Fear of Our Father

by Stacey Kananen

  “Did you ask him anything about your dad at that point?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “You knew that the police had believed that your dad was under the garage.”

  “I knew that morning, yeah.”

  “Okay. But you didn’t ask Richard about it when he said he killed your mom?”

  “Probably not, but then a part of me said, I hope to God my mother didn’t have anything to do with it because she was so beaten all the time.”

  Burdick asked, “She never said to you that she had anything to do with it?” I told her that she had not.

  Finally, after almost an hour and a half, the grueling questions were over. Her last question was about Cheryl, and whether I had been in communication with her.

  “I get the impression she doesn’t want to speak to me. I could be wrong, but this is very hard on all of us and everybody needs to put it all back together. She’s got three kids she has to take care of. And out of anything, that’s the most important thing, those three kids.”

  CHAPTER 9

  A Dull Roar

  As we settled in, Susan and I took on pretty much all of the day-to-day responsibilities of managing GCR. The buck still stopped with Ann—she made all the decisions—but we did the actual work. By the summer of 2004, we discovered that running a resort was definitely two full-time jobs. I put in seven-day weeks in the kitchen, ordering food and cooking meals. We hosted dances on Saturdays and planned pool parties and special events. The Tiki Bar was open on the weekends, so we held cookouts and served beer and wine coolers in the Florida heat. The customers wanted their money’s worth, and we tried our best to give it to them.

  The long work hours and social atmosphere helped to take my mind off of where Rickie was, and why, but what helped the most was that I started drinking again. Since I was four years old, my father had gotten me drunk on a regular basis to make me more compliant while he was doing what he did, and as a teenager I started drinking on my own. I was soused pretty regularly until I met Susan at age twenty-two and quit drinking. My father was “gone” by that point, and I didn’t feel like I needed to escape in the bottle anymore. But now, living in a tropical paradise vacation resort where the daily “Happy Hour” started before 3:00 P.M. for many of the snowbirds, vodka became my friend again and we spent a lot of time getting reacquainted.

  Ann sold the trailer we were living in to some snowbird friends of hers from Canada, so Susan and I moved over that first summer into one of the rental units in the resort. Our address was now “Unit N” instead of “Lot 130.” We filed a change of address with the post office so our mail would be forwarded from the homeowners’ bank of mailboxes to the resort’s general delivery mailbox. The resort and subdivision shared the same address, but the resort office was responsible for sorting and delivering the campers’ mail. Anything without a lot number came to the resort office. We all lived within the same small, gated community at 13220 Houston Ave.

  I got to be good friends with the staff—most of whom lived at the resort—and many of the residents and snowbirds. Wendell, the maintenance manager, was a gruff Alabama good ol’ boy, and he became like sort of a grouchy big brother to me, even though he made it pretty clear that he wasn’t sure about my innocence. And then there was Jeff, his assistant, a clown who kept everybody laughing. Jeff—who insisted on working in the nude—was changing a lightbulb in one of the streetlight fixtures, when the ladder fell out from under him. He instinctively leapt forward and clung on to the pole as the ladder fell to the ground. Fortunately, Wendell was nearby to lift the ladder back up, but he took his sweet old time doing it, just to make sure that Jeff realized the full impact of what sort of splinters he would have gathered on the way, if he’d had to slide down. He wore shorts to work from that day forward.

  We built quite a team of volunteers, who put together tennis and Petanque tournaments with the other local nudist resorts, and Gulf Coast Resort was beginning to be a player in the local nudist scene. Business grew rapidly as word of mouth let people know that GCR was now a happening place.

  I was beginning to think that perhaps life had a chance of being okay again when, in March 2005—right around what would have been my mother’s birthday—I received an “anonymous” piece of mail. It was a birthday card that said, in what looked like my sister’s handwriting, “I would have been 67 years young this month.” I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. The next month I received another one, in time for Rickie’s birthday. This one was typed. It said, “I should not be the only one in jail on my birthday. Code of Silence no more. The pact was us together … all the way.”

  I’d had enough. I contacted my lawyer and asked him what to do about this harassment, and assuming that the cards were from Cheryl, he sent a letter telling her that if she wanted to contact me, she should do it through him. I still don’t know for a fact whether they were from her, but I never received any more cards like that after that. Up until then, I was saddened and dismayed that my own sister could possibly suspect me. But now I was pissed. If it was her, that kind of behavior was definitely not okay.

  I had lost my entire family, for good, and I was resigned to accepting that Susan’s family would have to be it for me. I threw myself into working almost nonstop for the resort. Between working and drinking, I didn’t have any time to think about how alone I was and how I came to be that way. But then Ann got sick in late 2005. She was getting older and her health was beginning to decline. She was falling out of bed on a regular basis, and it took several men—oftentimes EMTs—to lift her back into bed. Many days, she didn’t even have the strength or ability to lift herself out of bed. She was on oxygen by now, because she had been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

  For several months, Susan and I spent a great deal of our time taking care of Ann, between 1:00 A.M. phone calls to lift her back into bed and trips to the emergency room. She’d be hospitalized and we’d prepare for the worst, and then she’d rally again and come home. This went on until, finally, she was done in. The doctors said it was congestive heart failure. She had lost circulation in her legs, and they were becoming gangrenous. All of the kids had come to the hospital to say their good-byes, and Susan told her mom it was okay to let go. As far as she could tell, there were no loose ends for Ann to stick around for. Finally, in January 2006, she closed her eyes for the last time and Susan, who was devastated, was now fully in charge of the resort.

  We were both exhausted. Too much drama, too much work, and no respite for either of us. And before Susan even had time to plan a memorial service for her mother, Ed and his girlfriend showed up at Ann’s house and demanded the keys. They gave Susan and her siblings a few hours to get whatever they wanted out of the house, including all of the business computers and files that Ann kept there, and they moved in. Needless to say, this created more than a little bit of tension between the Kirk kids and their father, not to mention the “Bitch,” as she came to be known (she actually had a license plate on her vehicle that said that, so it wasn’t like we gave her the title). The two of them came to the restaurant several days a week to get a free breakfast, and we had to serve them. I was used to swallowing abuse, so I was able to just grin and bear it, but poor Susan was beside herself.

  She hid it well, however. Well, she didn’t so much “hide” it as much as she soldiered on. She still had a resort to run, a Mardi Gras dance to plan, a St. Patrick’s Day dinner to buy for, a Casino Night to put together: She had far too much to do to worry about her own personal drama. With Ann gone, she was now free to brighten up the resort a little more, and when some of the residents asked if they could paint the place with Key West colors, if they could get enough volunteers, she told them to have at it. We were hosting AANR Florida conventions regularly and Woodstock weekends with bands and vendors. If Ed and the Bitch wanted to try to pee in her Wheaties, they’d have to stand in line.

  Another thing we did, after Ann passed, was patch things up with a
large number of the homeowners, some of whom loathed Ann Kirk with the heat of a thousand blazing suns. In case I haven’t made it clear, Ann was a difficult woman, and when she and Ed took over the park from the former owners, it was not a pretty scene and a lot of people held grudges. They refused to buy memberships or use the facilities because not a dime of their money was going to support the Kirk family. But Susan approached them to make amends and invited them all back to the resort that they once loved. Slowly but surely, most of them came back and marveled at what a great job Susan was doing.

  She and I made a very special point of bringing the park back together again. We helped to take care of some of the older residents, rewriting some of Ann’s former restaurant rules like, “No food deliveries” and “No credit.” Some of the residents were elderly or disabled—after all, they came to Gulf Coast Resort to retire—and had trouble cooking. We would have Wayne, one of the other resort employees, deliver dinners to them, on the resort’s golf cart, for no extra charge. We made sure that the restaurant building and bathroom were handicap accessible, and even created handicap parking spaces for golf carts, which was the way that most of the residents got around the park.

  In spite of the drama with her family and mine, we were building a new life—a bizarre one, to be sure, but it was good. Yes, I was still going to Orlando from time to time to talk to the state’s attorney about testifying against Rickie. Yes, he was still putting doubt in our minds as to whether he was truly insane or just malingering. And, yes, Cheryl and Detective Hussey still apparently thought I had something to do with my mother’s death. But they had no case, no evidence, because I was innocent.

  Each time I went to Orlando to meet with Robin Wilkinson, the assistant state’s attorney who had taken over the case from Linda Drane Burdick, I was never comfortable. I went to Orlando a total of five times—once for deposition, twice for hearings that I can’t talk about (they were sealed), once for a pretrial hearing, and once to meet with Robin the week before the trial. Although she had a background in child abuse cases and, therefore, was somewhat compassionate and understanding about the way our lives went, there was something about her that made me very nervous. She was sort of abrasive and had an air about her that just wasn’t very friendly. The permanent look of annoyance on her face was intimidating. I always figured, “This is it; they’re going to throw something new at me.” She and Hussey had me scared.

  I was giving depositions on Rickie, going to hearings in order to affirm or disprove things that he was saying, and being asked what I felt about the death penalty for him. I didn’t feel he deserved the death penalty. He was destroyed by the abuse we all endured, and someone should have noticed it earlier. Right before Rickie’s scheduled trial in 2007, I went for one last meeting with Robin. I felt uneasy and said to Susan, “This is an ambush. I feel like this is an ambush, this trip.” Little did I know, it really was.

  CHAPTER 10

  Rickie Pleads Guilty

  I never went to visit Rickie between his arrest in 2003 and his trial date in 2007, but Cheryl did go to see him a few times. This was very hard for me, and I wrestled with whether I was doing the right thing or not. My brother was our protector—he was a human being. But, for me, it would have been so disrespectful to go see him after he murdered our mom—especially burying her in my backyard and then trying to get me to kill myself. I felt betrayed by him, and also physically petrified to go near any type of police area.

  I saw him, however, after I was subpoenaed to testify for hearings, on behalf of the State. I honestly don’t remember which trip to Orlando this was, but if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it was in early 2007, as they were preparing for his trial. He was shackled at the ankles and wrists, wearing a blue jail jumpsuit, and he looked horrible, stick-figure horrible, because he had just come off another hunger strike. It made me nauseated to see him. He was as skinny as he had been in high school, when he was so tall and gangly. Then he was slim because he had a teenager’s metabolism and was physically strong and active. Now he was emaciated. I couldn’t bear to look at him.

  Leading up to his trial, I was on pins and needles, waiting to find out if they were going to make me testify, or if he would take a plea. I was hoping for a plea. No one in her right mind would prefer to testify against her brother.

  On May 1, 2007, in front of Judge Alicia Latimore and without my knowledge, he withdrew his previously tendered pleas of not guilty of both charges. I had no idea this was going to happen or that it was happening until after the fact. He pleaded no contest to manslaughter in my father’s death, and no contest to second-degree murder in my mother’s. For the first charge, he was sentenced to fifteen years, and the second charge got him a thirty-year sentence, to run concurrently with the first.

  Robin Wilkinson began the proceedings with, “Your Honor, if the State were to go to trial, the State would show that around September of 1988, that Richard Kananen Sr. disappeared from his home …” and then she proceeded to tell the story. “The State would show that the defendant before the Court actually called his sister Cheryl, who planned on getting married in two weeks, to tell her that he’s gone and you don’t have to worry about him, have a nice wedding.”

  She told the judge, “Based on the family background and the amount of violence that occurred in the family, along with physical and sexual abuse of those children, Mr. Kananen was not going to be invited to the wedding. The defendant had called her to tell her he had a present, that she didn’t have to worry about him coming.”

  Rickie sat there, in his jail garb and shackles, as the prosecutor told how no one ever reported our father missing, because no one missed him. She then regaled the court with the story of my mother’s disappearance, how she didn’t show up for work on September 11, 2003, and how a coworker called Cheryl at home to report this extremely unusual situation.

  Robin told the judge that Cheryl went to the house to check on our mom, and saw that her car was gone and the locks on the house had been changed. Robin continued that when Rickie arrived at the house, “He would say that he believed that the father had reappeared and taken the mother away. Ms. Bracken felt that was unusual since there had always been the feeling that he was just gone.”

  The judge was informed that a missing persons report was filed, at first, but that the case eventually was handed over to the homicide detectives who were unable to freeze a particularly large bank account that my mother owned, because it was still in probate. Then came the damning stories about me. She said, “The State would show that Stacey Kananen and Richard Kananen proceeded to have electronic checks sent to different accounts that they had, personal accounts, including their business accounts for Green Acres Services and Emerald Electric.

  “The State would show several thousand dollars were moved from the SunTrust account to accounts of Mr. Kananen, along with his sister. The State would further show that Richard Kananen and Stacey Kananen had a yard sale, which Detective Mark Hussey went by and found they were selling Disney collectibles, which were believed to be the property of Marilyn Kananen.”

  She paced the courtroom floor, winding up her tempo and launching into how Rickie was seen by Mom’s neighbors emptying her house at all hours of the night, taking black trash bags to the curb. “Mr. Kananen went from saying ‘The nightmare was back,’ and ‘Dad must have taken her,’ to making statements that Marilyn Kananen had been receiving these Social Security checks of Richard Kananen over a period of fifteen years.”

  After telling the judge that Rickie told Daniel that he had shot our father, “blow-to-blow,” Robin stated that Rickie resented Mom for not doing something more to prevent the abuse. He admitted, she continued, to using Mom’s bank account to pay bills, but then he was confronted by police, during questioning, with the fact that it was not bills being paid, not credit cards, the house had been paid off, there was no mortgage, but that it was actually checks to him. She said that he then told police that “His sister actually killed his father
, and that he was called over. He’s also made a statement his mother actually killed his father, and he’s just the one who buried him.”

  “Once they made statements to the police,” Robin explained, “Stacey and Richard were left in a room, and unbeknownst to them, they were being videotaped, in which Stacey Kananen admitted to making phone calls to banks trying to portray herself as Marilyn Kananen. But the defendant, obviously, aware of SunTrust accounts, started talking about it’s all over for them, they know what we’ve done, and I need you to help me do something.” The judge was then told about the suicide attempt in the storage unit, and how we were stopped and “rescued” by the fire department. “At the hospital the defendant confessed to killing his mother, although he continued to state that he only helped bury his father. He told police officers, told the sheriff’s office that his father was buried underneath the garage. He also described that his mother was buried in the backyard of the Okaloosa residence, which is a mere block or so away from his mother’s house where he and Stacey lived.”

  After the judge confirmed that my brother’s attorney had nothing to add and no objections, his sentence was agreed upon, and the plea deal was complete. Robin then continued, “Your Honor, for purposes of this plea, it’s our understanding that Mr. Kananen has agreed to speak to law enforcement.” She told the judge that after the plea, he would be talking to Detective Hussey. And that’s exactly what he did.

  CHAPTER 11

  Thrown Under the Bus

  Immediately after Rickie was done with the plea hearing and sentencing, while they still had him shackled there in the courthouse building, he met with Detective Hussey, Hussey’s partner, Darryl McCaskill, and Deputy Sheriff Wayne Lenihan in another room at the Orange County Courthouse. Officially, there was no deal in the works—nowhere on record is there any sign that he was given leniency in exchange for turning on me—but my defense attorney said to me later, “You can’t tell me they didn’t do something. I can’t prove it, I can’t find it, but verbally something was done somewhere.” He went to a very good, special facility for serious offenders with mental illness.