The Officer's Daughter

by Elle Johnson

  I printed out the transcript but couldn’t calm down enough to read it. I placed the pages on the dining room table then paced around, hands on my hips, head cast down. A jumble of feelings in my stomach bubbled up into my chest, caught in my throat until I felt like crying. I wished I had a boyfriend, someone to comfort me, to help me understand why after thirty-three years I still couldn’t come close to thinking about Karen’s murder without being on the verge of tears. Why was it that the trauma of this loss wouldn’t go away? A thick layer of sadness descended. Everything in my body, movements and thoughts, slowed to a buzzy stillness as I turned the events over in my head. What was I searching for? A moment when the outcome might have been different? I knew that could never be. A way to forgive? Not only the boys who did this, but myself? There was nothing I could have done to prevent Karen from being killed. Caught up in the loop of memory and emotion was something more than grief and sadness. Something unsettled that I couldn’t identify. Unknown and unnamable.

  I picked up the transcript, thumbed through the pages, and caught the words “Depraved indifference to human life.” I was afraid to continue. I lingered on the cover page, drawn to the words “The People of the State of New York against Santiago Ramirez, defendant.”

  I’d never been to that particular courthouse in the Bronx, but I could easily imagine what the courtroom looked like. A cavernous rectangular chamber with high ceilings that still managed to feel tight and claustrophobic. Dark wood walls and low partitions, benches and desks that pulled your gaze from the airy, open space overhead down to the ground. There was something church-like about the layout of a courtroom, with its gallery of onlookers instead of congregants in pews, a jury box where the choir would be, and a black-robed judge at the altar presiding over sinners and those sinned against. In both church and court, the proceedings are about the human soul. Innocence versus guilt, punishment versus forgiveness, rules versus free will.

  The rules of the court said that before the sentence was read, the People, represented by an assistant district attorney, had their say, then the defense attorney, and then the defendant. Finally, the judge would announce the sentence. But the straightforward orderliness of the sentencing hearing belied the intensity of the underlying process to determine how much prison time the convicted would serve.

  The sentence is a result of several weeks of investigation into the crime and criminality of the convicted. Judges, however, don’t conduct the actual investigation. That’s delegated to a probation officer, who can take anywhere from four to eight weeks to write up a narrative about the convicted called the presentencing investigation, or PSI. The rules have since changed, but in 1981, probation officers were allowed to reinterview witnesses and question anyone they deemed useful to determining a sentence for the convicted, from a kindergarten teacher to a next-door neighbor at an old address. The process even allowed probation officers to interview witnesses who weren’t allowed to testify during the trial.

  The only reason I knew so much about the sentencing process and the presentencing investigation report was because I’d learned about it while writing cop shows. It sounded like a good idea for a television series. I’d started researching, and as with all things law enforcement, I’d asked my father if he could recommend someone I could talk to who did this job. He chuckled and said, “Yeah, your aunt—Barbara.” I thought about that as I held the sentencing transcript in my hand. Years later I would find out that generating this report was not part of Aunt Barbara’s job as a probation officer. But at the time it struck me as a cruel irony that Aunt Barbara might have been tasked with coming up with the sentence for convicted murderers. I imagined it must have been painful for her to keep doing that job after Karen was killed. But she did. She found a way to continue. I sat down at my dining room table and read the transcript.

  The hearing began with the court clerk restating the conviction. Santiago Ramirez was found guilty of murder and assault in the second degree. In the transcript, the court clerk used the word “You.” She spoke directly to the defendant. I felt a jolt. He was there. Of course he was there. But this was the closest I had ever been to Karen’s killer. A man I had never met or seen. I didn’t know what he looked like or sounded like. The hearing had taken place more than three decades earlier, and yet I felt his presence across time and space, through words printed on a page. It was electric, dangerous. To me, this young man was a threat, someone to be feared.

  In the transcript, the assistant district attorney called the defendant “a mad-dog killer,” barren of any sense of dignity for human life, devoid of any redeeming quality that would warrant a sentence of less than the maximum. The assistant district attorney described how earlier in the evening, before Karen was killed, Santiago Ramirez had sat in Devoe Park in the Bronx with his girlfriend and talked about the robbery that ended up taking Karen’s life. The defendant’s mother was sitting with them, though it is unclear whether she heard her son talk about the robbery that his girlfriend unsuccessfully tried to convince him not to commit. The ADA continued, “And even after he took her life, this defendant coolly, calmly unloaded and reloaded that shotgun with the presence of mind that clearly shows what kind of person he really is.”

  I wondered if “unloaded and reloaded” was a reference to the second shot and proof that Ramirez had indeed fired twice—although the transcript didn’t actually say. Had Ramirez reloaded intentionally or as a reflex, unthinkingly racking the gun again, thereby moving another shell into the chamber? I didn’t have a transcript of the trial testimony to know what witnesses had said happened. And the shotgun was never recovered, so I didn’t know enough about the type of shotgun used to hazard an educated guess as to how it was loaded.

  Later, the transcript showed the judge agreed that this action by the defendant presented a problem. “It seems to me that a man who has accidentally shot the top of the head of a 16 year old girl off accidentally, would probably, I may be in error, would probably drop that shotgun and run out screaming but we didn’t have the situation here. . . . That caused me to have second thoughts as to whether or not there was an actual accidental shooting and it was most disturbing.” I was disturbed as well. It occurred to me that the newspaper articles must have assumed there was a second shot because of the unloading and reloading, but maybe he never fired what he reloaded. According to the sentencing transcript, there didn’t seem to have been a second discharge.

  The moment when the shotgun was reloaded constituted the crux of the five-week trial. I didn’t understand why there had even been a trial, when saying Karen’s murder was an accident seemed like an admission of guilt. But the grand jury hadn’t indicted on a murder charge, only felony murder, which was attached to the charge of robbery. There was no question the robbery had taken place, the defendant had admitted to that, but he’d pled not guilty on the grounds that he did not intend to kill Karen or anyone. Reloading the shotgun was thus a crucial moment, the linchpin that proved that the defendant was guilty, depraved and indifferent to human life, and not merely clumsy. That moment also now formed the linchpin to shaping my opinion of the defendant as someone who thirty-three years later didn’t deserve to be forgiven or paroled.

  Even at this late stage of the process, the defense attorney tried everything he could to reduce his client’s prison sentence. He tried to paint a picture of his client as full of remorse and regret, insisting it had been an accident. Then he blamed the light trigger on the gun. “It was the unfortunate touching of the trigger which caused the firing, not a pressing or a squeezing of the trigger, but touching of a trigger which was exceptionally light, a light trigger, three to four pounds, as opposed to ten to 14 pounds for a normal gun.” He harped on the grand jury’s decision not to indict on murder as a factor that should mitigate the sentence. He called into question the instructions to the jury, then nitpicked the wording of the conviction. He argued that his client should serve only as much time as the accomplices, who’d each taken a plea and gotten on
ly fifteen years to life. Then he pointed out that his client had never been in trouble before, that this—murdering Karen—was his first brush with the law. He offered as an excuse the reason for the robbery: the defendant needed money to pay a fine. I was so angry reading the litany of excuses that my hands trembled and I had to put the pages down.

  And angrier still at his mother, father, aunt, cousins, and friends who had been there in the courtroom, lending their support. Karen meant nothing to them. Depraved indifference to human life. I wanted them to suffer the way Karen’s mother, father, aunts, uncles, and cousins had. As the assistant DA had said in his statement, why should the defendant’s family members get their loved one back when Karen was gone “beyond the veil [sic] of tears?” He used the seasons as a metaphor for the tragedy of Karen’s murder. Instead of being in spring, a time of hope, joy, and new life, we were in the cold of winter, the season of loss, “for Karen Marsh is dead.” Brutally murdered by a brazen defendant who hatched an “evil plan.”

  The robbery was premeditated. This was the first time it had occurred to me that Santiago Ramirez didn’t just walk into the Burger King by accident. He’d targeted that Burger King. Maybe he had even seen Karen behind the counter or, worse, been served by her when he scoped out the place. I didn’t know if this was true, but I felt nauseated at the idea. Depraved indifference to human life.

  When it was the defendant’s time to address the court, he couldn’t. He tried reading from a prepared written statement, but his nerves failed and his voice faltered. The court reporter asked him to speak up. The judge responded in a way that made me angry. He was solicitous: “Take your time, take your time and read it slowly. And I’ll listen to you.” The defense attorney had to read the statement for him.

  The trial was an ordeal for the defendant, he claimed. He had tried to remain peaceful and calm despite what the ADA “made me look like.” He felt discriminated against because of all the publicity surrounding the case. “It seems like I am accused of killing a New York City detective, not his daughter,” he said. He called the judicial system “corrupt,” “pathetic,” and “designed to soil good people.” He said, “This case was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.” I couldn’t help but laugh at how ridiculous he sounded. I was disgusted, offended, and yet drawn to his words.

  I reread the sentences in disbelief to make sure I was understanding them correctly, getting this right. And then I dissected his word choices, looking for some deeper meaning, the subconscious tells they revealed. He’d said, “I assure you, I will not be a victim.” A victim for being on trial? A victim of whatever sentence was imposed? The defiance in the phrase “I assure you” felt like a threat. A promise that he would not be controlled or cowed in the future. Certainly this was not someone who should be let out on parole.

  He referred to the reloading of the shotgun as “unusual behavior,” something the prosecutor exaggerated. He wrote, “I am not a monster.” Then he wrote it again: “I am not a monster.”

  He didn’t apologize for what he had done. He didn’t say it was an accident. He didn’t wish that he could have changed the outcome of his actions, his depraved indifference to human life, except maybe for himself. “How can you put a man behind bars for a long period of time, ’specially when he hasn’t been on this earth, planet Earth, for that long? I was proven guilty but two wrongs doesn’t make one right. I am not asking for your sympathy, just another chance at life.”

  This was not someone full of remorse and regret, except for the loss of his own freedom. Still, his despair and desperation were palpable. I was surprised to feel my anger and sadness extending into compassion for this nineteen-year-old kid who was about to lose his life as effectively as Karen had lost hers. My chest tightened, and I could almost feel the closeness of the prison cell where he would spend the next three decades. Who wouldn’t be scared and panicked by the impending loss of freedom, the prospect of being trapped? He had killed my cousin, yet somehow I felt sorry for him. In this last desperate plea for mercy, he wasn’t a monster, just some stupid kid who had made a horrible mistake. To think he had never committed a crime before, and his first time out, this was what had happened. The last line of his statement spoke to me across the chasm of the decades gone by. Another chance at life. I still didn’t know if he deserved it. I couldn’t reconcile his reloading of the shotgun. But I had an idea who he had been. I needed to find out who he had become.

  Chapter Fifteen

  April 9, 1981

  It was a closed-casket funeral. My mother warned me the mortician couldn’t put Karen’s face back together after the shotgun blast. For the service Aunt Barbara displayed a framed photograph of Karen smiling and draped a purple sweatshirt over the shiny white coffin.

  I felt like I was inside a kaleidoscope: every fractured moment moved like a sharp shape shifting through a tube in diffused light. Recognizable, yet strange.

  Mourners on the sidewalk spilled into the street, stood shoulder to shoulder against the back wall inside Trinity Baptist Church. Karen had gone to a Catholic school, but Trinity Baptist was her home church. The pews were packed with bodies, but the soaring ceiling made the sanctuary feel light and airy. Instead of black, the mourners wore purple. Instead of old, the grieving were young—Karen’s classmates and friends.

  My heart ached with a yearning to see Karen one last time, before they put her body into the ground forever. But I would never see my cousin again. My chest pulled tight with regret that the week before, I’d decided to stay home, to study for the SATs, instead of going with my father to the Bronx. “Karen will be there,” he had said, trying to entice me. Now all I wanted to do was open the lid of the coffin for one last look. I opened the program instead.

  I counted twenty items in the order of service. The invocation, the doxology, the Gloria, the message. The Lord’s Prayer, a prayer of comfort, and three types of hymns—for trust, preparation, and parting. I knew them all by title: “Jesus Loves Me,” “He Leadeth Me,” “This Is My Father’s World.” I could hear their melodies before they were sung. The words sat ready on my tongue, but when the time came, the songs dropped out of my mouth a cold comfort. The lyrics were a cruel reminder to trust in God in troubled times.

  This is my Father’s world.

  O let me ne’er forget.

  That though the wrong

  seems oft so strong,

  God is the ruler yet.

  Karen is dead, but God is still in charge. Blind faith. But I started to wonder why. Why had this happened? Was there a reason? A purpose for Karen’s murder in God’s bigger plan? The words of the reverend put that idea into my head.

  The reverend didn’t talk about how Karen had died. He didn’t mention that she had been killed, murdered. Just that we should go on stronger and better so her “passing” would not be in vain. As if something good could still come of this.

  At the end of the service the organist played the Funeral March by Chopin. The maudlin opening melody seemed cruel and absurd. The lyrics “Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you” ran through my head as I remembered hearing this while watching Saturday-morning cartoons when I was a kid.

  Everyone in the church filed out quickly, eager to get to the cemetery for the interment. My father complained that it was an hour’s drive away, in Valhalla, New York. He didn’t understand why they would bury her so far from the family. I didn’t understand why he didn’t want to go. I wanted to be there for every last minute of Karen’s last minutes with the living, even though she was dead. I wanted to see where Karen’s final resting place would be. I wanted to watch the casket being lowered into the ground. I wanted to watch the dirt cover it up until it was part of the earth and somehow connected to my feet. My father wanted to go home.

  Outside the church, everything was in motion. Cars pulled out from the curb, glided into the procession behind the hearse. People walked in every direction. Wiped away tears. Cried into their hands. I saw the girls from Karen’s class in th
eir school uniforms looking lost, holding one another, anxiously chewing their hair or twirling strands of it around their fingers. I tried to figure out if they were sadder than me. I wondered if they knew Karen better than I did. My father left to get the car. I lost track of my mother. I was by myself, swept up in the tide of people, tumbling around like a seashell underwater. I landed on the sidewalk outside Aunt Barbara’s house. For a while my cousin Warren and David, the white boy from Karen’s sweet sixteen, stood with me. We watched the funeral procession. A seemingly endless line of cars streaming by, headlights on, en route to Valhalla.

  There were so many cars it was unbelievable at first. Then ridiculous. And finally funny. I laughed out loud at how long the procession of vehicles lasted. They streamed by me in a blur of metal and glass. I stopped counting after fifty and grew annoyed.

  How could there be this many people going to see Karen buried? A hollowness crept into my belly. I felt sick. Disgusted by the spectacle, the public display of grief. Did all those people really know and love Karen? Or were they just glomming on to the grief? Swept up in the moment by mourning? I watched with my mouth hanging open, eyes cast up, as cars crested the hill, then drove down the block.

  It made no sense. None of it. Karen had been killed for no reason. No purpose. No greater calling. No bigger plan. She was not in heaven. She had not been called home. She had not gone to a better place. She was in a casket about to be put into the ground and covered with dirt. Everything I’d learned in church, in Christian school, it wasn’t a lie; it just wasn’t the truth. There was only one explanation that made sense of my pain, suffering, and questioning. I felt the answer first. It lighted on my skin, sank into my bones, and filled my mind with the peace of truth revealed. Then I heard a voice inside my head, one with an answer to the question of why this had happened. When I heard it, I felt free. I knew that from then on, everything was up to me.