desperate the wish of the veteran guardians of the law to put it out.

  “Skyler? Do you recognize this man, son? Take your time answering.”

  Slugg spoke quietly. Or was it Sledge. Men of indeterminate age, older than Skyler’s father by many years, faces drawn with unease, fatigue. Skyler was made to know that he should say yes. How powerful the wish, that Skyler say yes. Staring at “mug shots”—as on TV!—of a frightened-looking youngish man with stark shadowed eyes and a soft, bruised mouth. Longish hair, disheveled. Who was this? The “ex-convict sex offender” who’d broken a basement window in the Rampikes’ house, crawled inside with the intention of kidnapping Bliss—but killed her instead? Heavily sedated Skyler (Serenex, Zomix) was having trouble thinking over the roaring in his ears. How many hours or days this was, after “it” had happened, Skyler could not have said. His heart was pounding hard and sharp as an ice pick in his chest, for all the adults in the room were staring at him and waiting for him to speak.

  “—saw him at an ice rink? Did you?”

  “—on Ravens Crest Drive? Outside your house?”

  Skyler tried to think. He had seen this man somewhere: he knew. At one of the ice rinks? The staring eyes, the soft bruised mouth that felt like Skyler’s own mouth for he’d been gnawing at his lips. The man’s eyes were bulgy as Skyler’s eyes and there was that stricken/guilty look Please have mercy, I am your friend.

  Suddenly Skyler remembered: a horizontal mirror, a mirror spanning a wall in a men’s restroom, above a row of sinks. In that mirror the rusty-red-haired man stood watching him, a smile stretching the rubbery lips.

  Quickly Skyler shook his head, no.

  “D’you mean—no? You don’t recognize this man?”

  Stubborn Skyler shook his head. No.

  Mummy was staring at him, disappointed. Mummy’s face swollen and discolored from crying. And Daddy, puffy-skinned and tired-looking rubbing a big-Daddy fist over his mouth.

  No! Skyler didn’t remember this man. No mor
e than Skyler remembered it.*

  * Clearly fictitious names bearing but the most oblique onomatopoeic relationship to the names of the now-retired New Jersey police officers.

  * How puzzling this is! Though Skyler “remembers” having seen Gunther Ruscha in a men’s room one evening, that memory is utterly inaccessible to me at age nineteen. Yet, I remember “remembering” it, though the original memory has vanished. And I have no idea why I didn’t tell these adults that I’d seen him when it was the truth for why, at such a time, would I have lied?

  TABLOID HELL I

  EX-CON PEDOPHILE CONFESSES

  “I KILLED BLISS”

  35-Yr-Old Fair Hills, NJ Sicko

  Paroled After 18 Months of 31/2-Yr Sentence

  New Jersey Sentinel

  February 10, 1997

  “I KILLED BLISS TO SAVE HER”

  CLAIMS EX-CON BABY RAPER RUSCHA

  6-Yr-Old Skating Prodigy Slain

  While Family Sleeps Upstairs

  Star Eye Weekly

  February 10, 1997

  SLAYER OF 6-YR-OLD BLISS RAMPIKE CONFESSES

  Ex-Con Child Molester Ruscha Indicted in Fair Hills, NJ

  “I Killed Bliss Because I Loved Her”

  The Trentonian

  February 11, 1997

  HOW VALID IS RUSCHA CONFESSION?

  Fair Hills Police: “Investigation to Continue”

  The Star-Ledger*

  February 12, 1997

  * Reader, repeat these headlines, accompanied by full-front-page tabloid photos of beautiful little Bliss Rampike and her purported slayer Gunther Ruscha, ad nauseam. And photos of Betsey Rampike, and Bix Rampike. And that Rampike family photograph taken for our 1996 Christmas card. If you can stomach this crap, fine. Not for me! Though it’s true that I grew up in the seething penumbra of tabloid hell, and that the very name “Rampike” was borne by me as one might bear the ignominy of an obscene figure branded into one’s forehead, I was able to shut it out. Mostly.

  OUR PEDOPHILE III

  IN HIS QUAVERING HIGH-PITCHED VOICE BRAVELY HE DECLARED:

  “I am the one. I am the murderer of Bliss Rampike. Only me.”

  How these words sprang from him. At Fair Hills police headquarters. In that fluorescent-lit windowless interview room. And no need for a lawyer. Insisting: no lawyer.

  “What has been caused to happen by my hand, I must be punished for. I am that one.”

  So readily did Gunther Ruscha confess to Fair Hills police detectives, yet so incoherently, in more than thirty hours of taped, rambling interviews over a period of several days, it would prove very difficult for investigators to collate, distill, and verify this statement. Initially, Ruscha told detectives that he had come to the Rampike house to “spirit Bliss away”—confusing his attempt to bring flowers to her, when he’d been taken into custody, with approaching the Rampike house through the woods and entering it through a basement window on the night of the murder; it became clear that Ruscha had somehow confused the two incidents though when detectives questioned him, he seemed not to hear, repeating in a quavering voice: “I am the one. I am the murderer of Bliss Rampike. Only me.”

  How Ruscha’s eyes shone! Greeny-gray glassy eyes with twitchy red-rimmed lids and pale-red lashes that looked as if they’d been partly pulled out. The pedophile, incarcerated at the Morris County Men’s Detention Center, sequestered in a “quarantine” wing to prevent his being attacked by other (normal non-pedophile/sicko) inmates, had not shaved that morning nor had time it seemed to wash for his slender/snaky body smelled frankly of sweat, anxiety, guilt.

  What could be corroborated in Ruscha’s statement was his admission of having bicycled numerous times on Ravens Crest Drive and having come to the Rampikes’ door twice; of having attended Bliss Rampike’s skating competitions where he arrived early and stayed late and videotaped as many “precious moments of Bliss” as possible; of having written to her, cards and letters and “special little gifts,” over a period of approximately two years.

  There had been a “secret understanding” between Bliss Rampike and Gunther Ruscha, Ruscha claimed. From the first, they had been able to “send their thoughts winging” between them; they shared dreams—“That were more real, much more real!—than this is, or you”; it was when Bliss called to him desperately with her thoughts that he came to her, bicycling on Ravens Crest Drive, passing the beautiful Rampike house that was set back from the roadway, at the end of an ascending graveled driveway; tirelessly Ruscha pedaled to the end of Ravens Crest Drive and circled the cul-de-sac, returned then passing the Rampikes’ driveway—“Many more times than people complained of”; and in the evenings, when he was rarely detected, Ruscha picked up “secret signals” from his darling Bliss inside the house at a second-floor window facing the road: “They had her captive in there. I don’t think they were her real parents, I think they adopted her. They ‘bought’ her. These things happen. She was an angel on earth, the Rampikes ‘bought’ her. They did terrible things to her, Bliss told me! In the window Bliss would light a candle to signal me. Or Bliss would shine a flashlight and blink it: like Morse code. ‘Help me Gunther—I am so lonely in this place Gunther—I am so afraid—don’t leave me with these terrible people will you—Gunther?’”* Ruscha’s voice broke, recounting such pleas. And at Bliss’s skating competitions, in the midst of one of Bliss’s performances on the ice Bliss would “lock eyes” with Gunther, seated always in the same approximate place in the arena; in Gunther’s videotapes you could see how the astonishing little skating prodigy, even as she glided on the ice, turned, spun, twirled, leapt and “skate-danced,” managed to cast her small, secret smile at him.

  Asked by detectives why, if he’d loved Bliss Rampike, he had killed her, Ruscha became vague and agitated insisting at first that he had not meant to “harm” her but only to “spirit her away”—for they were “soul mates” regardless of their ages. Ruscha was vague about where he would “spirit” the six-year-old to, as he was vague, excitable and not very coherent telling detectives how he’d made his way through the woods to the Rampike house on the night of the murder, he’d been summoned by Bliss to her, broke a basement window, crawled through and made his way upstairs in the darkened house—“Bliss pulled me to her, in her thoughts. It was like one of our dreams.” And inside the little girl’s room, Bliss was waiting for him in her bed. Ruscha spoke agitatedly claiming that what had happened was an accident: “On the stairs, Bliss fell. I couldn’t save her. So I hid her away, in the basement. I don’t know why. On the news it was said—‘brutal attack.’ It was not ‘brutal’—but an accident! Bliss fell from my arms and hit her head. She was hurt. She was bleeding. I saw.” Asked why he hadn’t summoned help if the little girl was hurt, Ruscha lowered his head, struck his forehead against the table at which he sat, muttering: “Because I am a coward. I deserve to die.”

  Yet next morning, Ruscha’s story had shifted in tone, and become darker and more lewd, yet more romantic; for somehow in the night in his cell in the grimy interior of the men’s detention center at Morristown, Ruscha was made to recall what he’d done to his darling Bliss Rampike differently: “Detectives, it was a suicide pact. We had decided, we would both die. To escape the world that would judge us harshly. The plan was that I would ‘extinguish’ Bliss’s life—painlessly. And then I would kill myself. And so I did it. But then, it was so terrible to see my darling lifeless, I lost my courage to kill myself. I was a coward, I ran away. I ran away in the night. I left my darling behind, and ran away in the night. And I thought Maybe this is a dream?—it was so like dreams we had both had. But when I am executed by the State of New Jersey, I will make amends. I will be forgiven. Bliss will see that I have not abandoned her. Bliss will see that I killed her to save her. I killed her because I loved her. No one loved Bliss Rampike as I did! I love her now, I will never stop loving her. When I die, I will join her. I must be punished. This is fair and just. Momma must understand, and let me go.”

&nbs
p; Ruscha broke down, sobbing; yet his expression, preserved on the grainy Fair Hills PD videotape for posterity, was radiant. Here was the very glisten of madness: or, of one who has been, like the martyred Saint Sebastian, transfigured by suffering.*

  “DISGUSTING.”

  A warrant was issued to allow Fair Hills police to search the Ruscha house on Piper’s Lane and there, in Ruscha’s private quarters on the second floor, which Mrs. Ruscha conceded she had not entered in years, the pedophile’s secret treasure trove was discovered.

  On the walls, nearly covering every inch of wall space at eye level, were photographs of Bliss Rampike in her dazzling skating costumes, smiling shyly into the camera or performing on the ice; on the wall close beside the pedophile’s narrow bed (the covering of which, I am obliged to reveal, though not one reader among you would give a damn if I did not, or even miss such a trivial detail if it were not shoehorned in here, shamelessly parenthetically, when the reader’s obvious wish is to move on, to see what the hell is on Ruscha’s wall: this covering, faded and stained with God knows what pasty-crusty pedophile-sicko excretions, was a pale blue, emblazoned with boy-nautical symbols: compulsively repeated silhouettes of frigates, man-o’-war ships, leaping whales, anchors) mawkish and sentimental pastel drawings of Bliss Rampike as a little-girl-angel skater; neatly shelved in strict chronological order in a five-foot Ikea untreated pine bookcase, were videotapes of young girls’ skating competitions, beginning in 1986 (when the pedophile was only twenty-three), long before Bliss Rampike’s debut as a child skater. (And how fortunate these anonymous young-girl skaters were!) But with the spectacular emergence of Miss Tots-on-Ice Debutante 1994 on Valentine’s Day of that year at the Meadowlands rink, the pedophile discovered his destiny, Bliss Rampike, and footage of other girl-skaters, though taking up some space on Ruscha’s tapes, had the air of the incidental and haphazard.