EXTRAORDINARY PRAISE FOR UNANSWERED CRIES:
“A story filled with dark truths about ourselves and our neighbors.”
—Carlton Stowers, author of Careless Whispers
“A provocative account of how an ‘ordinary’ murder transforms the lives of those connected to it in an extraordinary.”
—Alan Gelb, author of Most Likely to Succeed
“A compelling true crime story with the pacing and suspense of a first-rate novel.”
—Ken Englade, author of Beyond Reason
“Will immediately find a spot in the top rank of can’t-put-’em-down true crime books. Thomas French is a painstaking reporter and gifted writer who tells this sad story with great insight and sensitivity.”
—Jerry Bledsoe, author of Bitter Blood
“Searches for the heart of darkness, and finds it next door.”
—Stephen Michaud, author of Only Living Witness
“A powerful, gritty and true-to-life murder story. French captures the criminal justice system and gives it the strong and relentless shaking it so often deserves.”
—Maury Terry, author of The Ultimate Evil
UNANSWERED CRIES
A TRUE STORY OF FRIENDS, NEIGHBORS, AND MURDER IN A SMALL TOWN
THOMAS FRENCH
St. Martin’s Paperbacks
Smashwords Edition
UNANSWERED CRIES
Copyright © 1991 by Thomas French.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-49299
ISBN: 0-312-92645-6
Printed in the United States of America
St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition/May 1991
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition/March 1992
For Tad
Acknowledgments
So many people have helped me with this book that I could not begin to list them all. Yet there are a number who deserve special thanks—all of those close to Karen Gregory who shared such painful memories: Lu Redmond, who shared her invaluable insights; the officers of the Gulfport Police Department who shared their time and expertise; my agent, Jane Dystel, who had faith from the start; and my editor at St. Martin’s, Charles Spicer, and Associate Editor Bill Thomas, who gave me confidence and guidance.
What appears on these pages is based closely on articles I originally wrote for the St. Petersburg Times; in fact, the book would not have been possible without the generous support of numerous people at the Times, including Sandra Thompson, Michael Foley, Andrew Barnes, Eugene Patterson, Don McBride, Rick Holter, Steve Small, George Sweers, Barbara Hijek, and everyone in the Times library. I also am indebted to George Rahdert and Pat Anderson for their counsel and heartening words; to Suzanne Klinkenberg for identifying the flora and fauna; to Kati Kairies of the Times Tallahassee bureau for cheerfully tracking down a dozen different addresses; to Frances Purdy of the Gulfport Historical Society, as well as to the society’s book on Gulfport, for providing historical details; and to Terri McKaig for spending countless hours trying to explain to me the inner workings of the courts.
I have had the good fortune of knowing some of the best writers and writing coaches in the country, many of whom have given me their encouragement, suggestions, and friendship through several years of reporting and writing. Among them are Roy Peter Clark and Donald Fry of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies; Donald Murray, writing coach for the Boston Globe and other newspapers; Pat Meisol of the Baltimore Sun; Tim Nickens of the Miami Herald; Christopher Scanlan of the Knight-Ridder Washington bureau; and David Finkel, Anne Hull, Sheryl James, Jeff Klinkenberg, and Wilma Norton of the St. Petersburg Times. I am especially indebted to Karl Vick of the Times Washington bureau for all of his patience and advice. Deepest thanks to Neville Green, deputy managing editor at the Times, who always believed and was always there with the ablest hand. It is impossible to convey how much of Neville’s judgment and commitment run through these pages.
Finally, much love to my son, Nat, for lifting my spirits during hard times, and to my wife, Linda, for all of her proofreading, listening, and understanding.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of nonfiction. All of the people, events, and details described in the book are real: there are no composite characters, fake names, invented quotes, or imagined conversations. The information was gathered over the past five years from interviews with more than seventy-five people and from more than six thousand pages of court documents, personnel files, and other records. Most of the quotes are taken from notes or transcripts of official proceedings, but by necessity some are reconstructions based on people’s recollections.
I have tried, as best I could, to depict the emotional trauma that follows the murder of a loved one. However, it is a limited depiction that only begins to describe the depth of grief and suffering involved in such a case. If you are among the thousands of homicide survivors who are searching for help and understanding, I would encourage you to check with local victim organizations or with the victim advocate at the nearest police department to find out what services are available to assist you. In addition, there are several national organizations that may be able to provide support or referrals. Among these are the National Organization for Victim Assistance, 1757 Park Road NW, Washington, D.C., 20010, (202) 232-6682; the National Victim Center, 337 West Seventh Street, Suite 1001, Fort Worth, Texas, 76102, (817) 877-3355; and Parents of Murdered Children and Other Survivors of Homicide Victims, 100 East Eighth Street, B-41, Cincinnati, Ohio, 45202, (513) 721-5683.
Book One
She lay alone in the hall for a night and a day and another night. Finally someone saw her, and the police arrived and raised a circle of official yellow around the yard, and the neighbors stepped forward with their excuses, then retreated behind the walls of their front doors. The forensic experts came, and the forensic experts left, and at last the case was left in the hands of one who would not let go. During the day he would sit at his desk, examining and reexamining the photos of her on the floor, and ask her to help him see whatever he had missed. At night he would return to the house, wandering inside, hoping the empty rooms might reveal whatever they remembered. The weeks stretched into months. He eliminated one suspect after the other and ran down one blind alley after the other, and still he was no closer to understanding, until that day he stumbled across a single moment of stupid good luck. Then came the lie detector tests at the station, and the reenactments in the dark, and the anonymous phone calls that could not be traced, and the rounds of weary accusations and denials.
After all of that, he arrested a man and put him on trial for his life.
An investigator asked one of the neighbors:
“Does he look like a murderer to you?”
The neighbor said:
“What does a murderer look like?”
Part One
Ghosts
One
She might have stood a chance if she hadn’t been living in a place where almost everyone is from someplace else. If Florida were not such a colony of impermanence, overflowing with people from other corners of the map—if more of them had been born and raised there, or at least learned to think of it as home and not just as some place to wait out the rest of their lives or hibernate for the winter or work on their tans until something better came along up north—then maybe the neighbors would have known more about the dark-haired woman moving into the house on the corner. Maybe they would have seen her emptying her car and carrying in the boxes, and then politely walked across the street with a cake or a fresh-baked loaf of bread, as neighbors back home are known to do, and introduced themselves and told her that if she ever needed anything, anything at all, to just come knocking. If a few of the neighbors had done that, if they’d taken the time to find out her name and memorize her face, then maybe one person would have picked up the phone and called the police that night when her scream woke them in their beds.
The rain had been coming down hard that evening. This was May 22, 1984. The long Florida summer was just settling in for its annual siege on Pinellas County, a crowded little peninsula that dangles like a huge fishhook off the center of the state’s west coast. Bounded by the Gulf of Mexico on one side and Tampa Bay on the other, the county is home to St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Largo, and twenty-one other municipalities, all of which melt together into one subtropical sprawl of sand and concrete, an overpopulated jumble of bone-white beaches and bumper-to-bumper traffic, of two-bit tourist traps and alligator-inhabited retention ponds, of serene retirement communities where the buildings are painted in cartoon colors, and waterfront condos where the air-conditioning is always set on arctic, and towering palm trees that sway in the wind beside convenience store parking lots.
Summers there are surrealistically intense. The sun hangs only a few hundred feet above the ground; cascades of blinding white light ricochet off windshields, sidewalks, and buildings; humidity builds almost visibly in the air. And when the rains come, steam literally rises from the streets. From late May through September, that’s how days usually end, with a gathering of dark storm clouds—some of them forty thousand feet high, black as night, hurling jagged strikes of lightning—then the surge of release. This Tuesday evening was no different, except that the rain did not seem to want to stop. As people sat in their living rooms, staring at their TVs, they could hear the showers falling in waves against their windows.
Karen Gregory was busy that night. A thirty-six-year-old graphic artist with long brown hair and piercing eyes, Karen was carting some belongings from her apartment on Pass-a-Grille Beach to a house in nearby Gulfport, a small city tucked away in the southwest comer of the county, near St. Petersburg, on the shores of Boca Ciega Bay, which opens into the green expanse of the Gulf. The house was owned by David Mackey, Karen’s boyfriend, who worked as an administrator of a counseling program for Vietnam veterans. After dating David for more than a year, Karen was moving in with him. She had been living with him unofficially for awhile, spending most of her time at the house even as she kept her apartment at the beach, but now she and David had decided to formalize the arrangement. For days, she’d been loading her things into her Volkswagen Rabbit and hauling them over to Gulfport.
The house was modest but amiable in a nondescript kind of way. It was a small white frame house, one story—almost all of the houses in Pinellas County have only one story, as if everyone had agreed that two were too much to hope for—with three bedrooms, an enclosed porch, and a gray-shingled roof topped with a trio of fat, silver-colored wind turbines that spun in the breeze, sucking hot air from the attic. Out in the yard were a couple of birdbaths and a hibiscus with bright red blossoms and, just to the east of the house, a magnificent live oak tree with branches so thick and wide they cast a shadow over nearly half of the house, leaving the other half basking in the light. The house sat on the northwest comer of Upton Street and Twenty-seventh Avenue South, facing Twenty-seventh. The avenue was paved with red brick, so that whenever a car passed by, its tires made a faint rumbling, like thunder rolling somewhere off in the distance. Many times that was about the only sound along that stretch of Twenty-seventh. There weren’t many kids around. Most of the surrounding houses were owned by older people, a good number of whom were snowbirds who lived up north most of the year and migrated to Florida only during the winter, which meant that their Gulfport homes stayed empty for months on end. It was a quiet street, in other words, in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood, only a few blocks from the water, well away from the rush of traffic and the rest of the world. To make sure it stayed that way, the neighborhood was filled with special signs, one of which was posted in a front yard across from David and Karen’s house:
WARNING. THIS IS A CITIZENS CRIME WATCH AREA
In the middle of all this, Karen and David stood out. For one thing, they were younger than most of their neighbors; for another, Karen was white and David was black, and they were moving in together in a conservative town where interracial couples have been known to attract stares and veiled remarks. Still, after living in the house for several years, David had never encountered a problem. A native Floridian, he felt comfortable in Gulfport. It was close to the complex where he worked, it was smaller and more personable than St. Petersburg, and it was one of the few places left in the county where the streets were still lined with trees. David liked it there.
That Tuesday evening, while Karen went on with her moving, David was out of town, spending most of the week in Providence, Rhode Island, at a conference for other veterans’ counselors. So Karen made her run without him, packing up the Rabbit one more time and hauling another load from the apartment. Early that evening, when she finished, she went to visit Neverne Covington, a close friend who also lived in Gulfport. Neverne was leaving for Boston the next day for a wedding, and Karen, who had agreed to feed her cat and water the plants, needed instructions.
Karen arrived at Neverne’s house sometime between seven-thirty and eight. She was wearing a white T-shirt, a baggy pair of faded green shorts, tennis shoes, earrings, and a silver necklace and a gold chain. Although she’d already snacked on something back at the house, she agreed to have a little dinner with Neverne. They ate—Neverne had made a salad and some ratatouille with polenta—then sat around, talking and drinking wine. To this day, Neverne remembers the brand of the wine—Robert Mondavi Muscadet D’Oro—because she has not been able to bring herself to buy a bottle since.
The two women chatted for hours. They cracked silly jokes. They made plans to go wind surfing. Karen talked about her new job; after months of working mostly as a waitress, she had just been hired as a graphic artist at Datacom Associates, a St. Petersburg firm that produced technical writings and illustrations. She talked about how challenging this job was and how much she preferred it to waiting on tables. She talked about how excited she was to be moving in with David and how good it felt to be settling down and planting some roots in a nice little town like Gulfport. She felt things finally were going right in her life.
Sometime after midnight, Karen announced she had to go. The new job and all of the moving had left her exhausted. She said she wanted to go home and take a shower and get to sleep.
“I’m going to miss you,” she told Neverne.
Her friend laughed. “I’m only going to be gone for a week,” she said.
“I know,” Karen said. “But I’m really going to miss you.”
Then she hugged Neverne, climbed into the Rabbit, and drove away into the darkness.
Arthur Kuiper was up late reading that night. Kuiper worked as a restaurant manager at the Don CeSar, a huge bubblegum-pink hotel out on the beach. He lived on Upton, only a couple of houses behind Karen Gregory’s home. That evening he had been out to dinner at an Italian restaurant and drank several cups of espresso, and now the caffeine was keeping him up. He was sitting in bed, reading and listening to the radio, when suddenly he heard what he later would describe as a short, high-pitched, agonizing scream.
He looked beside the bed at his clock, which may have been two or three minutes fast. It said one-fifteen a.m. He got up, switched off the light, turned off the radio, and looked out the window. He wasn’t sure what he’d heard or where the sound had come from. He stood at his open window for fifteen minutes or so, watching and listening. But there was nothing else. The neighborhood was quiet. Even the rain seemed to have slowed down.
Martha Borkowski, a secretary who lived across from David and Karen’s house, was having trouble sleeping too. She was lying in bed when she head the scream and, immediately afterward, the slamming of a door. She thought someone was slapping a woman in a car.
“When I heard it, it just went through my mind that that girl does not smoke,” she later would say. “Because her lungs were so incredible.”
The scream also woke Glenda Harness, a bank teller who lived with her boyfriend on the southeast corner of Upton Street and Twenty-seventh Avenue, kitty-corner from David and Karen’s. Looking out her bedroom window, Harness saw an older man—another neighbor who had heard the cry—standing across the street in his doorway, gazing out; a few moments later his wife pulled him back inside. Harness went to the kitchen and looked out toward the garage, where her boyfriend, George Lewis, often worked late into the night. But the garage light was off and she could not see him.
Lewis was a firefighter for the city of St. Petersburg and a volunteer firefighter for Gulfport. He was also the neighborhood’s unofficial watchdog; it was in his yard that the citizens crime watch sign was posted, and whenever something suspicious happened in the area, he made a point of checking it out. Believing that George might have gone to investigate the scream, Glenda grew frightened. She went and found a large flashlight—she wanted something heavy in case she needed a weapon—and then sat at a table with her arms around her knees, waiting for George to come back. When he finally returned, he told Glenda he’d heard the scream too and had gone down the street trying to find out what was wrong. But he said he hadn’t seen anything unusual. The two of them talked about it for a moment, then went to bed.
All around the white house on the corner, neighbors had been startled by what they’d heard. The scream had been so loud, and the neighborhood so still, that it had carried for several blocks. In all, more than a dozen people had heard it. None of them called the police.
In the days to come, trying to account for why they did not call, they would give a dozen different answers. Some simply had not wanted to get involved; others had explained it away, telling themselves that nothing was wrong. One woman would say she thought it was cats parading in her backyard. Two other women had thought it was someone crying out from a nightmare. Others, as they lay awake in their beds, had told themselves that it was animals fighting, or a neighborhood nuisance creating a racket, or kids getting rowdy.
“But it really wasn’t that type of scream,” one man later recalled. “It was … well, I’ll never forget it, anyhow.”
Early the next evening, more than fifteen hours after the scream, Martha Borkowski returned home from work. She noticed that across the street, the front door of David and Karen’s house—a jalousie door that led to the enclosed front porch—was open. She didn’t think anything of it, though. That door often swung open.
An hour or so later, as it was getting dark, Borkowski looked out her front window and saw a man she did not recognize drive up to David and Karen’s house in a van. Across the way, George Lewis saw him too.
The man was tall and thin and rather gangly, with a beard and curly dark hair. He pulled into the driveway, parked under the oak tree, and walked up to the front of the house. The jalousie door was still open. He stepped onto the porch and knocked on the inside door, which led into the rest of the house and which was closed. When no one answered, he left the porch, walked over to the corner, and looked up and down the street, as though he was searching for someone. He went to his van and sat for a few minutes, then walked back to the porch and knocked on the inside door again. When there still was no answer, he returned to the van and drove away. Before he left, he scribbled a note on a piece of paper and placed it on the windshield of David’s car. The note said:
Karen & David,
Hello. Stopped by about 7:15 or so but saw no signs of life. Many things to do tonight so I probably won’t be back but I have something you wanted. Will be home not too late.
At the bottom was a phone number, and a name.
Peter
That same night David Mackey was trying to reach Karen. David was still at the conference in Rhode Island, and when he finished with the day’s work he called home. There was no answer. He called again later, several times. Still no answer.
By midnight David was growing worried, so he called Anita Kilpatrick, Karen’s roommate from the apartment on the beach. Anita said she hadn’t seen Karen and suggested that maybe she’d gone to see her sister, Kim, who lived in Dunedin, about twenty miles northwest of St. Petersburg. David called Kim’s house, but Karen wasn’t there, either.
The next morning—Thursday—David picked up the phone in his hotel room and tried again to reach Karen at the house. He called early, around seven-thirty, so he wouldn’t miss her before she left for work. No answer. He tried again. No answer. Next he called Datacom. But Karen’s boss said no one had seen or heard from her, either that day or the day before. He did not know where she was.
David called Anita Kilpatrick again. Both he and Anita were upset now. Clearly, something was wrong. Karen was not the type to skip work, especially a new job.
Anita started checking with police departments and hospitals to find out if there’d been an accident. But no one seemed to know anything about a Karen Gregory. Anita waited for David to call back. She was sitting on her couch when suddenly these pictures entered her mind. She saw Karen struggling with a man, shoving and fighting with a man who was taller than Karen. Then she saw Karen lying on the floor. Anita pushed the pictures out of her mind and told herself she was dreaming. She tried to read the paper but couldn’t concentrate. She kept reading the same sentence over and over. She got up from the couch and started pacing.
David was calling Amy Bressler, a neighbor who lived just up the street from his house. He asked Bressler to look out her living room window and see if Karen’s Rabbit was parked in the driveway. Bressler looked over. Yes, she told him. Karen’s car was there, along with David’s.
Now David was sure something was wrong. He asked Bressler to go over and check on the house, saying he would stay on the line until she came back.
Bressler put down the phone. She walked over to the house and knocked on the nearest door, a side door. No answer. She walked around to the front door. It was closed, but she noticed that several of the jalousie windowpanes had been broken and that glass was scattered along the walkway. She knocked on the door. No answer. She walked around toward the back and saw that a bedroom window was open, the curtains moving in the breeze. She called out.
“Karen?”
No answer. With the curtains drawn, Bressler could not see inside the bedroom. But there was a slit, four or five inches wide, in the screen of the window—it had been there as long as David had owned the house—and so she put her hand through the opening and pushed back the curtains. An unmade bed was directly in front of her. She looked to the right, toward the bedroom door leading into the hallway, and saw a woman lying on the floor. The angle allowed her to see only the lower half of the body, but it was surrounded by blood.
“Karen?”
Bressler ran back to her house, where David was still waiting on the other end of the line. She was crying now. She was hysterical. She said she had to get the police.
“Something really horrible has happened,” she told him. “I don’t know what it is.”
At 8:39 a.m., slightly more than thirty-one hours after the neighbors had heard the scream, Bressler called the Gulfport Police Department. Unsure whether the woman she’d seen on the floor was alive or dead, she reported what officially was recorded as a “nonresponsive person.”
She was waiting in the street a few minutes later when Officer Cheryl Falkenstein drove up in a cruiser. Falkenstein got out, walked past the broken glass on the sidewalk, and tried the front jalousie door. It was locked. She walked around the house to the back bedroom window, pushed aside the curtains, and saw the woman on the floor.
“Can you hear me?” the officer said. “Are you OK?”
No answer. By now a team of paramedics had arrived and joined Falkenstein at the side of the house. They needed to get inside quickly—for all they knew, the woman might still be alive—yet the doors to the house were locked. So they decided someone would have to go through the window. They removed the screen and Falkenstein crawled inside head first. She walked toward the woman, saw that she was not breathing, then quickly walked past her toward the front porch, where she unlocked and opened the jalousie door for the others.
Falkenstein, a twenty-two-year-old rookie, was badly shaken. She had been with the police department for only five months, and in that time she’d never seen anything like what she was seeing now.
All of the lights in the house were off. Inside the back bedroom, the one into which Falkenstein had crawled, a fan was sitting on the floor, still blowing. On top of the bed, stained with blood, was a blue flowered Hawaiian shirt. Next to the bed were the faded green shorts Karen had worn to Neverne Covington’s house two nights before. Karen’s tennis shoes were there too, with the laces still tied. Not far from the shoes was a black umbrella and a stack of magazines. On top of the magazines was a phone, and as Falkenstein and the others looked around, the phone began to ring. It kept ringing, even as the minutes passed and no one answered. It would stop for a second and then start again. It just kept going.
A few feet away, on the carpet just past the bedroom door, lay Karen. In the darkness of the hall, the paramedics had to use their penlights to see her. Even so, it was obvious that there was no need to check her pulse. She was on her left side, almost in a fetal position, with her face turned toward the wall. She was still wearing the jewelry she’d had on that night at Neverne’s, and the same white T-shirt, too, but it had been pulled up to just below her breasts. A black teddy was bunched around her waist. She wore no other clothing.
It was difficult, there in the hall, to be sure exactly what had happened to her. Her neck and head were covered with dried blood, covered with so much of it that it was impossible to see the exact nature and number of all of her wounds. But it was clear that she had been stabbed repeatedly. On her lower back and one of her legs, marked in blood, were several handprints, placed at such an angle that they could not have been made by Karen. Scattered around her along the stretch of hallway carpet was a series of bloody bare footprints. Not far away, on the tile floor of the bathroom, was another bloody footprint—a partial one, about the size of a silver dollar.
Blood had been left all through the house. There was some on the sill and curtains of the window where Officer Falkenstein had crawled inside. There was more on the bed. Outside the bedroom, across the walls and floor of the hallway where Karen’s body was still lying, there were large stains and smears. Out on the front porch, three drops had dried on the floor. On the door that led from the porch into the rest of the house—the door on which the visitor had knocked the evening before—there were smears below the doorknob. In the windowpanes of the front jalousie door there was a hole, and around the hole were some hairs that were the same shade of brown as Karen’s. The broken glass from the door was strewn along the front walkway, all the way to the curb and out into the street. In the driveway, on the windshield of David Mackey’s car, the visitor’s note was waiting to be read.
Inside the house the phone was still ringing.
It was David, calling from his hotel room. He’d been pacing, staring at the walls, trying to imagine what could have happened. He’d waited several minutes, waited as long as his patience would let him, then repeatedly dialed the number at his house, letting it ring and ring until finally someone answered. It was woman whose voice David did not recognize. An Officer Falkenstein.
“Is Karen there?”
“Yes.”
“What’s happened?”
The officer hesitated a moment.
“She’s dead, sir.”
Two
Every week, more than four hundred people are murdered in the United States. Their bodies, pale and useless, are found in ditches or on darkened streets or in the dew-covered grass of vacant fields or inside the imagined security of their houses. Karen’s was curled on the carpet of her new home, an expression of vague sadness on her face.
Her death, like most of the other four hundred, was hardly considered front-page news. The morning after the discovery inside the house, the St. Petersburg Times, an aggressive paper that usually gave prominent play to any local homicide of even passing interest, would relegate the incident to page 5B. The accompanying headline assured readers—in that shorthand peculiar to all newspapers—that the victim’s identity was not as noteworthy as the fact that something unpleasant had occurred in a place where unpleasantness is unexpected. “Woman slain in tranquil area,” it said.
The message was clear enough. This was not the most important case in the world, or the most striking, or the most shocking. As brutal as it was, the violence that had been committed inside the hallway was not extreme enough to stand out against the daily blur of death and destruction. It was not as singularly disturbing as, say, a gunman cutting down twenty-one people in a McDonald’s. In this instance, only one person had been killed, and that person was not particularly young or particularly old or particularly helpless in any especially heartrending way. In fact, she did not meet any of the criteria usually required—in either a newspaper or a true crime book—for someone’s death to merit special attention. She was not a movie star, a pregnant mother, an heiress, a rising executive, or an attractive college student with a brilliant future. She wasn’t rich or glamorous, wasn’t even remotely famous, wasn’t the daughter of anyone powerful.
She was simply a thirty-six-year-old woman trying to make a life for herself, and when she was killed it was what people sometimes casually refer to as “a little murder.”
Yet there was nothing little about it. The fact that Karen’s death was not as newsworthy as some did not lessen the pain felt by those who loved her. And it did not change the number of lives about to be swept up in the case that followed. For beneath the surface of this one ordinary murder there awaited a story that would shatter the illusions of safety to which each of us clings. Karen had died alone and anonymous, screaming for her life in a neighborhood where people had pledged to look out for one another. But her cry would linger on, exposing the astounding web of everyday existence, showing all of the ways we rely on those around us and all of the ways that reliance is betrayed. More than anything else, her cry would lay bare the limits of trust.
She was one of those chameleons who can transform themselves into different people. Sometimes she could almost pass for a teenager; other times she seemed older than her years, enveloped in an air of worldliness, as if nothing could ever surprise her. She had olive-colored skin, thick brown hair, fierce brown eyebrows, and crystalline eyes that some swore were green and others swore were blue. Occasionally she’d lock those eyes on people and mesmerize them with a hint of a smile that was both warm and slightly mysterious. Her “Mona Lisa look,” one of her friends called it.
She stood about five feet five and was trim and tightly muscled. She wore little or no makeup. A couple of her teeth were slightly crooked, and whenever she laughed hysterically, she instinctively would cover her mouth so that no one would see. She liked to call her friends “sweetheart” or “honey” in a half-affectionate, half-silly way. She was a vegetarian; she was crazy about reggae music. She made a mean batch of baklava. She would not miss the film Black Orpheus if it played anywhere nearby. She had a pronounced fondness for socks, possibly because she had once lived in the cold of New England. Her favorite color was purple. She loved to talk long-distance with her friends and rack up phone bills big enough to rival her rent check. She enjoyed telling stories and often began them with declarations.
“Honey,” she’d say, “you’re not going to believe this.”
Her name had not always been Karen Gregory. The “Gregory” came later, when she was in her twenties and was making a declaration of independence. She was born Karen Marshall on March 29, 1948. Her father, Delmar, owned an appliance company, and her mother, Sophia, was a homemaker. They lived in upstate New York, in Menands, a village outside Albany. Karen was their first child. Two years later came her brother Roy, and then there was a pause of five years before Kim arrived, and then two years after that came another brother, Mark.
Being so close in age, Roy and Karen were thrown together constantly. They took their First Communion together at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Albany, and a few years later, when it was time for confirmation, they did that together, too. They played together and got in trouble together and fought constantly for attention, affection, and superiority.
Karen brought a sweet but diabolical determination to this battle. She would blackmail Roy into bending to her will. She would tell him that he could sit in her room, which had a collection of music boxes and other treasures and which to Roy seemed like Oz, if only he would do the dishes for her. She would grant him a few moments to gaze at the latest issue of the Mickey Mouse Club Magazine if only he would dust the stairs for her. She threatened him. She made deals with him. When necessary she used force, squeezing the back of his neck. On those rare occasions when he would scratch out some small victory, she would spend days planning revenge. Typical big sister tactics.
One evening, when Karen was about nine and Roy seven, the two of them were sitting in the living room, watching TV and eating dinner. They were having grilled cheese sandwiches—both of them would later remember that fact distinctly—and their parents were eating in another room. Karen was about halfway through her sandwich when she announced she was not going to finish it.
“You have to,” said Roy.
“I’m not going to,” said Karen, and with that she took the sandwich and threw it into a wastebasket. Roy was astounded. One of the cardinal rules of their household was that one finished everything on one’s plate. As Roy thought about this, his astonishment quickly gave way to the realization that at last here was a moment where he had the upper hand. He ran into the other room and announced to his parents what had happened.
Their mother asked Karen whether she truly had thrown away her sandwich.
“No,” Karen said. “Roy did it. He did it, and he’s blaming it on me.”
Again Roy was astounded. In their house there was only one thing worse than throwing away food, and that was lying. You’ll never get in trouble telling the truth, their father had told them, and Roy had believed it. Yet here was Karen, lying to their parents’ faces. She wasn’t descending to hell. She was grinning.
Roy began crying and running around the room. Karen remained calm, pointing out to their parents that Roy’s loss of control only proved his guilt.
“That’s why he’s so hysterical about it,” she said. “He did it, and he’s trying to cover it up.”
Their mother would have none of it. She told them that if neither of them would confess, both would be punished. Roy couldn’t stand that, either. Being punished for something he had not done was bad enough. But the injustice of their both having to suffer for the same crime was even worse. Karen may have been his rival in a struggle for power, but she was still his big sister, and he worshipped her. So he confessed. He told his parents he had thrown away the sandwich, and they sent him to his room. As he left, Karen looked at him with an odd expression on her face. Finally, he had astonished her.
For years Karen reigned over the lives of her sister and two brothers. They looked up to her with a mixture of respect, admiration, and fear. She indulged them and bullied them and made them laugh with imitations of the absolutely ancient nuns who patrolled the halls of the parochial high school they attended. Not that there weren’t any signs of weakness. Karen was shy and nervous with outsiders, and for a time she had a stutter, which was made worse when a doctor advised her parents to mock the problem out of existence. Even so, Roy and Kim and Mark saw her as invincible.
Her style of babysitting, Roy remembers, was decidedly military. She would issue an order and they would follow it. She was wiry and strong, and when she wrestled with them she always won, even as they grew older. She was an excellent student, especially in art. She had legions of girlfriends who would retreat with her to the sanctuary of her room. Kim, who wanted to hang out with Karen and the other older girls, was usually kicked out during these sessions. Sometimes, though, Karen’s friends would appeal for clemency and Karen would allow Kim to stay.
The room really belonged to both sisters. Karen had a big bed; Kim had a smaller one. Kim was afraid of the dark and would ask Karen if they could have a nightlight. Karen would say no. But if Kim awoke in the middle of the night from a bad dream and asked to climb into the big bed, Karen would say yes and hold her there in the dark.
At the same time, like children in many big families, the Marshall kids showed off a collective talent for scaring the wits out of one another. They inherited it from their father, who had inherited it from his father, who’d had a thing about hiding behind doors. The kids perfected their own techniques. Karen was no amateur—she jumped out of closets to great effect—but Roy raised the art to a new level, taking his inspiration from episodes of The Twilight Zone and experimenting on Kim and Mark when their parents and Karen were gone and he was appointed babysitter. One night he turned off the lights, went into the kitchen, and found a knife and a bottle of ketchup. He poured some ketchup on himself and the knife and then cried out as if he’d been attacked. When Kim and Mark found him, he was on the floor playing dead. Kim got mad. Mark cried. Later, Roy would remember the moment and be ashamed.
As the oldest of four children, Karen did everything first. She drove first and went to college first and moved out of the house first. She was the trailblazer, as Roy put it.
She attended Nazareth College, a Catholic women’s college in Rochester, New York. She had to fight to persuade her parents to allow her to leave home; finally they agreed, but they insisted that the institution be Catholic. At Nazareth she studied art and was pleased when one of her sculptures was placed on display on campus. She made lots of friends and lost her shyness. The girl who had once stuttered now stood at the front of a class, making ten-minute presentations.
This was in the 1960s, and as Karen became more independent she began carrying signs and joining marches. Her parents were embarrassed when they picked up the newspaper one day and found a photo of their daughter sitting with some other Vietnam War protestors. When Karen came home to visit, she would take a seat at the dinner table and launch into extended debates with her parents over the war.
One of the touchiest subjects between Karen and her parents was Catholicism. Karen had more than her fill of it at Nazareth. The nuns, she said, cared only about the rich girls. Roy, who was feeling the stirrings of independence himself, had similar feelings about religion. He and Karen joked about how if they ever again tried to walk into their old church, Sacred Heart, the big oak doors would slam shut in their faces. Still, despite the nuns, Karen lasted the four years at school, earning a bachelor’s degree in art education. Her parents could hardly wait for graduation. But when her mother called to say they would be driving to Rochester for the ceremony, Karen told her to forget it.
“I’m not going to go up on the stage and get my diploma,” she said. “Let them mail it to me.”
“Are you crazy?” her mother said. “We’re making that trip to Rochester. If I have to break both your arms, you’re going up on that stage.”
Karen still refused. So her mother called out the heavy guilt artillery: she told Karen that if she wouldn’t do it for her parents, she should do it for her grandmother, who had sewn her a beautiful white dress for the occasion. Did Karen want to break her heart, too?
That did it. “Okay,” said Karen.
The big day arrived and the Marshall family took their seats in the audience. One by one the graduates filed out. Then came Karen, wearing her black robe and underneath it her new white dress. But there was something else.
“What’s Karen got on her feet?” asked her grandmother.
While the other women wore dress shoes, Karen was clunking across the stage in boots. Years later, when the family recalled this moment, there would be some disagreement as to whether she’d worn combat boots or hiking boots. Either way, Karen stood out. Her mother was dumbfounded. Her father sat there and burned. Roy just laughed. Once again his big sister had found the perfect revenge.
From that day on, Karen went her own way. She taught art to elementary school children, worked with patients at a mental hospital, and eventually got engaged. She’d met a young man named Steve Kruse. She told her mother they wanted the wedding to be outdoors.
“What mass are you going to be married in?” asked Sophia.
“I’m not,” said Karen.
Her mother refused to attend. She had no intention, she said, of going to a wedding without a mass. So Karen and Steve were married without the family. Her parents did not even know when the ceremony took place.
Karen and Steve lived in a little place in New Hampshire called Fitzwilliam. It was an isolated place, so isolated that sometimes it seemed Karen was on a long vacation from the rest of the world. In Fitzwilliam it was as if the sixties had never ended. Steve worked at a co-op, trading work for food, and Karen tended a garden and prepared their meals from scratch. After a few years, though, the marriage ended. Karen was still friends with Steve, but they had drifted apart. When they divorced, she dropped his last name and took a new one—Gregory, Sophia’s maiden name. She told her father she had used his name for more than twenty years and now she wanted to try her mother’s.
Even after the divorce Karen stayed in Fitzwilliam; she ended up living there for more than a decade. She worked at a children’s magazine and then at a computer magazine, eventually falling in love with a potter and moving in with him. She made pottery of her own, cooked vegetarian dishes, and lived in a big house crawling with cats and the smell of incense. When he went up to visit her, Roy kidded his sister, saying she had become the queen of the hippies. “Miss Whole Wheat,” he’d call her, and she’d run laughing to her closet and pull out a dress to prove she owned such a thing. It was her only one. Naturally, it was purple. “See,” she’d say, “I don’t wear blue jeans all the time.”
By January of 1983 Karen was ready to leave New Hampshire. Tired of the snow and the cold, she decided to move to Pinellas County, where Kim and her husband lived.
“I need a change,” she told her sister. “I really need a change.”
It wasn’t easy starting over in Pinellas County. It’s not easy for many people, because the county is an odd, mixed-up kind of place where it’s hard to get your bearings. According to the maps and any reliable thermometer, it’s located in the extreme southern portion of the United States. But in reality it’s packed with so many transplanted northerners—many of them from the Midwest—that it no longer feels even remotely connected to the South. It’s more like Ohio, only with bigger cockroaches. Worse, almost all of the land’s natural character has been bulldozed into oblivion. So much of the county has been paved over that it has come to resemble one gigantic parking lot.
And yet there are glimpses of the beauty and wildness that once enveloped the region. Alligators float motionless in lakes beside mobile home parks, occasionally emerging to swim in backyard pools; bald eagles nest where they can and ride the thermals above the subdivisions; sleek, gray bottlenosed dolphins gather in the bay at dusk, when the wind has died and the glassy water is tinged with purple, and then slice through the surface with their young, dallying only twenty feet from shore. And for all of the cement sameness of the place, there remains something mysterious, something unfamiliar etched into the landscape in a thousand tiny ways. Fireflies are scarcely ever seen, but the sweltering space above the highways is filled with lovebugs, which are black and flecked with red and which fly in couples, endlessly copulating even as they smash into the grilles of speeding cars. There are no pools of worms on the ground after it rains, but on warm afternoons scores of small brown lizards patrol every yard and sidewalk, bobbing their heads up and down, puffing out their dewlaps, engaging in precisely patterned rituals of display. During the day, billowing clouds of the most heavenly white drift in the distance; at night stars hang over the Gulf, shining through the vapor trails of the fighter jets that constantly roar over the water. And always there are the beaches, with their squadrons of seagulls and armadas of stingrays and miles of burning sand and wave after wave.
It was here that Karen was drawn. For all her northern upbringing, she was a tropical creature. She loved the sun, loved the water, loved all the things that still made Pinellas special. She found an apartment and began waiting on tables to pay the bills. She worked at the Garden, a restaurant and bar situated a few blocks from the bay in downtown St. Petersburg. The Garden was a nice enough place, with rows of dark, cocoonlike booths and a beautifully battered old bar that faced a big open patio where people could sit at night and drink under the moon. At first Karen didn’t mind the job—in college she’d waited on tables for her tuition money—but after awhile she grew tired of the hours and the drunks and the men who kept making passes at her.
“I’m a waitress,” she’d say to Kim. “What am I doing?”
There were other adjustments as well. After Fitzwilliam, this place seemed like a metropolis, filled with strange people. Karen started locking her doors at home and in her car—something there had been no need to do in New Hampshire. One night she was at Kim’s house when someone knocked on the door. It was late, but Kim got up and opened it without thinking twice. It was only a neighbor, looking for his cat. But once he was gone, Karen gave her little sister a lecture on safety. She couldn’t believe Kim had opened the door before seeing who was there. “You’ve got to be more careful,” she said. “What if somebody was to come in here and attack you?”
Kim never worried about things like that. But Karen did. Years before, the two of them had gone to see Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a movie about a woman stabbed to death in her home. Afterward, Karen and Kim went to a restaurant to talk. Karen sat with her hands wrapped around her throat.
“I never want to die like that,” she said.
Even though it seemed big to her, Karen was happy in Pinellas County. During the day she’d ride her bicycle for miles in the heat as if it were nothing. At night she’d pop a tape into a little portable cassette player and pulse through the rooms of her apartment. She was also spending a lot of time with her sister and her brothers, walking along the water, soaking up the sun. By now all of them had grown into experienced storytellers who understood the fine art of embellishment. Roy was especially good, and when he came down to visit he would spin wild accounts of childhood folly, including the infamous grilled cheese episode. Sometimes he’d get rolling and Karen would laugh so hard she’d have to beg him to stop.
At the same time, Karen and her mother were growing closer. Karen’s parents were divorced now, and while Sophia would never agree with everything Karen did, the two of them had grown to understand each other better. Sophia even laughed when she thought back to Karen picking up her diploma in those boots. The sparring of the old days was over. In fact, Sophia was planning to move to Florida so she could be close to Karen and Kim.
“We’ll have a chance to talk old ladies’ talk,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Karen. “We’ll have fun, Ma.”
Karen had not cut off her ties with the past completely. At night she would engage in epic long-distance conversations with her old friends from New Hampshire, making the phone company rich. Soon after she moved to Florida her friends sent her a present: a sleek black telephone. Still, Karen wasn’t hiding from the rest of the world anymore. She told Roy her days as queen of the hippies were over. She got her hair cut and began dressing stylishly. She even bent her vegetarian rules enough to eat chicken once in a while. Roy told her not to do anything rash.
“You know,” he said, “you don’t have to get into an IBM business suit and drive a BMW right off the bat.”
She was making new friends, too. She had moved into the apartment on Pass-a-Grille Beach with Anita Kilpatrick, a young freelance writer at the St. Petersburg Times who sometimes hung out at the Garden. Karen also had become close to Neverne Covington, another artist in her mid-thirties.
When Halloween rolled around, Karen, who was still waiting tables at the Garden, dressed up as a frowsy dime store waitress. She made a little white apron and a little white cap, smeared on some red lipstick, stuffed a wad of gum in her mouth, and put on some of the strangest earrings ever to grace the planet.
“They looked like Sputnik,” says Neverne.
But the best touch was the hair. Karen sprayed it with this black gunk—gunk so fierce it would stay on the walls of her bathroom for months—and piled it all into a towering beehive. On her way to work she accidentally bumped the beehive against the car, causing it to lean at a forty-five-degree angle. It stayed that way all night, and when her shift was over, she went to a restaurant where Neverne and some other friends were eating. Still in costume, she strolled up to their table, snapping her fingers, smacking her gum, asking for their orders. Her friends did a cartoon double take. They hadn’t even recognized her.
That was Karen. She had this animated, exaggerated way about her. She could run rings around people just talking to them. She’d slow down, speed up, go into reverse, then bulldoze straight ahead with the punch line. Her style was so distinctive that Anita did an uncanny imitation of her. Anita, Neverne remembers, would put her hands on her hips, throw her shoulders forward, and issue one of those declarations: “Now listen to this.”
Of all her new friends in Florida, none was more important to Karen than David Mackey. They had met in March 1983, not long after she arrived in Florida. David was a striking man. He was only twenty-nine, but he seemed older, carrying himself with an understated but unmistakable sense of purpose and control; anyone who saw him knew in an instant, before he’d even said a word, that he was well educated. He was also slender and handsome, with dark, penetrating eyes and a face so regal it resembled a lion’s. Once she’d met him, Karen went home and talked about him excitedly, like a schoolgirl, debating aloud whether or not to call him. Finally she decided to be brave and called, leaving a message on his answering machine. The two of them began dating regularly and quickly grew closer. They went sailing together, to movies together, and to reggae concerts together. Before long they were a certified couple.
“Have you seen David?” people were saying. “David’s in love.”
They were both in love. They talked about going abroad together. They talked about the possibility of marriage. That fall, as Christmas approached, Karen spent weeks making David a jacket. This was no ordinary jacket. It was reversible and had a patchwork of different colors and all sorts of zippers and pockets. Karen had no pattern; she just plowed ahead and hoped for the best. She worked on a table in her apartment. She wouldn’t let David come over for fear he’d see. Often she sewed past midnight, and time and again she had to rip out the seams and start over. It gave Anita a headache just to watch.
When she wasn’t working on the jacket, Karen was spending more and more time at David’s house in Gulfport. It was a relaxing area to settle down. Once a bustling fishing village that lived on harvests of mullet and stone crab, Gulfport has grown into a slightly worn community of retirees and working-class families. Even so, a sense of history—of time suspended—hangs over the place. Hidden away from the interstate and the main thoroughfares of the county, the town feels as though it never left the seclusion and simplicity of the fifties. There’s a shuffleboard club, and a cluster of tourist holes and beach bars that passes for a downtown, and the waterfront, which features a little park with bocce ball courts and horseshoe pits, not to mention the beach itself, a small brown stretch of sand where fat-necked pigeons coo among the squawking gulls. Beside the beach is the fabled Gulfport Casino, which was wiped out by the hurricane of 1921 and then rebuilt and then torn down and then rebuilt again and which now stands at the water’s edge, a huge white hall with a parquet floor where couples go ballroom dancing on weekends.