Fear of Our Father

by Stacey Kananen

  She said that, when she saw my trial, I hadn’t changed much—that my hair was shorter than the long blond braids I used to wear in school, but that my face still held a sweet, doe-eyed innocence. I look at pictures of myself from those years, which Karin e-mailed to me, and I see myself just as she described, a sweet-faced little girl with long blond hair, with a bright, innocent smile. Little did anyone in my class know what was happening to me at home. I put on such a brave face at school, for two reasons: sheer necessity and actual relief at not being in the line of fire for a few hours.

  Karin said what any of our friends must have felt, in what she wrote. It was an uncomfortable feeling and she couldn’t figure out what it was. I don’t remember the events of the night she wrote about, but I know how my household was. You sat at the table, you didn’t speak, you only did what you were told you could do after dinner. He didn’t change the rules if you had people over; it didn’t matter—his rules were his rules. The only difference was he wouldn’t explode and rant and rave and hit people. So it was just awkward. We probably went through a half hour, forty-five minutes of dinner without anyone saying a word. Immediately after dinner, we’d clean up and go upstairs to our room, unless we were told we had to watch TV that night. People don’t live their lives that way. They talk to their parents about what went on in school or church that day. We didn’t talk about squat and we didn’t go to church.

  During my childhood, I would say I believed in God, as long as you didn’t ask me that in front of my father. We didn’t talk about religion in my house. My father hated the Catholic Church. Then a very nice gentleman moved to town, a nondenominational minister. He opened a little church, and my father liked the man: he didn’t preach religion to my father, so he let my sister and me do some activities with him for a short while. He took that away from us because we started changing. I think we got more at peace with things in the house, and it was what it was, and he couldn’t get the same reaction out of us, so he decided, well, maybe you don’t need to be going there anymore. After that, I never thought about God much, other than to wonder what sort of God would allow us to have a life like we had.

  My father must have done something to earn a reputation around town with the local ministers, because one night he and my mother were coming home from a bar and he literally drove right into a ditch, in a snowbank, because he was so drunk. One of the local preachers drove by and stopped to help until he saw who they were. They had to beg the preacher to help get them out because he was scared of my father. He went and got them some help, but wouldn’t help them himself.

  Our father drank vodka when I was older, but he ran the gamut of everything: beer, wine, amaretto, brandy, scotch, and finally vodka became the cheapest at the end. Rickie’s novel manuscript was pretty accurate about the specific procedure for fixing our father a drink: fill a tall glass three quarters full of booze with a splash of water. He’d go through at least one large bottle a day, both in Rickie’s book and in real life. You’d go into the kitchen and get ice cubes, and wouldn’t break any of those ice cubes. You’d better not be able to fit another ice cube but couldn’t let the ice stick up above the rim of the glass. It was very precise. And you didn’t make it wrong because he’d fling it across the room.

  By the time I was halfway through sixth grade, we could probably count on four or five days a week being really bad and still have a couple of good days in the week. Once you get beaten to the point where your attacker knows you can’t take anymore, you have to heal before you can take more beatings, or you’re going to end up in the hospital and then you’re going to have authorities involved. That’s just how it is. At some point, bodies have got to heal. You can’t keep getting sexually assaulted or you’re going to have problems and you’re going to have to go to a doctor. Unfortunately, most abusers know this game. I hate to call it that, but it’s a game in their minds—just a game.

  The only time any of us went to a hospital was when my mother had to have surgery on her feet. Not because he did something to her; she couldn’t walk. Her toes were curling in so they had to take off the baby toes of both of her feet. It was some kind of deformity. Otherwise, no doctors. We healed on our own. Whoever needed to heal, for whatever reason, were the ones that got protected for that day. He may have even known who could or couldn’t take any more. It may have been something he directed. As time passed, and I got bigger, I could withstand more intense sexual assaults. They became more violent, with my father using many foreign objects to penetrate me.

  He was also becoming very brazen, shooting off guns whenever the mood struck. Sometimes he’d take a shotgun and hit Mom across the head with it. Russian roulette with a pistol was a favorite game of his. He would play with each of us separately and his response was always the same, “I guess today is your lucky day.” Only it didn’t feel lucky. That particular mind game was the hardest of all. Many times I was torn between fear of death and hope that I would die, to be free of this hell.

  Every day there was a loaded pistol in one of the rooms, often right on the kitchen table during dinner. If not, he could walk in the bedroom and put his hand on a loaded gun in less than two minutes. He fired them into furniture. A lot of our furniture had bullet holes. It just became part of life. Yeah, there are bullet holes in the furniture. No big deal.

  My father actually called the White House once and threatened to kill the president. He told them he had a sawed-off shotgun. Within a couple hours the state police arrived at our farm. Unfortunately for our family, my father—the con artist—convinced the police that he was harmless and just playing a prank.

  This is one reason we were never able to get away from him. The police would come to the door and hear, “Oh, everything’s fine,” and leave. We didn’t take that chance in the middle of the country. There were too many guns, and too few witnesses. So we just let the abuse go. It became everyday life. We were in pain all the time. We were the only kids in class who hated summer vacation.

  Now he knew no one would believe he was dangerous. He was becoming skilled at hitting us where no one would see the marks on my sister or me, but he didn’t care if people in town saw my mom hurt. No one would ever do anything to stop him, not in this small town. He would tie my brother up in snow-tire chains and make him stand outside. He would make my sister and me sit at the kitchen table and throw all kinds of objects at us, including sharp knives. Sometimes these objects would hit us and leave marks or bleeding, but sometimes if we moved our heads quickly enough we wouldn’t get hurt. He gave himself points for making us bleed. My mom, on the other hand, I think he wanted to kill. He would beat her almost unconscious, tie her up sometimes, and shoot off a gun to just miss her. At times, she used to beg for him to kill her. In Minnesota, this lasted for three years until my father decided that it was time to move again.

  I was in sixth grade, Cheryl was in eighth grade. We were riding the bus home and when it came to our house we saw the U-Haul truck. That was the moment we knew we were moving, and we both started crying. Yelling quick good-byes to our friends who were still on the bus and promising to keep in touch, even though we knew that we probably couldn’t, we stepped off the bus. My father was screaming at my mother for sending us to school because he had told her to keep us home. He was hollering and throwing things at my brother because he wasn’t loading the truck quickly enough. When my sister and I approached, we were given two hours to pack our rooms and help pack the sheds. Many personal items and family memories were left behind because, in my father’s eyes, we were done packing.

  Before I knew it, we were in our vehicles and began driving straight south into the night. No one knew where my father would decide to stop the U-Haul. We drove many hours without stopping even to eat. Our destination became a farm in the outskirts of the town of Viola, Arkansas, where we would spend the most volatile six months of our lives. Thank God we all lived to leave that farm in Arkansas, where fear turned to hatred when he finally got his way and raped me for the f
irst time.

  CHAPTER 6

  Susan Goes First

  Our first days at GCR were spent just trying to acclimate ourselves to our new surroundings and new life. I didn’t leave the house much, but Susan would go to the pool from time to time. She was more used to the nudist life than I was, and she enjoyed laying out in the sun. I stayed dressed, pretty much all of the time, unless I wanted to use the pool. That was the only place on the grounds where nudity was required. Otherwise, I wore clothes.

  We weren’t at Gulf Coast Resort two weeks when an officer entered the diner, whose entrance doubled as the guest checkin desk, to deliver the first subpoena. He came in the front door, as various nudists sat casually eating their breakfasts, and all eyes turned to the man in uniform. Susan’s brother, Robert, was working that morning, so he signed for it and called Susan at Ann’s house to come and get it, as the resort guests practically exploded with curiosity.

  It was an order for Susan to appear in Orlando for a deposition in the case of State of Florida v. Richard Alfred Kananen, Jr. I felt a jumbled sense of terror, shame, and a desperate desire to make it all go away.

  We drove to Orlando on March 2, about two weeks after the subpoena arrived, and while Susan was being deposed, I sat in the car mortified. My brother was on a hunger strike, in the hospital, with a feeding tube and forced medication. Because of the questions Rickie’s attorney, Gerod Hooper, asked Susan, we were beginning to get an idea of what sort of case the prosecutor was building against him, because up until Mr. Hooper asked these questions, we weren’t really sure what was happening with Rickie’s case. He asked her about my mother’s garage, to find out if there was any indication at all that there might be a body buried under the cement floor, and she told them that the garage was always neat and clean, with a carpet on the floor. For years the garage was sort of a playroom for Cheryl’s kids. Mom didn’t park her car in there at all.

  Then the attorney got down to the nitty-gritty, trying to find out if Rickie and I had been plotting to kill Mom. She told him, “Richard was angry about the father, on how he was abused and taught to be a criminal at an early age. From what I understand, the father had the son do criminal things, like robbing and stealing. Now, as far as the mother, he felt the mother did not protect him.”

  When Hooper asked about the suicide note, and specifically the line I wrote about having a “part in Mother’s leaving,” she explained exactly what I meant. “When Stacey left the police station, she was confused, distraught, upset. When they pulled away from the police station is when Richard supposedly told her that he killed the mother. And that because they are always together and because of him having Stacey open up bank accounts, that Stacey would be implied [sic] as having to have something to do with it. He convinced her that nobody would believe the truth, and that I wouldn’t love her anymore. Therefore, she should kill herself. At that moment, I believe she felt she had no reason to live, knowing her mother was murdered. I don’t believe she had anything to do with it.”

  Through Hooper’s questioning that day, we learned that Rickie had been writing checks from Mom’s account and was pretty free and loose with his spending. He gave some money to me and Susan to pay for his past room and board, since he had lived there free for several months, saying he won the money in the Fantasy 5 lottery. Susan used it to pay off her car, and I put a down payment on a new truck, trading in my old one, which was having major problems. She told Hooper, “He told us he won the Fantasy 5. We didn’t know anything different until the police told us otherwise. And sometimes these things are like a movie. When you see the end of the movie, then you think back to earlier scenes. You say, oh, my God, that’s what was happening.”

  And that’s exactly how it felt. In retrospect, we could see that all of these little things were, by themselves, no big deal. But when you add them up, they look very fishy. I first began to realize this on December 22, 2003, when the police were questioning me about Rickie’s activities, and that realization scared the hell out of me—all of these little things he was doing were making me look guilty. Especially when they pulled out a check made out to me for $2,500 from my mother’s account with “Christmas” written on the memo line. When they asked Susan about it, she looked at the endorsement on the back of the check, paused, and said, “This may not be her signature. She always signs with an M. She always signs Stacey M. Kananen, always.” The check had been signed “Stacey Kananen,” with no “M.” It looked like my handwriting, or at least close to it, but that’s not how I sign my name. Ever.

  Before letting her go, Hooper asked her about some trouble that Cheryl had been having with Daniel, and family scuttlebutt that Mom might be trying to have Daniel come live with her. In August 2003, a month or so before Mom’s death, Cheryl became very angry at me, Mom, and Rickie, for confronting her about stories that Daniel had told us about her temper. She gave us a letter telling us to butt out, and that she and her family were seeking counseling. I respected her wishes and we didn’t speak much between that time and when Mom disappeared. She was very angry with me already when Mom died. I don’t know if that has anything to do with why she ultimately turned against me or not, but it’s not like we were on happy terms when this nightmare began.

  When the attorney asked Susan about this, she told him, “Daniel was upset with his mother, Cheryl, that she was not treating him properly … Marilyn might have said to Cheryl that she would take the kids away …” This, I believe, is the reason that Rickie told Daniel that he would kill Cheryl if Daniel wanted him to. At least, that’s what Daniel told police back in December of 2003, just a few months before Susan’s deposition.

  CHAPTER 7

  Daniel

  When Mom’s body was found, Daniel was only twelve years old. He was called in to talk to Detective Hussey, on December 16, after reporting to Cheryl that Uncle Rickie had admitted to murder. Cheryl was present during that interview because Daniel was a minor.

  Rickie told the boy, sometime between moving in with us and Mom’s murder, that he had killed our father. Daniel stated, in the innocent way only a child could say it, “He told me, ‘He’s dead. Let’s just say that no one stopped me this time.’ When he was a kid he tried to do the same thing, but my grandma stopped him. He was always really mad at my grandma for saying that she still loved him and for not really doing anything.” Daniel continued, “He said, ‘I shot him blow-to-blow … like, short range.’”

  He told Hussey that Rickie said he traveled around the country saving children from their abusive fathers. He would go to the door as a “pizza man” and once he was sure that the wife and children were out of the building, he would go inside, “take care of the man,” and plant drugs in the house.

  Rickie told Daniel that our father said that Rickie was going to be just like him, and Rickie had started believing it. He told Daniel that he never wanted to be like our dad, and proceeded to give a demonstration of one of our father’s typical temper tantrums. Daniel told Hussey that Rickie was carrying some tools and a ladder, and, “He threw the screwdriver across the yard. He threw the hammer and it broke the fence. He threw the ladder and he just started yelling and cussing. He hit the wall and threw rocks, and he had to stop because he was getting into it.”

  I was present when Rickie was demonstrating to our nephew what our father was like. We were all working outside, in the yard—something we loved to do together—and I wasn’t paying much attention to their conversation. Suddenly I heard my father’s voice screaming harsh words, and I just about jumped out of my skin. I whirled around and saw that it was Rickie, doing an uncanny impression of “the Monster.”

  Because Rickie had admitted to the boy that he had killed our father, Hussey asked him during that interview if Rickie ever talked to him about his grandmother or where he thought she went. Daniel indicated that he hadn’t seen Rickie much since Mom disappeared, but he said, “Once he gave me like a look like, he knows where she is. He knows how to do crimes really good. He basically
told me he knows how to do whatever without getting caught, ’cause that’s how his dad raised him.”

  When I read the transcript of his interview, my heart broke all over again, because Daniel told stories of Rickie teaching him how to commit all sorts of crimes, from theft to kidnap for ransom to robbing banks by threatening to murder the children of the bank’s customers.

  Most eerie of all, however, was the psychic vision that Daniel told police that he had of my mother’s death. He said, “I saw her worrying, like she was breathing hard. Then she fell and actually hit the floor.”

  The conversation then turned to the timing of Cheryl’s wedding in 1988 to Chris Bracken, Daniel’s father, which “coincidentally” fell just a couple weeks after our father disappeared. “He got killed by my uncle, it was like two weeks before their wedding. That’s what he told me. Because the wedding would never have gone like it did and my grandfather would’ve never came down.”

  Hussey asked, “He didn’t tell you a date when he thought he killed your grandfather?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “And he used the word kill? He did say that?”

  Daniel replied, “He said, ‘Well, nobody stopped me this time.’ And I said, ‘You killed him? How?’ He’s like ‘Why would you want to know? Blow-to-blow, I already told you.’”

  Hussey continued, “Anything else that he’s said to you that was unusual?”

  “He told me that his dad raped him.”

  “Okay,” Hussey said. “How’d he start that conversation?”

  Daniel told Hussey that he asked Rickie what’s the worst thing that happened to him, “He said, ‘My dad raped me.’”