Restless Souls

by Alisa Statman

  At various crossroads, I sensed that God cleverly slipped me enlightening wisdom. As we turned the corner, I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck with another pull of His guidance. Scripted above the archway was Saint Francis’s prayer. I paused to read it again, and one phrase stood apart from the others: “Grant that I might seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand.”

  As the day passed, the sentiment clung to me like a child’s cry for help. What if I could convert prisoners through VORG? What if I could save one person from being victimized by reforming the predators?

  VORG’S maiden conference for Vacaville State Penitentiary was in less than twenty-four hours. Before leaving Corcoran, I called Jim Rowland. “I haven’t decided for sure, but can you get my clearance through at Vacaville in case I decide to go to the VORG meeting tomorrow?”

  “Sure, Doris, no problem. If you do go, you’ll need to get there by eleven. The meeting starts at noon.”

  Later that evening, I rested on the overly firm mattress in the hotel, fretting over the next day’s encounter with seventy-five prisoners in a room lacking boundaries. Seventy-five men who had created at least seventy-five victims. Men who had stolen security, and men who had stolen innocence. Men who made widows. And men who made mothers cry at their children’s funerals. Yet men who would soon complete their sentence and be released back into society. Like a windmill, thoughts were spinning full-tilt until the sails blurred into a circle I couldn’t separate.

  I reached into the nightstand to get the Bible, and then looked up. “You’ve gotten me this far, you may as well take me the rest of the way.”

  I randomly opened the Bible. When I looked down, the chapter title bolted from the page, “The Lost Sheep, Mathew 18:12.” Intrigued, I read on:

  “What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.

  “If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you will have won your brother over.

  “But if he will not listen, take one or two others along so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as a pagan.”

  The passage calmed the windmill to a breezy swirl of change in how I distinguished criminals. The prisoners participating in VORG could not be seen as villainous adversaries, rather as men who’d gone astray, men who needed openhearted courage to help them make amends.

  BEFORE ENTERING THE prison classroom for the VORG meeting, I looked for a familiar face to ease the anxiety. From the door, I noticed the group had divided; the victims assembled in one corner, the inmates in the opposite, each viewing the other with a combination of suspicion and perplexity.

  Against my instinct of going to the respite of the victims’ camp, I ventured to the inmates’ turf. Feeling as vulnerable as a balloon carried into a thorny rose garden, I picked the meanest-looking one in the bunch and extended my hand. “Hello, my name is Doris Tate, my daughter Sharon was murdered by Manson and his gang.”

  After a moment’s waver, he stood to greet me. Distinct from his towering presence was his gentle manner. “My name’s Gerry. I’m real sorry about your daughter.”

  As Gerry and I talked about our experiences, the others gathered around, hesitantly at first, then with curiosity as they watched us chatting comfortably. Time passed and soon the words came more easily, and eventually, spurts of laughter escaped from our circle.

  The border segregating the two cliques lowered by the end of the meeting as the atmosphere dissolved the speculative doubt into warmth and respect. Stereotypes were lifted to where they didn’t fit into the room anymore and people paired off, honestly communicating their fears and feelings about what’s currently happening in their lives. For the first time in their criminal career of injury, these inmates associated a name, face, and tragic story to crime; their spirits seemingly touched by the encounter.

  I appreciated that with each new group my story would compel the men, but how would I hold their interest in the future months?

  A RARE WAVE of humidity doused Palos Verdes. The open windows had a minimal effect in the family room, where I packed in twenty-five POMC members who grabbed anything that could serve as a fan. A father was midstory, “The day of my boy’s funeral they caught the bastard. I watched his arrest on TV and a reporter asked him, ‘Why’d you shoot Jaimie?’ He looked at the camera and shrugged. ‘I had a bad day.’ I remember thinking, pal, define a bad day, I just buried my son.”

  “You know, I’ve been trying to figure out ways of making a bigger impact on the VORG prisoners,” I said, “and it just hit me while listening to some of your experiences. What if we created a video that had all types of victims who explained to the inmates what happens in the aftermath of their crimes?”

  Unexpressed opinions held until Ernie spoke up. “Listen, Doris, I don’t think there’s too many of us that support this VORG idea. You’re helping these guys instead of making it tougher on them—like they deserve.”

  “Yeah,” Mike joined in, “I don’t know how you sit in a room full of murderers and rapists; seems to me like you’re riding the fence of supporting them.”

  “You all are entitled to your opinion,” I said. “But let me tell you, I’ve been at this for nineteen years, eight of them fighting for our rights, and it’s a slow process. I’m not about to stop lobbying for tougher laws, but in the meantime I need to work within the limits of what our laws do allow and that’s rehabilitation and release.

  “Like it or not, the prisoners that I’m working with will be released. So let me ask you, Mike, is there anything you wouldn’t do to bring Rachel back? Ernie, how about Linda? If by working with these guys I can keep one set of parents from having to join our group in the future, I’ll put everything I’ve got into it.”

  Shanee meekly raised her hand. “I’d like to do that, you know, to try to save another mother from having to go through this.”

  “Me too,” said Idell. “One less child murdered is one less of us.” She used a TV Guide to fan her face. “And God knows, we don’t have room for any more.”

  Despite the criticism that fell upon me from POMC and other victims organizations, I pushed forward with the video. With the CDC’s approval and funding, I found five victims willing to share their ordeal for the inmates.

  VIDEO IN HAND, I entered the VORG classroom. “Today’s going to be different,” I told the men. “We’re going to watch a movie.”

  I left the content a mystery and hit the PLAY button. I positioned my chair in the front of the room, facing away from the television, toward the inmates, and watched their reactions.

  “It was two in the morning,” explained the man on the tape. “My wife and I heard something outside, then a car door quietly closing. I thought it was my son coming home late, but when I looked out the window, I saw my car rolling down the hill.

  “When friends found out my car was stolen, they’d say, ‘Well, you had good insurance right?’ And I did, but this great insurance took me five months to get any action from them. In between that time, the experience almost cost me my marriage.

  “I work the graveyard shift at the docks, and the buses don’t run during that time. I had no car, no transportation, so on many nights, I walked eight miles to work and eight miles home. I was bitter and depressed. . . .

  “Thieves who think that what they do is okay because insurance will pay us back should know it’s not that easy.”

  A mother of two sons began the next segment. “It was 6:30 in the evening and I was getting ready to go to a friend’s for d
inner. The next thing I know, my six-year-old came running in and said, ‘Mommy, Mommy, there’s robbers in the house.’ I thought he was kidding, but before I knew it, there was a man putting one hand over my mouth and the other holding a sawed-off shotgun to my head. He demanded money. I told him to take anything he wanted. I didn’t care. I just didn’t want him to shoot us. My son was hysterical, and he threatened to shoot my boy if he didn’t stop crying.

  “After I gave him all my jewelry, I told him about a new stereo in the living room. At that point he let go of me to find the stereo. I didn’t know what was happening with my other son so I walked into the hall to look for him. Halfway down, I found the babysitter, but she didn’t know where my older boy was.

  “Time was running out at that point. The gunmen were unmasked so I assumed they weren’t intent on leaving witnesses. I had to make a decision that no mother should have to make. Either continue down the hall to search for my older son, or try to save my younger son and the babysitter. I decided to grab the younger one and the babysitter and pushed them into the bathroom. I locked the door and told them to lay down in the tub. I hid in a corner and started praying. . . .

  “I’d like to tell the prisoners that are watching this that the trauma is not over with the incident; it goes on forever. It affects family and friends. We’re people just like you. I’m sure many of you have families; how would you feel if this happened to your kids? How would you feel if you had to choose which child you were going to save?”

  A rape victim looked into the camera lens. “I feel like I am serving a life sentence. They tell me that rape is worse than murder because I have to live with what happened to me. They took away my innocence. . . .

  “It’s always there. There’s always a reminder. I still have flashbacks. I look at myself as a survivor, but what these men don’t realize is that I am still a victim. . . . My feelings go so much deeper than what appears on the surface. My inner being was violated. My soul and my heart were stolen. The scars will never go away. I want to get on with my life, I want to be whole again, but I don’t know if that’s possible,” she concluded.

  The final victim on the video is a young mother whose four-year-old daughter was shot during a domestic dispute. “My daughter . . . was playing out front when we heard a shot from across the street. . . . I picked her up when the shooting started again. I had her about a foot off the ground when her head fell back really hard. She’d been shot in the face. I started yelling for help, but I knew when I picked her up that she was dying. I held her in my arms and looked into her eyes. When they closed, I knew she was gone.

  “I loved my baby. I will never get over her. She was always so happy. My shadow, that’s what I called her. She would come up and say, ‘Mommy give me a kiss,’ and she’d make a loud smacking sound. Then she would say, ‘Mommy, give me a hug,’ and she would wrap her arms around my neck and give me a big hug. She would look me right in the face and say, ‘I love you, Mommy.’ I miss that. Oh, I miss it so much. . . .

  “Losing your child hurts more than words can say. People think it’s an emotional pain, but it’s also a physical pain. I feel like someone is squeezing the life from me because I’m missing my baby. . . .

  “In eleven years, [my daughter’s] killers will be able to walk out the door and join society again. In eleven years, I will still be going to the cemetery in order to tell my baby ‘I love you.’ If it’s over for them in eleven years that’s not fair because it’s never going to be over for me. I want them to see the photographs of my baby growing up. I want them to see her as she was laughing, playing, or taking a bath. This was a living, breathing human being, a laughing child, not just a picture in the newspapers. I would never want another mother to go through what I went through. It’s a walking hell.”

  For the video’s conclusion, I took heed to the young mother’s wishes, and shared pictures of her daughter during her short-lived life, including a picture of her tiny white coffin.

  Throughout the half-hour, I studied the prisoners. Some of the inmates appeared uncomfortable and fidgety; others sat as if in a trance, some shed silent tears.

  Along with some new members, there were the inmates I knew: Joe, who was serving three years for robbing motels to support his drug habit; Donald, a gang member serving fifteen years for breaking into a couple’s house, robbing and beating them; Rashad, serving a life sentence for a murder spree in San Francisco; and Craig, who had shot his roommate during an argument. I turned off the television. “Well, what do you think?”

  “I listened to what the lady had to say, but the casket at the end is what got to me. I realized that I hadn’t seen a casket in thirteen years.”

  I craned my neck to make eye contact with Craig in the last row. “It’s final, isn’t it, honey? Murder is not reversible. Once you’ve taken a life, that person’s never coming back. What you witnessed today are not isolated instances of victimization, it is the universal cry of all victims.”

  An armed robber who’d gunned down a clerk joined the discussion. “Mrs. Tate, how do you deal with the loss? I mean, you have your memory and your pictures, but you don’t have that individual no more.”

  “I can truthfully say that it took me ten years; ten years . . .” Try as I may, a persistent sob snuffed my response.

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Tate. Take your time.” A once-perceived enemy handed me a tissue. “Here, I know they don’t let you bring these.”

  I took the Kleenex and a calming breath. “It took me three years just to admit that Sharon wasn’t around anymore. It took me ten years to recuperate. Once I was prepared to face up to Sharon’s death, then I was able to go on to counsel other families. There are simply no words to describe the grief of losing my daughter to murder. The intensity of that grief is at the bottom of the pit. That’s where my grieving lies.”

  One by one, the men unveiled what lay beneath their icy veneer until even the coldest of the group spoke out. “We use to go in homes at night. There’d usually be families. Some were sleeping. We didn’t care. We’d just wake them up, tie them up, beat them down and then we’d leave. Sometimes, we did drive-by shootings. It really wasn’t for drugs or money, it was just for hate.”

  “Hate for what, honey?” I asked, wanting to understand.

  The inmate looked down to his hands and shrugged. “Hate for the things that happened to us when we was young, how people abused us, for the things we couldn’t get when we was little, so we’d just go around and take what we could take, do what we could do.”

  “We all have bitterness,” I told the group. “I have bitterness, you have bitterness, but now I’ve taken my bitterness and turned it into belief, belief that through VORG we can help each other. I have to believe that it’s all worthwhile. Otherwise we should all pack up and go back to what we did before.”

  Still suspicious, a gang member challenged my motivation. “After what you’ve been through, how can you come here and talk with us?”

  Knowing my answer was going to make or break a bond with this virtual child, I chose my words carefully. “I can talk to you because this is a voluntary program. You only get out of it what you put into it. I can separate the good guys from the bad guys. I think that’s why we’re all here. I know that I am not talking to the Richard Ramirezes, Randy Krafts, or the Charles Mansons of the world.”

  I walked over to the nineteen-year-old who’d posed the question. Asserting physical contact, I put my hand on his shoulders and leaned to his level. “I think that I’m talking to people who want to be rehabilitated. Am I right?”

  He had no choice but to look into my eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Discussions continued for another hour. The men talked freely in my presence because I didn’t treat them like an expert in the field, nor did I judge their actions. I concentrated on projecting myself as a nurturer who cared about their welfare. “I truly feel that if there are fewer of you, then there are going to be fewer victims, and frankly that’s what matters most. I wou
ld like to have one hundred percent of you never commit another crime, but if I can rehabilitate even one, or two, or three of you, I have saved one victim’s life.”

  THE CREW FROM 20/20 followed me to some of the VORG meetings for a report they titled “Mrs. Tate’s Crusade.” I was excited when Stone Phillips arrived at the house to tape a one-on-one chat—even P.J., who usually grunted a hello to most reporters before hiding in his bedroom, stayed to watch the interview.

  After a quick sound check, Phillips said, “You couldn’t have done this ten years ago, could you?”

  “No way. Too much pain. Too much Denial. Denial. It took three years to say that she was murdered. Three years to just say, she’s not around, she’s, you know, not in Europe doing a movie.”

  “These are guys [the inmates] who have become experts at telling people what they want to hear. Don’t you ever feel like you’re wasting your breath?”

  “Never. Never. Because out of sixty, one of them is going to be affected. One of them will have a child of their own, okay, and will relate to my loss.”

  “Do you think they care?”

  “I truly believe that some of them do. I have to believe that it’s all worthwhile. Let’s reverse that, okay. If I could save Sharon by what I’m doing now, how hard would I work at it? There’s nothing too monumental.”

  I caught sight of P.J. behind the camera. We were recording in the family room that he’d painstakingly remodeled after Sharon’s murder trial ended. The project was probably the only thing that kept him sane back then.

  As he stood there in the army’s “at ease” stance, with his arms crossed, and a pipe clenched between his teeth, he watched over me as the protector he’d always been—except for, on that August night twenty-two years ago when, in his mind, he believes he failed us. For years, my obstinate husband had claimed indifference to my plight, even balked at it, but in that instant, his look said otherwise. It said, I believe in you.