Another One Walks Free

Casey Anthony's trial has kept many otherwise productive Americans catatonic in front of their TV screens, hoping to learn in the proceedings how Casey's little girl died and who was responsible for her death.

This whole saga reminds me of my conversations with my father after he raped my retarded, autistic stepsister Denise (in her early twenties) five nights in a row. He was home alone with her while my stepmother was in the hospital undergoing tests for spots on her lungs. 

After several months of bizarre behavior, including an attempt to choke another student in the vocational school she was attending, Denise, who could not speak coherently, finally acted out the ugly scenes for her mother. The evidence was in underwear on the floor of Denise's closet and in her erratic, violent behavior, and in the sentences in my father's daily journal on those days, in his handwriting.

I carry the blame for what happened to her. My husband Whitey and I, musicians on the road with our Vegas-style showband, happened to have that week off in between bookings and had come back to Canton to see our families. I knew my stepmother was in the hospital. I knew my brain-injured father, lacking impulse control, was alone in his house with Denise. A strong inner voice told me that Whitey and I should be staying there with them. Instead, we stayed in a nearby motel. 

Every day my father drove Denise, Whitey and me to the hospital to visit my stepmother. I noticed Denise walking in a way she'd never walked before: bent over from the waist with her hands hanging an inch above the sidewalk in front of her feet. I kept nagging at her to stand up straight. She laughed an embarrassed laugh and stood upright for a few seconds before bending over again.

One day on the drive to the hospital, with Denise in the front seat and Whitey and me in the backseat, my father told us that Denise was "coming on" to him, and he was taking advantage of it. Whitey stiffened up, tightened his mouth, looked straight ahead. I knew his strong convictions against interfering in others' lives. My own years of abuse and incest from my father were still locked away in my own closet of demons. Neither Whitey nor I responded to my father's admission.

My stepmother finally told me about her daughter's rapes a year later, after Denise was already fortressing herself in her upstairs room with everything she could drag and carry from everywhere in the house. My father was still living in the house as though nothing had happened. Denise was already hitting and punching her mother and flying over the dinner table on top of my father toppling him backward onto the floor, screaming, "Why you do that, Daddy Bill?" 

I begged my stepmother to press charges and prosecute my father. I promised I'd help her send him to prison. The only action she took was to move him to the upstairs bedroom opposite Denise's bedroom.

During later visits, I asked my father questions. "Did you rape Denise?"

"Only God and I know that," he replied.

"Are you going to rape her again?"

"I don't know that. You don't know that. No one knows that."

I can still see his blank face and his wide eyes staring at me.

Donahue changed my life one early morning in Minneapolis. His cable show was aired on TV at 1 a.m.  Our band members were gathered in Whitey's and my Holiday Inn room after a night's performance in the nightclub, as we prepared to go out for our routine early-morning "breakfast." 

I was sitting at the end of the bed half-watching Donahue's show on TV. Donahue was interviewing a woman sitting alone in the spotlight. Her parents were up above in the shadows to protect their identities. The woman talked about the impact of incest on her throughout her life, about standing against the closet door full of her anger to hold it shut while the anger seeped out through the cracks around the door. 

I started paying attention. Her story was my story! Every detail she described was my experience, my acting out, my secret pain. Yes! I was an incest victim, too, and I thought I'd escaped it unharmed. In the end, the woman had written a book, and in a final dramatic moment when she revealed that she was a lesbian, the audience gasped. 

Donahue's show was over, but my show had begun, and I was alone in the spotlight of sudden, sickening awareness of the ways I'd acted out my anger and outrage for so many years. When I stood up to leave with the others, I felt dizzy and sick at my stomach. I told Whitey and the other band members to go to breakfast without me, but Whitey sent the others on and stayed with me. I cried loud, angry tears. I had wanted my stepmother to send my father to prison, not for Denise, but for me. A light had turned on in me that would alter the course of my life.

Whitey and I returned to Canton together a few times after we knew about Denise. On one of the visits, Whitey teased me afterwards about getting the "Nasty Child Award for the Day" when I calmly asked my father to move out of that home. He had already fathered a baby daughter with his girlfriend in another relationship. A week later he moved in with them.

I needed counseling. Whitey and I dissolved our band and settled in Colorado Springs. We performed as a duo act for a year. He was already a professional pilot and instructor, so he got a job with a small flight operation. I started seeing a psychologist. Several years later, he and I separated, and I went back on the road as a single act.

After five years, in the final days before the deadline when criminal prosecution would no longer be permitted, my stepmother retained an attorney and pressed charges against my father.

A Grand Jury judge decided that the criminal case would not go to trial. The judge was "corrupt," according to the attorney who handled the civil case several years later. My father wrote to me, "Thank goodness for our justice system!" 

Over my years performing alone on the road, I returned to Canton to visit my stepmother. One day the neighbor answered the door when I knocked. I could hear my stepmother wailing in the living room. Her leg was elevated on a footstool, her ankle was swollen, and her cheek was ripped open. Denise had attacked her and had been taken in a straight jacket to the hospital's mental unit. My stepmother's other daughters were urging her to put Denise in a home, but my mother would not even consider that. Denise was hers.

On one of my Canton visits, I met my father in a restaurant.

"You raped Denise, didn't you?" I said.

 "That's between me and God," he answered, his face blank, his eyes wide and staring. 

I pictured myself standing up and turning the table upside down, crashing the chairs against the floor until they broke into small pieces, racing over to the windows and jerking down the curtains. Instead, I quietly told him that I would never see him again. His dishonesty was too upsetting. He said, "That's okay. I understand. I can get along fine without you."

I saw him again six years later, when I returned to Canton to testify against him in a civil court case on Denise's behalf. My father represented himself and cross-examined me. A few weeks later, we received notice that the jury found him guilty. He was bankrupt. My father would never pay for his crime. 

He wouldn't allow his wife to be present at the trial. I was on good terms with her, and on this day, I wanted her to know that my father was guilty, that he was a predator and a pedofile, and if she didn't protect her ten-year-old daughter, my father would harm her, too. After the trial, I went to their home. They sat across the table from me, and for two hours, we had it out. To write what happened would take several books, but in the end, she told me she believed me and would protect her daughter.

In the months that followed my father's trial, I noticed that I was calmer and my anger had subsided. My visits back to Canton revealed healing of the relationship between Denise and my stepmother. What helped us was to know that others agreed that what my father had done was wrong.

I've averaged an hour a day watching Casey Anthony's blank face and large staring eyes and listening to the testimony. I've watched the trial re-runs and commentary on the news. The public doesn't know what happened to her little girl. The jury doesn't know. Casey knows. Now she walks free-- like O.J. Simpson walked free. 

Not knowing the truth about what happened when the person sitting there knows sends us all into a collective boil. This trial has taken us back to other times when others inside blank faces and large eyes lied to us. 

Ultimately, it takes us back into our own everyday lies to ourselves and others. We make up excuses for not doing things we don't really want to do. We withhold information. We blame others for our shortcomings. We make up justifications for our actions and hide our true feelings from ourselves. This trial and its abrupt ending forces us to ask ourselves the question: Who am I really mad at?