Dancing with the Octopus

by Debora Harding

  “You know your father asked Genie if she thought it was a hoax? The phone call you made? He actually wondered if it was a joke because you didn’t want to move to Iowa.”

  I knew without a doubt that Dad would never seriously suggest to her I might have staged my own kidnapping to get out of the move, that she had taken a fact (I was on the other end of the phone when Dad said he didn’t believe me) and twisted it into something that would serve her own purpose. And sure enough, next came the shot I knew she was lining up on the bow.

  “Do you know your father was confused about what counted as rape and what didn’t?” she said. “So I had to explain it to him? After that stunt of yours last night, I have to tell you, nothing you’d do would surprise me.”

  Dad, oblivious to the attack at hand, climbed back in the van, and my Pavlovian response to his presence kicked in—I adopted the unthinking mind of a dog. The three of us sat in silence, didn’t say a word for the rest of the journey.

  This time we didn’t have to wait for a real estate agent to greet us when we pulled into our freshly painted, five-bedroom, three-story Victorian house in Laurens. The Mayflower truck had arrived the day before—all the furniture had been moved into the appropriately marked rooms, and assembled for us.

  That night, I lay in bed listening to the ominous silence. I looked out my window and thought about this new town of mine with 1,600 inhabitants in the middle of hundreds of thousands of acres of corn, and I suddenly realized I had never seen stars this bright, or a sky as black as a hearse.

  In Which Mr. K Materializes

  Shepherdstown, 2002—When I awoke two hours later, Thomas was sitting on the side of our bed, sipping a fresh cup of tea, a warm, calm look on his face. I could tell he had something to tell me. He nodded in the direction of another hot cup of tea waiting on the table beside me.

  I slowly pulled myself up, felt the familiar stab of self-loathing as I reached over for my cup and took a swig, hoping he couldn’t sense how pathetic I felt. I couldn’t help but wonder how he had the emotional stamina to support me in the way he did.

  “I called the FBI,” he said when my eyes started to focus, “and the agent I spoke to was incredibly helpful.” He paused.

  I nodded, still cloudy.

  “Mr. K’s name is Charles Goodwin, Charles Mark Goodwin, and he was born in 1961. And Deb?” He waited for me to look at him. “He was sentenced to twelve to twenty years for first-degree sexual assault and kidnapping in March 1979.”

  There it was—the facts established without a reasonable doubt by the State of Nebraska. Justice. I might have been standing in a courtroom hearing the sentence for the first time, it hit me so hard. I reminded myself how fortunate and exceptionally lucky I had been all these years to never have had to appear in court, to not have had to stand trial as a victim. But as my initial reaction of the news began to dissipate, it occurred to me then the relief wasn’t triggered for the reason I expected—that I had just received confirmation that Charles Goodwin served time for a kidnapping charge—but instead came from the fact that I was right, despite what my mother had said.

  But what had been so bad wasn’t the fact that Mom had the facts wrong as much as the instant I heard her say it, I doubted my own reality; I threw my fourteen-year-old self under the bus. I’m the one who gave her that power. It wasn’t her fault. It was mine. What a relief we got that straightened out. I must have misinterpreted her point. Of course she hadn’t meant to imply I hadn’t been kidnapped. This was about his sentence. She thought because Mr. K hadn’t shown up to collect the money, they couldn’t charge him legally with kidnapping. And then the voice of Dr. H kicked in. “You aren’t wrong, and you aren’t confused. Trust that feeling. It’s your inner voice telling you something’s off.” I suddenly heard Thomas’s voice over the emotional roller-coaster in my head.

  “Deb—did you hear me? I said Charles Goodwin is coming up for parole in six months’ time.”

  “What?”

  “He’s been in prison this whole time—twenty-four years. He has a parole hearing in September.”

  That didn’t make any sense. I had been told by my friend that he had been released in 1986. Nor did his birthdate, which suggested he was just three years older than I was. I had always thought he was in his thirties.

  Thomas told me he also called the Omaha World Herald and asked them to send us any articles between 1975 and 1990 that mentioned a Charles Goodwin. We were going to fact-check this thing properly.

  Need I say the synchronicity between hallucinating he was in my house and finding out he was just coming up for release did not help my already anxious-ridden mind.

  In Which I Review the Headlines

  Shepherdstown, 2003—A few weeks later, a rather thick package arrived in the mail. There were about twelve articles spanning four months—stories that gave definition to the mystery of the man who disproportionally impacted my life, yet who remained in the shadows for twenty-five years.

  There was information about Goodwin’s former arrests, time served in juvenile, speculation about motives, and results from his psychiatric evaluation. But the most difficult to read were those detailing the abduction, the ransom demand, and most heartbreaking of all—an article describing my father’s experience that day, his helplessness.

  Contained in these articles was the answer to why “Charles Goodwin,” as I was struggling now to call him, was still in prison. On December 21, 1987, he had been paroled from the Lincoln Community Corrections Center after serving nine years of his twenty-year prison term for sexual assault and kidnapping. The article mentioned he had obtained a bachelor of arts in psychology, and several people at the University of Nebraska, at Lincoln, had testified on his behalf.

  He had been free for less than three weeks when he robbed a Union Bank branch in Lincoln, Nebraska, at gunpoint, wearing a pink bathrobe and long underwear. He faked an accent, which led them to believe that he was of either Hispanic or Middle Eastern descent. He ordered two female employees to lie on the floor in the back room, where he bound them with tape and then forced a third employee to take money from the vault and help him load it into his car. He walked away with more than $250,000 in cash, which made it the largest-ever cash bank holdup in Nebraska.

  But his itch for fancy cars got him. The same afternoon he robbed the bank, Goodwin went out and bought a Trans Am, in cash, paying extra to have it painted red. The owner of the garage, suspicious at that amount of cash, called the police. Goodwin was arrested soon after, with the weapon he used to rob the bank—a pellet gun.

  Five months later, on June 3, 1988, Charles Goodwin, while still in the local jail awaiting trial, faked a knee injury. As they were moving him to the hospital for an X-ray, he jumped out of the van and managed to run several blocks before being tackled by an officer, at which point he pulled a knife out of his pocket, made from a toothbrush and razor blade, and sliced the officer’s thumb before finally being subdued. He was charged with escape, second-degree assault, and use of a knife to commit a felony. So in addition to having the privilege of finishing his time for crimes against me, he now added time for bank robbery—another federal crime—and assault of a prison officer. And that was why he was still in prison.

  As the outline of Mr. K began to take the form of Charles Goodwin, I found my emotions slowly evolving into something I had never had to deal with before. This “guy” was a real human being, and his name was Charles Goodwin. I couldn’t bear to say his name without feeling I was giving him more respect than I cared to. So I preferred to call him the Fucking Asshole for a while. It was permission I had never given myself before.

  In Which I Fact-Check

  Shepherdstown, 2003—The articles did a lot to assuage my doubts about my own ability to perceive reality and recall history. They also had a punch. If my memory was correct about the abduction, it meant my memory was likely as a whole to be reliable. Trustworthy. And there was a lot of childhood material back there that I’d prefer to
think I had wrong.

  Now that I felt more confident in my own story and had learned Mr. K’s name and that in fact he was a seventeen-year-old punk, I needed to know what happened to that fourteen-year-old me. When, for example, did my father contact the police? Why did Goodwin plead not guilty and then switch to a plea bargain? Why was it I never had to go to court? Thomas suggested that if we got a hold of the police records, we might find the answers. They’d have witness statements and other evidence records—but procuring these would be difficult. They might have been destroyed by now.

  I thought of my childhood friend Kate Shugrue. She was working as a senior lawyer for Child Protective Services, in the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office. Our connection had never weakened, and I knew I could always call her.

  Once I got in touch, she was immediately supportive and thought it was natural that now that I was an adult, I’d want answers to what had happened that night. She asked about my parents, and when I told her, honestly, I was nearly estranged because of difficulties with Mom, Kate said she wasn’t surprised. She remembered my mother as a taskmaster, and that she seemed distant and uninterested in me and my friends. “She used to push you and your sisters so hard on the housework!” Kate said, thinking more about it. “And we’d never hang out at your house, always at mine. Now I understand why you always seemed to take such a shine to my mom.” It was clear to her the Monday I showed up at school, talking about the kidnapping in the same tone as about what I had for breakfast that morning, that I was not getting the support and love I needed and deserved at home. She said she’d help me find out the full story in any way she could. There was a good chance that the police reports might no longer be on file, but she would see what she could do. Several days later, another large envelope arrived.

  I opened it to find a complete copy of the court files. The report included witness statements from people who had been involved that night—the gas attendant, the woman who rescued me and helped me into her office, the undercover officers who waited with my father, the friend of Charles Goodwin who had turned him in—all the pieces of that horrific night, all the parts of the story I had never heard.

  Most chilling of all was Goodwin’s original testimony, given right after his arrest. He had been happy to brag about the whole assault, in extremely foul language, confirming not only every single fact as I remembered it but with a violence that leapt from the page. This is when I learned that the railcar he left me by was next to a loading dock, and that after he left me, he drove to the Center Shopping Center open-level parking garage, where he saw my father and parked the van on the third level. He said in his statement to the police that when he left the vehicle, he noticed what he thought were undercover police. No problem, cool as a cucumber, he asked a stranger if he could borrow a dime to make a call, fake-dialed someone, hung up, and walked off to a McDonald’s to have a hamburger. That detail still gets me. If there had been any question of whether Goodwin had been treated unfairly by the court system, pushed into a plea bargain, this eliminated it.

  Near the bottom of the stack of pages, I found the hospital reports and the description of what had been done to me in medical terms. I had no idea of the history of my own fourteen-year-old body. After fighting back waves of nausea, I sealed the reports back in an envelope, never wanting to lay eyes on them again.

  The most difficult report for me was the last one, which listed the evidence gathered from the van. In addition to a sample of my blood, which they had identified from a piece of carpet in the back of the vehicle, there was another piece of evidence found: irrefutable proof of the personal cost, my cross necklace.

  In Which I Solve a Psychological Riddle

  Shepherdstown, 2003—Now that I had all the articles, the witness statements, and the police records, I spent hours, with Thomas’s help, fitting the pieces together. After we were done, I felt strung out, but I knew this time that it wasn’t anything sleep couldn’t sort out.

  Three months had passed since Thomas had contacted the FBI. Meanwhile, Mr. K’s parole loomed. Though I tried to dismiss fears that he could be a danger to me or my family, it wasn’t that easy. I had learned enough in therapy to know the antidote to anxiety is not logic; the antidote to anxiety is noting it and letting it pass. But in this case, my mind was exploding with variables, and I couldn’t fight the analytical part of my brain that was wrestling for order.

  For example, I couldn’t put to rest my fear that Charles Goodwin would try to contact me after his release. It wasn’t simply a question of would he or wouldn’t he contact me. It was a question of chance. What were the chances he would appear in my life—the percentage of probability?

  That there was a probability at all, I wouldn’t have even been thinking had it not been for the letter he sent to my Iowa address in 1980 and the freak coincidence of his meeting my friend Kim Haller in prison, in 1986, eight years after the crime.

  What I could say with confidence was that it was unlikely he spent the same amount of time thinking about me that I spent fearing him. If Thomas hadn’t thought to investigate the reasons for my hallucinations, I wouldn’t have known he was still behind bars. Learning of the timing of his parole was coincidental; unfortunate in terms of timing, but that was all.

  I drew a diagram on a piece of paper so I could see it visually, separate the two.

  (A) The sniper attacks triggered (B) hallucinations/PTSD symptoms. This was based on memories of past trauma.

  (C) New information of his reincarceration and parole timing triggered (D) appropriate levels of anxiety based in present time.

  Was it any wonder I was overwhelmed? Identifying the variables and giving them order certainly helped the picture look less fragmented. One set lived in the world of memory, the other in my world today.

  It struck me this equation had striking similarities to the work I had just done with Dr. H with regard to my childhood.

  (A) My children reaching the age at which I first had memories of the abuse triggered (B) Mom’s voice in my head and intrusive flash-backs/PTSD symptoms. This was based on memories of past trauma.

  (C) Our move back to America put me back in proximity with Mom, which triggered (D) present anxiety and distance concerning my relationship with her, based in present time.

  I was still hoping that time was going to produce some sort of resolution, at least a new arrangement that could salvage my relationship with Dad.

  In both cases—the relationship with my mother and the relationship with Mr. K—I was trying to separate current challenges from the legacy of trauma they had left me.

  Turning my attention back to Charles Goodwin and putting my mother aside, at least for now, I began wondering what the chances were that he was actually rehabilitated. He was a violent rapist, and a repeat violent offender. Having spent twenty-five years in jail, what were the chances that he had changed?

  While researching the recidivism rates of violent offenders, I came across the concept of restorative justice. In an effort to address the shortcomings of the criminal legal system, some prisons were facilitating dialogue between victims and offenders.

  This allowed victims to ask questions that are left unanswered in the wake of a crime. Some do it because they haven’t been able to move on with their lives, some because they want answers to questions. Some had managed to reconcile with their offenders. A few even established ongoing relationships. Just imagining that made my stomach curdle.

  I was now an adult making decisions for my fourteen-year-old self, no longer under the custody of my parents. Would gaining a better understanding of the forces that shaped that day put my fears to rest? Despite the serious depressive episodes, the seizures, the dark current of anxiety that had been a part of my inner world for as long as I could remember, I had refused to let this crime define me. Would reopening the door to my unresolved childhood trauma really help anyone?

  Every time I thought of calling the Nebraska State Penitentiary to see if they offered such a p
rogram, I felt my heart rate quicken. I’d be breaking unspoken boundaries that my parents had set years ago. There must be statutes of limitations on something like this. It felt slightly perverse, like I was stepping into dangerous territory just by making the call. Adolescent even. Like I was fourteen years old and disobeying Mom and Dad.

  I decided to make some notes—a process that always slowed my mind. But one of the questions I wrote down threw me—“Was the dog wagging the tail, or the whale tagging the dog?” Just the fact that my brain had dished up a spoonerism threw a chink in my new armor. Was any of this a good idea given I had just recovered from a mental breakdown?

  In Which Charles Generously Provides His Services

  Lincoln, 2003—Charles found himself feeling more and more elated. He was at the last stop in his incarceration, the Lincoln Community Corrections Center. For the first time in over twenty-four years, at the age of forty, he was beginning to let himself think like a free man. It could even be argued he had been in prison longer than that. He was fourteen years old at the time of his first arrest and had spent his youth in and out of juvenile facilities.

  His parole hearing was two months away in September, and the state couldn’t hold him much longer. The recidivism rate was much higher for offenders who left prison without a period of supervised parole, so it was unlikely that they would require him to serve the full twenty-five years as it meant he wouldn’t be under observation.

  He was trying not to get too cocky about it because you never know what might go wrong. This time, he wanted to do it right. He had decided he really wanted to live a life outside prison. Since moving to the Lincoln Release Center, he had successfully held down two jobs in the community for a couple of months. He was still being escorted back and forth to his job sites, but he was able to put money in an account for the first time in years, and was accumulating cash for a deposit on a place to live. The telemarketing he enjoyed enough—his boss was impressed with the easy manner he had with folks and said he was a natural (his boss had a sense of humor). But hanging drywall was better pay, the hours flew by faster, and he enjoyed the team aspect of the work.