Jacine’s childhood personality traits continued as she became a young woman in high school. She’d quickly established herself as an athlete and a leader, twice helping take her team to the Colorado state high-school basketball championship game.
Jacine played her senior year of basketball in pain because of ankle surgery she’d had in the off-season, but she never gave less than everything she had. Her coaches knew that she was the glue that held the teams together. She made them all better as athletes and as people, handing out inspirational quotes she’d written down before the games to every player, no matter if the other girl was a starter or riding the bench. Jacine was always the one who remembered to bring a birthday cake for a friend or teammate when everyone else forgot.
At summer basketball camp before her senior season, the buzz was about a hot freshman player who was thought to be a lock to make the varsity team. Some of the varsity players, apparently fearing that the new girl would usurp their place on the squad, shunned her at the beginning of the first day of practice. But Jacine saw the girl standing by herself and made it a point to walk over and welcome her to the team with a hug. The other girls had no choice but to follow her example and include the new girl.
Jacine didn’t limit her friends to the school jocks. Few, if any, could resist her smile and the personality it advertised. She moved easily in all circles—from the heavy-metal head-bangers in their black leather coats and studded dog collars to the artistic types in the drama club and the cheerleaders and football players. It didn’t surprise anyone who knew her when she befriended a developmentally disabled girl who otherwise had a lonely existence at the high school.
Academics didn’t hold the same fascination for her, but she did well enough in school to get by. In the meantime, she had grown into a beautiful young woman—blond and blue eyed with a cute, athletic figure. There were plenty of boys interested, and there were plenty of dates, though nothing serious. Yet for all the friends and people who felt her touch their lives, if there was one incident that demonstrated the true heart of Jacine Gielinski, it was her reaction to the news in the spring of 1993 that her biological father, Jake Gielinski, had contracted lung cancer and was dying.
Jake Gielinski was Peggy’s second husband. She met him at a bar where she was working that summer. He lived in Evergreen, a small town in the mountains thirty miles west of Denver. She wasn’t looking for another long-term relationship on the heels of her disastrous first marriage, but he was funny and nice and a few months later, she was married for the second time.
Jake didn’t try to control her like her first husband. But he had other problems that he kept secret from her until several months after their marriage, the worst being that he was an alcoholic and a drug dealer. He sold speed, a nervous system stimulant he also used to counteract the effects of alcohol. However, some of the side effects of the drug were paranoia, delusions, and irrational, even violent, behavior.
In 1974, after the couple had moved into their house in Littleton, his behavior worsened. One night he called from a pay phone a few blocks from their house saying he was afraid to come home because the disc jockeys from a local radio station were trying to kill him.
When he wasn’t drinking or on speed, Jake was his old self, sweet, funny, the nicest person anyone would want to meet. Peggy loved him, but it was becoming harder to deal with his problems, especially because he refused to help himself.
Jake got in trouble with the law several times, including a conviction for forging prescriptions. He was placed on probation with the requirement that he take Anibuse, a drug that makes the user physically ill if combined with alcohol. Only after he was out of her life did Peggy find all of the untouched bottles of Anibuse in a shed in the backyard.
In the midst of these tribulations, Peggy got pregnant. She hoped that the added responsibility of a child would straighten her husband out, but he didn’t change. In fact, he only got worse.
One night he came home in a rage and started punching holes in walls. Afraid, Peggy called the police. When they arrived, Jake refused to leave the house and yelled out the window that he was armed. However, he didn’t really have a gun. Instead, he painted a banana black with a felt-tip marker. Then with his fruit “gun” and all the kitchen knives he could find, he stepped out of the house to confront the police.
It was obvious to Peggy that he was trying to commit suicide-by-cop and he nearly succeeded. She looked out the window and saw the officers kneeling with their guns drawn and pointed at her husband, who was raving at them from the front doorstep. Peggy knew that if he moved toward the officers, they’d shoot. She pleaded for Jake to stop. At last he put down the banana and the knives and allowed himself to be handcuffed and taken off to jail. Once again, he got probation.
There was one bright spot in all the insanity. On January 16, 1975, Jacine Renee Gielinski was born. But even on that auspicious day, Jake Gielinski could not keep it together. He could barely stay awake to drive Peggy to the hospital, but a few hours later, after she’d delivered their child, he bounced into the room, his eyes wide open and glittering with the effects of speed. He was all smiles, but Peggy’s mouth hardened, angry that he couldn’t even stay off drugs long enough to greet his daughter.
The marriage lasted another eighteen months. When he was around and sober, he was a good father who enjoyed spending time playing with his infant daughter. But he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, kick the habits that were destroying his marriage and his health.
Many nights, Peggy lay in bed with her child, afraid to get up when she heard him come home, banging about the house like a madman. One morning she went out to the living room and found that he’d covered all the windows with butcher paper so that no one could see in. Then he’d set up a tent in the room where, he declared, he was going to live.
The final straw for Peggy was the day he ransacked their daughter’s room and found a collection of rare, old silver dollars that had been given to Jacine as a birth present. He took the coins, hawked them, and spent the money on drugs. Then he went to the home of Peggy’s parents, broke in, and stole their liquor. It was just more proof that there was nothing he wouldn’t stoop to in order to feed his addictions. She told him he had to leave their home, and she divorced him shortly afterward.
Peggy wasn’t looking for another man in her life when she met Bob Luiszer in 1977. Actually, she remet him, as they’d both belonged to a bowling league the summer before. But they’d also both been married at that time, so nothing had come of it. A year later, they were both divorced and began seeing each other.
Jacine was two and a half at the time, which was about the same age as a son Bob had with his former wife. However, his divorce had been bitter, and she allowed him little contact with the boy. Bob transferred his affection to the little blond girl with the 1,000-watt smile and a personality to match. She was all the more endearing because of a speech impediment that made it difficult for her to pronounce certain hard consonants—she called herself “Day-dine”—and Peggy and Bob were almost sad when speech therapy corrected the problem.
Bob moved into the house in Littleton a year after he and Peggy started dating. He was willing to marry her, but Peggy wasn’t interested in a third try at matrimony. Then again, she hadn’t counted on Jacine, who in 1982 decided it was time for her mother and Bob to get hitched. The reason was she wanted to be the flower girl in their wedding. The ceremony was held in their backyard in front of family and a few friends. Of course, it was seven-year-old Jacine happily tossing turquoise daisy petals who stole the show.
Bob joined Peggy in attending all of Jacine’s sporting events: a never-ending procession of swim meets, soccer, basketball and volleyball games. He’d been the one to encourage her to sign up for the basketball and volleyball teams on the first day of high school when she was feeling a little intimidated. He and Peggy were the teams’ biggest boosters, helping any way they could, including taking tickets at the door.
Jake Gielinsk
i, on the other hand, had little to do with his daughter after the divorce. And Peggy didn’t try to shield her daughter from the truth about him. When Jacine was old enough, Peggy told her about the drugs and alcohol and run-ins with the police. He’d rarely paid the child support he owed, and Peggy told her daughter about that, too. She and her daughter had always been honest with one another, and she saw no reason to hide the fact that Jake Gielinski was a lousy father.
Every so often, they’d hear about his continuing troubles after he moved back to Evergreen. Once there was a call from a concerned driver who’d found him passed out in a car alongside the road and got Peggy’s number from his wallet. Another time there was a call from a sheriff’s deputy. Apparently, Jake had just had an operation on his arms for carpal tunnel syndrome, then got drunk and decided to go rock climbing. By the time the police got to him, he’d busted out the stitches in his arms. The deputy said his blood alcohol content was so high, Jake was lucky to still be alive.
Jake saw Jacine twice a year, at Peggy’s secret insistence: on her birthday and at Christmas. He would spend hundreds of dollars at those times buying Jacine extravagant presents as if making up for the other 363 days of the year. But when Peggy would ask him to spread the money out over more of the year and make more of an effort to see his daughter, he just couldn’t seem to find the time.
Peggy knew his apparent indifference hurt Jacine, though her daughter tried not to show it. One incident, however, she could not ignore. In Jacine’s senior year her volleyball team was scheduled to travel to play the high-school team in Evergreen where Jake now owned a security-guard company. Peggy had begged him to come to the game, and he’d agreed.
Jacine was surprised and overjoyed when she saw him, wearing his uniform, walk into the gymnasium. He came over to talk to her, but then he dropped the bomb. Something had come up, he said, and he couldn’t stay for the game. With that, he turned and left.
Waiting only until he couldn’t see her pain, Jacine then flew into a rage. She started throwing balls and crying.
When Peggy learned in the spring of 1993 that Jacine, a senior, had been nominated for Prom Queen, she’d gone to the school counselor and asked to be told beforehand if her daughter was going to be crowned. She explained that if Jacine won, she wanted to make sure that her daughter’s father was present. But Jacine was the runner-up, so that moment in her life passed, like all the others, without Jake.
Shortly after, Peggy informed her daughter of Jake Gielinski’s illness and prognosis: the doctors were giving him six months. She was surprised by her daughter’s reaction. She expected sadness, maybe even bitterness, over the father she hardly knew, but not Jacine’s announcement that she was going to “get to know” her father.
Jacine contacted Jake and began to visit him regularly in Evergreen. She spent weekends with him, coming home with stories about how much fun they had, even if it was just watching their favorite cartoon, Beavis and Butthead. “You should watch it,” Jacine told Peggy. “It’s sooooo funny.”
After the initial surprise wore off, Peggy realized that Jacine’s reaction to her father’s illness wasn’t so hard to understand. Jacine sometimes described herself as Jake’s “caregiver,” and if there was one term that fit her daughter, caregiver—not just to her father but to the world at large—could have been it
As Jake’s disease progressed, it was clear to Peggy and Bob how much the pain of watching him deteriorate was taking a toll on their daughter.
Near the end of that summer, Jacine was spending as much time as she could caring for Jake. He had a woman friend in Evergreen who assisted as well, but otherwise, he was too weak to take care of even personal matters on his own. Jacine had to clean him, feed him, and help him with his medications.
The end wasn’t pretty. He was taken to a hospital and set up in a hospice room. Although he was medicated for the pain, drugs couldn’t mask all of it, nor stop him from coughing up blood. Death, when it finally came, was as merciful for his daughter as for himself.
Even in death, Jake Gielinski didn’t change. He’d told Peggy that he’d made arrangements with a mortuary in Evergreen to be cremated. However, she learned that although he’d talked to the mortuary representative, nothing had been paid for and it fell to her and Bob to cover it. He left little behind except more debts, including one with the Internal Revenue Service, which tried to collect from the Luiszers. Other than a few personal effects, there was no sort of inheritance for Jacine. Still, she seemed to have peace of mind that she at least had the time to get to know her father, and the long good-bye had somehow made it easier to accept the inevitable.
Or so her surviving parents believed.
After graduation from high school in June 1993, Jacine was awarded a full volleyball scholarship at a junior college in southern Colorado. While she was a star player on the junior-college team, she was also the one who would decorate the locker room before games, cutting out inspirational sayings to tape to her teammates’ lockers.
While at college, Jacine also fell in love with Mike Lemon. He was a police officer with the town’s police force and also helped as an assistant coach for the volleyball team.
After Jacine’s first year at college ended in May 1994, she decided to stay in town so that she could work and be near her boyfriend. She knew her parents didn’t like Lemon and felt that he was using her, which had some truth to it as she paid for things he wanted like a jet ski and trips. It didn’t help when her mom learned she’d been hospitalized for complications from an abortion.
Although they’d always been close, the relationship between Jacine and her mother grew strained as they fought about Lemon. Her mother was overjoyed when she was offered a volleyball scholarship at the University of Colorado campus in Colorado Springs that would allow her to pursue her bachelor’s degree, and get her away from Lemon.
Jacine still wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. Sometimes she joked about being a “professional beach volleyball player” in California with her high school teammate and best friend, Maggie Bush. But she was a communications major and also talked about becoming a sportswriter, a vocation her mother thought she would excel at.
Jacine had played for the university team for the 1995-96 season, but she quit the next year so she could concentrate on her studies; her maternal grandparents made it easy by paying her rent and tuition. She was renting an apartment with a good friend of Lemon’s, Allen Crumb, and his girlfriend, Tisha Terrell.
Peggy thought her daughter was through with her old beau. Then Jacine told her that she and Lemon were going on a vacation to the Caribbean in January. What’s more, Jacine admitted that she was paying for it.
When Peggy asked why, Jacine told her that Lemon had cancer. He’d told her that he had been traveling to the city of Pueblo for treatments, and she wanted to do something nice for him.
She knew her parents thought something wasn’t right. Coming on the heels of her father’s death due to cancer, they thought he was manipulating her, knowing how she had responded when her father was dying.
In any event, Lemon wasn’t very grateful for Jacine’s gesture of a trip to Mexico. She called her mother in tears shortly after they got back and said that they’d hardly stepped off the plane in Denver when he told her to “fuck off” and that he never wanted to see her again.
Jacine was devastated. It only started to get better when she met a nice guy, Tim Ratican, through her new job at a local hotel. Ratican was funny and treated her nicely. She told Peggy that she was looking forward to introducing him to her and Bob.
Most of the time, Jacine was Jacine. She’d been assigned a project that winter in one of her classes to study the causes of homelessness, including interviewing homeless people on the streets. She felt so bad after talking to one man that she went home to her apartment, packed a box full of food, grabbed an extra coat and a blanket, and returned to give it to him. Another time she was out with Ratican when she spotted a vagrant who had no soc
ks. That time she made her boyfriend return to his apartment, where she claimed a $ 15 pair of his best winter socks and drove back to give them to the surprised man.
However, not everything was all right with Jacine. For one thing, she learned she would not be able to graduate from the university that spring, nor was a course she needed going to be offered that summer. She was going to have to wait until the next fall. She felt that she was letting down her grandparents, who were supporting her and telling her how proud they were that she was going to be the first on their side of the family to graduate from college.
She also was not over Lemon and would call him dozens of times a day, only to be ignored. She grew depressed and her health deteriorated until she was battling mononucleosis, which left her exhausted and even more down in the dumps. By mid-April, all of it—the postponed graduation, her health, and Lemon—was too much for Jacine. She called her mother in tears.
Jacine started talking crazy about her dead father, Jake Gielinski. She said she was certain that his ghost was visiting her when she slept, moving things around in her room.
The conversation alarmed Peggy so much that she was worried her daughter might be contemplating suicide. She called Bob at work and told him to come pick her up. They needed to drive to Colorado Springs as soon as possible.
They arrived at Jacine’s apartment with Peggy determined to talk Jacine into moving back to the Denver area. However, Jacine was angry that they’d come. Everything was all right, she said. They should just turn around and go home. But everything was not all right. She looked worn out and cried the entire time, admitting that she was concerned about being infected with HIV
Jacine repeated that she’d been dreaming a lot about her father lately. He’d been in her room, and she felt that he was nearby for some reason. She was full of tearful questions. “Where do you go when you die?” Was her father trying to communicate with her? Was he watching over her? “Do you think he’s in heaven?”
A CLOCKWORK MURDER: The Night A Twisted Fantasy Became A Demented Reality Page 6
