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

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Disgusting!”

  The shocking revelation was, Gunther Ruscha had been stalking Bliss since February 1994. How was it possible that the tall lanky rusty-red-haired pedophile had managed to tape hours of Bliss practicing at the Halcyon rink? (Must’ve been in disguise, or in disguises.) There was much footage of Betsey Rampike driving her daughter along Ravens Crest Drive, to and from town; there were numerous blurred mall scenes, and parking lot scenes; Betsey and Bliss and sometimes Skyler, climbing into/climbing out of Betsey’s car or minivan; there was footage of the eye-catching Rampike family—big handsome smiling Bix, glamorous smiling Betsey, darling little children in Sunday clothes and polished shoes—entering quaint Trinity Episcopal Church amid a stream of other well-dressed Caucasian worshippers. (One day it would be startling for Skyler to see his young self with his family oblivious of being captured on videotape, for a lurid and unimaginable posterity: an ordinary-seeming little boy of seven or eight walking beside his father without any discernible limp which is weird because I know that I limped, and I know that my child’s face was disfigured by scowling.) There was even a surreal shot of Mummy, Skyler, and Bliss being videotaped together in Sunday clothes, or maybe it was Mummy’s birthday, Bliss and Skyler holding hands and Mummy behind us leaning over us and smiling happily, the three of us positioned on a hill in (I guess) Fair Hills Battle Park (where I haven’t troubled to bring the reader since nothing of significance in this document ever happened there, I’d thought); videotaped, that is, by Daddy standing a few yards away holding his new camcorder, beaming with Daddy-love for his little family; and somewhere close by, hidden from view, the pedophile Ruscha was lurking, daring to videotape the Rampikes without their knowledge. (If Daddy had known? Had seen Ruscha? It is possible, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike would never be written, and you, reader, and I, tangled together in its pages like the luckless Laocoön family in the giant serpents’ grip, would never have come to know each other.)

  How hard this is to comprehend, even for edgy/pessimist/paranoid Skyler, that for years the Rampikes were being observed by a stranger; moments of their lives were being snatched from them, and preserved on tape and on film; and that, in some of these scenes, so unexpectedly, Skyler appeared young, innocent, a mere child.

  And yet: the reader knows, as I know, that this can’t be true.

  In glossy pink albums not unlike those favored by Betsey Rampike, Ruscha had lovingly inserted laminated clippings of interviews with Bliss from such publications as People, New Jersey Lives, Galleria, The Star-Ledger Magazine; newspaper stories of Bliss’s skating triumphs: Miss Tots-on-Ice Debutante 1994, Little Miss Paramus Ice Princess 1995,* All-Star Girls’ Figure Skating Champ (Junior Division) 1995, Little Miss Atlantic States (Regional) 1995, Tiny Miss Golden Skate Princess 1996, Little Miss Jersey Ice Princess 1996, Little Miss All-American-Girl Ice Jubilee First Prize Winner 1996. And more.

  Always, in the life of a public figure, there must be more.

  (Of Bliss’s defeat and humiliation at the Hershey’s Kisses competition, there was no trace. So protective was Gunther Ruscha, though claiming to have killed my sister!)

  Yet more disturbing material was discovered in a musty-smelling alcove off Ruscha’s room, where the pedophile had a kind of workshop, or studio; here, detectives found more pastel drawings, and portraits of Bliss Rampike in acrylic paint, weirdly glossy, at odds with the “poetic” subject matter:

  —A very young (four-year-old?) Bliss Rampike posed en pointe on ice skates, in a daffodil-yellow tulle skirt and sequined top, lavender ribbons fluttering in her pale gold hair

  —A slightly older, less shy and “seductive” Bliss in the sexy red-sequined Boléro costume with the ( just slightly) padded bodice and slit-skirt, peekaboo black panties beneath (which the amateur artist had tried to represent, detectives discover with revulsion, with a small patch of actual black lace)

  —An ethereal “angelic” Bliss in a ballerina’s costume of antique lace fitting her small body tight as a glove, fluffy white tulle skirt, a hint of white silk panties, white lace stockings, ashy-pale hair plaited like a crown upon which a white-gold tiara rested

  —Eyes closed, hands clasped on her chest, Bliss lying on her back inside what appears to be an ivory-white casket, in her Hershey’s Kisses costume of dark-chocolate velvet with tinsel trim; seemingly at peace, a small sweet smile on her pink-rosebud lips; yet the eyelids were translucent, as if the little girl was peering through them; if you stood close, you could see the glimmer of a cobalt-blue gaze fixed upon you.

  In all of Ruscha’s likenesses of Bliss, the little blond girl was crudely and yet tenderly depicted; her face, mawkishly sentimental, with exaggerated features, was yet recognizable as the face of Bliss Rampike.

  “Jesus! What next!”

  Equally repugnant to the detectives were Gunther Ruscha’s florid scribblings, kept in a leatherbound ledger labeled BLISS MY BELOVED:

  BLISS MY BELOVED

  You, my Destiny; and I, yours—

  Never will I understand

  The cruel ways of God to man—

  You, a Child; and I, a Man—

  This cruel fate, we dare not mate.

  BLISS MY DESTINY

  Summon me my darling, and I am at your side—

  In the grave, you will be my bride—

  Your little footprints in the snow—

  Reveal to me, where I must go.

  “LITTLE MISS JERSEY ICE PRINCESS 1996”

  None is more beautiful than you,

  None is more angelic than you,

  None is more perfect than you,

  None is so blessèd, to be you.

  SONG OF INNOCENCE

  Who dwells in beauty is a Child

  Unknowing how Man’s heart is wild

  Who dwells in joy must one day weep

  Such promises she has made, she cannot keep.

  CRUEL ANGEL HEAR ME!

  Ah, to be the Ice

  Beneath your sharp Skate

  In ecstasy’s Vise

  I am—thy Fate!

  In disgust the detectives examined a few of the manuscript pages. Here were “rimes”—“poetry”? More than sixty pages of pedophiliac love verse but reader, I will spare you.

  Fortunately, Ruscha owned no computer. The year was 1997, a little too early for the average pedophile to have realized the possibilities of the Internet for kiddie-porn. And so, reader, we are spared even more despicable crap.*

  “Jesus. Will you look at this.”

  Yet more astonished, Fair Hills detectives discovered, in the ill-smelling basement of the Ruscha house, what appeared to be a taxidermist’s workshop: on a badly stained and scratched table were a number of clumsily “stuffed” small animals (squirrel, chipmunks, mice, a young rat with a stiff pointed tail and bristling whiskers) and birds (primarily sparrows but also a bluejay, a cardinal, a mangled house finch); here was a powerful odor of formaldehyde, amid a more powerful odor of organic decay. Gunther Ruscha, long notorious as Morris County’s pedophile, had been, all along, in secret, an amateur taxidermist as well? Inside several Plexiglas boxes were attempts at “artful” arrangements of stuffed creatures, and in one of these, seemingly Ruscha’s favorite, for it was showcased on a pedestal table, was a bird of about the size of a cardinal, but with pale gold feathers that looked as if they had been painted; the little bird had ill-fitting glass eyes; on the little bird’s tiny feet, tiny ice skates fashioned of tinsel. And on the bird’s pert, uplifted head, a tiny tinsel tiara. The little gold-feathered bird was skating on one skate, on an aluminum foil surface meant to suggest ice, wings outspread, while at the sides of the Plexiglas box an audience of small birds, mostly sparrows, looked on, applauding with their wings. On the Plexiglas sides glitter dust had been sprinkled. The effect was both tenderly quaint and grotesque. The smell was unmistakable.

  In silence detectives Sledge and Slugg stared at this hellish display, pressing handkerchiefs over their noses.
For never had these Fair Hills detectives, longtime “veterans” of the force, seen, or smelled, anything so bizarre.

  “You think? He was going to stuff her?”*

  * How strange this is! I don’t like this at all. That the delusional ravings of Gunther Ruscha should so echo my sister’s words to me. Which I know can only be meant for me.

  * It is clear that Gunther Ruscha was a man consumed by guilt and shame and yet: the fact that in his thirty-plus hours of a rambling confession he never speaks of a “ransom note” or the crimson silk scarf used to bind Bliss’s wrists above her head would seem to suggest that Ruscha is merely confabulating, and is not the killer. Yet, no less an expert than E. L. Lance of the FBI, commenting on the “snarled and botched” Rampike case years later, came to the conclusion that Ruscha followed the pattern of “the most devious and ingenious” of psychopath killers: one who “confesses” in such a way to suggest delusion, and therefore innocence, while shrewdly failing to address crucial facts that would substantiate his guilt. Following such a pattern, the psychopath killer would leave no trace of himself at the crime scene, which was the case with Ruscha. “In my mind, Ruscha was the abductor/killer of Bliss Rampike. Not the parents.”

  * How strange, I hadn’t remembered this title; there is no record of it in my manuscript; yet Gunther Ruscha remembered, and enshrined it here, lest it be lost.

  * Am I being too “harsh”—“judgmental”? Am I overstepping the tacit boundary between Author and Reader, and speaking too openly where I should try for subtler and more modulated tones? If there are pedophiles among my readers, can I afford to offend and alienate anyone? Let me say, then: for readers with a “scientific” interest in the ravings of the lunatic mind, The Collected Works of Gunther Ruscha —love verse, reproductions of “art-works”—is available in the teeming cesspool of cyberspace. Investigate at your own risk!

  * If any among my readers think that this is funny, it is not.

  Whether Sledge or Slugg made this remark is not known. Though neither would include this grisly speculation in his report, it quickly became part of the Gunther Ruscha legend, maintained in cyberspace by individuals convinced that GR was a budding and ingenious serial killer who had planned to kill and “stuff” his beloved Bliss.

  OUR PEDOPHILE IV

  “JESUS! LOOK AT THE FUCKER!”

  At 6 A.M. of Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1997, exactly three years after Gunther Ruscha had first seen Bliss Rampike, his lifeless body was discovered in his cell in the Morris County Men’s Detention Center, in a “contorted and convulsed” posture on the floor beside his bed. Around his neck the confessed murderer had fashioned a crude noose made of a torn shirt, one end of which he’d knotted to the iron post of his bed; somehow, with desperate effort, he’d managed to choke himself to death, by repeated thrusts of his body downward. The medical examiner would declare Ruscha’s death to be “self-afflicted”—the “most unusual suicide” in the history of the detention center, where inmates usually hanged themselves in showers or from lighting fixtures or, having fashioned crude knives out of toothbrushes and the like, slashing an artery.

  Neatly placed on Ruscha’s pillow was a handprinted note:

  GONE TO JOIN MY BELOVED.

  I AM “THE EYE THAT SEES.”*

  G.R.

  No attempt was made to revive Ruscha when his body was discovered, by either prison guards or emergency medics, for it was clear that Ruscha had been dead for hours.

  Immediately the news was released to the public nationwide: the “confessed killer” of Bliss Rampike was dead, “by his own hand.”*

  BY THIS TIME, BLISS RAMPIKE’S “AUTOPSIED” BODY HAD AT LAST BEEN RELEASED by Morris County’s medical examiner Dr. Virgil Elyse and had been buried in Trinity Episcopal cemetery. A private funeral had been held at the church to which only a “select” number of Rampike relatives and close friends were invited, yet the small church was jammed with mourners, including an impressive number of those Fair Hills residents once listed on Mummy’s secret pyramid of names. And so many flowers! A deluge of flowers, most of them white, dazzling-white, lilies and other spring flowers, surrounding the heartrendingly small gleaming-white (closed) casket set before the altar.

  The sweet sickly fragrance of calla lilies, suffused through the quaint little “historic” church like an expelled breath.

  Outside on Highland Avenue, in this neighborhood of large old homes set back from the street with an air of patrician dignity, a crowd had gathered that would be called “unruly”—“comprised of mostly outsiders.” This crowd of an estimated one thousand people had started to form as early as 6 A.M. Fair Hills police officers including the elite Equestrian Squad (five handsome horses, five police officers) were on hand to direct traffic and to maintain order. Though the Rampikes had been warned, and a small cadre of security guards had been hired to protect the family from the ever more intrusive media, as from grieving fans of Bliss Rampike, yet the Rampikes were surprised by the size of the crowd, and the excitement their appearance provoked when they stepped from a black Lincoln Town Car and ascended the stone steps to the church. Cries of “Betsey!”—“Betsey!”—“Bix!”—followed in their wake.

  Astonishing to Betsey Rampike that so quickly, in death, her beautiful daughter seemed to have achieved a degree of fame she had not had in life; and that she, Betsey, Bliss’s grief-ravaged mother, seemed to have ascended to that hallowèd ground as well.

  Like an annunciation, it was. And so quickly!

  Ashy-skinned stony-eyed Bix Rampike stared straight ahead and did not acknowledge the crowd. Behind her dark glasses Betsey blinked back tears and smiled—wanly, bravely—lifting a gloved hand to the rapt faces and the eyes of strangers damp with tears that mirrored her own.

  “Betsey! God bless you!”

  “Betsey! We loved Bliss!”

  “Betsey! Bliss is with Jesus!”

  Badly Betsey wanted to pause, to take the hands of grieving strangers, to speak with them and to share their tears but there came Bix’s strong fingers gripping her arm without sentiment and urging her forward.

  Betsey wore stylish dark glasses to hide her discolored and swollen eyes, which she fumbled to remove when she entered the church. The grieving mother was swathed in black: black belted cashmere coat with a black mink collar and cuffs, mink-trimmed black hat, black leather gloves. Red lipstick like a gash in her pale-powdered face that seemed to have lost its shape, like uncooked bread dough. It was observed that Betsey Rampike seemed to have gained weight, as if bloated. And Bix Rampike, it was observed, had become strangely—“uncharacteristically”—grim-faced, distracted. Moving clumsily and almost wincingly like an athlete who has been stunned by defeat with no clear idea how seriously he has been injured. (And had Bix been drinking? Was Bix drunk?)

  “Betsey! Bix! We are praying for you!”

  In their front row pew the Rampikes were flanked by Bix’s numerous relatives—brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins—Bix’s mother Edna Louise who was now an elderly, infirm woman hunched like a turkey vulture, the lower part of her face frozen in a grimace of awe, hurt, astonishment as in the aftermath of a stroke; during Reverend Higley’s funeral sermon, elderly Mrs. Rampike would whisper into Bix’s ear, tugging petulantly at his sleeve. (“Who is that man? What is he saying about my granddaughter? Who has given him the right? Why are we here?”) No members of the Sckulhorne family were present, for Betsey had rebuffed their eager wishes to drive down from Hagarstown in a minivan to attend. (“Not now! Now it’s too late! You didn’t know my beautiful Bliss in life, you will not know her and exploit her fame in death. Our grief is not yours.”) An organist was playing Bach: “Jesu, Our Redeemer.” A soprano sang “O Christ Who Art the Light and the Day” in a voice of thrilling certainty. The Trinity choir rose to sing “Hail to Thee, My Jesus Holy!” At this time it was known that the pedophile-murderer of Bliss Rampike had been swiftly arrested by Fair Hills police and had confessed; and the effort was now, as Reve
rend Higley said gravely, blinking back tears at the pulpit, to begin the task of “healing”—“helping to support the Rampike family” in this time of “unfathomable tragedy and pain.”

  In the quaint little “historic” Trinity Church, as in the snowy “historic” churchyard to the rear, where Bliss Rampike in her child-sized gleaming-white coffin would be “laid to rest” there were many tears, you can be sure. But none of then were Skyler Rampike’s: why?

  Skyler wasn’t there. Wasn’t at his sister’s funeral. Skyler was in quarantine.

  (In fact, did you miss Skyler? Was the runty kid’s absence noted by anyone at all?)

  Quick cut! Let’s depart the solemn “church scene” tremulous with Trinity Church’s show-offy organist (male, Brit) tripping and clattering up and down the keyboards emitting yet more deafening Johann Sebastian Bach that most classy of classics, now we’re in an unidentified room, dowdy old “good” furniture, vaguely Skyler recalls through the cotton batting scrim of Serenex/Zomix haze that this is the room designated as “his” where he’d been brought to stay with Mummy in a dark-browed old English Tudor house smelling of mothballs, must’ve belonged to one of Mummy’s rich-old-widow church friends, Frannie Squires or Adelaide Metz, who’d been eager to take in the Rampikes after it happened, for Skyler could not sleep in his room any longer, not ever again in that room where in the night in even the Zomix haze his sister Bliss barefoot and shivering in her nightgown pushed open the door pleading Skyler? help me Skyler help me there is something bad in my bed causing Skyler to wake screaming and thrashing and his runt-heart to race at twice its normal beat nor could Mummy sleep in that “accursed” house in which “Satan” had set foot for Mummy’s heart was “torn to shreds” as Mummy had said weeping in numerous “exclusive” interviews. Certainly it was true and would be forever true that Skyler could not sleep in that house in that bed but Skyler could not sleep very well in any house or in any bed nor could Skyler eat without needing to puke up what he’d eaten nor could Skyler sit still for more than two or three minutes, nor would Skyler allow any doctor to examine him without panicking, kicking and screaming like a two-year-old except, as a two-year-old, Skyler had not ever thrown such tantrums, especially Skyler went ballistic (“ball-istic”: way cool word in Skyler’s dyslexic vocabulary) when a nurse tried to draw blood from his runt-veins, shocking to hear a child diagnosed as “withdrawn”—“indifferent to surroundings”—“mute”—suddenly cry Nooo! Noooo! Nooooo! piteous as a bawling calf. Most annoying to adults, Skyler refused to “meet their gaze” including such adults as Mummy, Daddy, Grandmother Rampike and the wedge-faced new Maria whom Mummy had hired to look after Skyler now that Lila Laong had decided to return to the Philippines unless maybe Mummy had had to “let Lila go”* (but why? Skyler would not have known) and Skyler missed Lila! Skyler missed Lila! Skyler cried missing Lila who’d been so kind to him even as he’d pushed her aside, scowled and spat and refused to allow her to bathe him, slapped her hands away when she tried to prevent him scratching so hard at his scalp, his nails came away ringed in blood, and hair began to fall from his head, how cruel he’d been to Lila I hate you you let Bliss be hurt, hate hate HATE YOU which made no sense (did it?) but Skyler remembers such accusations as Skyler remembers his throat shutting up tight so he could not scream at all, could not speak at all, choking/gagging possibly it had to do with his medication, after it happened Skyler’s medication was naturally increased, new medications prescribed by the new pediatric psychiatrist Dr. Splint. And so, Skyler missed his sister’s funeral. Skyler missed his sister’s burial in a far corner of the old Trinity churchyard. Nor would it be explained to Skyler where his sister was “buried” for the crude word “buried” would not be uttered in Skyler’s presence like such words as “die”—“dead”—“death.” Nor such cruder words as “murder”—“blunt force trauma.” Nor such a word as “suspect.” And on that day, Valentine’s Day 1997, there came Mummy to Skyler to wake him from his groggy nap in an unfamiliar room smelling of mothballs, Mummy’s face was wet with fresh tears, and Mummy’s eyes shone, and Mummy hugged Skyler so passionately, Skyler thought, in the confusion of waking from groggy sleep, that Bliss must have returned to them: was this good news?