Fear of Our Father

by Stacey Kananen

  Most of the time, it would happen after people had been drinking, and there was a lot of drinking at GCR. It was, after all, a vacation resort where people came to relax and party. I had to bartend many events at the Tiki Bar and in the clubhouse. I was around a lot of drunks, and some of them would get diarrhea of the mouth after a few frosty beverages. They would crack jokes about coming to visit me in prison or make child abuse jokes. They didn’t intend to be mean, they were drunk and making jokes in bad taste, but it was awkward. I had to smile and pretend it didn’t bother me, because I was on the clock and the customer is always right.

  Then there was a snowbird couple that came back shortly after I got out of jail, and I thought I was good friends with them. I walked over to their camper to welcome them back for the season, and the husband stopped me and said, “You’re not welcome over here. We only paid for one month and we’ll be leaving.” They never came back. It’s unfortunate because I thought the world of them.

  I think the most glaring example of a foot-in-mouth moment happened about two months after I got out of jail. Behind Gulf Coast Resort is a small housing addition, and between them is a wooded area. A woman named Karen—whom I had never met but with whom Susan had a working relationship because she paid monthly to use our Dumpster—owned the property and lived on the far side of the woods.

  A bolt of lightning hit the woods adjacent to the resort and started a small fire. The fire was closer to the resort than it was to her house, so there was no way she would know about it. Wendell was over there with the hose, and Susan and I were sitting on the golf cart, sort of “supervising” … which is a nice way of saying we were sitting on our asses watching the show.

  Susan called Karen from her cell phone as we watched Wendell and said, “Your property is on fire. It’s close to us, but it’s on your side of the fence. We called the fire department, but I don’t know how far onto your land it’s burning. You might want to come and check it out.”

  Karen rode through her property, and then came over to the GCR side, where the fire department was working. Someone had been planting marijuana back there, and there were jugs of water, and big mounds of dirt where they had dug up the ground to grow their plants. She joked, “There’s a huge pile of dirt back there! I hope that person who got arrested in your park didn’t bury a body back there!”

  Wendell didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and I turned to Susan and said, “I’m going in the restaurant to get a drink.” Karen didn’t know it was me. She assumed that person was in jail. I was mortified.

  I could deal with all of that more easily if things were going okay in our household. But the murders and the arrest were starting to damage my home life, as well. Before all of this happened, when Susan and I had a good life, I could wake up and everything was fine. I enjoyed my job, I loved my life, and she felt the same. But Rickie didn’t just take my mom from me; he took my life.

  Susan said, one day, “We’ve lost everything. We don’t have what we had.” She didn’t just mean our material things. She meant us. I was afraid we would never get it back. I wasn’t supposed to talk to her about my legal issues, because it might damage her testimony, so I had to keep a lot of things to myself. This was my best friend, and I wasn’t allowed, legally, to talk to her about the most important issue in my daily life.

  This whole thing killed a chunk of who Susan and I were. We weren’t able to have date nights or just be us anymore. We tried not to grow apart, and it helped that neither of us was able to leave even if we wanted to—she was stuck running the resort and I was confined to the premises. But the stress of being forced to stay was enough to push us away from each other. We fought almost constantly, and when we weren’t fighting, it was because we weren’t speaking. It was a long three years between my arrest and my trial.

  We got into a particularly vicious argument, one Friday, over nothing, really. We were at our wits’ end, and I snapped at Susan, “I can call Diana and change my plea to guilty, and be done with this whole thing!” She screamed back, “Why don’t you just do it and get it over with? I can’t take this anymore!”

  Susan didn’t really want me in jail, of course. She was just tired of it, like I was. She’d say, “I’m sick of being tied down to this. I’m sick of your fucking ankle bracelet. I’m sick of driving you to Orlando.”

  It got so bad that there were times, especially once I found out that Daniel would have to testify, when I talked to Diana about the feasibility of arranging some sort of a plea deal just to get it over with, and I wasn’t doing that just to hurt Susan. Sometimes I felt like I didn’t have it in me to fight this battle. The closer it got, the more I wondered, “Am I doing the right thing? I’m dragging my favorite boy onto the witness stand. I can’t do this to him.”

  Diana would say, “Do you want to go to prison? Do you want to do the right thing?” and I always said, “I’ll get back to you.” I’d do some soul searching for a week or so, and decide that I couldn’t give up. I didn’t do this. I had to keep my eye on the prize, as it were, because I knew I didn’t do anything wrong. But on the other hand, I knew I was hurting Daniel.

  It was the worst thing I ever had to do in my life, putting him through that, making him testify. They weren’t hard on him; it was just the fact that he had to do it. Although, honestly, if Rickie hadn’t told him, “I killed my dad,” if he hadn’t offered to get Daniel’s mother out of the way, if he hadn’t told him all those stories about killing abusive parents and making it look like they just went away, then our nephew would have had nothing to testify about—heck, if Rickie hadn’t killed our mom, none of this would have happened. So I knew it wasn’t my fault that Daniel was being put through the ringer, but I still felt horrible about it.

  Diana and I talked about the possibility of asking to plead guilty to lesser charges, like misdemeanor check fraud, and things like that, but even to those I said, “The more we talk about it, the more I think about it, I didn’t do anything wrong in this whole ordeal. Why am I going to plead to something I didn’t have anything to do with?”

  Honestly, though, Robin Wilkinson didn’t offer any deals. They were going full tilt for the death penalty until May 2009, after Diana pulled off another miracle. She called me up one day and said, “This is really a leap of faith on my part, but I want to put in a Motion to Separate. You’ll be charged with first degree on your father, and first degree on your mother, instead of first degree for both.”

  Alarmed, I asked, “That’s double charges. Why do you want to do this?”

  She said, “Once I get them severed, I’ll demand a speedy trial, which means they have to go to trial on the charges for your father’s death within sixty days. They’ll have to drop it because they don’t have any evidence.” By that time, it had been over twenty years since his death, and they didn’t have any proof of anything. All they had was a receipt that said my mother rented a concrete saw, and my brother saying I killed him, even though he had been documented in numerous ways confessing to that murder to numerous people.

  I talked to Susan about it, and she cried, “No, that’s crazy!” I said, “Yeah, but I thought going for a bond on murder charges was crazy, and I thought a second bond was crazy.” When I talked to Toni, my private investigator, she said the same thing. “Trust Diana. I’ll bet you money they don’t go to trial.”

  I called Diana and said go ahead and do it. That’s exactly what she did. She got the separation and then ten days later told the judge, “Your honor, I want a demand for a speedy trial and I have that right—this is a new charge because we just severed it ten days ago.” The state’s attorney responded, in essence, “Your honor, we need to drop the charges. We have no evidence.”

  He dropped the charges, with prejudice, meaning they can’t ever bring those charges back on me. I finally received a formal letter, notifying me that they were dropping the death penalty, but talk about sweating for two years! Let me tell you, I thought about ending it, myself, many times during th
ose twenty-four months. I didn’t want to be subjected to them getting to decide how I died when I knew I was innocent. That may not make sense to some folks, but I’ll be damned if I was going to let them kill me when I knew I was innocent. Bullshit, I’ll kill myself first, and I’ll do it my way.

  The whole process was demeaning, starting when Detective Hussey began threatening me, instead of realizing that I was Rickie’s victim, just like the rest of the family. Maybe he had stars in his eyes, thinking he’d make a name for himself by catching the next Aileen Wuornos. Maybe he was seeing me as a lesbian serial killer from Pasco County, like her. I do know, however, that he wasn’t such a stellar cop. He was reprimanded in 2005 for claiming about one hundred dollars’ worth of alcoholic beverages on his expense report, and attributed his bad decision to “laziness” and being too busy to do it right. He also received a written reprimand in 2007 for failure to properly conduct a death investigation, which he chalked up to a “lapse in judgment,” just days after being written up for not showing up for another investigation. I get that people make mistakes—I’m not perfect, either—but in light of how my trial ended up, Detective Hussey probably should have dialed it back a notch or two in his overly zealous pursuit of me.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Year It All Fell Apart

  Before Grandpa died, he and Mom were helping us house hunt. We lived on the far south side of the city and wanted to live closer to where the family lived on the far northeast side, especially in light of the problems that Cheryl was having at home. Mom thought it would be good for us to live nearby, instead of a forty-five-minute drive away, in case the kids needed a place to spend some time, and because Cheryl was having issues with Daniel. Cheryl had talked, in the past, of sending him to Cherokee School, which is a school for children with severe emotional and behavioral problems. Mom was extremely unhappy with that idea, and she began to talk about taking Daniel away from her. She told Cheryl, to her face, “I’ll take your son and I’ll raise him. You’re not putting him there. He’ll live here.”

  In my opinion, that wasn’t the answer. I thought, “Your daughter needs help. Yanking her kids will only make it worse.” My mother could have raised Daniel perfectly well, and they were very close. But I didn’t think that was the answer for that family. I thought Mom was overreacting, maybe overcompensating for our childhoods—trying to make up for not being able to protect us.

  Mom went with us to look at a house around the corner from her and said, “It’s a great buy. You should do it.” She was helping me and Susan to figure out how to do a budget. She had our bank account and paycheck info and was doing an overhaul on our finances. So when she advised us that it was a good deal, we decided to go ahead and get the house after we came back to Florida from Grandpa’s funeral. Our new house had a big yard and a nice-sized pool. The house was big, too: living room, dining room, kitchen, family room, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, screened-in back porch, two-car garage.

  In the meantime, Rickie’s life was a mess. His wife left him, and he was living in a horrible little trailer. When Susan and I moved in to our new house, at the end of March 2003, he helped. Susan and I took the week off work, and we all busted our butts and got the job done.

  It didn’t take long for the subject of the two extra bedrooms to come up—one of the rooms was for Ann when she came to visit, but the other two were empty—and we invited him to move in. It just made sense. He was floating aimlessly, with no anchor, now that Mary had moved back to Georgia.

  He was on unemployment and worked occasional freelance electrician jobs, so we didn’t charge him rent—he worked on the house in exchange for a roof over his head. He bought plenty of groceries and definitely held up his end of the bargain. Our new house needed plenty of fixing up. He earned his keep by being the man around the house.

  He was very caring, exactly what you would want a brother to be. But sometimes after dinner, when we would be sitting at the table chatting, he would start talking about how things were in the past. We thought he was just talking about our childhood—we didn’t pick up that he was still hurting.

  We didn’t feel that he needed therapy or that instead of dwelling on those things in our company that he should have been telling them to a shrink instead. He didn’t seem to have a big emotional reaction; he was just telling stories about stuff that happened, and it became obvious that he wasn’t real thrilled with Mom. We all noticed that the two of them had a frosty relationship, in the way that he wouldn’t go to visit her when Grandpa was still alive unless he was home, and only went over there if she specifically asked him to.

  We went to the movies quite often, and he paid most of the time. If he didn’t make dinner, we’d go out to eat. One evening the three of us went to Quiznos and the movies after work, and he said, “See all these lights here?” pointing at the overhead fixtures at the shopping plaza. “That’s what I’ve been working on the past few days.” We believed him. We had no reason not to.

  Looking back, I can see that there were a few red flags popping up here and there, but they only became noticeable when they were pointed out by the police after he was arrested. I grew up with a father who literally went psycho, and I didn’t see the signs of my brother doing the same. Maybe it’s because our father was whacked out to the point where nobody even cared if he lived or died. My father’s “crazy” was normal to us, and Rickie wasn’t anywhere near that. At the time, he wasn’t hurting anyone, but he became controlling in a way that I didn’t even notice because he was just acting like an extremely mild, nonviolent version of our father. Once he moved into our house, he didn’t want to be left out of anything Susan and I were doing. Or, if Susan was gone, he monopolized every spare minute I had, and he used to try to have private conversations, about nothing really, when we were at family gatherings.

  I was noticing that, for the first time, Susan and I weren’t getting along very well. For fifteen years prior to his moving in, we got along just fine and had an almost perfect relationship. And now we were fighting all the time. I look back on this time in our lives and, knowing now that Rickie split up Catherine and her husband when he moved in with them, have to wonder if he wasn’t somehow the cause of our uncharacteristic fighting. It almost seems like he was one of those brood parasites, moving in to a preexisting nest and pushing out one of the rightful residents.

  I didn’t realize until years later that he was e-mailing various family members and including me in every one of his signatures, as if I were participating in his e-mailing activity. I didn’t even use a computer, much less get involved in his e-mail writing. He didn’t sign them from himself alone, and many he signed from “Rickie Stacey,” as if the names were one. He sent one to my Aunt Nancy, my father’s sister, in June 2003, saying that Mother lied to her about our father, and that Rickie knew where our father was. Rickie told her that our father couldn’t bother anyone anymore. But he also made sure to tell her the e-mail was from both of us, even going so far as to tell her that he called me “Squirt.”

  Over the course of the summer, he and our nephew became very close. He used to pick Daniel up and they would hang out and talk. I believe that it was during one of those outings that Rickie told Daniel that he shot our father, “blow-to-blow.” He told Daniel a lot of inappropriate things—things a boy his age should never have heard.

  When Rickie found out that Mom wanted to take Daniel, he did not want that to happen, either. But his reasons were different from mine. He felt that Mom was unfit. I didn’t think she was unfit; I thought she did all she could do. To me, unfit means she didn’t care. Unfit means she sat back and watched. He remembers her being a part of his abuses, and I do not. I wonder if the fact the he was a boy, being raped, caused him to react differently than Cheryl and I. I don’t know much about the psychology of rape and gender, but it seems that a male would have to deal with testosterone-fueled rage, pride, and vengeance issues more than a female would.

  Maybe that was why he was particularly conc
erned about what was going on between Daniel and Cheryl. Daniel showed us, when we were working on Grandpa’s memorial garden, that he had taken his dad’s knife and was carrying it for self-defense against his mom. Rickie took it away from him and gave it back to Chris. We had a long talk with Chris and told him that something needed to be done, maybe an intervention, if the boy was stashing weapons to protect himself.

  Chris and Cheryl decided to get some counseling from their minister, Pastor Dan, and take some parenting classes. But Cheryl was so upset and humiliated by our interference that she wrote a long letter to me and Rickie, telling us to let her handle it and, basically, butt out. So we did. We stopped going over for family game night, and communication between us ceased.

  I won’t lie and say my feelings weren’t hurt by being given the frozen shoulder, because we really were just trying to help. There was no good way to do this. We didn’t want Mom to try to take Daniel, but we certainly didn’t want to allow our nieces and nephew to endure a difficult household while we just sat back and did nothing. It sucked that our stepping in caused a wedge to form between us, but I’d do it again if I had to, to help those kids.

  I don’t know what prompted him to do so, but it was around that time that Rickie bought a chest freezer, in August 2003, under the name John Taylor, and gave a false address. He also borrowed Mom’s car, and she wasn’t happy about it at all, but he insisted. While he had it, he made her an extra car key, for seemingly no reason at all.

  Even though we weren’t seeing Cheryl’s family anymore, life went on. My cousin Laureen came to visit for a week, and it was a whirlwind of activity: Mom and Laureen went to SeaWorld on Labor Day, Laureen went to Discovery Cove by herself on Tuesday, she and Susan went to Epcot on Wednesday, and then she, Susan, and I went to St. Augustine for a couple of days. After Laureen went home on the fifth of September, Mom, Susan, and I went to Disney on Ice on the sixth. It was a very busy week.