by Gregg Olsen
Perry went on and on about the minister’s wife. What a great worker she was.
Right, great worker when she’s on her back.
How sweet she was.
Sweet as honey pie dipped in sugar and rolled in razor blades.
How everyone adored her at the office. In fact, Perry said, Sharon and Barb were like mother and daughter.
The woman’s a bitch on wheels.
Both parties in the Nelson marriage knew it was hard to change. Tearful promises were made over the phone, in the darkness of a bedroom. Forgiveness was sought. When a man promises his wife he will never stray again, the woman wants more than anything to believe it so. Julie Nelson had bought into her husband’s promises more than once. She had tried to keep their marriage intact for the sake of their daughters. And later, she would wonder why she stayed so long, when there had been no chance Perry could really get it right.
But stay she did. For a time, it seemed a miracle had occurred. It seemed like God’s hand had touched her wayward husband and brought him to his senses.
Before Sharon arrived in town, other friends saw it, too.
“Perry had really changed. He had come around to what’s important. He changed. He was a person who did a lot of exercising. He would get up very early in the morning, exercise, read his Bible. He was a Sabbath school teacher and a very earnest Christian,” a friend recalled.
Many had hoped Dr. Nelson was one of the rare individuals who knew second chances were gold, both precious and rare.
Sharon Fuller arranged for a baby-sitter after Perry called to see if she wanted to ride down to Trinidad in the motor home. He planned on filling up the rig’s holding tanks—the water supply in Rocky Ford wasn’t fit to nourish houseplants, let alone drink. After the water was loaded, they’d stop off at the office for “some training” before returning to Rocky Ford.
Much to Barb Ruscetti’s chagrin, the doctor and new helper spent the afternoon charting patients and brushing against each other like high schoolers in lust.
Sharon later said what happened next was inevitable.
“I just knew it was going to happen. There wasn’t any other way,” she told a friend. “By the time we left the office in Trinidad that afternoon,” Sharon continued, “there was no mistaking in either his mind or my mind what was going to happen in the motor home.”
The signals that had started from the moment they met and lingered over the weeks of the summer had been loud and clear.
The two left Barb to close down the office while they set course for Rocky Ford. Halfway home, Perry guided the motor home off the highway. He parked in a secluded area at the edge of a travelers rest stop. Three trees framed the patch of grass around a picnic table. The sun was low in the sky. In a few minutes, they undressed and made love.
“It was everything I thought it would be. It wasn’t hurried. It wasn’t rushed. It wasn’t forced. It was the most natural thing,” Sharon said afterward.
Chapter 4
TODAY THEY CALL IT THE “GREAT Disappointment.” Seventh-Day Adventists trace their church history to William Miller, a New Hampton, New Yorker, who predicted the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ would take place October 22, 1844. His prophecy, first voiced thirteen years before the end was to come, begat the attention of a growing group of followers. Nineteen years later, the sect splintered into what became the foundation for the modern-day Seventh-Day Adventist Church.
Since then, followers have held to the unshakable belief the Bible is the literal translation of the word of God. The human body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Believers do not smoke, drink alcohol, eat meat or wear jewelry. Church followers share a lifestyle beyond mere beliefs. And they pay for it. Ten percent of a family’s income is gifted to the church in the form of a tithe.
Adventists still believe the second coming is imminent. Death is only a sleeping state until He comes. And, of course, they follow a seventh-day Sabbath. Worship services are held in pleasant—though somewhat austere—churches on Saturdays. Being an Adventist is more than following a religion. It is a culture, a way of life.
On July 3, 1945, Sharon Lynn Douglas was born into such an existence.
When the memories of her childhood came so many years later, she pressed her slender fingers, nails lacquered like red Chinese boxes, to her lips. It was as if by doing so she could stifle the very recollection of what resonated through her mind. The instant it came flooding back, she knew such retrospection had been throttled for decades for good reason. To avoid thinking about what had happened to her was to save herself from being a slave to the past. Sharon Lynn buried her face into her hands, soft curls of bleached blond hair falling past her wrists. She wanted no part of the past, and in fact had spent the last third of her adult life trying to escape it. She was MGM’s Dorothy in Oz and her first twenty-five years had been nothing but grainy images in black and white. Color only came when there was freedom.
Her tear ducts rained when she deliberated on growing up inside the impervious shell of fraudulent perfection.
“I had to be the compliant little person, but I got tired of it. So I’d have my little sneaky ways to find someone who would make me feel I was pretty, and I was important. I think I could have been a real good minister’s wife/call girl.”
When her awakening came as a young woman, it was the result of a desire to cast off the restrictions of the past, to possess everything she saw. Sharon had missed so much. She had been deprived. She would no longer wait.
The red lipstick, the blue of a lover’s eyes, the excitement of feeling… was everything her heart desired.
Sharon Lynn was the middle daughter born to Morris and Josephine Douglas, a hardworking carpenter, and his wife, a homemaker and part-time church bus driver. Though the family was Seventh-Day Adventist, they might as well have been old order Amish, so restrictive was their particular interpretation of their religion. No dancing. No movies. No bowling. Family legend has it that when Elvis Presley swiveled his hips on the Ed Sullivan Show, Mr. Douglas went haywire and put an end of television viewing in the tidy household in rural Reisterstown, Maryland.
Morris Douglas was a sandy-haired man with the outward appearance and speaking cadence of a country boy all grown up. He was the type of man who’d stuff his hands deep into the folds of his dungaree pockets, clear the phlegm from his throat and speak his piece. Though it might take him an hour to make his point, when he did, there was no doubt about his meaning. His main message was always: My daughters will be good girls.
Before the Elvis debacle, Josephine Douglas would stand in front of the television set and spread her skirts to conceal the television whenever a cigarette commercial came on the air. Before they had their short-lived TV, the lady of the house would take a tube from the radio when she left to go shopping or run errands in town. She was firm in her resolve: No one would be corrupted by the wrong music when she was not around to turn the radio off.
In her middle daughter’s eyes, there was no woman more lovely than Josephine Douglas. Her almost-black hair and dark brown eyes shimmered from across the room. But if she was lovely to look at, Sharon considered her mother somewhat cold and undeniably aloof. If only there had been a pretty smile to go with the rest of her lovely face. When she was younger, Sharon thought her mother was quiet because she had put herself above others, was stuck-up. Later, she realized it was because Josephine was a woman who simply didn’t want to draw attention to herself. She didn’t want to stand out from the other women of the church. Josephine never in her life wore makeup or jewelry.
Josephine was as serious as she was beautiful. Sharon would grow into adulthood without a single memory of her mother laughing. She never let her hair down. If the woman never had a good time, as Sharon would frequently insist, it was because her singular focus was on her religion.
God’s hand was felt on everything the Douglas family did.
When Josephine was upset she would go to the bedroom, shut the door
, cry and pray. She would grapple with the pages of a Bible so used that pages literally fluttered to the floor.
Sharon always knew why her mother kept the old one.
Don’t get a new Bible! It’d be like saying the old one wasn’t any good.
Judy Douglas, on the other hand, never thought their mother was gorgeous. The oldest of the three girls never allowed herself to think those kind of thoughts—not when she viewed her parents as her persecutors. As her enemy.
“My mother beautiful? I don’t know,” Judy mused later. “I guess there is a picture of her taken when Mom and Dad were first married. She was eighteen. The photographer had her sitting on a post in a fishing wharf scene, her hands were hooked around her knees and she was leaning back. I guess she was beautiful in that picture. But Mom to me was always the woman sitting in the front church pew, all serious, unsmiling. That was my mother.”
If Josephine was an unhappy woman, it was no more evident than the time when she marched herself from the house in Reisterstown to the nearby railroad tracks and planted herself in the middle. It was only as an adult that Sharon learned of the incident that took place during the time her mother was pregnant with Joy, the youngest of the three sisters.
“She was just waiting for the train coming along,” Sharon recalled of the story. “She didn’t want to be there anymore. I’ve never talked to my mom about it.”
And despite her own despair, appearances remained everything in the household over which Josephine Douglas presided. It was supposed to be a close family with no worries, no sadness. Oddly, though Sharon idolized her older sister, she was forbidden to play with her.
“Mom didn’t want any fights. She didn’t want noise,” Judy recalled. “Mom kept us apart. The fact Sharon has no feelings or emotions or can’t show them might be based in part on the fact that she was so isolated by our mother.”
Bitterness flowed with their mother’s milk; it seeped into the air they breathed. In the Douglas household, emotions were expertly hidden. It wasn’t that emotions weren’t felt. They were not talked about; they weren’t expressed. The girls were taught that they loved everybody—not that they should love everybody. Hate was a four-letter word as ugly as the unseemly ones spoken by those outside their faith. Like most people, members of the Douglas family had a public face, yet for the most part they wore the same mask at home. They were emotional chameleons.
Judy and Sharon became just like their parents. They became adept at keeping secrets.
What others thought of a person was far more important than the truth of someone’s actions or character. Lies became part and parcel of creating the most perfect of facades.
“Sharon was taught to be who she is,” sister Judy said after her younger sister’s world crashed around her, “and she learned her lesson very well. Sharon’s deviousness was probably a way to protect herself.”
Everything, all the time, was in the name of God. No accomplishments were the result of the person’s actions or choices, but a reflection of what the Lord had done. At seven years old, when Judy took the bus from the Maryland countryside to the Seventh-Day Adventist academy in Baltimore, she was proud that she hadn’t cried and that she had made her first such trip all by herself.
At the dinner table, her father praised Judy for being so grown-up while her mother looked on and said nothing. It was little Sharon, still in a high chair, who spoke up.
“Oh, Judy didn’t go to school by herself,” she said. “Jesus went with her.”
Everything Sharon and her sisters did that was perceived by their parents as good, God had His hand in it. Everything the girls did that was bad was something they had chosen to do.
They were two little girls in white nightgowns. Judy was almost six and her sister Sharon three when her stomach started to give her pains. Acrid vomit surged from her mouth, diarrhea stained her bedclothes. Judy was in a panic to get herself cleaned up before their mother found out. She didn’t like any stink, any disarray. Little Sharon scurried about the room helping her flu-stricken sister clean up.
Judy would always hang on to the image of her little sister working like a crazed beaver cleaning up the wretched results of her sick stomach and bowels. She’d never forget how the little girl told her it would be all right. Their mother would never know and Judy would be safe. She wouldn’t get in trouble.
Mrs. Douglas didn’t like any messes.
“Lysol commercials remind me of my mother,” Judy later said. “We talked on the phone and she put Lysol on it.”
And so it went. Year after year. Hour after hour.
God had a place at the immaculate dinner table set by Josephine Douglas. God had a place in the bathroom. The bedroom. There was nothing Josephine did that didn’t include her devotion to God. She took care of her children with the idea that it was her sole job into raising them in a manner that prepared them to live in His Kingdom. It was her job to see they grew up with good values, respect for others and love for the Lord. But, even more importantly, to raise them without humiliating and embarrassing incident.
That would have been fine, except for Judy. Morris and Josephine’s oldest presented a rebellious streak that reverberated with earth-shattering regularity throughout her adolescent years. She was kicked out of school when she smoked when no others dared. She was chastised when she was caught talking with boys outside of the church.
Judy was a rebel in knee-highs.
Sharon would never forget coming home from school to see a row of police cars lined up outside their rural Maryland home. Her mother told her to be quiet when she wanted to know what was going on.
No one talks about this! No one in this house!
A day later, the police brought Judy Douglas back home. She reportedly had met a boy at a picnic and gone off with him, though that night she had spent with a girlfriend. Judy was not a bad girl, just one in search of her own place. She was sullen and beaten. Instead of talking with her, instead of clueing Sharon in to what had happened, they sent Judy packing for Montrose School for Girls. The gates of the reform school were but a half mile from the Douglas home. No one told Sharon.
“We never had family discussions,” Sharon lamented three decades later. “They never talked about why they put her in there. I thought she was pregnant… I know later on she had a lot of trouble getting pregnant Maybe it was a maternity home? I don’t know. I still don’t know.”
As she would wrestle with her own mixed-up life, Sharon Lynn would wonder where it had all gone wrong. In doing so, she often revisited her older sister’s troubles.
“Those experiences combined with other things that happened in my childhood… I couldn’t have told you then, but I felt like white trash. That I lived on the wrong side of the tracks… that was the beginning of a stigma for me.”
Like many of their day, Josephine and Morris Douglas believed in the value of corporal punishment. A good spanking or whipping, coupled with some old-time religion, could straighten out even the most ill-behaved, defiant of children. Whenever the oldest Douglas girls misbehaved, they were told to go outside and cut a switch off a bush.
“That one won’t do,” Josephine sometimes told curly-haired Sharon, as she stood over her, inspecting her selection. “This one doesn’t make the right sound,” she said as she tore the switch through the air. “Get another.”
Punishment in the household was neither swift nor merciful. Though Sharon never felt the full wrath of her father’s hand, Judy did many times. But it was more than the beatings, more than the hairbrush, the switches, even the metal grid of an ice cube tray that had been used as a weapon of punishment against her small body.
Worse than that, strangely enough, was the incessant praying.
“We were sent to our rooms where Mother would pray us to death,” Judy recalled many years later. “We’d sit for an hour and a half and were told to think how evil we were and how we had displeased God and shamed the family… then Mother would come in and talk about it for an hour. Then
we’d pray.”
One little incident—speaking out of turn, for instance— could command as much as three hours of penance and punishment.
Years later, Sharon would tell a friend that she vowed she’d “never bring God and a belt into the room at the same time.”
Judy’s punishment was the most severe. She would later say she had vague memories of being whipped with the buckle end of a belt. Welts and broken skin were common marks on her body. She was desperate to leave, but had nowhere to go.
One time a tearful Judy reportedly went to the police in Reisterstown for help after a particularly severe beating. She begged an officer to take her away from her father and mother, but all the cop did was send her home. By the time she was returned to her parents, the blood on her back had dried. The fabric of her blouse had to be moistened so she could peel it away from her skin. Judy Douglas vowed she’d save every penny she could get her hands on and she’d get the hell out of there.
She was sixteen when she left home.
“If I had stayed, maybe I would have got the education I deserved. Maybe I would not have married an abusive man. But leaving was my sanity. It was the right thing to do. It was not rebellion. It was survival. Sharon and I learned different ways to survive.”
Even though she would never say the two of them had forged a close father-daughter relationship, Sharon was her daddy’s shadow. She followed him around whenever she could. Mostly she tagged along on errands and when he worked around the house. Morris Douglas was a capable carpenter who put a great deal of emphasis on getting the job done right. He didn’t have a whole lot of interests outside of his work and, of course, the church. And while he was not as humorless as Josephine, Morris was not exactly a barrel of fun. Sharon was close to her father, she would later insist, only by default. Her mother was simply too distant.
