Gitchie Girl: The Survivor's Inside Story of the Mass Murders that Shocked the Heartland (17 page)

He wouldn’t have considered sleeping in when there was work to be done. Carroll still owned the pawnshop that Sandra’s brother had worked at for several years. After arriving in Sioux Falls to care for his dad, he had rented a rather squalid store next to a tavern in a strip of old brick buildings just off of downtown and started the first pawnshop in the city. He rose early, worked long hours, and ended the day by taking Sandra on a date nearly every night of the week. She wasn’t sure how much money he made, but based on the simplicity of their dates, she assumed it wasn’t much. For Sandra, money wasn’t even a consideration. This was about a relationship. Their dates continued to be modest, finding out-of-the-way places to talk or watching television at home over a bowl of popcorn. One Saturday Sandra awoke mid-morning feeling refreshed and not missing the blahs that came after a night of partying into the wee hours. Perhaps Carroll’s method of “work hard, unwind, sleep, repeat” wasn’t so bad.

It wasn’t just his relentless drive that surprised her; it was his unfailing kindness almost to a fault. As the two of them sat watching a late movie at home, Sandra knew something was amiss. “What’s going on? You seem really distracted.” This was unusual for Carroll, who readily pushed work aside when it was “their time” to focus on the two of them.

Finally Carroll confessed there was a problem brewing that had hijacked his thoughts. “Two years ago I caught an employee stealing from the shop. When I asked him why, I discovered he was paying medical bills due to his child’s ongoing health problems and his car was in the shop until he paid the mechanic. He came clean, so I figured he deserved a second chance.” The raucous laugh track of the TV in the background distracted Sandra from his story, and she simultaneously fumbled for the remote while moving closer to Carroll. Right now, he was all that mattered. She clicked the TV off. “A month ago I caught him stealing again, but only because his rent was overdue, and he’d had every intention of replacing the money with his next check. I’m not a pushover, but the guy’s almost like family to me, and sometimes compassion is more important than a buck. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt again only to discover today that he hadn’t rung up a sale.”

Sandra was stunned. She’d never known anyone with that much faith in another human before. Perhaps if Carroll were capable of forgiving and accepting someone so deeply, there was hope he’d accept her faults as well. They talked into the early morning hours until Carroll, with logical thinking and infinite patience, determined a course of action regarding the employee. The man would get one final chance but would never have access to the cash register again. Sandra’s respect for Carroll surged, and she now had eyes for no one else.

“I’M GETTING MARRIED,” Sandra shouted into the phone, laughing. After a year of dating, Carroll had proposed at the end of a long night, and the first thing Sandra did was call Lolo.

“Call me back later, and we’ll make some plans,” Lolo mumbled, half asleep.

When Sandra called back, Lolo was already up and waiting for the call so she could take her to the mall. The two of them picked out the prettiest dress they could find and together packed Sandra’s suitcase. Carroll had purchased last-minute plane tickets, and by the next day he and Sandra were headed to Las Vegas, where they were married in the Little White Chapel. It hadn’t sunk in yet that everything she’d wanted for all these years now lay before her like a lavish feast. The only thing missing from her wedding, she surmised, was the fact that her brothers and Lolo hadn’t been there. But in her heart they were all there on this special day of love.

Almost immediately upon returning home, Sandra and Carroll set off on a month-long honeymoon, driving down Highway 101 in California and even stopping to see his sister. Sandra made her first foray into the ocean, wandered among giant Redwoods, and fell in love with traveling. To pass the time during the long car rides, they would pepper each other with questions.

“Will you stay married to me if I go broke?” he asked, somewhat seriously.

“Yes,” and she meant it. When she married him, it had been because she wanted, needed, and couldn’t live without his deep love.

“If I go bald?”

“Yes.”

“Lose my teeth and need dentures?”

“Yes!”

“Gain so much weight you have to roll me over to the shop every day?”

“Yes!” They were both laughing by now, and Sandra kept reminding him to watch the road, but he already was. The questioning continued until he finally came up with the golden question.

“What if I became a pig farmer?”

“Okay, then, NO! That’s where I draw the line, even though I love piglets,” she laughed, recalling the summertime stench of a relative’s pig farm. Though truthfully, she’d have been right beside him slopping the hogs.

The honeymoon itself ended, but their feelings for each other grew. Carroll worked long hours every day to build up the pawnshop along with two fireworks stands he’d started a few years ago in a nearby town. The pawnshop outgrew its old space, and they took a chance on a more expensive one-year lease of a large shop that became profitable overnight. The place was so successful that within months they were house shopping.

“Oh, Carroll! It’s like a Terry Redland painting,” Sandra gasped when she first saw the sprawling house on an acre of wooded land. They moved into the dream house, but in typical Carroll fashion, he had made sure they still had plenty of money to help others.

“How much do you owe your mom?” he asked Sandra before the ink on their mortgage had dried, knowing that Lolo was the one who’d helped Sandra numerous times over the years when she was between jobs or needed help with a car payment. When Sandra told him the amount, he made a plan to pay Lolo back as well.

Sandra adored Carroll’s two boys, Joshua, six, and Jacob, four, from Carroll’s first marriage that hadn’t worked out. So when the boys came to stay on weekends, Sandra forged bonds with her new sons who completed her life, while Carroll worked the small firecracker stands and pawnshop. She made a commitment to treat them like her own, and one night when Jacob sat in the bathtub with shampoo piled on his head, he turned to her and asked, “Sandra, did you lay me?”

“What do you mean?” she asked while perched on the edge of the tub, reaching for the basket of toys she’d already compiled for the boys.

“You know, like a chicken lays a egg. Did you lay me in a egg?”

Sandra laughed until her sides hurt but at the same time marveled at how close she and the boys had become in such a short time. Her family had grown. Besides Carroll and their sons, Sandra had also been blessed with two half-brothers, Jeff and Jason, and a half-sister over the years although she never considered them “half.” They were family, and to Sandra family meant love.

Every summer shortly after the fireworks stands closed down for the year, the four of them would embark on a month-long vacation. The first stop was usually the other side of the state where Carroll’s mom lived. All of them would pitch in to help with work around her house, Carroll undertaking some major job like repairing the water cistern while the boys picked up sticks in the yard. But after that, the real fun began, and they were off to Disneyland or South Padre Island, where Carroll astounded them by renting a condo right on the beach and immersing the boys in all the experiences a summer vacation could offer. He worked hard during the year and made sure that his time away from work was well spent, splurging and showering his family with surprises. They traveled to Maui, taking both of their mothers with them. One spring, Carroll and Sandra headed to a Sandals Resort in the Caribbean, and he reserved a small bus just for them so they could spend time as a couple. Another year they traveled to the jewelry mart in downtown Los Angeles, where they spent tens of thousands of dollars for store inventory, and Sandra quickly developed a talent for spotting what would appeal to their customers.

Then there were the Christmases where he lavished Sandra with jewelry and one time fifteen bottles of perfume from Macy’s. On several occasions, he drove through a run-down neighborhood and threw money out the window in hopes that a person in need would find it. Sandra, who’d never even looked at the checkbook since the day they were married, wasn’t surprised when he showed up with a new car for their son Joshua when he turned sixteen.

He wasn’t just generous with his immediate family. His mom’s birthday was July third, so every year after the Fourth of July sales were over, he closed the stands, which he’d now built into two giant warehouses and three fireworks stores. Dozens of friends and family would get together in a nearby resort town, where Carroll rented a block of rooms and put on a birthday party for his mom. No one in the group would drink and drive, and Carroll realized the limo was costing him so much money that he’d be better off buying one. Which he did.

“He’s the only person I know who can make a seventy-year-old lady feel like the prettiest woman on earth,” his mom said after concluding her tenth limo ride of the weekend. Almost as soon as one ride was over she would cluck with surprise at herself that she’d forgotten to pick up some small item, which would then require yet another limo ride to retrieve it.

During these peaceful moments, happiness seeped into Sandra and acted like a salve on the Gitchie Manitou scars that still marred her spirit. The scars faded to a lighter hue, but they didn’t go away completely. Having a family and a routine kept her balanced. She and Carroll worked together, went to lunch together, and after work would go out for a beer, something that he had done since he’d started his first business. Occasionally the detectives from Iowa would stop by the pawnshop just to talk and see how she was doing. Most days were good, but there were still bad days, and during one of these bouts she found herself praying the Lord’s Prayer over and over, waiting to get to the line about “deliver us from evil,” which gave her a peace that passed understanding. She went to church a few times, but it was as if her self-esteem only held up in familiar surroundings. Inside the church she felt unworthy, like a stain of a person dirtying up the sanctuary. She went to church with Carroll’s mom, with her own mom, and with her son Jacob, but she felt like an outcast, never comfortable. In the silence of her home, she’d reach out to God with simple heartfelt prayers that were sometimes answered in ways she didn’t expect.

Today was one of those bad days. Some business problems had cropped up in the past weeks. To top it off, a relative had unknowingly mentioned something that pulled the murders to the front of her mind. Her head pounded, her stomach sickened with the vivid memories that had flooded back. She forced herself to push forward and carry on as usual. Try to regain some order in her life. As usual, Carroll had headed for work prior to Sandra, who was getting the boys off to school before spending some time spoiling her miniature pinschers.

“Sorry, pups!” she said, quickly giving their ears a vigorous rub before answering the phone that had interrupted the morning pampering. It was her mom calling to give her an update on an abused stray dog that had been rescued from the reservation months ago. The dog, one of the dozens of strays in the area, had been following Sandra’s brother Bill back and forth to work every day and would wait outside until his shift was over. Bill named him Buddy. One day, two dogs attacked Bill and Buddy leaped to his defense. Fur flew, saliva spewed, and dust rose from the ground as the dogs grappled for control with snarls and snapping teeth. Two against one placed Buddy at an unfair advantage, yet he refused to quit until Bill was safe. When it ended, Buddy lay exhausted and bleeding in the dirt. Bill rushed him home and with the help of Lolo and his brother Jeff dressed the open wounds, including a deep gash that had sliced Buddy’s throat. It didn’t look like he’d make it.

Later, the vet determined Buddy had been shot and his back leg broken at some point during his life. He had splotches of bare skin from mange, his breathing was labored, bones stuck out from his ribs, his ear was nearly torn in half, and bandages covered the sores and bites that riddled his body. After a long recovery, Buddy was up and running, and he’d greet his family with blinking eyes and a quaking tail every morning, but Lolo, in spite of her big heart, had a fear of dogs.

So of course, Sandra took Buddy as her rescue project and began intensive support to heal his emotional scars. In spite of his past, Buddy never snarled and even let her other dogs take the special treats from his dish. What Sandra noticed that first day was that every time she reached out to comfort him, a piece of her discontent slipped away. By evening, the memories of Gitchie had faded to the background where they belonged. While the business problems still remained, she and Carroll had set a plan, and she had the strength to move forward. They’d closed the fireworks stands due to fierce competition from similar businesses, and as business goes, the pawnshops were on a downswing as well. Both agreed the important thing was that they had each other and family.

Years later when she first saw the term “pet therapy,” Sandra realized how many animals had been put in her path over the years to help her through her own troubles: she would place crickets in a cup to release outside, help birds with broken wings, and check the paper every morning to see if there were any ads for lost animals she might recognize. The seed had been planted. Instead of conjuring up the awful memories that had consumed her thoughts that morning, she recalled the times she’d told her grandpa that she wanted to save all the animals in the world and bring them to his farm.

At the time she hadn’t realized how big the world was or how ugly it could seem at times, but as she stroked Buddy’s bristly head the thought occurred to her that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a mistake that she’d survived that night. Maybe, she allowed herself to think, maybe she had a purpose for being here. Buddy had been broken, abused, cast out and frightened but never gave up. Tears rolled down Sandra’s cheeks, and suddenly she was next to him on the floor, her head next to his, sobbing uncontrollably and trying to forget that night long ago when her life had seemed as hopeless as his once had. Sandra had discovered pet therapy on her own and helping animals would become an ongoing part of her life. On her dream board, a bulletin board covered with all the things she hoped to see and do someday, she posted a note:
Open my own no-kill animal rescue shelter.