The Officer's Daughter

by Elle Johnson

  My mother said we’d yelled at him, “We’ll kill you! We will kill you!” Throwing punches and slapping at him until we were out of breath. We stepped back, panting, and watched my father uncoil. Elbows propped up on the couch arm, his feet planted on the ground. My mother said that was the scaredest she had ever seen him. But I remembered a look of stunned disbelief and pained indignation on his face. When he moved to stand, my arms jutted out like daggers to keep my father away. He walked past us and out of the house without saying a word. We didn’t talk about what had happened. That was the last time my father ever hit my mother. I pushed it out of my mind and blocked it from my memory.

  But as my mother retold the story, I felt an adrenaline rush and an uncomfortable mix of emotions I couldn’t identify. This trauma had lived inside me hidden, unexamined, for so long that I didn’t know how to process it now. It sat inside my gut like a sack of shards pricking me from the inside. In the bottom bunk of my childhood bed I was afraid of the dark again. I covered myself with pillows and blankets and curled into a ball.

  When I got back to Los Angeles, I wanted to remember the incident but couldn’t bring myself back to the moment. Instead I remembered a woman at the memorial for my favorite uncle who had passed. She told a story about how Uncle Bill had hypnotized her to stop smoking. I wondered if hypnosis would help me remember the things I had blocked. I found a hypnotherapist in the Valley and called to make an appointment. He was a fast talker with a thick Brooklyn accent. I was oddly reassured to have stumbled on another New Yorker from the outer boroughs, someone I thought would innately understand where I was coming from. But he wouldn’t help me. He said helping me remember a memory would be unethical because the power of suggestion was too strong. It’s not that he doubted that the incident with my father had happened. He thought I had blocked the event to protect myself from being traumatized. What he felt I needed to understand was why.

  He talked quickly as he rattled off several theories having to do with fight or flight, the consciousness of mammals, the lizard brain, and the human propulsion system, which reacts to danger at a cellular level. I wedged my phone between my ear and shoulder, struggled with my free hand to write down on nearby Post-its his insights and theories. He said all I really needed to do was give myself permission to feel it. He said one night before I went to bed I needed to open myself up to remember what had happened and how it had made me feel. That was the only way I could begin to forgive my father for what he had done to my mother, and, more important, to forgive myself for what I had done to my father. The hypnotherapist must have felt my hesitation and said, “You suppressed the memory because it was too painful to acknowledge that you beat your father up.” He thought that if I stopped trying to protect myself, my full memory of it would come back to me. I would be free.

  I bristled at the thought that I needed to be forgiven for coming to my mother’s defense. But I couldn’t deny that I had blocked the memory for a reason. I recognized the feeling churning in the pit of my stomach as the warming guilt of shame.

  Forgive. Forgive. Forgive.

  I didn’t know where to begin.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It took more than a year for the Office of Victim Assistance to send me copies of all the parole board hearing transcripts for Karen’s killers. During that time, I left the world of teen TV dramas and decided I wanted to go back to writing cop shows. Over the course of my career, I had written for franchises (Law & Order, CSI: Miami), quirky cop shows (Homicide: Life on the Street, Saving Grace, The Glades), and even a show about parole officers (Street Time).

  My first job in television was as a script coordinator on a show called The Cosby Mysteries. It starred Bill Cosby as a retired NYPD forensic expert and was created by cop drama royalty William Link who, with Richard Levinson, had created Mannix, Columbo, and Murder, She Wrote. The show featured quirky characters by the legendary talent Rita Moreno and a newcomer named Dante Bezé, who went on to become the rapper Mos Def. The Cosby Mysteries was being produced during the LAPD investigation of O. J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Looking back, I realize how astounding it is to think of how wrong public perception was about those two celebrities, Cosby and OJ. That from a distance it was difficult if not impossible to really know someone based on what you might have heard or read about him.

  One of the writers on The Cosby Mysteries, the playwright Eric Overmyer, gave me my first writing job in television—an episode of an NBC drama called Homicide: Life on the Street, based on the book by David Simon. Eric would become a mentor to me. I was excited when he asked me to join the writing staff on his latest show, Bosch. This television series was based on the beloved novels by the bestselling author Michael Connelly about an LAPD detective, Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch was a character I understood and could relate to—a man of few words, a rule breaker who didn’t play well with others. He was damaged, forever traumatized by his mother’s murder, which had taken place when he was just a kid. He went into law enforcement to get the justice his mother’s unsolved murder never did. The series also explored the fraught relationship between the emotionally distant Bosch and Maddie, his teenage daughter.

  While I was pondering what to do about Santiago Ramirez, I was given an episode of Bosch to write in which one of the main characters was to be shot and injured. In the writers’ room we had extensive discussions about the motivation of the suspect who was to carry out the shooting. We needed to figure out who he was and the series of events that led the character to this point in his life. We could make him a crazed sociopath or desperate man. We needed to understand why he would do such a thing.

  I was well into a second draft of the script when I started receiving packages from Victim Assistance. Thick manila envelopes stuffed with stacks of documents about Luis Torres and Francisco Alemar arrived at my home. I was still waiting for transcripts from Santiago Ramirez’s parole board hearings. I had added my name to the list of people receiving notice of when his hearings would take place. Every now and then I would receive a thin white business envelope in the mail with an official letter notifying me of postponements or his next hearing date. I still hadn’t written a letter for or against his release. I still didn’t know how I felt.

  It bothered me that Luis Torres and Francisco Alemar were already out and living their lives. I couldn’t affect their paroles, but I hoped the transcripts would somehow shed more light on Santiago Ramirez, the person he was back then, and clarify if the gun had really gone off accidentally. That was the key to my being able to forgive Ramirez and give him another chance at life. I knew forgiveness was supposed to free me from my anger. But I didn’t know if forgiveness was even possible.

  I read Alemar’s transcripts first. He was more familiar to me. I remembered the photo of him in the newspaper when he surrendered himself to the New York Daily News. He was a twenty-year-old technical student studying air-conditioning repair to make a better life for himself. “Look what I have done to my future now,” he told the reporter, Daniel O’Grady, after he surrendered. Alemar had taken a plea and was given fifteen years to life. I wondered what he had said or done to convince the parole board that after more than three decades behind bars he should be freed. I braced for unsettling revelations. If the court transcripts had taught me anything, it was that my knowledge of the crime was incomplete and to expect the unexpected. The first surprise was a familiar name at Alemar’s initial parole board hearing—Commissioner Gerald Burke.

  I had interviewed Commissioner Burke more than a decade earlier for my parole documentary. In the back of my mind I must have known it was a possibility that he could preside over the parole hearings for the boys who killed Karen. Burke was tough but compassionate with a colorful way of speaking and a gallows sense of humor he explained away as a defense mechanism common to people in law enforcement. I heard his voice in my head as I read the commissioner’s questions to Alemar in the first parole hearing transcript, from February 20, 1996.
“You then entered the Burger King restaurant . . . and then your buddy, Ramirez, decided to blow some little girl’s brains out. Why was it necessary for you and your friends to snuff out that young girl’s life?”

  “It wasn’t,” Alemar said, then explained he wasn’t in the room at the time, that it had been an accident. He described the crime as “terrible” and wished he could take it back. The commissioner scolded him, saying, “Well, you can’t. That’s a self-serving statement other than maybe you’ve taken a knife out and slit your own throat.”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Alemar said.

  “Well, you didn’t do it, did you?” The commissioner wasn’t letting him off the hook.

  Alemar replied, “No, I’m a coward.”

  Alemar’s responses seemed honest and raw. Surprisingly unpracticed for a man who had been sitting in prison for the last fifteen years with nothing but time to think of what to say to get himself out, if he was so inclined. But maybe he didn’t think he would get out, at least not his first time before the board. Even so, he said he was sorry. “It’s something that I’m going to have to just carry with me for the rest of my life . . . I’ve done it so far.” I understood his inability to move past Karen’s death—though it made me uncomfortable to think we were both carrying the same burden, both trapped and looking to be freed. I was glad his parole had been denied.

  Alemar’s second appearance before the parole board was different. More desperate than resigned. I could feel him leaning in. He wanted to get out, and this time he thought he had a chance. He had given thought to what he was going to say, maybe even gotten guidance from other inmates, and was eager to say it. When the commissioners asked why he had gone ahead with the robbery, he said it was a combination of a lot of things, notably peer pressure, immaturity, and machismo.

  At twenty years old, Alemar was already a father with a common-law wife. His wife didn’t like Santiago Ramirez and had told Alemar not to go with him, begged him not to commit a robbery. But Alemar went because, in his words, “I felt like, she can’t tell me what to do.” But then he flips and says back then he was more than just macho, immature, and subject to peer pressure. He insists to the parole board that he did good things, too. He had a woman friend with three young children. “I was like a surrogate father to them. I took them milk. That was part of who I was.”

  The hearing process seemed to encourage this type of flip-flopping. It asked the inmate to take responsibility, then encouraged him to offer excuses for the crimes he had committed. I didn’t know how the commissioners would know when he was telling the truth or making more self-serving statements. So when he told a story about his son asking questions about the crime, Alemar said he reminded his son that even though he wasn’t the one who’d pulled the trigger, it didn’t matter: “I was there, and it’s the same thing.” It sounded like some kind of twisted humblebrag, designed to absolve him of wrongdoing by subtly reminding the commissioners that he wasn’t the one who’d fired the fatal shot. It was hard for me to take what Alemar said at face value. I started to pick his words apart, looking for the deeper motive behind what he’d chosen to reveal. The writer in me studied him like a character I might create. What did the character want or say he wanted? To get out of prison, obviously. But what did he need? The answer was in what he said about his seventeen-year-old son, who asked his father repeatedly about the crime itself. Alemar admitted, “Now that we’re getting to talk to each other a lot more, I’m realizing more and more how awful it was what I did.” He said he wanted to make himself “not seem so—such a bad guy.” He ends by saying he wants to be a good husband and a father. “I’m asking that you please give me a chance to rejoin society. I can prove that I’m a better human being, a worthwhile human being.”

  Parole was denied.

  Alemar would go before the parole board nine times, once every twenty-four months for eighteen years. By all accounts Alemar was a model prisoner. He was “an excellent inmate” with “no disciplines” except for his “one and only ticket . . . back in 1991.” He took all the vocational and self-improvement classes he could, including programs in substance abuse, aggression, community prep, and children’s advocacy. Alemar was determined to keep busy. “I structure my life to avoid problems. There’s a lot of problems you can get into in here, but if you structure your life correctly.”

  “You keep to yourself?” the commissioner at his eighth appearance asks.

  “No, I get out a lot. I help. I do a lot of things, but I structure myself, my life so I stay away from those bad influences.”

  One of the good influences that Alemar had was his family. I was stunned to learn that while he was in prison Alemar had met his wife on what was essentially a blind date, married a year later, and had children.

  “A friend of mine was—his wife came to visit and brought a friend. And he asked me if I wanted to go to a visit and I went.” He said they “got to talking and it snowballed.”

  “You’re smiling,” the commissioner notes. “I mean, you’re telling the story and you’re smiling . . .”

  “It’s a nice memory,” Alemar says. “She visit me for about a year before we got married.”

  He had four children: one son, three daughters. “Two of them were—we had trailer visits.” And three grandchildren. Alemar was a family man.

  Despite his circumstances, he’d managed to create a life for himself full of work and loved ones. It was maddening, since Karen had never had that chance. But if I was looking for proof that people could change and improve in prison, there it was.

  There was so much about Alemar to recommend him. He said he worked in the prison hospital with AIDS patients. “I’ve had my hands inside men’s wounds when nobody else wanted to work with them. I’ve had to clean them when they were incontinent, when they couldn’t take care of themselves.” He claimed to have done these things as “an atonement for what I did.” Transcripts showed me a man I didn’t expect to see, with revelations I never anticipated, on a journey I didn’t think was possible. I was begrudgingly impressed—but also deeply conflicted about my contradictory feelings about the man, ashamed to acknowledge that a part of me didn’t want him to succeed. Maybe that’s why I second-guessed everything he said. Over nearly two decades, Alemar’s answers revealed a man genuinely struggling to understand why he had taken part in the crime in the first place and how he could be better. True, his freedom depended on his answering those questions. But Karen’s death seemed to weigh heavily on his mind and in his soul. I realized that honestly looking for answers and making excuses about one’s behavior are not mutually exclusive.

  At one hearing he offered as an excuse that he had no excuse. At another hearing he blamed his upbringing, what he’d learned growing up. “I realize now I didn’t really have a normal childhood, although to me it was normal.” His father was a violent alcoholic who beat his mother and abandoned the family when Alemar was five. His stepfather was a drug addict who died in prison. His mother’s next boyfriend was a convicted rapist. According to Alemar, all the men his mother dated, his father figures, “they all committed crimes. They never worked. None of them worked. This is what I saw. So I never thought that crime was something that you shouldn’t do.”

  Alemar’s answers could have been coached, concocted after therapy sessions with mental health professionals and other inmates telling him what they thought the parole board would want to hear. He said, “I’m sorry for the crime that I committed and for the death of Karen Marsh.”

  I went back and listened to my recorded interview with Commissioner Burke explaining the parole board hearing. How the inmate starts to parrot back what he learns in whatever therapy group he’s in. If the group’s leader says to take responsibility, that’s what the inmate does. If they say find God, the inmate gets religion. If they say you are a product of your surroundings, the inmate blames his surroundings. Alemar was in a program called Exodus, in which he said he was able to “face my past.” Through the proce
ss of trying to figure out what to say to the parole board, he found the truth. It wasn’t until his ninth appearance that Alemar had a revelation and came clean.

  “I lied to myself and I lied to the parole board,” Alemar said. It wasn’t peer pressure or bad role models, he explained. “I had other role models, good role models that I didn’t—I could have chosen to learn from . . . I realize that all along I wanted to be a man, but what I wanted was to be the kind of man that my mother loved . . . bad guys.” Once he realized that, he said things started to fall into place and he understood that he was rationalizing his behavior. He didn’t worry about consequences, but now he knew that “everything I say, everything I do, everything has consequences.”

  He was a long way from the twenty-year-old who ranted about ruining his life. Now he was fifty. As time wore on, and his children, particularly his daughters, grew up and reached Karen’s age, he started to understand what he had done. That this was his fault. But it was something he said at the end of his statement that touched me deeply and opened my heart to forgiveness. “Karen Marsh you said would have lived another sixty years. Karen Marsh is still alive inside of me. She’s never going to die as long as I’m alive.” Alemar said he wanted “to be able to live a life in honor of the memory of Karen Marsh.”

  I believed him.

  Part of the reason I believed him was because, in another surprising turn, he had owned up to the truth. Over the years, the transcripts reveal a gradual, albeit sometimes unwitting, admission that Alemar and his codefendants had committed robbery before.