Fear of Our Father

by Stacey Kananen

  For the first couple of days we all wondered if he was going to show up. Our grandfather called Cheryl and asked if it was true, but no one ever asked anything beyond that. We were all just relieved and hoped that he wasn’t coming back. People were watching at the back of the church just in case he showed up, but Rickie didn’t seem concerned that he was going to be there. Rickie was in the wedding. He was up at the front of the church with everyone else.

  Everybody was on edge and refused to stay at the house. They stayed at hotels. We were wary, too, hoping he didn’t get wind of it wherever he was and show up while my grandfather was walking my sister down the aisle. It had become apparent, during that crazed Arizona trip, that he had lost his mind, and I had no doubt that he could have walked into the church with his guns blazing. In fact, when we made it to the reception, I said to Cheryl, “Good God, he really didn’t come.” And she replied, “Yeah, but it’s not over yet. We still have a four-hour reception.”

  After he disappeared, Mom rarely talked about him. None of us did. We pretended the past never happened. We got on with life and tried to find a new normal. We had our own version of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” so we just kept the norm. So many questions we should have had answered. Somebody should have had the guts to ask them.

  CHAPTER 18

  Freedom from Terror

  Cheryl’s wedding weekend was the first and last time that I ever saw my mother’s mother. I had never met her before and, unfortunately, she went into a coma a few months after the wedding and died the following spring. We all went to the funeral, except for Rickie, who—I learned years later—stayed behind to bury a frozen body under the garage floor. He and Mom told us, at the time, that he stayed home to take care of her dog. I know differently, now.

  Following the wedding, we didn’t know how to act around one another, because we had never had the opportunity to just be ourselves. It was awkward when we got together for our very first Thanksgiving and Christmas—none of us knew how to talk to one another. Once my grandfather moved in with Mom, after his wife died, his presence seemed to give us a common ground and he somehow broke the ice that had frozen around us.

  Grandpa was a wonderful man. He was one of the best things to ever happen to me, and I pride myself in being a lot like him. He grew up during the Depression and had a very matter-of-fact way of looking at life: “You lived through what you lived through. You move on in life and make something of yourself.” That was his philosophy. You survive it, you move on, you do what you have to do, and you keep going.

  When Grandpa moved in with Mom, he helped her pay off the house, and he also made her get rid of the bullet hole–riddled dresser in her bedroom. She didn’t even notice it. It took an outsider to point out how very wrong it was. He did so much to help us find our way back to the way other people live. He couldn’t do enough for any of us. He said to me one day, “Do you want me to buy you a restaurant? I have the money. Let me buy you a restaurant. Look how much money you could make! You’re good at what you do!” I felt like he was trying to say, “Let me fix what happened in the past.” He did that with all of us kids. I told him, “Grandpa, I don’t want to own my own business. It’s not what I want to do. I’m happy the way I am.”

  After I got hired at Burger King, I became fast friends with one of my coworkers, a zany woman named Susan. She was funny and happy, with a heart as big as Texas, and we had such a great time together. I don’t know when I had ever laughed so much. She was several years older than me, but that didn’t mean anything. I had friends of all ages. It wasn’t long before we were spending all of our time together.

  She and I were best girlfriends, until one evening we went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant and we became actual “girlfriends.” As Susan tells the story, “I didn’t eat. I had butterflies. I had this weird feeling that I was falling in love with her.” It was around Christmastime and the restaurant was so pretty, all white lights, with beautiful music playing. We were sitting there, talking, and I just started pouring it out, telling her my life story. I guess it was just the right moment. Somehow that evening turned very romantic and … well, we’ve been together ever since.

  The funny thing was, neither Susan nor I were into girls, and neither of us was looking for a relationship. She had been married to her high school sweetheart, and I was engaged once to a boy in high school. It just sort of happened. Somehow we just knew that we were going to be together—best friends who fell in love with each other.

  We moved in together after Christmas, when Grandpa told me Mom didn’t need me to watch over her anymore. I was twenty-two years old. It was time to spread my wings and make my own life. “Move out, move on, and get past” is what he said to me.

  There is controversy, regarding homosexuality, about whether people choose to be gay or not. I guess I did make a conscious choice, if I’m pressed to declare it one way or the other, but I never thought of it that way. I don’t think that from the day I was old enough to perceive thoughts that I said, “I’m going to be with a woman.” I think I got to a point in my life, after the intensity of the abuse that I lived through, to say I don’t want to be in a sexual relationship with a man. Whether I made a conscious choice to fall in love with a woman, or I made a conscious choice not to be with men, however people want to perceive that, that’s their decision. If anyone asks, I’m perfectly at ease with saying I’m a lesbian.

  If I hadn’t met Susan in my twenties, I don’t know if I’d be this okay today. I was a seriously heavy drinker back then. I didn’t care if I lived or died. It wasn’t until we got together that I stopped pouring the booze down my throat like it was water.

  Susan and I had a great relationship. We went to theme parks, movies, and anyplace else we could to have fun. Our families weren’t thrilled about us pairing up, however. Even though they got along just fine, Mom never accepted that Susan was more than my best friend. She didn’t want to know about our relationship. It was a non-conversation. Yet Grandpa just said, “I knew about those types of boys up north, but we just left them alone.” That was his way of saying it didn’t matter to him.

  Susan’s mom hated me at first—not because of any gender issues, but because no one was good enough for her kids. She wanted to know what freebie I was looking for from her daughter. But once Susan told her a little bit about my past, about my father, she calmed down. As the years wore on and it became apparent that I wasn’t going away, she finally learned to like me, but it took a long time. She was a hard-nosed woman.

  Over the years, we all lightened up. Weekly dinners with Mom and Grandpa were very common. I was learning, because of Susan, that it was okay to have fun and be happy. Once my father was gone, Mom went on trips to Ireland and Hawaii. She and I went to Niagara Falls and California. She went with my aunt to Branson, Missouri, and Graceland. Mom had a job with an airline and got to fly standby for free. Mom didn’t date, that I know of. I think once was enough.

  If my mother had ever talked to us after my father went missing, we might have understood more, but even after he was gone, nobody brought it up. She just went on as if he never existed, like the elephant in the room—or under the garage floor—that she ignored.

  I don’t think I could live in a house if I knew that. I don’t know how she did it for so many years. Although, it’s not like she could ever sell it, for fear of discovery. She was stuck there until the day she died. That was her personal hell. And I wonder what she was thinking when she made the garage into a carpeted playroom for her grandkids. Was that her way of getting the last laugh on him, or was it just a way of lightening up a very dark space? I wish I could ask her. I don’t think she had much of a sense of humor. She liked to go places, she liked to experience things, she liked to hang out with the kids. We could have a pool party, everybody would be over, but she didn’t laugh. She participated in conversations, more so with the grandkids than with Susan, Cheryl, or me. She rarely spoke to my brother, when he was around. I don’t think she knew wha
t to say to us kids. She had a better relationship with my brother-in-law than she did with her own children, because he was an outsider. He didn’t live our life, and looking into his eyes didn’t haunt her with bad memories.

  She ended up being a pretty normal person after “it” was gone. She was happy. She had a good life. Even her neighbor noticed that she came out of her shell after 1988 and was much friendlier. She would chat when she’d see him in the yard, whereas before she would just dart into the house. She was a different person. We called the transformation “Before It and After It.”

  My sister became pregnant for the first time in 1990. Nine months, and twenty hours of labor, later, in April 1991, my nephew, Daniel, arrived. Susan and I made his first Easter basket four days after he was born, with a rattle and his first Mickey Mouse. He became a huge part of my life and we grew to be best friends. My sister, her husband, and their son were very happy. Holidays and birthdays finally became joyous occasions.

  Cheryl was determined to be a great mom, and she really did give it her best shot. It was as if she was declaring to the world, “I’m going to come out of this and I’m going to raise kids and I’m going to show the world how it’s supposed to be done.” She was going to be the perfect mother of the perfect family with the perfect picket fence.

  Susan and I used to take Daniel with us to Disney. We had sleepovers, we watched movies, we hung out and had fun. I loved to play basketball, and he and I would go out and shoot hoops, even in the freezing cold. He wanted to learn how to roller-skate, so I helped teach him. I just adored that boy. He was the son I could never have, and we did everything together. I was Aunt Stacey and Susan was Aunt Susan.

  We were learning what a true family was. In 1996, Cheryl had her first baby girl, and in 2000, she had another adorable little girl. Those were good times, and Rickie missed most of them because he wasn’t around. I have to say one thing about my brother; he knew he shouldn’t have kids. He always had that fear of turning into “it.” I similarly wondered, would I have had kids, if I could have? I don’t know if I’d have had the temperament for actually raising children. I don’t want to ever find out I have my father’s temper. It’s one thing to be a doting aunt. Having a kid is absolutely different from babysitting one. I always hyped them up on sugar and dropped them off. I could take my sister’s kids home and say, “Okay I’ve had enough. See ya.”

  At my trial, there was much discussion about Cheryl’s relationship with Daniel, but I have to give her credit for doing her best. She probably thought, in comparison to our upbringing, that she was doing an amazing job, and when she heard that he was becoming afraid of her, she was devastated. She took parenting classes and really did try to do the right thing.

  Throughout those fifteen years between my parents’ deaths, my mom, Susan, and I took lots of trips together—just the three of us. At least once a year, we took a weeklong vacation together somewhere. On Susan’s side of the family, she and Ann and I went on a Carnival or Disney cruise every September, to celebrate our birthdays, which were all within a week of one another. I was becoming rather well traveled.

  Even though she was happier, Mom still never smiled much. It could be that if she was involved in his death, even though it was a good thing, she was probably living with that, the memory of “I’m a murderer. I killed someone.” If she did kill him, it was obviously self-defense or because she snapped. Whatever happened, it was justified. But then she would have to live with the feeling of “I’ve taken a life.” So if she’d already been beaten to the point where she was forced to allow the rape of her children, now the only reason she could smile was because she’d murdered her husband or, at the very least, helped hide the body.

  The Social Security checks that came every month were a constant reminder. She didn’t spend a penny of that money, but every month, there was his ghost saying, “Here’s your check. Here’s your check.” She must have been pretty tortured over those years. That would explain why it was hard for her to smile. She had a heavy load. She had a heavy, heavy load.

  There was, however, one thing about my mother that still infuriates me to this day. Ten years after my father was gone, she sat in the living room of my uncle’s house and actually said, about my father, “I love him and I miss him.” I thought I was going to come out of my chair and start screaming at the top of my lungs, “How can you love and miss that monster?”

  I called my uncle later and said, “I’ve got a problem.” He said, “I know. I saw it in your face. There was always something between the two of them. I don’t understand it, either. There was something he had, some kind of hold on her.”

  It drives me nuts that she could think that way. Everything else I can understand, and I can make excuses for her until the cows come home, but saying she still loved him angers me to no end. She must have seen some kind of spark of something worth loving, but whatever was there, it was buried deep. Rickie even said that he was furious because she said she still loved him.

  I guess it angered him enough that he just stayed away. Rickie was almost never around. We went years without knowing where he was living or if he was alive. He missed out on so much. He just didn’t want anything to do with the family. He never went to visit Mom unless he was going to see Grandpa. He didn’t have anything to say to her. If my mother was the only one home, he would not stop. Then he disappeared. I don’t know everywhere he went, but I do know he was in Cocoa Beach for a while. He was still married; Mary, his wife, was still in Orlando, and he just took off.

  I don’t know what finally happened between Rickie and Mary. One minute they were together; the next minute he was living in a shithole trailer and she’d gone to Georgia. There was a really bizarre story that happened during this time frame that I didn’t know about until after Mom was murdered and the police started to investigate Rickie’s past. In 1999, he met a woman named Catherine Crews, in the Cocoa Beach area, and moved in with her and her husband, as sort of a roommate. He didn’t pay rent, but he did odd jobs around the house, which is just like the arrangement he made with me and Susan, years later. He told them that he worked for a company called All Star Electric and was doing renovations on a local hotel. He told us that he owned Emerald Electric and was doing electrical work on a local shopping mall.

  Rickie and the husband talked about starting a business together, just like he and I and Cheryl’s husband did. Catherine and her husband split up, because Rickie deliberately drove a wedge between them. He became romantically involved with Catherine. In November 1999, her house burned down, due to a strange electrical problem. During the following months, she discovered that Rickie had stolen between ten and fifteen thousand dollars of her fire insurance money and sent money to women named Mary and Marilyn. Catherine had no way of knowing that these women were his wife and mother, because he told her that he had never been married, and never told her Mom’s name. After he killed Mom, he started siphoning money from her accounts and giving it to me and Susan. And this was one of the main reasons I was indicted. That’s like assuming Mom or Mary were in on his theft of Catherine’s money, just because they received it.

  Catherine told the investigators about a discovery she made when she and her sister went to his storage unit to get her Christmas decorations. Inside that unit, to which she said he had the only key until that day, she found a trash bag filled with black clothing that smelled like gasoline, a black baseball bat, and a Taser.

  She told police, when they interviewed her in February 2004, that he was physically abusive and very controlling. She broke up with him in April 2001, because, she said, “He was like Mr. Crazy, psycho. It was like every move I made I had to give answers to.” He forbade her from working, made her account for literally every penny she spent, and demanded to know who she was talking to on the phone. He said he could snap her neck if he felt like it, and that he had killed his father. He said that he would rather kill her children than let them visit their father, because Rickie “knew” that their dad w
as molesting them—he recognized the signs. He told her that he was writing a book, something along the lines of “The Mind of a Killer.”

  Finally, she’d had enough. She sent him packing and went back to her husband. They reconciled after comparing stories and realizing that Rickie had split them up with lies that he was telling each of them. The month after they broke up, on May 29, 2001, Rickie was questioned by a patrol officer who spotted him in a U-Haul truck parked next to a wooded area, across the street from where the husband worked. Rickie said that he was looking for a friend’s house and he was going to help him move. When the officer asked where his friend lived and what his name was, Rickie said that he had it written on a piece of paper and he lost it. That’s when the officer noticed a pair of latex gloves, a change of clothes, and rope lying on the front seat.

  When he asked what the latex gloves were for, Rickie responded that he gets cuts on his hands while moving and uses the gloves to avoid getting injured. During that part of the conversation, Rickie got out of the truck and began to vomit and act nervous. When asked why he didn’t know his friend’s name, and why he was getting sick, Rickie told the officer that he had a stomach virus and avoided answering regarding his friend. But because he wasn’t breaking any laws, the officer let him go and simply filed a report. He did, however, let Catherine and her husband know about the incident, as part of his follow-up to filing the report, because Rickie’s ID still showed him as living in her house.

  We tried to bring Catherine’s testimony into my trial, and it wasn’t allowed because I didn’t need any help discrediting him. I think, however, that the similarities in the story lines are a little too eerie and would have helped tremendously.