|
 CELLBLOCK ‘A’
Karla gave Paul everything he wanted, including her younger sister. When he wanted more, she gave and gave until finally, he gave her a beating that almost killed her.
Everyone saw the picture. It was on the front page of all the newspapers. Paul had hit her so hard on the back of her head with one of those big, black, steel flashlights that her eyeballs almost popped out and a mask of bruising welled up around her sockets. The doctor said it was the worst case of abuse he had ever seen.
When things had been better between them, before the atrocities began, Karla had sent Paul a love note that said “All men are not alike... You are so special, you mean so much to me... amo nunquam obliviscar.”
Amo nunquam obliviscar – Latin for “Oath of Love, never to be forgotten.”
But he did forget.
Now, monitored by the same video technology with which he was so obsessed when they were together, day by day, month by month, year by year, Paul wastes away in a tiny cell in the Kingston Penitentiary’s segregation unit with Karla’s amo nunquam obliviscar eating his brain. It’s a cinch he’s never going to forget that broken oath now – at least not as long as he is compos mentis.
It only took Paul a few years to betray Karla. It took the prison authorities seven. Instead of packing up her belongings and getting ready to move to the Elizabeth Fry Society’s halfway house on the outskirts of tony Westmount in Montreal, Karla found herself unpacking her posters and pictures in a tiny cell of her own, this one on Cellblock A in the Regional Reception Center at Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines in the province of Quebec.
Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines is a complex of correctional service facilities near the small rural town of the same name, about a fifty-minute drive directly north from downtown Montreal. A bunker-like compound made up of different pods that are distinguished only by the level and severity of the inhabitants’ security classifications, it sits back off the road in the middle of a vast cornfield.
Karla was being “oriented” to the Center by the resident psychologist, a petite, bespeckled creature named Christine
Perreault. Karla needed orientation. Even though she had been a model prisoner throughout the seven years she had been in prison, she had, by this point in early April, 2001, been in four different institutions in less than six months and moved by airplane back and forth across the country.
It did not take long to realize that this time she was in a very peculiar place indeed. It was not quite hell, but it was headed in that direction. The Regional Reception Center was the clearinghouse for all male prisoners in Quebec. Every man convicted of a crime which garnered a prison sentence of more than two years was first sent to Sainte-Anne to be assessed and evaluated for a period of four to six weeks. Each of them, Dr. Perreault explained – over a thousand a year – is watched, interviewed, given a few computerized psychological tests including the ubiquitous Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory(MMPI-2) and assigned a security classification.
MMPI-2 is the nucleus of psychological testing because it is the test against which any other of the myriad tests a
psychologist might chose to administer are measured. The test requires one of three responses to hundreds of statements about behavior, feelings, social attitudes and psychopathological symptoms. The subject answers each question with either a “T” for "true," a “F” for "false," or a “?” for "cannot say." The answers are then scored on scales established by the tests’ authors, a psychiatrist named J.C. McKinley and psychologist named Starke Hathaway.
In prison, one’s security classification is everything. There are only three possibilities – minimum, medium or maximum. From the time Karla arrived in prison on July 6, 1993, she had been classified as a medium security prisoner. The security classification determines in which of a dozen different institutions a con will do his/her time and how hard that time will be.
Karla surmised during her orientation that the Regional Center at Sainte-Anne was going to be where she was kept, at least for the foreseeable future, maybe even until she had served her full sentence, four years hence. This was not good news. Karla had fully expected to be returned to Joliette, Quebec’s only medium security prison for women from whence she had been so unjustly plucked that past Thanksgiving.
There were five other women on Cell Block A. As Karla wrote to a friend “This a very boring place to do time, outside of the regular self-injuries, headbanging, screaming, emergency interventions, etc. there is nothing much going on...The women here are in prison for a variety of things. Some of them are not max material, some are mental health (meaning women with identifiable mental defects or disease,) some are typical max women. They ended up in prison for various reasons, the typical abuse and drugs. Most women in prison have similar stories. They end up in max for various reasons, mostly violence in other prisons.”
But none of them – regardless of whether they were “max material,”“mental health,” or Karla – were welcomed in Sainte-Anne and it did not take Karla very long to discover this fact of life. “This is not a place for women,” she continued. “We are not wanted here by anyone. It is a fight to get anything. We are constantly insulted.... It is not nice to be somewhere you are not wanted.”
It was never intended that anyone, man or woman, be “housed” in the Reception Center for any length of time. Its sole raison d’etre was the evaluation and processing of male prisoners. Women in prison have different needs than men. To be responsible for the long-term incarceration of six women in a facility specifically designed for the short-term evaluation of men made the administrators’ lives hell.
As Camille Trudel, the Reception Center’s Program Manager and a thirty-year veteran of the Correctional Service explained to me when I visited the prison in the summer of 2001, the entire complex was routinely locked down whenever one of the women had to be moved, whether to attend the medical unit or just buy cigarettes at the canteen across the pod. Things were a bit looser now, but not much.
There had been no real effort made to accommodate women either. For instance, there were no hairdressers. Karla’s dark roots were already showing when she was flown back to Quebec in mid-January, after her fourteen-week stay in a psychiatric facility operated by Correctional Services in Saskatoon where she had been isolated and psychiatrically probed against her will.
Well, that was not entirely true. It was true that by law and by virtue of its own regulations, the prison system was supposedly prohibited from conducting psychiatric or psychological examinations without consent. However, Karla had recently come to clearly understand that they broke their own rules and regulations all the time, whenever it suited them.
Once she was ensconced in the Regional Psychiatric Center in Saskatoon and against her better judgement, she had decided to cooperate.
“I was basically threatened. Not outright, the threat was subtle. I was informed that if I did not cooperate then that could be used against me to increase my security level to maximum. And that was the last thing I wanted. Of course, back then, they were also promising me that when they were finished I would go back to Joliette.”
Ever since Karla’s plea bargains with the Ministry of the Attorney General in 1993 delivered her twelve years in exchange for guilty pleas to two counts of manslaughter and her testimony against her ex-husband, she had been led to believe in a fate very different than her recent experience and arrival at Sainte-Anne signaled.
Everybody had said that if she was a good girl, if she minded her P’s & Q’s, did her school work, applied herself to the prison’s programs, bettered herself, did not do any of the bad things that women in prison do, such as fight, drink and take drugs, she would treated fairly. And in fairness, she would be released from jail – on parole – no later than July 6, 2001, after serving two-thirds of her sentence.
By law, all prisoners in the country are automatically released after they have served two-thirds of their sentence. It was very rare that the overcrowded prisons moved to detain a prisoner beyond that individual’s Statutory Release Date, known throughout the system as an SRD.
Karla’s lawyer, George Walker, had explained early on what a twelve-year sentence meant – four years, if she continued to behave as she had (this was when he used to visit her in Kingston before Paul Bernardo’s trial, during the first two years of her incarceration) and eight years if she was the worst inmate in the world.
Although there was no impediment to Karla applying for full parole as early as July 6, 1997, after she had served only four years of her sentence, and indeed, the judge and the prosecutor at her trial had deferred parole recommendations, a sign that the authorities would not oppose any application she might bring, Karla herself demurred and decided to wait for her Statutory Release.
Karla had lived up to her end of the bargain. If her name weren’t Karla, she would have been the poster girl for the country’s new women’s penology. She completed the necessary high school credits and then went on to get her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology through a local university’s correspondence program. (Ironically, the only Bachelor of Arts program on offer to her through correspondence from Queen’s University was psychology. She had really wanted to read the law, but that was not possible by correspondence. Sociology had been her next choice, but there were not enough correspondence courses to get a degree.)
The majority of women in prison do not have the equivalent of a Grade Eight education and very few emerge with any further academic credentials. There are many ways to do time and the statistics show that most simply waste it or fight it.
Karla kept her nose clean and stayed out of trouble. She “graduated” from all of the programs the prison insisted she take such as “Anger Management” and “Survivors of Abuse.”
With the prison’s encouragement, she gladly took the “Peer Support” courses offered at Joliette and made a concerted effort to help other women who were having trouble on the inside. But the betrayal was more egregious still because not only did the system not live up to its end of the bargain, it was now patently obvious they were really trying to screw her in the process and make the remaining years of her sentence hell on earth.
What no one seemed to grasp was the fact that doing time in the Reception Center at Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines was a lot “easier” than doing time in Joliette. In Joliette, you were kept busy fourteen hours a day. It was a very structured, disciplined environment. If you were even a minute late for work, or one of your courses, you received demerit points on your record and demerit points directly affected your privileges and progress.
It was no picnic either, trying to live and keep up in a house with seven or eight other drug-addled, strung out women who came from all different walks of life, none of whom were very pleased with themselves or wanted to be where they were. Some women just couldn’t cut it in that kind of environment and those women were sent to special segmented maximum security lockups in men’s prisons like the Regional Reception Center or the big male pen out in Saskatoon.
In Sainte-Anne, they did not really care about the six women they housed. As long as they stayed out of the way and did not cause any trouble, everybody was happy. Not only were there no hairdressers, there were no programs, no therapy (Dr. Perreault was the only staff psychologist and responsible for overseeing and interpreting the administration of the psychological testing) and no work to speak of either.
“Oh well,” as Karla wrote in one of her letters, “I still get paid the same $6.90 a day.”
In Joliette, Karla was working thirty-three hours a week and getting regular therapy. She had responsibilities for which she was held accountable. And she had hope. No one had disavowed her of her obvious belief that she was going to be released on her Statutory Date, in fact quite the opposite. They encouraged her to work hard toward it.
Here, they opened her cell door at 7:30 a.m. The yard opened at nine. She had to be back in her cell by 10:30 p.m. when they were locked in for the night.
Between 7:30 a.m. and 10:30 p.m., she did exactly as she liked. She had all the time in the world to sit around and think, put on her makeup, fix her hair, take showers, exercise, watch television, read, write letters, kibitz with the other women, sunbathe, and generally twiddle her thumbs. It was by far the easiest time she had done, but the least fulfilling.
It was sure a hell of a lot easier than her first four years in Kingston’s antiquated, gothic Prison for Women where she had been locked down in her tiny third-floor cell twenty-three of twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Then again, now that she thought about it, maybe not. The first two years before she testified at her ex-husband’s trial had really been the easiest time of all. She might have been isolated in the prison tower but they treated her like a princess. She was continually being coached by police and prosecutors in preparation for her appearance as their “star” witness, often for days, sometimes for months at a time. And the prison had provided a psychologist and a psychiatrist whom she could see as often as she wished. During the first two years, Karla often had three or four therapy sessions a week.
Things did change after she testified. Although Sergeants Bob Gillies and Gary Beaulieu came down to see her one last time as they had promised, she never saw another policeman or prosecutor. As far as the police and prosecutors were concerned, Karla had served her purpose. What happened to her from then on was no longer their concern. They got what they wanted – her testimony against her husband and his conviction, on all counts.
At least the prison did not abandon her. They seemed to redouble their therapeutic efforts on her behalf. She kept seeing the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Roy Brown, until he got sick in 1996 and left the prison. He was old and never came back. Then they sent a very prominent Kingston-based psychiatrist, Dr. Sharon Williams, to see her. Dr. Williams was very nice and helped Karla with some issues she had, particularly what she should tell someone whom she might meet after she was released about her crimes and time in prison. But that was a long time ago now.
Karla’s thirty-second birthday was coming up on May 4. Her girlfriends from high school, with whom she used to celebrate around the pool in her parents’ backyard, had long since stopped sending her cards. One by one, they had all betrayed her too. Her former very best girlfriend, Kathy Ford, nee Wilson, had even sold Karla’s letters to a tabloid newspaper. Kathy said it was compensation for the fact that by simply being there, and being in so many of the shots, Karla and Paul had ruined her wedding videos. Karla had always been a bit jealous of Kathy and her seemingly perfect marriage – to a Marine named Alex Ford. Since coming to Sainte-Anne, Karla heard that they were now divorced. So much for happy endings. Karla took some solace knowing that other people “fucked up” too.
Karla would occasionally catch herself dwelling on some ridiculous artifact, like Kathy Ford and her letters, that meant absolutely nothing to her anymore. So much had changed over the seven years she had been in prison. After she had testified in the summer of 1995 and returned to Kingston, her mother started to suffer annual breakdowns between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The reality of what had happened finally sunk in and her mother’s collapses were severe enough that she was hospitalized, sometimes for months at a time. And now her father, who, although quiet, had always been a bit of a rascal and robust, had multiple sclerosis. And her beloved Rottweiler dog, Buddy, was dying. On the plus side, her surviving sister, Lori, with whom she had remained close, had finally married and now had a baby that Karla absolutely adored. Her sister brought him to Joliette so Karla could see him when he was barely two months old. He was beautiful. Karla wanted children herself so badly that the visit had been strangely unsettling.
After years of haggling, the authorities had decided, once and for all, to close the dilapidated Kingston prison. Karla was transferred to general population in Joliette on June 1, 1997. In Joliette, Karla made many new girlfriends and she celebrated her last few birthdays with Tracy Gonzales and Christina Sherry, Linda Veronneau and Stivia Clermont.
Three and a half years later, in what was no more than a politically motivated publicity stunt, Karla’s keepers unceremoniously transferred her to the Psych Center in Saskatoon where she was placed in maximum security isolation. They did not have hairdressers there either. Karla was almost able to look back on it now and laugh. For the first time in a half-dozen years, her mother had managed to stay out of the booby hatch and there Karla was, locked down in one four thousand miles away. She and her mother had actually chuckled about it on the phone. For the first little while out there, every time she phoned her mother the call would not go through and she had to redial two or three times, a sure sign that the prison was monitoring her phone calls. Calls were not supposed to be monitored unless the prisoner was advised, but they were anyway. She confronted the Warden. Naturally, he denied it but after that her calls went through on the first try.
After years in the open environment with eighty other women in Joliette, other than a couple of nurses, two shrinks, a psychologist named Cindy Presse and a couple of her grad students, the only other person she talked to over the four months she was there was her mother.
When they finally shipped Karla back to Quebec in January, they did not immediately place her in Sainte-Anne. There was no room. They had to wait for one of the six cells on Cellblock “A” to become available. Instead, they put her in Institut Philippe Pinel, a psychiatric hospital on the northern boundary of Montreal. They did not offer her any therapy in Pinel either. It made absolutely no sense.
Karla’s favorite place of all the places she had been was Joliette. Not only was it a structured and a disciplined environment where all the inmates were required to work and attend programs, everyone was responsible for the upkeep of their property and for cooking and feeding themselves. The groceries were bought with pooled wages.
Each woman earned $6.90 a day, a minuscule sum given that a bag a potato chips at the prison store or canteen was $3.50. The store in Joliette was well stocked and run by the inmates. However, groceries were as expensive, perhaps in some cases even more expensive, than groceries in those twenty four hour mini-marts on the outside. Meager wages and healthy prices meant there was no way to opt out of the cooperative thing. The only way to get sufficient food was for each woman to contribute her share to the house fund and buy enough groceries to feed everyone. Some of the women could not cook, others would not cook. Practicing a primitive form of democracy, the house members quickly had to select cooks and cleaners and divide functions in some semi-equitable way. This was not easy. It was actually very difficult. And just when you seemed to get things working they way they should, one of the women would be paroled, and another, new, disoriented or disgruntled con would take her place and everything would become tenuous again.
Celebrating someone’s birthday in Joliette in 1998 – Karla did not think it was hers – she and Christina and Tracy got dressed up in their best dresses. Karla wore a little, black cocktail sheath. They all put on lots of makeup. It was no big deal but they made a birthday cake and had a lot of fun.
The prison recreation committee made a camera available so inmates could take pictures and send them to their family and friends. Two years later, Karla’s picture showed up on the front page of the September 22, 2000, edition of the Montreal Gazette.
A firestorm of publicity ensued. Everything, from her styled blond hair, to the dark eye makeup, painted lips and sleeveless dress, incensed the public. What did they think? That they wore sackcloth and shuffled around in leg chains. All the women in prison wore their own clothes. As far as she knew, it had ever been thus. “It makes me laugh,” Karla wrote in the aftermath, “how little the public knows about what really goes on in prison.”
Newspapers across the country picked up the pictures and extrapolated the story with verbose editorials by indignant columnists. People wrote letters to the editors. They telephoned, faxed and e-mailed their Members of Parliament, the Solicitor General and the Commissioner of Corrections. Members from the right-wing Alliance Party howled.
Even though birthday parties and other gatherings are common in prison, prison officials expressed regret and a sense of helplessness. This was somewhat pawky too, given it was the prison that supplied the camera with which the pictures were taken in the first place.
Karla instantly scanned a mental lineup of possible betrayers. It was not Tracy Gonzales. She was still in Joliette. Linda Veronneau would not do it. At that time Linda was in love with Karla and Karla would have been the last person Linda would betray. Neither would Stivia Clermont. It was not her style.
Christina Sherry had been paroled but it wasn’t her either. Christina would not have wanted those pictures published anymore than Karla did. As it was, Christina was on the outside when the pictures appeared and she lost her hard-won waitressing job because of them.
The paper said that they bought the pictures from an ex-con for $500. It could have been Mary Smith, it was the kind of thing she would do. Like Karla she was doing time for manslaughter but she was incredibly bossy and belligerent and everyone was really happy when she had been paroled.
But Karla was skeptical. One would think that even an idiot like Mary Smith would have known that she could have easily sold the pictures to one of the Toronto newspapers for thousands of dollars just as one of Karla’s own uncles had done with her wedding photographs years earlier. And given the timing, and how bad it was for her, Karla would not put it past the prison to have been the source. For them, the timing was perfect. The pictures portrayed Karla as a vamping slut, living la vida loca in what the media dubbed “Club Fed” and the “Hen Pen.”
Tracy Gonzales and Christina Sherry had been involved with a notorious Montreal pimp named James Medley and had been convicted on sexual assault charges to do with some kind of bizarre, violent tryst of his design. They were very different women than Karla - both much younger, drug-addled street kids who had run away from abusive homes. Their stories and their crimes were dramatically different. The one common element, perhaps, was the fact that all three women had somehow fallen under the spell of a sadistic sexual predator. But the press made it sound as though Joliette were a sandbox in which women who committed heinous sex crimes spent their time cavorting in townhouses with color televisions. In retrospect, Karla realized that the party pictures and the attendant furor raised the specter of Karla the Sex-Crazed Killer again and made it much easier for the prison to do what it had fully intended to do anyway.
Karla’s family had long-standing plans to visit her in Joliette that Thanksgiving weekend. They had not seen each other since the previous year and the visit was much anticipated. Sixteen days after the pictures appeared in the Gazette, on the Friday night that began the long weekend, at 11 p.m., Karla found herself the only passenger on a seven-seat Pilatus 7, flying into the oblivion of the prairie night with her legs shackled to the seat, two, silent, armed guards on either side and a soggy egg-salad sandwich in her lap.
* * * * * * *
Situating her beloved Disney and Care Bear posters, collating the dozens of pictures she had collected of her nephew and thinking about all this in her new cell at Sainte-Anne, Karla decided to do a little “housekeeping.” Looking around, she determined that her new cell was really about the same size as the sub-basement room she used to have when she lived at home with her parents. The metal cot with its roll-up mattress and the stainless steel toilet made it a little different but there was a desk and chair and a built-in ottoman. The heavy, steel door was typical of max units. She had a window though. It was about waist-high. Although there were bars embedded in the concrete structure, the window itself opened pretty wide, and on that particular day the sun was shining brightly and there was a very pleasant early spring breeze.
At the bottom of one of her boxes, she found Dr. Hans Arndt’s business card. Running her fingers over the embossed lettering, good memories of him and his sleep therapies came rushing back. At various times between the day they first met on March 4, 1993, and the time Karla went on trial on July 2, 1993, Dr. Arndt would check her into Northwestern General Hospital in Toronto and mix up drug concoctions that knocked her out for three days at a time. It was bliss. Once he kept her in the hospital for eight weeks, prescribing copious amounts of drugs and giving her daily therapy. Dr. Arndt was the first psychiatrist Karla had ever met. He really helped her and she really liked him.
A kindly, German-born man, he would have made a far better Freud than Montgomery Cliff in John Huston’s 1962 biopic. Tall, lean and prone to tweedy jackets, his wire-rim glasses had a tendency to slip down his nose and the balding pate of his head was endearingly shiny. Dr. Arndt had been on Karla’s side. There was no one on her side now.
For a while, during her first few years of incarceration, she had written to Dr. Arndt. She told him all about what her life in prison was like, about the other women in the segregation unit where she was kept at P4W, the university courses she was taking by correspondence, the police and prosecutors who were then coming to see her regularly and her growing sense of self-assertiveness. She asked for his advice and counsel about her psyche and the medication she was being prescribed by the prison psychiatrist.
He replied with spirited, chatty, supportive letters. In one of her letters to Kathy Ford that had just been published in the paper, Karla said that she hated her psychiatrist. Dr. Arndt wrote saying that he hoped she was not referring to him. Karla laughed and immediately sent him another note. Of course it was not him. She had meant the psychiatrist the prison had assigned her, Dr. Roy Brown.
But now, here in Sainte-Anne, very far away from those halcyon days before her trial when she had been under Dr. Arndt’s care and protection, Karla felt a strange emptiness when she looked at his card. They had not corresponded for a long time. And there was nothing Dr. Arndt, or anyone else for that matter, could do for her anymore. Psychiatrists and psychologists had become agents for her detention, rather than advocates for her rehabilitation. She threw the card out.
A few days later she was given her mail. Among the cards from the usual crackpots offering to pay her if she would send them pairs of her panties, and a chatty letter from her sister talking about the kid and how wonderful married life was, Karla found a letter from someone she truly despised and from whom she had never expected to hear again.
Although the envelope had been opened by the prison, Karla resolved not to read the letter and tossed it out. As she did a photocopy of Dr. Arndt’s obituary, clipped from the April 9th, 2001, Globe and Mail newspaper, fell to the floor. In elegant script, there was a single handwritten line: “Thought you would want to know.”
The obituary said that Dr. Arndt, who was just sixty-years old, had died at his cottage after a long illness and spent his last hours surrounded by his family. It noted that he was a devoted father and grandfather. “Perhaps on some level I knew? Things like that happen to me often,” Karla wrote in a letter dated April 27, 2001.
Coincidences have always had special meaning for Karla. She had always interpreted them, from the time she was a teenager, as omens or signs with adumbrative significance. Like the tabby cat that had found its way out of the woods and through the chain-link fence at Joliette. Imagine a cat showing up, as it did, on her doorstep – not on any of the other ten houses’ doorstep but her doorstep – just as she learned that her dog, Buddy, who still lived with her parents in St. Catharines, was in declining health.
After that, more cats made their way into Joliette and the prison bent to Karla’s will, and permitted the inmates to keep the strays. It was such a good thing, coming out of her bad news.
Karla loved her dog so much that she used to send her unwashed socks to him when her family returned to St. Catharines after a visit. That way, the dog would retain the scent of his mistress and remember her when they were reunited. Thanks to the prison, now she knew she would never see him alive again and they would never be reunited and it made her very sad – and resentful.
Karla had been in the process of presenting the prison with a plan to bring dogs into Joliette as therapy for the inmates when they lowered the boom and hustled her onto that silly airplane.
Perhaps they were small things, a sick dog coincident to a found cat and an obituary notice, a reminder of one kind voice lost to her forever and the pure serendipity of its arrival right after she had found his card and thrown it out. Even more significant, to Karla’s way of thinking, was the fact that she had been toying with Dr. Arndt’s card and thinking about him just about the time he had taken his last breath.
Magnolia, a critical hit in 1999, was a movie about the dramatic effects of coincidence on the lives of six different characters. It opens with a series of vignettes recounted by an omniscient, soto-voiced narrator, played by the internationally renowned sleight-of-hand artist, Ricky Jay.
Mr. Jay repeatedly tells the audience, as one short story after another about disaster brought on by unbearable coincidence unfolds on the screen, that he is constantly “trying to think that it was all only a matter of chance.”
The last vignette in the prologue is about a failed suicide attempt by a seventeen-year-old Los Angeles teenager named Sidney Barringer that nevertheless results in his death.
Sidney was an unhappy young man. His parents, Faye and Walter Barringer, were always fighting and at the height of their domestic arguments, Faye would grab an unloaded shotgun which was kept in the closet and threaten to shoot Walter with it.
Sidney and his parents lived on the sixth floor of a nine-story apartment building. Sidney decided to commit suicide by jumping off the roof. He wrote a suicide note and put it in his pocket. Just before he went up to jump off the roof, he took the shotgun out of the closet, loaded it and put it back.
A young friend of Sidney’s told police that Sidney had said “they (his parents) wanted to kill each other, and that’s all they wanted to do was kill each other and that he (Sidney) would help them do that if that was what they wanted to do...”
On March 23, 1958, Sidney jumped. As he did, his parents’ arguing three stories below swelled to a crescendo. His mother grabbed the shotgun from the closet, pointed it at Sidney’s father and threatened to shoot him. Just as Sidney passed the sixth-floor window, the shotgun discharged, missed Walter and hit Sidney.
A safety net installed for window washers three days earlier would have broken Sidney’s fall and saved his life, except, as Ricky Jay notes, “for the hole in his stomach.” Faye Barringer was charged with killing her son, and Sidney himself was named as an accomplice in his own murder.
“It is, in the humble opinion of this narrator,” Mr. Jay continues, “not just something that happened; this cannot be just one of those things; this, please, cannot be that, and, for what I would like to say, it can’t. This was not just a matter of chance. Whoa. These strange things happen all the time.”
In Karla’s cosmology, these strange things do happen all the time. And as far as she is concerned, these things, like Dr. Arndt’s obituary appearing as it did, just after she had tossed his card, were not just chance occurrences. They had meaning, they were signs. And the significance of the timing of the receipt of Dr. Arndt’s obituary was magnified by how it had come to her attention. She decided to read the bulky, type-written, single-spaced, eight-page letter after all and retrieved it from the garbage.
|
