Fear of Our Father

by Stacey Kananen

  As difficult as those questions had been to answer, the really difficult ones were about to come my way. Hooper wanted to know about the day I found out that Rickie had killed our parents and what led to our suicide attempt.

  “Now, there came a time when you and Richard went to the police station and gave statements and you were separated at that time. After you gave the statements, is that when you and Richard attempted suicide?” Hooper asked, gently.

  I confirmed that was true.

  “What happened in the police station that led you and Richard to decide to attempt suicide after speaking to the police?”

  I recalled that horrible day, shuddering at the memory of Rickie confessing to me that he had killed our parents. I took a deep breath and replied, “When the detectives walked in the room and said, ‘We know where your mother’s car is,’ I pretty much fell apart. And then when we left the police station, he just kept telling me, ‘Oh, I did things. Oh, I was horrible. I’m going to ruin your life. You have no purpose. You have no family. You’re going to have nothing.’ And all I kept thinking was, ‘Oh, no, I let you come into my home. I let you come close to the family and what have you done?’ It just ripped me apart.”

  “So was it a joint decision that you and him made?” Hooper asked.

  I had to reply that I honestly didn’t remember. He wanted to know what we did after we left the police station and I told him that I remembered driving to a store and that I stopped to get gas. As we drove home, Rickie told me that he murdered my mother and that’s when he started in with the: I have no purpose. I have no family. I’ll have nothing. I’m going to be destroyed. And all I kept thinking was, I let him come in my house and all he did was tear my family apart.

  “Did he bring it up or did you bring it up?”

  I told him that Rickie brought it up. Hooper now wanted to know where we went, and I told him that Rickie directed me to drive my truck to an industrial storage complex, with large units that some companies actually used as their place of business, like welding and car repair companies. The units had lots of space and a small bathroom inside. I drove my truck into Rickie’s unit, and he got out of the truck and closed the large overhead door.

  Hooper continued his probing. “Okay. Had you guys discussed how you were going to attempt the suicide, by carbon monoxide, was that discussed at all or …”

  “I don’t remember it being discussed until we actually got inside the storage shed, and by then I was distraught,” I replied.

  “Okay. So the truck is still running?” he asked. “Other than the truck running in a confined shed, had you taken any other means to attempt a suicide?”

  “He attached some kind of a hose thing from the back of the truck into the window.”

  “So you are both sitting there with the windows rolled up in the storage shed and the exhaust pipe vented into the passenger compartment?”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s what was vented. I don’t know anything about vehicles,” I answered. When he asked if we were talking about anything, I told him, “No. I didn’t really say anything to him at all. I wrote a letter to Susan.” The next thing I remember after passing out, I told him, was the cops pulling me out of the truck and taking me to the hospital.

  Suddenly, he launched into a different line of questions. He barked, “Were you present when your mom got killed?” Surprised, I replied, “No. I was not.”

  “Okay,” he continued. “Did you have any involvement in her being killed or her disappearance?”

  “No. I did not.”

  “And you mentioned you left Susan a note?”

  “Yes. I did,” I replied.

  He continued pressing, “And in the note you say to her, ‘We had a part in mom’s leaving.’ What did you mean by that?”

  So again I explained, “We, meaning that I brought him into my house. He was never close to my family until he moved into my house. And then we started having family dinners, pool parties, but until then, he was never close to the family, so I felt, like, God, what did I do?”

  Still not getting it, he said, “Okay. So the ‘we’ you’re referring to, you and Susan for bringing him in … or just you and Richard or …”

  “Me and Richard,” I explained. “I feel horrible because it wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t in my house, or at least that’s what I believe. He wouldn’t have had access to everybody because he never did before.”

  Hooper paused and asked, “Well, if he tells you that he killed your mom, so he’s going to kill himself, what I’m lost on is how does that get to you having to kill yourself? How does that affect you?”

  It was frustrating that I couldn’t make him understand. I told him, “He kept saying I have no purpose. I have no family. He put the body in my backyard. I’ve just as much destroyed my family as he did. I didn’t physically do anything, but I brought him back into our family.” And that’s exactly how I felt. Maybe it’s from growing up in such a severely abusive household, but I’ve always felt hyper-responsible for things going wrong in my life. If anything bad happens, I have a tendency to feel like it’s my fault, no matter what. It is what the abuser teaches his victims: “I wouldn’t have to hit you if only …” This was one of those “if only …” moments. If only I had not invited Rickie to live with us, Mom would be alive today.

  Hooper changed the subject then and told me that Rickie said, in his note, “‘Our father was killed by Stacey.’ Did you know he wrote that in his note?”

  I replied that I heard that after the fact but didn’t know it at the time. I told him that I did not kill our father, and that Rickie had never told me, before that day, that he had killed him, either. All I was ever told was that he was gone.

  He pressed on, “Do you know of any reason why he would put in his suicide note that you killed your father?” and I had to reply that I had no idea. I still don’t know why he said that. I can guess until I’m blue in the face, but I will probably never know for sure.

  Then the subject rolled around to that Christmas check made out in my name. Hooper showed it to me and said, “It seems to be a check made out to you for $2,500 from your mom’s account and the back of the check has written on it: Stacey Kananen. Is that your signature?”

  I looked and noticed the missing M. “No. It’s missing the ‘M’ and everything I sign has an ‘M’ in the middle initial.”

  He dropped that subject without any more questions, and the state’s attorney, Linda Drane Burdick, took over from there. She spent a substantial amount of time asking me about what life was like back in 1988, when my father disappeared, just a few weeks before my sister’s wedding. “How would you describe your parents’ relationship at that point?” I told her it was violent, and left it at that.

  “Were you aware of there being any weapons in the home?” she asked.

  I explained to the state’s attorney that my father had handguns and shotguns and that he pulled them out to threaten my mother almost once a week.

  “Would it be reasonable then to assume that within the week prior to his disappearance, you had seen him threaten your mother with a firearm of some sort?”

  I probably had. It had been a long time—over fifteen years since that hellish part of my life—so I could not say for sure, but this really was a regular occurrence in our house. It would not surprise me at all if he had. In fact, I was so used to the never-ending death threats and beatings that rarely did I even come out of my room. There was nothing I could do about it but stay out of the way, because if I interfered, it would just be worse for all of us. I would go to my bedroom and hide until it was over. I did, however, call 911 during a particularly heinous attack in the mid-1980s, when we lived in Orlando. I remember it being Saturday afternoon because Mom wasn’t working. I don’t recall the date, but it was summertime. I hurried outside with the cordless phone, wearing shorts and a tank top. The police came out and rang the doorbell, but she told them everything was fine and they went away.

  Then Burdick’
s questions went in a different direction. “Where were you when your mother rented a concrete saw?”

  I didn’t know anything about a concrete saw. At this point, I went numb. All I wanted to do was leave. I was torn between being angry because it felt like they were trying to ruin my mom’s name, and utter disbelief that what they were implying might be true.

  Ms. Burdick asked me to describe my mom’s garage. It was a pretty typical two-car garage, with a washer and dryer at the back wall. One side was piled from front to back with boxes, totes, and holiday decorations. The other side had a play table, toys, games, and other kids’ activities. Near the roll-up door, a wooden shelf was built in to the wall, and it was covered with tools and odds and ends. The garage was used mostly as a playroom for the kids, with indoor/outdoor carpet on the cement floor.

  She asked me, point blank, “Did your mother ever tell you she killed your father?”

  “No. She didn’t.”

  “Did you know your father was under the concrete in the garage?”

  “No. I did not.”

  “So who killed your dad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who do you suspect?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  The subject then turned to the fact that Mom had been collecting my father’s disability checks all those years. This was something that Rickie kept trying to point out the night she disappeared. There was paperwork left on the counter, and he kept referring to it, but at the time neither Cheryl nor I paid much attention. We were too concerned that “the Monster” had shown up after all these years and snatched her away. This is what Rickie had first suggested as to how she had gone missing. We didn’t much care about bank accounts and Social Security payments. Cheryl, that night, was terrified that our hideous father would now track down and hurt her kids the way he hurt us. That would be her worst nightmare, and I don’t blame her one bit for being concerned, because I, too, believed that he would hurt her kids if he got hold of them.

  Burdick asked me about that night, back in September, “How were you made aware of her disappearance?”

  “My sister called me Thursday evening, and said, ‘She didn’t come to work today.’ I got my brother and we went over there. I walked in the house, and there were things missing and she wasn’t there.”

  I once had a key to my mom’s house. I explained, “I had one at the beginning of the month. My brother told me that when my cousin left, he changed the locks and none of us had keys, except for him and my mother.”

  Puzzled, she asked, “Did Richard tell you why he changed the locks after she left?”

  “Well, it was typical for my mother, whenever she had company in her house, to have her locks changed in case they made copies of her keys, so that’s what he said he did. I didn’t think anything of it because that was kind of normal.”

  Changing the locks after a visitor was just par for the course for Mom. We were all used to it and didn’t think twice about it. As far as I knew, there were no specific incidents to cause Mom to be suspicious of her own sister, my Aunt Gerri, or even my cousin Laureen. In retrospect, of course—knowing now that there was a body buried under the garage floor, and illegal bank accounts—I can see why Mom didn’t want anyone to be able to snoop around in her absence.

  “Every year when Laureen came, your mom let her stay in the house and then promptly had the locks changed?” she continued.

  “Within a couple days of her leaving, she would have the locks changed. The same thing with my Aunt Gerri, when she would come see my grandfather.”

  Burdick then asked me, “So at some point while she’s missing Richard decides to resurface the garage floor? What did he tell you about that?” After Mom disappeared, Rickie had taken it upon himself to hire a company to install a new, decorative floor in her garage. I didn’t think much about it, because he was the one who had taken charge of her house and he thought it was a good idea, to keep the house in good condition. I had no inkling that there was a body buried under the cement for fifteen years, and he was just trying to hide any signs of that in case of any investigation.

  “He told me that the garage floor needed to get some work done on it and he wanted to try to get a mortgage on the house to save it. This was after I found out about IRS and Social Security and the checks, and not knowing anything about legalities, I believed him.”

  She was dubious. “You didn’t check into it for yourself? I mean, obviously you’re a smart person, graduated in the top ten. So it wouldn’t have taken much for you to try to check into what Richard was telling you?”

  Honestly, I hadn’t given it much thought. His story made sense, after he told me that Mom’s house was in jeopardy. I thought he was taking care of business, like it needed to be done, and I never really thought to check up on him. He’s my brother. I assumed he would tell me the truth. I was wrong. Very, very wrong. Hindsight is blinding, sometimes.

  She continued, “So it’s my understanding you were around whenever the floor to the garage was being redone.”

  “When he had the stone stuff put on it, yes. I was there.” Who knew, at the time, that this would be considered suspicious behavior? I didn’t know anything about garage floors or how impractical it was to do what Rick was doing. I just helped him pick out a color.

  “Were you there when the installer said, ‘That’s kind of a stupid thing to put on a garage floor? Why would you want to do that?’” she asked.

  “I wasn’t within earshot. All I had to do with that conversation was, ‘Oh, I like this color.’ That was it. I didn’t have the money to pay for it. He said he was paying for it out of his electrical jobs, so I let them discuss business.”

  It really did seem to me like my big brother was taking care of our mom’s affairs in her absence. He told me and Cheryl that, because of the IRS investigation, we had to protect her assets, lest they get seized. He moved her more valuable things to our garage, and even into a storage unit. When we got letters from the utility companies that her electric and her water bills were not being paid because there was no money in the account, he had me call the bank to question that.

  Burdick asked me about the bank account, and I explained that they wouldn’t give me any information. They needed to see my mother and obviously she couldn’t show up, so I told Richard we needed to pay her bills. We needed to keep her house in order for her, and he said he was going to take care of it.

  That’s when we found out that the bank accounts had been frozen. My memory of the exact chain of events is somewhat fuzzy, unfortunately, but as a result of my phone call to the bank, red flags went up because she was a “missing person.” We were told that we had to call Detective Hussey, so we did. This incident would haunt me years later at my trial as would all of these—individually—small details. Put them all together and they hung a great big suspicious cloud of guilt over my head.

  Once again, Burdick led me through the events leading up to the suicide attempt, so I repeated the story for her—again. I was glad that I had already decided to just tell the truth and not try to hide any embarrassing secrets, no matter how painful they might be, because it was obvious that the two attorneys were trying to trip me up. Yes, I know my story of why I so blindly followed my brother sounded lame to them, but they never grew up in a severely dysfunctional, abusive household. They didn’t know what I considered strange or “normal” behavior, and why I never questioned what an older, male family member was doing. In my family, you just … didn’t ask. You did not ask. Period. So I didn’t question any decisions, actions, or any of his behavior, even when he was acting a little strange.

  Burdick asked, “What does Richard tell you he told them?”

  “He doesn’t tell me anything until we get back to the house. A little bit of chitter-chatter on the way: ‘Are you hungry, blah-blah-blah. We’ve got to run a couple of errands.’ Then we get back to the house and …”

  “Which house?”

  “My house. And he
’s acting a little strange and he says, ‘I killed your mother.’ And I just flipped out. I totally just freaked out. I started crying. And then he started saying, ‘You don’t have a future. You don’t have a purpose.’”

  “Why would he say that at that point if you had been getting along well and you were having a great time with Richard since he had moved back into your home?”

  I wish I knew the answer to that, as well. “I was. I have no idea why he did that. I don’t understand it at all.”

  They insisted I go through the sequence of events. “We drove together. I honestly didn’t want to hear what he had to say because in the same interview with the sheriff’s department, they brought me in a diagram of my mother’s garage and showed me where the other body was also. I, of course, didn’t believe it, but came to find out it was very true. I just told him I didn’t want to hear anything. I didn’t want to hear it. I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on and I didn’t want to hear it. I don’t remember discussing it in the truck. We may have, but I don’t remember it.”

  “So Richard’s basically telling you your life is over at the house? And your response is, ‘You’re right. My life is over? I didn’t do anything. Why is my life over?’ Did you say that?”

  “I believe I did say that. I don’t remember exactly what I said to him. I was pretty hysterical at that point.”

  Once again, I had to walk her through the story. Yes, we went to Wal-Mart, where I was too afraid and confused to just leave him. I wasn’t thinking straight. I had just found out he had murdered our mom and buried her in my yard. Yes, we went to the storage unit where I used the bathroom while he rigged the truck with a hose. Yes, I drank NyQuil because I can’t swallow pills. Yes, I wrote that damned, incriminating note.

  “Okay,” she asked, “did he mention again who he killed or how?”

  “He said, ‘I killed our mother and put her in your backyard.’ That was the final straw. I couldn’t handle it anymore.”