Fear of Our Father

by Stacey Kananen

  She told the jury that we decided against the cruise that year because of money and time off, but, she said, “A week or so before I got to thinking, well, maybe I’ll still take my mother on a cruise if I can get a good deal.”

  She told the jury that she went on the cruise because her mother insisted. “I said perhaps I should not go on the cruise and maybe I should stay home, because I was just as close to Marilyn. I mean, she was not my mother, but she was almost like a mother to me. But my mother is very strong and my mother said that there was really nothing I could do. I wanted to be there for Stacey to be support but she said, ‘She will be fine. The police will take care of it.’”

  Diana had Susan describe Mom’s strict regiment, going to bed and rising early, her house immaculate. “She would not leave anything out. She complained if Grandpa left a crumb on the table.” She laughed, fondly remembering Mom and her ways, then remembered where she was. She glanced at the jury, smiling. “I don’t mean to be silly, but she was always that way. She always wanted the counters clean, and when Grandpa was living there and he would make a sandwich or something, and if she saw a crumb, she would make a mumble and say, ‘You would think he’d clean it up,’” she said, miming my mom furiously wiping. “But the guy’s like, however old. He can’t see these little tiny crumbs.”

  She testified that she and Rickie and I would often go to the movies, but we didn’t go nearly as often with Mom. If we did go with her, we saw primarily Disney movies. Diana asked, “Had you and Stacey and Richard seen Charlie’s Angels?” Susan said that we had and that Mom would not be likely to go see a movie like that.

  I wrote on my legal pad, “7 pm have shower and ready to rest for bed. Game night never more than 2 hours. Richard, Susan and Stacey went to movies frequently. Susan, Mom and I went to the movies on occasion.”

  “Did you see ever Rickie and Stacey and Marilyn go to the movies together?”

  “No.”

  I wrote, “Never saw Richard, Mom and I go to the movies together.”

  Diana asked about the events of December 22, the day of the suicide attempt and the finding of the bodies. Susan said she got home around 6:00 P.M. It wasn’t a surprise to her to find two police officers waiting for her, she explained, “Because I had passed Marilyn’s house, so I was already aware that there was a situation. I was frantic. The first thing I did—they were rattling whatever they were rattling to me—was where is Stacey and what happened? So I immediately was racing through the house to get to the answering machine to see if she had left me a message. And they followed me until I settled for half a minute so they could talk to me.”

  She said the officers told her that I was in the hospital. By the time they left, she was aware of what they found in our backyard. She and I both teared up at the memory of that night. She started telling about Betty Kelly coming over to fill in the hole and broke down into sobs. “I told her I didn’t know how we were going to handle the backyard. So she said she would send somebody over.”

  She continued crying and told Diana that she thought it would be better if we went and stayed with her mother. She wiped her eyes and testified about finding Rickie’s manuscript in a file cabinet in his room, and turning it over to the police. Next thing both of us knew, we were witnesses for the State of Florida.

  Diana asked, “Do you recall if there was discussion about the upcoming trial and the process that that would entail?”

  “Robin Wilkinson asked Stacey what her feelings were as far as if the death penalty was on the table.”

  Robin leapt up from the table and said, in her condescending tone, “Objection, hearsay,” and I saw Susan’s face instantly switch to anger. I could see that she felt like Robin was accusing her of lying about something she damn well knew had happened. It was right then that Diana said, “I don’t have anything further,” and Susan was Robin’s witness.

  Robin started off as combative right out of the gate. “When you found out Marilyn was missing you would have been upset? And shortly after that you went on a cruise?”

  “Unfortunately, yes, I did,” Susan replied.

  “And your partner at that time of approximately fifteen years, you left her behind. Did Stacey take a leave of absence from her work those three months that Marilyn was missing like her sister Cheryl did?” Robin asked.

  “No, she did not,” Susan said, archly. “She chose to be responsible and work to pay her bills.”

  Robin kept pushing. “While you were with Stacey did you see her pick up the phone and call the Orange County Sheriff’s Office to find out what was going on in the investigation?”

  “No, because Richard did.”

  “Ma’am, let me ask you this question one more time,” Robin asked. “Did you ever see Stacey pick up the phone …” and Susan interrupted, “No, I never saw Stacey call the police department.”

  “How about Deputy Patrick, the one who came out that night? Did she pick up the phone and call him?”

  Susan angrily enunciated her words very clearly. “I never saw Stacey call any police officer whatsoever.”

  Robin wisely changed the subject and started talking about Cheryl and Daniel, and family discussions about Mom quitting work so she could take Daniel. Susan was never really in on those conversations, but she was aware that they had taken place.

  The questioning then led to why Susan didn’t find it odd that Rickie was taking things from Mom’s house and storing them in our garage and in his room. Robin asked, “As you start to see item after item from Marilyn’s home show up in yours, you don’t think that’s a little strange? Did you pick up the phone and call the police and say my lover’s brother is clearing out his mother’s home and it’s all ending up here?”

  I kept telling Diana, “She’s going to lose her temper any minute now.” And then she did. Now Susan was pissed. She’s about the friendliest person I’ve ever met, but when you make her mad, look out. She is her mother’s daughter.

  “I didn’t look at it that way,” Susan snapped. “I looked at it as Marilyn’s son was taking care of Marilyn’s house. He is the older son. He was taking care of Marilyn’s house.” I wrote on my pad, “SHE IS MAD NOW! LOOK OUT ROBIN.”

  She was just getting wound up. “He told me he was calling the police.” She pounded on the witness stand railing. “He told me he was talking to the IRS. These are the things he told me. I felt confident that he was telling his sisters the same thing. I felt confident that the police were taking care of this.”

  Robin kept trying to interrupt, but Susan was on a roll. I smiled proudly and wrote on my pad, “Give it to her, Susan!”And she did. She kept going. “He told me he was putting things away to protect Marilyn so that when Marilyn would come back, if the house got sold, she would at least have her possessions. Stupidly, that made sense to me. I’m sorry. But I’m a simple person. That made sense to me. I wish I had the hindsight to know what happened but I didn’t.”

  It’s a good thing that Diana had so thoroughly taught me to maintain my composure, because it was all I could do to just sit there and grin broadly, instead of jumping up and fist-pumping, shouting, “You tell her, baby!”

  Robin finally got a word in and asked, “You were the older person in the relationship with Stacey, correct? By a number of years? And you never stepped in there and checked any of this out about Marilyn’s disappearance, although you’re so close to her?”

  Susan looked at her like she had two heads and said, “Why should I? The police were taking care of it. I’m not a police person. The police came to the house. The police took a report. The police are doing a missing person’s report. I assumed the police do these things. I’m sorry. My mother was there and my mother told me the police would take care of it. I believed in the police department. I didn’t know we had to do something.”

  You can’t argue with that logic, can you?

  CHAPTER 35

  The Truth Is the Truth Is the Truth

  Susan finished her testimony, and I was sch
eduled to take the stand next, on Friday morning, the end of the second week of the trial. I was terrified, but Diana and I had been preparing for three years. She suggested that I just pretend it was the two of us talking and not pay attention to them. It’s all a painting. It’s just us. Girl talk.

  I was fine, all set to get it over with, until Judge Lubet talked to me directly on Thursday evening. He had me placed under oath and said, “Miss Kananen, it’s been made known to me that tomorrow morning you are going to take the witness stand and testify on your behalf, is that correct?”

  When I said yes, he replied, “I want you to understand several things. If this case doesn’t go well for you, a year, two years, three years down the road, I don’t want you coming back saying, ‘My attorney forced me to testify, and I didn’t want to.’ Have you made the decision to testify after consulting with your attorney, and that is your decision alone? Did she explain to you all the possible consequences of you testifying?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  He continued to pound home the seriousness of what I was about to do, and he made it clear that he didn’t think it was a good idea. He made me answer, over and over, that I knew what I was doing and made the decision to testify without coercion. After we finally got out of the courtroom, I frantically asked Diana, “What the hell? I was okay, until all of that!”

  Diana said, in her calm-Stacey-down voice, “They do that to every defendant who wants to get on the stand. That’s just status quo. Look, the popular defense lawyer theory is that you never have your client testify. That’s one of those weird lawyer urban myths. But there are things you have to explain to that jury that I have no way of explaining. They have to hear it from you. The jury is told that they can’t hold it against you for not testifying, but I think most of the time, they do anyway. They’ll wonder, ‘Why didn’t she get up and tell me she didn’t do it?’”

  She told me to go back to my hotel and think about it—like I would be thinking about anything else. I didn’t just think about it, though. I agonized. I paced the parking lot for hours, trying to decide. Was Diana wrong? Did we make a wrong decision? Is the judge telling me I don’t really want to answer these questions? I ran the gamut that night. I finally decided maybe he’s telling me not to testify because I’ve won and shouldn’t mess with success. My decision was made.

  Friday morning, I said to Diana, “Good morning. I’m not testifying,” and she said, “Oh yes, you are! Don’t give me that bullshit. I picked a jury based on your testifying. You’ve got to testify. You said, at the beginning of jury selection, that you wanted to tell your story. You gotta get on that stand now.”

  I was terrified of getting pissed off at Robin. I saw how she tore into Susan and made her lose her cool, but Diana reminded me that Robin would be uncomfortable because for four years I was her star witness and she knew it would be weird coming after me. Diana said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to protect you from Robin.”

  I told her I felt like it was a mistake, and she said, “But what did you tell me? If we lose because you’ve told the truth, it’s okay. You go to prison knowing you told the truth. If we lose because you didn’t get on the stand, we have no appeal and you’re screwed.”

  She fed my own words back to me, and I remembered saying them, during our many conversations. I remembered how much I trusted her judgment and advice over the years, how she managed to get the charges dropped in my father’s death. I saw how she handled Hussey. I had to ask myself, “Do I trust Diana Tennis or do I not?”

  I took the stand.

  The tension in the room was palpable as I held up my right hand to solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. There was no backing out now.

  Diana started out gently, asking about any previous testifying I might have done, which was her way of reminding the jury that I testified at a hearing for my brother. She asked whether the abuse stories that the jury had heard so far were accurate, and I said yes, and when she asked what kind of relationship I had with my siblings, I responded, “I would say we were kind of distant. I don’t think we ever learned how to be close to each other because of all the fighting between our parents. We were isolated when someone moved out of the house. We wouldn’t be able to have much contact with each other.”

  It seemed that Cheryl thought I might have had it easier than she did, growing up, and she called me “the fair-haired child.” But from my perspective, all of us were equally abused, including our mother. Diana asked, “When your brother, Richard, says your mother sexually abused him, was that your perception? Do you believe it?”

  It was heartbreaking when I heard him say it during his testimony, and it was heartbreaking now. I started crying and said, “No.” Diana brought me a tissue and I whispered to her, “Sorry.”

  She asked if I thought Mom failed in her job to protect her children, and I replied, “No, I think my mother did the best she could under the circumstances and the abuse that she went through. My perception would be she was very afraid for all of us. She was afraid to do anything against what my father said.”

  Diana waited until I had calmed down a bit and said, “I’m going to ask you a few questions about your childhood as they relate to this case. You heard the audiotape of the conversation you had with law enforcement on December 22 of 2003. And the officer asked you repeatedly, why aren’t you sticking up for yourself? Tell the jury, what did you learn when you were a child?”

  I told them, “The more you fought back, the more you argued, the worse you got beaten or raped or whatever the abuse was of the day.”

  She then asked, “How’d you learn to deal with traumatic events as a child?” and I replied, “You kind of sat in a corner or sat by yourself. You were very quiet. You didn’t discuss it. You didn’t argue it. You didn’t start an argument about it. You just kind of sat to yourself and kept it all inside.”

  Then came the big question: “Were you ever sexually abused by your father?” It was the question I dreaded. I knew it was coming, and I didn’t want to do this. When I said yes, she said, “Tell the jury about one instance and how you dealt with it.” I laughed a nervous laugh and smiled a nervous smile at her, thinking, “You’re really gonna make me do this, aren’t you?” and got on with it.

  “Well, the one that I remember the most, that’s the most poignant in my mind, was when we lived in Arkansas. My parents were having a fight and my father decided he was going to take me and my sister and leave. I must have been in sixth grade. He put us in the car, he went up to the town bar, got himself really polluted. Then he decided to go back home after the bar closed. It was two in the morning, one in the morning, and when we came in the house, my sister went to where we had our bunk beds. My brother was sleeping in the living room on a pullout sofa. He told my mother, ‘You’re not sleeping in the room with me. Stacey’s going in the room with me.’ We went in the bedroom, he locked the door, he pulled out a handgun …”

  I had to pause. This was hard to say in front of so many people and cameras. I closed my eyes and forced myself to finish the story. “… and then he raped me with a gun in my … in my mouth.” And then the tears came. I didn’t want to cry, damn it.

  Diana asked gently, “Did you fight back?” and I whispered, “No.”

  Out of the list of abuse stories I had given Diana, I got to pick the one I told in court. I wanted to make my sister hurt, too. She and I never talked about that night, when she and Mom got to go in that other bedroom and I got stuck going with him. We had never talked about that night, so I wanted her to hurt. That was my own way of making her realize that it’s not all about her and it never has been.

  Bless her, Diana changed the subject and asked about our new house and how often I saw Mom. I told her we talked on the phone often and at least once a week we’d go to dinner. I told the jury that I only saw Cheryl on game nights, and saw Rickie when he moved in with us. Otherwise, I didn’t see him much. I told her, “When Susa
n and I bought our house, he helped us move in.”

  We talked about the night Mom disappeared. I told the story all the way through, about Rickie saying “it” must have taken her, and that he was waving a letter around from Social Security saying they needed to see our father.

  We talked about Mom’s house being in disarray, and how out of character it was for her. We talked about the months following that day, how I thought Rickie was paying her bills and putting her stuff in storage to protect it. We talked about all of it, from my side of the story.

  Diana then showed me a photo and asked, “Do you recognize the document laying on the dashboard of that vehicle?”

  It was the suicide note to Susan, on the dashboard of my truck. The photo was taken after the police interrupted our suicide attempt. I said I did recognize it and that I wrote it. She then showed me the page with the two notes written to Cheryl. “When is the first time you would have been shown that note?” she asked, and I thought for a moment before replying, “Oh, goodness. I’m not sure of what the date was, but it was 2008, 2009.”

  “Is that a note that you recall writing in the truck on December 22, 2003?”

  I did not recall writing it in the truck. Diana then said, “Now, I’m going to show you that notebook again, exhibit 36.” It was the notebook she had found in the “stinky underworld of the sheriff’s office,” after the delay. “There appears to be in here a lot of pages with writing on them, including on this page, a note addressed to Susan with a ‘See you later, Stacey,’ referencing a cruise. Is that a note you wrote and did you ever give it to Susan?”

  I told her that I did write it and said, “I may have left it on the counter. I may have closed it up in the notebook and not shown it to her.”

  “Do you know how long this notebook had been hanging around being written in?” she asked. I said, “Quite a while. From the looks of it, it came from our first house when we moved to the Okaloosa house, because it refers to the U-Haul we rented, the PODS we put some of our furniture in.” I flipped through the pages, describing what I saw: “housekeeping—we had thought about calling to do a detail cleaning on our house before we moved. Different bill places, Bell South, Time Warner, we had to transfer everything from one house to the other.”