Head Shot

by Burl Barer

  The significance of inappropriate conversation from a grandfather shrinks in comparison to the inference of incessant abuse within the family. “I might have to draw some sort of chart or diagram to explain it,” asserted Marty Webb in half jest. “That doesn’t necessarily mean sexual abuse. There are many forms of brother/sister hurt, mistreatment, and exploitation. I’ve heard some scary stories of what may have gone on behind closed doors in that house, but no matter what you did in that family, everything was OK as long as you prayed for forgiveness. I’m not just talking about Lowell and Dolores’s little nuclear family, but the whole extended family of grandparents and uncles. It didn’t matter what sin you were committing. If Jesus forgave you, and He always did, then you could do it again and again... . Yep, a combination of sex and prayer was perfect for that family—as soon they finished with one, they were already on their knees for the other.”

  Marty alleged Dolores Webb sexually molested her son, Wesley, when he was ten years old, and that he confronted her about it as an unpleasant Christmas surprise shortly before she died.

  “I think Marty is off base with that,” responded Gail Webb. “Mom, because of her own horrid experiences, was very protective of us, or tried to be. Wes, like me, doesn’t show pain. For example, when he had appendicitis, by the time he mentioned that he was in pain, it had already burst and he was doubled over. Mom was a nurse, and if he said something hurt, she knew that it meant it had really been hurting him for some time, and she needed to check it out. Any touching of him in any sort of way that could be interpreted as inappropriate would have been purely in a clinical sense. Wes had problems with his genitals when he was younger: his testicles didn’t drop, he had mumps, and Mom was concerned that he would be infertile. Perhaps her medical examinations of him were misinterpreted in retrospect, attributing impure motives that Mom never had.”

  Wesley’s version is significantly different from either Marty’s or Gail’s. He remembers touching his mother in an improper way when he was ten, the result of a leg massage going too far up, and acknowledged bringing it up one Christmas before his mother passed away. According to him, she didn’t remember the incident at all.

  The event was also a breakthrough for Dolores. It was not until her father’s funeral that she acknowledged the intense hate and resentment she harbored toward the man who beat her, raped her, and repeatedly abused her. As a Christian, she knew that she had to forgive him—free herself from the burden of his sins and her resentments. As they lowered him into the ground, Dolores forgave him. He was gone, but his influence lived on.

  “One of my younger sisters,” recalled Gail, “is exceptionally intelligent, a genius IQ, but Andrew and Wesley always told her she was stupid. I believe she was abused physically and emotionally by Andrew and Wesley, and it is really tragic.”

  “Wesley told me,” insisted Marty, “that he had a sexual relationship with one of his older sisters. But now he says that she, who was about four years older than he, wasn’t having any kind of sex; they were just ‘playing around’ out of normal childhood curiosity. You can call it whatever you want,” she said, “but brother-sister hanky-panky makes a big impact on your life, and I’m pretty sure that it has an influence over your choices of boyfriends and husbands. The Webb girls seemed to have no more judgment when it came to picking husbands than I did,” she said with obvious self-mockery. “Take a look at Gail’s taste in men—all of her husbands were either self-centered jerks, murderers, molesters, rapists, crack addicts, or all of the above in various combinations.”

  Gail Webb didn’t disagree with Marty’s characterization of her record of failed romances, destructive divorce-bait matrimonial matchups, and life-threatening relationships. The men Gail Webb found inexplicably appealing were those who lived for the moment, loved themselves, preferred a crack house’s paranoid chaos to the calm comfort of hearth and home, and regarded their wives and children as warm-blooded punching bags and/or spent lust depositories.

  “I got married for the first time in 1971 at the age of nineteen,” recalled Gail, “to a nice fellow who didn’t abuse me. He also didn’t work, didn’t want to work, and had no interest in being a parent. I left him after six years. I married my second husband, a military man, in 1979.”

  Gail’s second spouse was beyond abusive, and disgraced his uniform by horrendous acts of child molestation, including children of his own family. Despite her religious dedication to “stand by her man,” enough was enough. In 1984, while he was stationed in South America, she notified him of her intention of divorce, the irrevocable finality of their separation, and the existence of “another man” in her life.

  Exactly one week before Paul St. Pierre shot Gail’s brother Andrew Webb, Gail’s recently rejected husband flew back to the States and murdered Gail’s boyfriend. “He stabbed him to death,” Gail said tearfully. “My mother flew down and got the kids and took them back with her to Tacoma. About a week later, Mom called and said to get the kids, Andrew had been shot, and then charged with murder. It was all too much. I was already traumatized by what I was going through. My brother—the eldest one, the one whose wife, if I remember correctly, was molested by her grandmother—they just up and took off. They didn’t want to deal with any of it. Because both my situation and Andrew’s were so emotion-heavy, Dad became withdrawn. The combination of crises was more than what Mom could handle. She just snapped.”

  Dolores Webb, who survived so much, finally confronted the limitations of her own elaborate coping strategies. If the crises had abated from that point on, perhaps Dolores Webb’s final decades would have been partially tolerable. Instead, yet another son-in-law was also revealed to be a compulsive child molester who had sex with his own young children, and with virtually all his nieces, and perhaps the nephews, too.

  “Not to be left out of the multigenerational incest and molestation marathon,” added Anne, “Wesley was arrested and sent to prison for sexually molesting Marty’s fourteen-year old daughter from a previous marriage. The poor kid ran away from home and went to the police about it. At first, Marty didn’t believe her.”

  “I’m ashamed to admit that, but it’s true,” said Marty. “I didn’t believe her at first, at all. I thought she was just saying that because she hated Wesley. But it was one hundred percent true. Wesley made a deal with the prosecutor for a shorter sentence, and he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.”

  Wesley Webb doesn’t deny a certain amount of truth to the allegations against him, admitting to one episode of easy familiarity. He maintains to this day that the primary offense alleged against him was a complete fabrication.

  Sexually inappropriate behavior, promiscuity, or avoidance of sexual activity are common among incest survivors, rendering healthy relationships in adulthood almost impossible. “The Webbs either can’t get it up, get it in, or they can’t get enough,” joked Marty. “Some of them can’t bring themselves to do it in any normal way, and the others can’t stop doing it with everybody in any way. One of Wesley’s sexual problems,” Marty said, “was that he had sex with his cousin—I believe it was the daughter of the uncle who molested Gail—and the cousin gave Wesley the clap. Face it, for the Webb clan, childhood play meant toying with the kids. Either they were kissing and fondling, or slapping and hitting.”

  Incestuous relationships, such as those alleged in the Webb family, also self-perpetuate over multiple generations. Among the recurring and most obvious behavioral symptoms of incest victims are sudden outbursts of extreme and violent anger. This can include willful destruction of personal property, furniture, clothing, and other household items.

  Extreme violent anger was a common characteristic of both Lowell and Dolores, and their children were convenient targets. Kids were bounced off walls, whacked with broom handles, and hit repeatedly with a wide variety of household items and utensils. Any comment or happenstance with a possible negative connotation was dealt with immediately.

  The Webb children would often cower outside
their own home after school, peeking in the front window to see if it was safe to enter. Many times it wasn’t safe at all because Dolores, on a rampage of destruction, was smashing everything in sight.

  “Mom’s reputation for violence didn’t lessen with age or time,” acknowledged Gail. “We grew up and had kids of our own, and she would explode at them as well.”

  “The whole family had an issue with abuse, but Grandma Dolores had the worst reputation,” said grandson Travis. “We all knew how bad she could get. I knew because she was still beating on me when I was a teenager. The last time, but not the first, was when I was fifteen. She came at me with her fists, hitting me, striking me, and pummeling me over and over. I just curled up and let her do it. What do you do when an old woman beats you? My aunt heard the ruckus, came in, pulled Grandma off of me, and threatened to call the cops. I don’t know how much further it would have gone.”

  Such painful behavior is seldom discussed beyond household walls, and the Webb family’s violent nature was not shared with the neighbors. The St. Pierres, for example, knew nothing of Dolores Webb’s horrid upbringing or ongoing anger. They knew her only as a friendly neighbor, living in a spacious older home, who, like the other moms on the block, had plenty of kids: the Webbs had nine, the Kisslers fourteen, and the St. Pierres—George and Carmella—had five.

  George St. Pierre is a man of many accomplishments, a schoolteacher, an avid fisherman, and a caring, if strict, father. Carmella St. Pierre is remembered with affection by the Webb boys as the type of neighborhood mom who would meet you at the door with a plate of cookies, and then put you to work.

  Hard workers and attentive parents, George and Carmella St. Pierre were especially protective of their youngest son, Christopher, born with a heart defect. “He had open-heart surgery when he was three and a half months old,” explained his mother years later. “They changed the pressure in the chambers of his heart. Then, when he got to be about four or five, they had to go in and close the hole in his heart. They didn’t give him a fifty-fifty chance to survive. He was the youngest in Pierce County to have survived the operation.”

  Undaunted by his condition, and eager for acceptance, he threw himself into the rigorous demands of boyhood. Exhaustion often outpaced intention; tenacity overrode reason. Being “one of the guys” was all-important; too important. An unofficial third-grade rite of passage—a fistfight—was Chris St. Pierre’s first entree into the world of American masculine stereotypes. George St. Pierre, a “ringside” spectator eager to see his son in action, tacitly approved the prearranged one-fall no-time-limit battle against eight-year-old Willie McGraw. The two third-graders went at it, their dimpled little fists flying. Chris was no match for the more mature and experienced champion, and soon he sought reprieve and turned to his father.

  Little Willie suddenly felt his neck’s scruff clamped by fingers larger than the white-knuckled pink ones pinned beneath his knees. The adult grip of George St. Pierre lifted and ultimately launched Willie into the air. Willie landed a few feet away, more surprised than hurt. George St. Pierre declared the fight over, grabbed his son above the elbow as dads do when they’re displeased, and marched him away in disgust. Christopher St. Pierre gleaned an important insight: no matter what, never give up.

  “As for Mrs. St. Pierre,” said Ericson, “she was also a schoolteacher. She was always a really nice person, and a very sweet lady. Chris wasn’t the only one of their boys with a problem. Paul St. Pierre was challenged as well.”

  Paul St. Pierre’s heart was strong, but his mental and social skills were weak. Forever the outsider, the “slow” one, the brunt of jokes, and perpetual victim, Paul St. Pierre was continually teased, pelted by insults, or rendered invisible by intentional ignoring.

  “Wesley told me that Paul St. Pierre was really mistreated by the other boys in the neighborhood,” said Marty Webb. “They were cruel to him—and kids can be so cruel—when he was a kid.” Desperately wanting friends, hungrily seeking acceptance, baffled by circumstances and overpowered by individuals, Paul St. Pierre lived in a world in which he was seldom welcome—a hostile environment where almost everyone was hell-bent on making him miserable. There were notable exceptions—those treating him kindly received courtesy in return more often than not—but exceptions are, by definition, never the norm.

  “I probably made him miserable myself when we were younger,” acknowledged Roy Kissler. “Then again, I can’t honestly say that Paul got it that much worse than the rest of us when it came to teasing or what you would call ‘kid cruelty.’ That behavior was common back then, and maybe it still is. Perhaps Paul got it worse just because of the way he was—different, sort of slow on the uptake. Then again,” Kissler added thoughtfully, “perhaps Paul St. Pierre was more sensitive. And I don’t mean that in a negative way at all—maybe that stone-cold heart of his wasn’t stone cold at all when he was younger.”

  Paul St. Pierre’s pubescence and adolescence were long past before pediatric researchers discovered that newborn males are more sensitive than females. This male sensitivity continues until banished by the unwritten rules of “American Boyhood”—rules by which it gets trained out, beaten out, or repeatedly stuffed so far down that resurfacing is exceptionally unlikely.

  For boys such as the Webbs, Kisslers, and St. Pierres, the prevalent misconception that somehow boys are biologically wired for aggressive, violent, and risky behavior was an operational reality. Andrew Webb’s younger brother, Ben, who was also Christopher St. Pierre’s best friend, acknowledged that they all did their best to conform to that faulty theory of maleness. By the time they were teens, the boys were acting like hoods, doing the dangerous, illegal, or absurdly stupid.

  Unaccepted as a kid, Paul St. Pierre found teenage inclusion through chemistry. By beclouding his already diminished mental capacities with illegal intoxicants, and stilling any remaining shreds of sensitivity, Paul St. Pierre bought bragging rights with truancy and trouble. More aggressive than assertive, more the bully and less the victim, Paul St. Pierre reinvented himself from the inside out.

  While his older brother became increasingly antisocial, Christopher St. Pierre was developing compensatory tenacity to offset his weak heart and related physical defects. An example of his evolving tenacity, but not his good judgment, was when a schoolyard bully harassed him at Lincoln High School.

  The young St. Pierre took matters into his own hands. He crafted a fistfight equalizer as a wood shop and metal shop project. He made a handle from a wooden cylinder, and then formed a bar of bent metal. He fashioned this into something rather like a pair of brass knuckles. The handle fit into the palm so he could grip it while making a fist; the bar was on the outside of his fingers.

  As a result of using his metal shop ingenuity, Christopher St. Pierre got in trouble. Even this event did not scale the heights of antisocial and illegal activities beyond the Tacoma norm. Then, with the advent of too much beer augmented by too much pot, the neighborhood boys experienced their first “real problem”—one that involved the cops.

  “It was Paul St. Pierre and my younger brother, Boyd,” recalled Roy Kissler. “They broke into a house when they were about sixteen years old. It was about three-thirty in the morning, and they were smoking some pot in an abandoned house. Boyd and Paul came out of the house just when the cops showed up. One of the officers got out and yelled for both to freeze, but they made a mad dash for the car, jumped in, and started it up to make their getaway.”

  The police officer knelt down, aimed a shotgun at the back windshield, and fired. This ended the car’s getaway, but not their getaway. The blast through the back windshield fanned out the pellets, and they hit Boyd in the back of the head. He was thrown against the steering wheel and against his cohort. Paul St. Pierre panicked, jumped out of the car, and took off on foot. He ran through a yard, down the street, to an alley—where he stashed his stocking cap, gloves, jacket, and gun in a nearby garbage can—and jetted toward the front sidewalk.


  As he was walking along, trying to look normal, an older police officer stopped him and told him he had better get off the street because there had been a shooting nearby, and the suspect was still at large. Paul thanked him and agreed to get off the street as soon as possible.

  “I guess Paul thought he was home free when he turned the corner and ran down the block,” said Kissler, “but a few seconds later, his life turned into a scene from a bad action movie—a whole bunch of squad cars came out of nowhere, skidded to a stop, and Paul was surrounded. All of these cops jumped out simultaneously with guns drawn, screaming at Paul to put up his hands, so he did as they asked. What Paul didn’t know was that Boyd’s blood was all over one side of his blue jeans. When he turned away from that old policeman, the cop saw all the blood and called in the squad cars.”

  Boyd Kissler’s parents considered instigating a lawsuit over the incident, but decided against any legal action. Paul St. Pierre pleaded guilty. Facing two to five years at Cascade Correctional Institute for juveniles, Paul St. Pierre accepted the judge’s offer of a reduced sentence in exchange for enlisting in the armed forces.

  Paul opted for the U.S. Marine Corps., and was quite gung ho at first, even trying to recruit all his friends. Once in the marines, Paul became obsessed with bodybuilding, and became stronger and more muscular. Most of all, Paul St. Pierre readily admitted to his buddies, he really liked learning how to kill people.

  While Paul St. Pierre was in the Marine Corps, Christopher St. Pierre devoted his after-school hours to Ericson’s Auto Body.

  “I’d probably known Chris since 1976, when he was just a young kid in junior high,” Mark Ericson recounted years later. “He’s probably four or five years younger than me, and he started working here when he was high school age. I told him that I needed somebody to wash cars and stuff, and he fit in real good—good worker, good kid. He buffed out cars, and this gave him a lot more strength. As a result, Chris could arm wrestle the football players with one hand, and still slam a beer with the other. He loved this new attention and played it up to the hilt. As for his brother Paul, I just remember Chris saying he was trouble. ‘Trouble follows him and he follows trouble.’ ”