Written in Blood

by Diane Fanning

  Many evenings, the girls popped into their pajamas and hunkered down on the carpet in the landing at the top of the stairs—Margaret with B Bunny and Martha with her Slim Bunny—to listen to stories. Barbara and Liz sat on the floor with them and took turns reading to them from their favorite books—the Beatrix Potter classics and Enid Blyton’s Noddy books, an English children’s series.

  Barbara adored those two little girls and even took them with her when she visited her mother in northern Germany. Barbara lived in the house full-time at first. Then in the summer of 1985, Michael Peterson told Liz that it was not fair that Barbara did not have a life of her own. She should have an apartment where she could have some privacy, and Liz should pay for it.

  Barbara found a flat in the neighboring village, but her room in Liz’s home was still there, allowing her to spend the night whenever it was needed or desired. Margaret and Martha had occasional getaway weekends at her place. Mike visited Barbara there, too. She came to love and respect him as a friend and turned to him for advice and understanding. They did not always agree, but still, Mike was always there for her. She felt they had a very close friendship.

  Barbara rode over on her bicycle to Liz’s house most mornings, arriving between 7 and 7:30. Typically, Patty and Liz traveled to work together at 7:40. They taught classes across the hall from one another at Rhein Main Elementary School.

  The glow of the lights from Liz’s bedroom and the bath filtered down to the foyer each morning when Barbara arrived. At the door, she removed her footwear. Boots and shoes were always left standing by the door in this household—perhaps a vestige of the time Liz lived in Japan. The heating system, with warm water pipes running under a tile floor, made the home suitable to practice this habit with comfort.

  In the kitchen, by the light of the “Goosy, Goosy Gander” lamp, Barbara could see the breakfast preparations that Liz had set out the night before—the oatmeal and pan by the stove and the plates set out on the children’s table.

  October 1985 rolled around with all its painful memories of George’s death. It was a difficult month for Liz, but she was making progress toward her recovery. She was nowhere near as despondent as she had been on the first anniversary of her loss the previous year.

  Liz’s depression had lifted enough that she was making plans for the future. She talked to Barbara about wanting to go back to the States to teach if she could find a job in Texas. She wanted to get to know George’s family. After a couple of years there, she hoped to move to Japan and settle down.

  She wanted Barbara to come with her and care for the girls. They wondered about the difficulties of getting a visa for Barbara. Mike assured them that since Liz was the widow of a soldier killed in the line of duty, the military should make it easy for them.

  The Ratliff crew saw the Peterson family almost daily. They dined together more often than not and developed a mutual dependency. When Patty’s washing machine broke down, she lugged her baskets of dirty laundry over to Liz’s house and cleaned them there.

  That month, Liz’s mother, Elizabeth, flew over for a three-week visit. During that time, her sister Margaret called and they made tentative plans for her to come to Germany. Throughout the years, Margaret had a strong desire to visit her sister in Europe, but financial constraints were always prohibitive. Now, the trip was affordable. The two sisters looked forward to their reunion and hoped to spend time skiing together.

  Cheryl Appel, a DOD teacher who had lived with Liz and George when she first moved to Germany, married Tom Schumacher the previous June. In the fall, they moved from their small apartment to a bungalow in Buschlag. Tom had a Ph.D. in psychology and headed up the Family Advocacy Center on base.

  Liz loved to entertain. Cheryl and Tom’s marriage and move seemed a good reason to celebrate. She wanted it to be a surprise for the newlyweds. She led them to believe she was throwing a party for someone else that November. She even went so far in her ruse as to ask Cheryl to bring some dips.

  The two arrived around 7 with dips in hand. They did not have a clue. Liz was delighted. The couple stayed to help Liz clean up after the party, leaving for home shortly after midnight.

  The Ratliff home was plagued by repeated hang-up calls that year. Throughout October and November, the number of calls had increased. Their frequency had made Liz uneasy and frightened. She asked Barbara to stay over many times, including Friday and Saturday, November 22 and 23. Barbara slept there for those two nights and returned to her apartment mid-day Sunday to check on her place and get some clean clothes.

  That afternoon, Liz took the two girls sledding on the freshly fallen snow. She and the girls had dinner with Patty and Michael and their two boys that evening at the Petersons’ home. Mealtime conversation centered around the joint family trip to Copenhagen over the upcoming winter break.

  After dinner, Michael walked Liz, Martha and Margaret down the street to their home. He helped Liz get the girls cleaned up and tucked into bed. After they were asleep, Liz drove her car to the neighboring village to leave it with a mechanic. Mike followed her there in his car and gave her a ride back home. Upon their return, he took out Liz’s trash for pick-up the next morning.

  About 10 o’clock that Sunday night, Liz’s neighbor, Karin Hamm, looked out her window in time to see Michael Peterson, dressed in light-colored tennis shoes, dark blue jeans and a light-hued cardigan, emerge from Liz’s home. He jumped down the three steps from the door and started to run away. He looked back over his shoulder in Karin’s direction, stuck both his hands in the front pockets of his jeans and moved on at a quick pace.

  18

  Barbara O’Hara looked at the snowy vista outside her apartment on November 25 and decided it was not a good morning to ride her bike. She called for a taxi and Salvatore Malagnino picked her up.

  The sun had not yet quenched all vestiges of darkness when Barbara arrived at 7:15. As soon as they turned onto the street, she knew something was wrong. Every light in the house was on—even the one in the living room that was never used. An ugly premonition clenched her stomach muscles tight as she slid her key into the lock.

  Her eyes grazed over the kitchen. The oatmeal was not sitting by the stove. The plates were not on the children’s table. She heard no sound of Liz stirring upstairs. An unpleasant, unrecognized odor hung heavy in the air.

  Then she saw the body crumpled in a pool of blood at the foot of the stairs. Her heart thudded like an overworked piston in her chest. Her mind screamed out in denial and blinded her to what was before her eyes.

  “Liz! Liz! Are you okay?” she shouted as she stepped over the body and lunged up the stairs.

  Liz was not in the bathroom. Barbara opened the bedroom door. The room was empty. She checked on the two girls. Both were still asleep. That was unusual for Margaret, who was an early riser. Barbara went back to Liz’s room. The phone was beside the bed, where Liz placed it every night. She grabbed the receiver. She would call Michael for help. He would know what to do. No dial tone. She stabbed the disconnect button. She pushed it again with more force. And again. Still, no dial tone. She dropped the receiver and, looking out the window, discovered that her cab driver was still sitting in front of the house. She raced back down the stairs.

  Three steps from the landing, reality formed a tight fist that slammed into her head. The boots—yellow boots—Liz’s snow boots. It was Liz at the foot of the stairs. It was Liz in the pool of blood. Was she wearing a red sweater? Or was there just that much blood? Her eyes registered the blood up and down the stairway. Too much blood.

  She forced herself to go down the steps to Liz’s body. Liz lay on her right side with her legs pulled slightly toward her chest. Barbara ran outside and asked the driver to call an ambulance and the police.

  She hurried back into the house and took Liz in her arms. She felt warmth. Hope was still alive. Her fingers traced the open wounds on the back of Liz’s head. Gently, she laid Liz down as she had found her. She fled the house to find more help.r />
  She banged on the Petersons’ door with the intensity of a jackhammer. Patty, half-dressed, flung the door open to a panting and wild-eyed Barbara.

  “Something horrible has happened. Hurry,” Barbara blurted.

  Mike appeared at the top of the stairs in a pair of boxers and a tee shirt. Nothing Barbara said made any sense to Patty. She and Michael slapped on their clothes and followed a babbling Barbara over to Liz’s house.

  Once inside, Barbara raced upstairs to the bathroom—she thought she was going to be sick. Michael came to the door and, in denial, Barbara told him, “I touched her. She’s warm.”

  “She’s not warm, Barbara,” Mike told her, placing his hands on her arms. “She’s not warm—she’s dead. The warmth you felt was from the floor heating.”

  The fear that the little girls would see their mother dead and covered with blood propelled Barbara into action. Wrapping a blanket around Margaret, she lifted her up and carried her down the fire escape stairs in the back of the house. She ran around the garden with her precious bundle and left her up the street at the Petersons’ house with Todd and Clayton. She then returned for Martha.

  She took the littlest one from the house by the same route, laid the sleeping baby down next to her drowsy sister and slipped back to Liz’s house. When she reached the door, she could not bear the thought of stepping inside. Instead, she headed across the alley and six doors up to the home of DOD teacher Amybeth Berner.

  She banged a desperate tattoo on the door. “Come quickly. Something’s happened to Liz,” Barbara pleaded.

  Amybeth and her husband, Bruce, grabbed their coats and followed Barbara across the alleyway. Amybeth came through the front door and her eyes focused on the yellow boots. The rest of the body was covered, but she knew it was Liz.

  Amybeth turned to Patty Peterson. “What happened?”

  Patty said not a word. She just stared into space—a look of disbelief dragged on her face.

  Amybeth turned back to the stairs. She absorbed the scene before her. Blood on the walls—a lot of blood. Blood on the floor—too much blood. Her eyes sought out Michael Peterson. She did not say a word, but he saw the question etched on her face.

  He told her that Liz had a brain aneurysm and had fallen down the stairs. Something did not seem right to Amybeth, but in her shock she could not shape that vague feeling into a concrete conclusion.

  Amybeth hurried back to her home. In the kitchen, she grabbed the green Christmas cookie tin that held her phone numbers. She rooted around until she found the slip for Tom and Cheryl Appel-Schumacher.

  Her knees shook and her hands trembled as she dialed the number. Tom, who was home alone, answered her call.

  “Tom, you need to sit down,” she ordered. “You and Cheryl need to come right away. Liz had an accident.”

  After delivering the news, Amybeth went back to Liz’s house. She approached Liz’s body with the sensation that she was drowning in her own helplessness. She focused in on a bloody footprint on the third step. “Whose footprint is that?”

  “That’s my footprint. That’s when I went to get Martha Baby and Gigi,” Barbara admitted, referring to the little girls by their baby names.

  “This is a crime scene,” Amybeth insisted. “Someone needs to investigate this. Don’t walk up the stairs.”

  “Yes,” Barbara said. “There is an awful lot of blood here.”

  “Yes,” Bruce echoed. “Something is wrong. Something is wrong.”

  At Amybeth’s suggestion, Bruce went outside and checked the perimeter of the house for any signs of forced entry. Amybeth went down three steps to the lower level and checked the sliding glass garden door from the inside. It was locked. She went around to the washroom in the back of the kitchen. That door was locked, too.

  She scanned the house, looking to see if anything was missing or disturbed. They found no evidence of a break-in-no clues pointing to a robbery.

  19

  Cheryl Appel—Schumacher was not at home when Amybeth talked to Tom, because she had already left to go to work at about the same time that Barbara O’Hara entered Liz’s house. Cheryl taught a fourthgrade special education group at the same Department of Defense Overseas School where Liz and Patty were teachers.

  When she arrived in the classroom, she posted all the week’s assignments on the chalkboard. Her students filled in and took their seats at 8:10. It was a short week because of Thanksgiving, and the few days were crammed with work. She was explaining it all to her kids when the school counselor walked in and pulled her aside. She told Cheryl that Tom was waiting in the counseling office with some very bad news.

  A puzzled Cheryl went to meet her husband, worrying about possible scenarios as she walked down the hall. “You have to sit down,” he said as he led her to a chair. Gently, Tom broke the news. “It’s hard to believe, but Liz is dead. She had a hemorrhage. She fell down the stairs. And she is dead.”

  They left the school and went to Liz’s home. The foyer was crowded with people—Amybeth and Bruce Bemer, Barbara O’Hara, cab driver Salvatore Malagnino, Patty and Mike Peterson and the German emergency medical team—when they arrived at about 9 o’clock. Cheryl saw part of Liz at the foot of the stairway, her upper body covered with a coat and her legs and yellow boots sticking out. She turned away. Amy Beth greeted Cheryl with a mournful hug.

  Barbara was near hysteria—crying, sobbing, shaking and talking in a loud voice. The cries and sobs of other voices joined in her chorus of grief.

  The German police arrived on the scene soon after Cheryl and Tom. As the officials examined Liz’s body, Amybeth noted the blood-soaked hair and a cut above her left eye. She translated for her gathered friends that the Germans were trying to decide if Liz died before she hit the floor. She watched as a doctor used a syringe to remove fluid from Liz’s spine.

  Although his German was spotty, Michael Peterson asserted himself as the man in charge of the situation. He communicated as best he could to both the German police and the medical professionals with a mix of English, German and hand signals.

  Mike also called the American military to inform them that a Department of Defense employee was deceased. At noon, Steven Lyons, a special agent for the U.S. Army Command walked through the door with an interpreter in tow. Lyons’ role was to assist the German police and report back to the Defense Department.

  Lyons did not examine the body. He made a cursory exploration of the stairs, looking for anything that would contradict the story Michael Peterson had told him. He found nothing. Except for the pool of blood at the bottom, he did not notice any of the blood running along the length of the stairs. The only American he talked to was the one he described as “the dominating male on the scene,” Michael Peterson.

  Cheryl avoided the stairs as much as she could. Her first sight of Liz’s body seared like a brand into her brain. She did not want the image to penetrate any deeper. She also did not want that image placed in the minds of others. She blocked the door and would not allow any other teachers or neighbors to enter. Patty Peterson spent the whole morning sitting in the kitchen. She heard nothing. She said nothing. She stared wide-eyed out into space.

  Cheryl was appalled when she realized that the military were going to leave without Liz’s body. She wanted to clean up the blood before Martha and Margaret returned home, but she knew she could not begin while Liz lay there abandoned in that crimson pool. She pleaded with Mike to do something.

  When he questioned the departing men he was told they would have to wait for the mortuary people to come from Frankfurt. The military did, however, grant permission to move the body.

  Amybeth laid garbage bags on the floor next to the body. Tom and Mike grabbed the rug beneath Liz and lifted it up and set it down on the bags, hoping to prevent the creation of a blood trail.

  They placed Liz on the bed in Barbara’s room. Tom placed the dripping, blood-soaked rug in a plastic bag and later took it to the cleaners.

  In the house, the friends talke
d about what had happened. Mike said, “She had a cerebral hemorrhage and fell down the stairs. She was dead before she hit the bottom.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Barbara snapped.

  And she was not alone in her skepticism. With the body moved, Amybeth took a hard look at the wall by the stairs. She was nearly six feet tall and yet, at the top of the steps, blood was higher on the wall than she could reach.

  Barbara was antsy and could not wait to leave the house. When the decision was reached that Amybeth, in the middle of another high-risk pregnancy, should not be cleaning up, Barbara went with her and Bruce to their home.

  Cheryl looked at the profusion of blood all the way down the wall by the staircase, the small spatter across the room and the endless lake of it on the floor. She wanted to flee. She wanted to forget. Instead she focused on the two baby girls. She did not want that blood—their mother’s blood—to be part of their memory.

  She got a bowl of water and the leather chamois that Liz used to wash dishes in lieu of a sponge. She trudged up to the top of the stairs.

  The rough stucco-like texture of the walls made cleaning a challenge. Soon, she discovered that small circular motions were the most efficient method. Up above the light switch the spray of blood was so tiny, she had to peer at it to make sure she got every drop.

  At times, she would think about what she was doing and her eyes would well with tears, making it impossible to see. She would take a break and regain her composure. She forced herself to think of this blood as just another mess and got back to work again.

  Rubbing and rubbing. Rinsing the chamois in the bowl until the water became too pink to clean the cloth. Dump the water out. Refill the bowl. Rub and rinse again. She emptied that bowl more times than she could remember.

  Tom cleaned the areas alongside the staircase that Cheryl could not reach. He focused his energies, though, at the foot of the stairs where Liz was discovered. Massive quantities of blood had leaked through and around the rug underneath her body. By now, it had thickened to a jelly-like consistency. The congealed substance clung to the surface. When he wiped at it, the blood moved around in smears. When he did absorb some with the rag, dark blobs hung pregnant on the edges.