My Portrait In The Memorial

By Ben Leib

P—- was taken from her mother’s home one evening. It was the last time that she would ever see her home, the last time she’d feel the textures of the carpeting on her bare feet, the last time that she’d hear her friends laugh, the last time that she’d whisper about boys, the last time that she’d have a shower or brush her teeth. For her, at least in this earthly form, in the materiality of an existence that we can believe in based upon the reassuring powers of our senses and our rationality, the evening constituted an unexpected, unanticipated finality.

P—- had two girlfriends spending the night that evening. Very likely they participated in the innocent yet whispered gossip of twelve year old girls, the intrigue that feels so illicit at the time, but becomes quaint and endearing in retrospect, through the renegotiations of intervening years. P—-’s mother was asleep in her own bedroom when a bearded man—heavy, reeking of cheap liquor, sweating in his delirium, fat, unwashed, balding, sinister in ways that true villains are so often deprived of, sinister from the cover to the core—let himself into their home, snuck upstairs to P— -’s room, where the girls sat awake, and he took her. At knifepoint, he tied the other two girls up and threatened them to make them keep their mouths shut. Maybe their silence, maybe P—-’s silence, saved all of their lives. Maybe it saved the lives of P—-’s mother and her little sister.

I cannot, in good conscious, put myself in P—-’s shoes. I cannot tell her story. What a sham that would be! And what hypocrisy, to claim to be able to represent the horrors of a tragedy far beyond the spectrum of imagination, beyond the emotional limits of empathy. To confine her story to narrative would suggest understanding where there is none to be had. For these reasons, I can only give my story, the recollections of an observer, a bystander who may have witnessed, but had no agency.

I was also twelve years old at the time, and P—- and I were classmates at Petaluma Junior High School. In the daily life of my adolescence, I was troubled. I was out of place in my own skin. I felt scared of life, and I spent my school days hiding out in bathrooms, smoking weed and cigarettes, and trying, relatively successfully it seems to me now, to endure as comfortably as possible.

P—- and I knew each other only as very passing acquaintances. We shared the same homeroom, and on the very first day of seventh grade, a day which, due to the fear and anxiety I had been experiencing, remains a small and memorable trauma, P—- smiled at me, though I couldn’t remember where I knew her from. As it turned out, and I only realized this weeks later, her mother and my own mother were members of the same women’s group. P—- and I had met once during a swim party that the group held. I was already interested, very much so, in my female classmates, and I remember thinking that P—- was pretty, if a bit mousy, a bit bashful, possibly intimidated by the loudness, the insistence of adolescent voices. She was poised for beauty, and I remember, on that first day of school, after seeing P—- smiling at me, thinking that things might go all right and that I might be a bit more special than I’d initially judged myself.

From then on, I made a point of smiling at her, saying hello in the hallways, but I was intimidated by girls, and I never made an effort to get to know P—- beyond these superficial pleasantries. So, on the morning of October 2, 1993, when Kay, my stepmother, asked me if I knew someone named P—-, I told her that I didn’t. “She’s in your class,” Kay said. “She was kidnapped last night, right out of her house while her mother was sleeping.” That sparse description didn’t elicit the sense of urgency that was already burgeoning in the community around us. Somehow, other folks’ tragic truths have the tendency to remain distant enough that they become legend, fairytales played out in some familiar but parallel reality.

At some point on Saturday, a portrait, a police sketch of an almost swarthy man, bearded, smirking, began running with the reports. A description of the man had been provided by P—-’s two friends. I imagined crazy hoboes armed with homemade shanks, dirty rags wrapped around the handle, slipping into homes and abducting children under cover of night. Though I told myself there was no need to worry, I nevertheless considered the layout of our own home, both my mother’s and my father’s, and imagined what I might do were some armed transient to breach the sanctity of our domicile. I planned escape routes: what window I could crawl out of, what rooftops I could jump from, how I could get to a phone, how and with what I could arm myself.

By Sunday, the hunt had begun. As of that weekend, the search was limited to details of the suspect’s recollected image, all points’ bulletins, and descriptions of a vehicle he might be using. So in that sense, the hunt was similar to one for any suspect, but for the urgency that had now set in. Petaluma’s community, which was not used to such flagrant and sensationalistic transgressions of its sanctity, worked in hysterical tandem with the media, whose only motivation seemed the story itself, whose stratagems involved documenting and publicizing a community gripped by terror, by fury. Any local citizen willing to be filmed for the purpose, and there were no shortages of such citizens, were recruited as talking heads in community response pieces that dominated the nightly news.

When I returned to school the following Monday, P—-’s chair in homeroom remained unoccupied. Teachers spoke of the tragedy of her disappearance in each of my classes, and lessons were put on hold in favor of something like a forum for discussion about our feelings, our fears. Mental health professionals were brought in to counsel students traumatized by the kidnapping. Teachers in each class announced that any student needing a mental health pass would be granted one without question. I took passes from every class. Instead of heading to the administrative offices, which had been set up as the temporary sites for marathon therapy sessions, I snuck into bathrooms, into the flora on the edges of campus, into the wooded area across the street from the school. I got stoned and smoked cigarettes, feeling only tinges of guilt that I was exploiting the unknown yet presumably dire condition of my disappeared classmate.

It has only been with time and experience that I’ve been able, even to a small degree, to stop interpreting the world based upon the ways that it directly affects me to recognize my own insignificant influence in the daily churnings of fate, and to allow that those random happenstances were not designed for me alone. It was this narcissism, in part, which led me to conclude that the rest of the city and the rest of the nation was exploiting P—-’s disappearance far more despicably than I was at the time. The world was involved in an emotional exploitation, using the tragedy of another to selfishly publicize its own emotional upset in acts of cathartic displacement. While people went on television and cried for a girl they never met, I felt that I was mourning in my own, more honest way. I was wrong. The community was right to cry for one of its lost children, and the news was right to give voice to that sadness.

But the media were not saints. That school week began as a free for all, with reporters sneaking onto the junior high school campus during school hours, interviewing any weepy children that they could corner, and, again, people, young people in particular, were only too eager to be filmed, as if the camera itself bestowed some affirmation of importance, of relevance, the promise of which proved irresistible, for we all want the relevance of our emotional lives to be affirmed. Because it seemed as if the newsmen were unable to restrain themselves through common sense, the school had to impose sanctions upon the media, forbidding reporters from stepping foot onto campus or from interrupting school day proceedings in any way. From that point on, fleets of media vans, television crews, cameramen, and reporters were sure to be waiting at the base of campus when class got out. My grandparents lived about three blocks from Petaluma Junior High School, and, walking home each day, I had to dodge these media folk, who I was determined would not get a minute of my time, for this wasn’t a legacy that I wanted to propagate.

It became a nightly routine, during the weeks at my father’s house, for our family to gather in my parents’ bed—my dad, Kay, my brother, and I—to watch the ten o’clock news. We were sure to see recognizable members of our quaint community airing their sadness in public reaction pieces. We sustained a running commentary about the folks appearing on the news. For example, when watching the news reel of my friend’s mother, an unstable woman to begin with, screaming in drugged-up hysteria, we laughed with abandon. We laughed at Ms. Stitch, because her performance was so bizarre, so over the top, and because some news station found it fitting to air this woman’s instabilities as representative of our community. We critiqued P—-’s family in ways that were only acceptable amongst ourselves, in the privacy of our home. My dad and I found fault with P—-’s father, who seemed to thrive on the media attention, who seemed to glory in the limelight like some small town John Walsh. Kay’s critiques, which questioned P—-’s mother for her overstated fragility, possibly contained an unstated but more heartfelt critique of a mother’s inability to prevent such a thing in her own home. I suspect that other families watching the drama unfold had their own privately expressed opinions, all of which were irrelevant and invalid, of course. We had shared no legitimate experience with the family upon which we could critique their reactions to such a tragic loss. But through our nightly rituals, we were able to relegate P—-’s kidnapping to the realm of the unpleasantly unfamiliar, instead of participating in more substantial speculations that would have forced us to acknowledge the horrors that humankind is capable of.

Some weeks into the investigation, the fliers began appearing on light posts, on phone booths, in storefront windows. The fliers presented images of other missing children, kids whose circumstances, for one reason or another had not elicited the same kind of attention as P—-’s. And the fliers asked difficult questions of those who cared enough to pay them any mind: “Why is my child different than P—-?” a flier would ask. “Will you help me find my little girl?” “B—- was loved just as dearly as P—-, please help us bring her home.” “If I looked like P—-, would you care about my fate?” They featured images of children less stable, less prosperous, more ethnically diverse than P—- or her family. These kids didn’t live in Victorians on D Street.

These children came from troubled homes, I imagined. They had been abducted by angry or unstable family members, they’d fled their own domestic horrors, they’d succumbed to the temptations of inebriates, they’d been taken in by smooth-talking boyfriends, and somehow the complicity in these imagined situations, in the public’s mind and in mine, constructed a less sympathetic victim, though they were children to the last. It was P—-’s unarguable role as victim that made her story so compelling. I, nevertheless, was moved by the fliers. I heeded their message and was convinced of the unfairness of a world that does not care for and protect all of its children.

The nature of the manhunt shifted at some point. The kidnapper was still at large, and there were still perpetual reminders of his presence among us, but, as time passed, volunteer hours were spent searching for P—- herself. Thousands of county employees and community-minded citizens joined together to comb the Sonoma County countryside, expecting, if not exactly hoping, to find P—-’s body and some sort of evidence of the crime that still remained a mystery. Newsreels featured helicopter-view films of adults, organized into long, single file rows, searching the shrubs and fields of our undeveloped landscapes. There was a sense of communal purpose, as tens of thousands of man-hours were spent in an endeavor that seemed bound to produce results.

But it was not the endless hours of human endeavor, nor was it the investigative ingenuity of police or national agencies then involved, that finally led to the arrest of D—-, two months after the kidnapping. Rather, it was the vigilance of the memory of two traumatized 12-year-old girls who aided in creating a police sketch, the memory of a nation who would not let this one child, out of so many, fall from the realm of consciousness, that caused officers to detain D—- for parole violation until they confirmed his role in the P—-’s abduction. The material evidence linking this man to the crime: a lone and otherwise inexplicable palm print in P—-’s bedroom.

D—-’s rap sheet read like the biography of another lost child: in and out of youth authority, recurring struggles with drugs and alcohol, an inconsistent home life, impelled to join the military as a form of coercive sentencing, burglary, theft, violence. As he matured, so too did his crimes. He did not become a sophisticated criminal, but rather an opportunist with a gun. He became more and more violent, and, over time, came to exhibit sadistic impulses, kidnapping, beating, and sexually assaulting women, and ended up spending more than half of his life in prison. After serving 16 years of an even longer prison sentence, D—- was released only three months before landing in Petaluma and kidnapping P—- out of her bedroom.

The fact that D—- was a recurring violent offender was also a matter of media intrigue. Here was an example of a man who made no redeeming contributions to the world, who only took away and destroyed, as if a primal force, without conscience, without contemplation. As such, as an embodiment of violence, D—- was inept, he did not constitute the threat that a smarter, more charismatic man might have. He was not intelligent. He did not act with forethought. His crimes were impulsive. But, as such, as so clearly a dangerous man, as a man with so little in the way of potential redemption, how was he able to roam the streets freely? I was torn, because it was quite easy to hate such a man, and I was shocked that, with all of humanity’s technological, scientific, and epistemological advances, we could not spot a sociopath, nor could we find a cultural justification for keeping this man off of the streets forever. But it was my mother who pointed out that D—- was chalking entries onto his rap sheet when he was my age, that his troubles began when he was young, and that he had suffered horribly, unimaginably. And where did these questions of nature-versus-nurture get me? Could I feel empathy for a man who had committed unforgivable crimes? And would empathy constitute forgiveness?

It was D—- who finally led police to the body. P—- had been left in a shallow grave in a countryside locale not dissimilar geographically to the fields and woods that volunteers were combing daily. Because the body was badly decomposed after two months in the unprotected wild, the specific details of P—-’s death remain a mystery, D—-’s account being the only one on record. And it was at this point, two months after her disappearance, that I finally was able to mourn P—- in a way that seemed authentic. It was the not knowing that had done it to me.