My Sister, My Love (40 page)

EX-CON PEDOPHILE CONFESSES

“I KILLED BLISS”

35-Yr-Old Fair Hills, NJ Sicko

Paroled After 18 Months of 31/2-Yr Sentence

New Jersey Sentinel
February 10, 1997

“I KILLED BLISS TO SAVE HER”

CLAIMS EX-CON BABY RAPER RUSCHA

6-Yr-Old Skating Prodigy Slain

While Family Sleeps Upstairs

Star Eye Weekly
February 10, 1997

SLAYER OF 6-YR-OLD BLISS RAMPIKE CONFESSES

Ex-Con Child Molester Ruscha Indicted in Fair Hills, NJ

“I Killed Bliss Because I Loved Her”

The Trentonian
February 11, 1997

HOW VALID IS RUSCHA CONFESSION?

Fair Hills Police: “Investigation to Continue”

The Star-Ledger
*
February 12, 1997

IN HIS QUAVERING HIGH-PITCHED VOICE BRAVELY HE DECLARED:

“I am the one. I am the murderer of Bliss Rampike. Only me.”

How these words sprang from him. At Fair Hills police headquarters. In that fluorescent-lit windowless interview room. And no need for a lawyer. Insisting: no lawyer.

“What has been caused to happen by my hand, I must be punished for. I am that one.”

So readily did Gunther Ruscha confess to Fair Hills police detectives, yet so incoherently, in more than thirty hours of taped, rambling interviews over a period of several days, it would prove very difficult for investigators to collate, distill, and verify this statement. Initially, Ruscha told detectives that he had come to the Rampike house to “spirit Bliss away”—confusing his attempt to bring flowers to her, when he’d been taken into custody, with approaching the Rampike house through the woods and entering it through a basement window on the night of the murder; it became clear that Ruscha had somehow confused the two incidents though when detectives questioned him, he seemed not to hear, repeating in a quavering voice: “I am the one. I am the murderer of Bliss Rampike. Only me.”

How Ruscha’s eyes shone! Greeny-gray glassy eyes with twitchy red-rimmed lids and pale-red lashes that looked as if they’d been partly pulled out. The pedophile, incarcerated at the Morris County Men’s Detention Center, sequestered in a “quarantine” wing to prevent his being attacked by other (normal non-pedophile/sicko) inmates, had not shaved that morning nor had time it seemed to wash for his slender/snaky body smelled frankly of sweat, anxiety, guilt.

What could be corroborated in Ruscha’s statement was his admission of having bicycled numerous times on Ravens Crest Drive and having come to the Rampikes’ door twice; of having attended Bliss Rampike’s skating competitions where he arrived early and stayed late and videotaped as many “precious moments of Bliss” as possible; of having written to her, cards and letters and “special little gifts,” over a period of approximately two years.

There had been a “secret understanding” between Bliss Rampike and Gunther Ruscha, Ruscha claimed. From the first, they had been able to “send their thoughts winging” between them; they shared dreams—“That were more real, much more real!—than this is, or you”; it was when Bliss called to him desperately with her thoughts that he came to her, bicycling on Ravens Crest Drive, passing the beautiful Rampike house that was set back from the roadway, at the end of an ascending graveled driveway; tirelessly Ruscha pedaled to the end of Ravens Crest Drive and circled the cul-de-sac, returned then passing the Rampikes’ driveway—“Many more times than people complained of”; and in the evenings, when he was rarely detected, Ruscha picked up “secret signals” from his darling Bliss inside the house at a second-floor window facing the road: “They had her captive in there. I don’t think they were her real parents, I think they adopted her. They ‘bought’ her. These things happen. She was an angel on earth, the Rampikes ‘bought’ her. They did terrible things to her, Bliss told me! In the window Bliss would light a candle to signal me. Or Bliss would shine a flashlight and blink it: like Morse code. ‘Help me Gunther—I am so lonely in this place Gunther—I am so afraid—don’t leave me with these terrible people will you—Gunther?’”
*
Ruscha’s voice broke, recounting such pleas. And at Bliss’s skating competitions, in the midst of one of Bliss’s performances on the ice Bliss would “lock eyes” with Gunther, seated always in the same approximate place in the arena; in Gunther’s videotapes you could see how the astonishing little skating prodigy, even as she glided on the ice, turned, spun, twirled, leapt and “skate-danced,” managed to cast her small, secret smile at him.

Asked by detectives why, if he’d loved Bliss Rampike, he had killed her, Ruscha became vague and agitated insisting at first that he had not meant to “harm” her but only to “spirit her away”—for they were “soul mates” regardless of their ages. Ruscha was vague about where he would “spirit” the six-year-old to, as he was vague, excitable and not very coherent telling detectives how he’d made his way through the woods to the Rampike house on the night of the murder, he’d been summoned by Bliss to her, broke a basement window, crawled through and made his way upstairs in the darkened house—“Bliss pulled me to her, in her thoughts. It was like one of our dreams.” And inside the little girl’s room, Bliss was waiting for him in her bed. Ruscha spoke agitatedly claiming that what had happened was an accident: “On the stairs, Bliss fell. I couldn’t save her. So I hid her away, in the basement. I don’t know why. On the news it was said—‘brutal attack.’ It was not ‘brutal’—but an accident! Bliss fell from my arms and hit her head. She was hurt. She was bleeding. I saw.” Asked why he hadn’t summoned help if the little girl was hurt, Ruscha lowered his head, struck his forehead against the table at which he sat, muttering: “Because I am a coward. I deserve to die.”

Yet next morning, Ruscha’s story had shifted in tone, and become darker and more lewd, yet more romantic; for somehow in the night in his cell in the grimy interior of the men’s detention center at Morristown, Ruscha was made to recall what he’d done to his darling Bliss Rampike differently: “Detectives, it was a suicide pact. We had decided, we would both die. To escape the world that would judge us harshly. The plan was that I would ‘extinguish’ Bliss’s life—painlessly. And then I would kill myself. And so I did it. But then, it was so terrible to see my darling lifeless, I lost my courage to kill myself. I was a coward, I ran away. I ran away in the night. I left my darling behind, and ran away in the night. And I thought
Maybe this is a dream?
—it was so like dreams we had both had. But when I am executed by the State of New Jersey, I will make amends. I will be forgiven. Bliss will see that I have not abandoned her. Bliss will see that I killed her to save her. I killed her because I loved her. No one loved Bliss Rampike as I did! I love her now, I will never stop loving her. When I die, I will join her. I must be punished. This is fair and just. Momma must understand, and let me
go
.”

Ruscha broke down, sobbing; yet his expression, preserved on the grainy Fair Hills PD videotape for posterity, was radiant. Here was the very glisten of madness: or, of one who has been, like the martyred Saint Sebastian, transfigured by suffering.
*

“DISGUSTING.”

A warrant was issued to allow Fair Hills police to search the Ruscha house on Piper’s Lane and there, in Ruscha’s private quarters on the second floor, which Mrs. Ruscha conceded she had not entered in years, the pedophile’s secret treasure trove was discovered.

On the walls, nearly covering every inch of wall space at eye level, were photographs of Bliss Rampike in her dazzling skating costumes, smiling shyly into the camera or performing on the ice; on the wall close beside the pedophile’s narrow bed (the covering of which, I am obliged to reveal, though not one reader among you would give a damn if I did not, or even miss such a trivial detail if it were not shoehorned in here, shamelessly parenthetically, when the reader’s obvious wish is to move on, to see what the hell is on Ruscha’s wall: this covering, faded and stained with God knows what pasty-crusty pedophile-sicko excretions, was a pale blue, emblazoned with boy-nautical symbols: compulsively repeated silhouettes of frigates, man-o’-war ships, leaping whales, anchors) mawkish and sentimental pastel drawings of Bliss Rampike as a little-girl-angel skater; neatly shelved in strict chronological order in a five-foot Ikea untreated pine bookcase, were videotapes of young girls’ skating competitions, beginning in 1986 (when the pedophile was only twenty-three), long before
Bliss Rampike’s debut as a child skater. (And how fortunate these anonymous young-girl skaters were!) But with the spectacular emergence of Miss Tots-on-Ice Debutante 1994 on Valentine’s Day of that year at the Meadowlands rink, the pedophile discovered his destiny, Bliss Rampike, and footage of other girl-skaters, though taking up some space on Ruscha’s tapes, had the air of the incidental and haphazard.

“Disgusting!”

The shocking revelation was, Gunther Ruscha had been stalking Bliss since February 1994. How was it possible that the tall lanky rusty-red-haired pedophile had managed to tape hours of Bliss practicing at the Halcyon rink? (Must’ve been in disguise, or in disguises.) There was much footage of Betsey Rampike driving her daughter along Ravens Crest Drive, to and from town; there were numerous blurred mall scenes, and parking lot scenes; Betsey and Bliss and sometimes Skyler, climbing into/climbing out of Betsey’s car or minivan; there was footage of the eye-catching Rampike family—big handsome smiling Bix, glamorous smiling Betsey, darling little children in Sunday clothes and polished shoes—entering quaint Trinity Episcopal Church amid a stream of other well-dressed Caucasian worshippers. (One day it would be startling for Skyler to see his young self with his family oblivious of being captured on videotape, for a lurid and unimaginable posterity: an ordinary-seeming little boy of seven or eight walking beside his father without any discernible limp which is weird because I know that I limped, and I know that my child’s face was disfigured by scowling.) There was even a surreal shot of Mummy, Skyler, and Bliss being videotaped together in Sunday clothes, or maybe it was Mummy’s birthday, Bliss and Skyler holding hands and Mummy behind us leaning over us and smiling happily, the three of us positioned on a hill in (I guess) Fair Hills Battle Park (where I haven’t troubled to bring the reader since nothing of significance in this document ever happened there, I’d thought); videotaped, that is, by Daddy standing a few yards away holding his new camcorder, beaming with Daddy-love for his little family; and somewhere close by, hidden from view, the pedophile Ruscha was lurking, daring to videotape the Rampikes without their knowledge. (If Daddy had known? Had seen Ruscha? It is possible,
My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike
would never be written, and you, reader,
and I, tangled together in its pages like the luckless Laocoön family in the giant serpents’ grip, would never have come to know each other.)

How hard this is to comprehend, even for edgy/pessimist/paranoid Skyler, that for years the Rampikes were being observed by a stranger; moments of their lives were being snatched from them, and preserved on tape and on film; and that, in some of these scenes, so unexpectedly, Skyler appeared young, innocent,
a mere child
.

And yet: the reader knows, as I know, that this can’t be true.

In glossy pink albums not unlike those favored by Betsey Rampike, Ruscha had lovingly inserted laminated clippings of interviews with Bliss from such publications as
People
,
New Jersey Lives
,
Galleria
,
The Star-Ledger Magazine
; newspaper stories of Bliss’s skating triumphs: Miss Tots-on-Ice Debutante 1994, Little Miss Paramus Ice Princess 1995,
*
All-Star Girls’ Figure Skating Champ (Junior Division) 1995, Little Miss Atlantic States (Regional) 1995, Tiny Miss Golden Skate Princess 1996, Little Miss Jersey Ice Princess 1996, Little Miss All-American-Girl Ice Jubilee First Prize Winner 1996. And more.

Always, in the life of a public figure, there must be more.

(Of Bliss’s defeat and humiliation at the Hershey’s Kisses competition, there was no trace. So protective was Gunther Ruscha, though claiming to have killed my sister!)

Yet more disturbing material was discovered in a musty-smelling alcove off Ruscha’s room, where the pedophile had a kind of workshop, or studio; here, detectives found more pastel drawings, and portraits of Bliss Rampike in acrylic paint, weirdly glossy, at odds with the “poetic” subject matter:

In all of Ruscha’s likenesses of Bliss, the little blond girl was crudely and yet tenderly depicted; her face, mawkishly sentimental, with exaggerated features, was yet recognizable as the face of Bliss Rampike.

“Jesus! What next!”

Equally repugnant to the detectives were Gunther Ruscha’s florid scribblings, kept in a leatherbound ledger labeled
BLISS MY BELOVED
: