He’s also collecting $1 million in compensation from the state of Texas and a guaranteed $80,000 annuity every year for life. Who knew that the state that executed the most people also was the most generous in compensating for its errors?
Charlie and I miss Effie. She Skypes us in pink plastic curlers, mails food bricks without regard to the cost of postage, keeps up the good fight with her gremlins. The new owners next door painted her house a non-historical Notre Dame blue and gold. The three tiny human terrors they brought with them have ripped out every bit of Effie’s landscaping. Charlie politely refuses to babysit for a standing offer of $20 an hour.
Jo continues her battle with a never-ending supply of monsters, throwing on her white lab coat every day and grinding up the bones of the lost. We’ve become running buddies, and more. The night before Lydia’s grand appearance, she had dropped by. She unfastened her gold DNA charm necklace and looped it around my neck like an amulet of protection.
I spend a lot more time than I’d like to admit thinking about Lydia Frances Bell aka Elizabeth Stride aka Rose Mylett. She makes her home in England, where she lives with her two cats, Pippin and Zelda. At least that’s what it says in the bio on the back of her New York Times bestseller, The Secret Susan. Charlie is reading Lydia’s book on the sly. Let her do it, Dr. Giles insists.
Charlie and Aurora text regularly. They started following each other on Facebook after the media coverage that threw all of us into a boiling soup for two months. Aurora’s had a sucky life, and I haven’t, Charlie tells me, as if defending the relationship. She wants to be a nurse. Her foster parents just bought her an old yellow Bug. She’s still hoping her mom will pick up the phone and call.
Their relationship makes me happy, and uneasy.
My gaze is stretching as far as it can over the sloshing, murky Gulf. I’m thinking about how to paint it. With dark, reckless abstract strokes? With a brilliant Jesus sky resurrecting everything that lives under the surface?
Jesus isn’t a sunburst today. There was a shark attack an hour ago, so there are only a few spots of brave color in the water. It’s cloudy. The water is leaden and impenetrable, like it often is in Galveston even when the sun is shining. The sand is littered with seaweed that makes it feel like you are walking barefoot on a thousand snakes.
My daughter and I return to this rickety rental house for a week every summer anyway. The hard, chunky sand is perfect for castle building. The sunsets are worth every second of still watching. At night, you can plunk down on the seawall and count the fish jumping out of the water in the moonlight. It’s an island, ugly and beautiful, with a history as deep and dark and quirky as ours.
For the first time, we tentatively invited company. Bill may drop by this weekend. I’m on the deck, watching Charlie run along the water’s edge with her friend Anna, whose mom has been whisked to a three-month rehab for her Big Gulp Diet Coke and vodka habit. No one passing by would guess that anything tugs at either of these teen-agers. They are kicking at the surf, laughing, their chatter mixing it up with the seagulls.
Reminding me of two other girls.
Before Lydia hopped a plane, she told the police a serpentine and wholly convincing tale about the night she took out the Black-Eyed Susan killer. Self-defense. Rape. Manipulation by her parents. The police have never considered filing charges. When they stumbled across the same online psychological journal pieces I did, written under the doctor’s name, Lydia freely admitted penning them herself. “It made me feel less like his victim to use his name,” she told them. “I can’t explain it.” So they even let her off the hook for that.
Anti-death-penalty advocates are still trying to goad Terrell into suing her. The female talk show hosts who chatter in silly tribal circles don’t like that Lydia cashed in. Domestic violence groups remain staunchly behind her. She was a teen-age girl sexually manipulated by a killer. Either that, I think, or the other way around. Much has been made about the doctor’s cleverness. The risks he took to thwart the process. His ability to fool a district attorney and a devoted father. The way he snaked onto a list of doctor candidates so I’d choose him myself.
I lock my rage in a place I go less and less often. I use the tricks he taught me. When I do let him crawl into my head, he is very much alive. Sitting under that Winslow Homer painting with his legs stretched out, waiting for me. Slithering in the dark along the lake bottom. They’ve dragged parts of Lake Texoma with high tech equipment three times now, unearthing the skulls of a fifty-something unidentified woman and a two-year-old boy who went under last fall, but not the remains of a monster.
Of course, it makes me wonder.
If almost every word out of Lydia’s mouth was a lie.
If her pockets are full of seeds.
If Lydia and I are really finished.
Just in case, I hold on to a final weapon. Her diary. I’ve curled her notebook into my old hidey-hole in the wall of my grandfather’s basement. I won’t hesitate to pry open that tomb if I need to. Bring all of her darkness and vanity up to the light. Let Lydia’s own words vanquish her. Strip her back down to the pale, weird little girl no one wanted to play with but me.
I do go to sleep certain about one thing.
Wherever Lydia is, alone with her pen or lying on soft sands or stretched out in a field of flowers, the Susans are quietly building their new mansion in her head, brick by brick.
THE END
Look, you shoot off a guy’s head with his pants down, believe me, Texas ain’t the place you want to get caught.
– Lydia and Tessie, 14, watching Thelma and Louise, hanging out the back of a pickup at the Brazos Drive-in, 1992
Acknowledgments
This book took an army of kind, brilliant human beings-scientists, therapists, and legal experts-who generously advised me about cutting-edge DNA science, the impact of psychic trauma on teen-agers, and the slow path to a Texas execution.
Mitochondrial DNA whiz and Oklahoma girl Rhonda Roby consulted on Black-Eyed Susans over text, phone, email, and beer. She also shared her profound experiences identifying victims of serial killers, the Vietnam War, Pinochet, plane crashes, and 9/11. She stood with some of the best scientists in the world at Ground Zero in the days after the attack, and spent years getting answers for families. Her personality, expertise, and humanity are woven throughout this book. And that crazy deer story? It’s true. Rhonda now works a dream job as a professor at the J. Craig Venter Institute.
The University of North Texas Center for Human Identification in Fort Worth is represented with a little fictional license, but not much. Its mission, under Arthur Eisenberg, is beyond imagining-to put names to unidentified bones when no one else can. Law enforcement agencies from all over the world send their coldest cases here. And, yes, UNTCHI did identify one of the unidentified victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy thirty-three years after his remains were dug out of a crawl space under a Chicago house.
George Dimitrov Kamenov, a geochemist at the University of Florida, opened my mind to the miracle of isotope analysis and its current use in solving crimes and identifying old bones. He made me understand, more than anyone ever has, that we are the earth. George also inspired one of my favorite twists.
Nancy Giles, a longtime children’s therapist, provided intricate detail about how both good and bad therapists operate and a reading list of psychiatric textbooks (Shattered Assumptions, Too Scared to Cry, Trauma and Recovery) that changed the course of this book. I was also aided by her son, Robert Giles III, an expert with the Child Assistance Program in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps for the U.S. Navy, and his wife, Kelly Giles, a therapist who has dedicated a good portion of her life to treating abused children. Nancy’s husband, Bob Giles, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and former boss of mine, believed in me early in my journalism career. He’s a big reason why I eventually had the crazy confidence to write a book.