No Regrets (39 page)

She took the toddlers to church every Sunday, and the only time she ever left them was when she went to work as
a waitress at a restaurant to help the family finances. Often her husband didn’t make the sales commissions he expected. The restaurant was one of a chain that paid barely minimum wage. Waitresses there had to depend on tips to make a living wage. A company rule decreed that, even with burning hot plates of food to carry, waitresses could not use oven mitts. It was a stupid rule, and many nights, Christine went home with blisters up and down her arms. But she never complained. She considered herself lucky to have her husband, her babies, and her church.

In the Mormon Church, marriage is ideally meant to be for life. Christine believed serenely that she and her husband had married with the hope of being together forever—in both life and the Celestial Kingdom beyond. She never looked at another man; it didn’t even occur to her to do that.

And then, during the Thanksgiving holiday, Christine’s whole world collapsed: She learned that her husband was involved with another woman. She was shocked, but typically, for her, she didn’t blame him; she blamed herself— for being a failure as a wife. She had tried very hard to be the perfect mate, and she had failed.

Her husband moved out, leaving Christine to support her little boys on her small salary. They moved into a tiny mobile home, and as Christmas neared, she didn’t have enough money for her rent. Her car broke down, and she couldn’t afford to fix it. And she was running out of groceries. Her church was known for taking care of its own, and it maintained warehouses full of food to help members in financial distress. But, as always, Christine was too proud to ask.

She had been a good worker at the restaurant, but it soon became clear to her fellow waitresses that she just
couldn’t handle it anymore. One friend recalled later, “Her hurt was so obvious—you could almost touch it.”

Now that her husband was gone, Christine had no one to look after the little boys while she worked. Her bosses noted that she couldn’t keep up with her diners’ orders, and that she wasn’t smiling or joking enough with the customers. Her job was the next thing to go. She was fired just before Christmas. Her phone was disconnected. She stayed inside the trailer, hiding from the world that had suddenly slapped her in the face. And still she cuddled her baby sons and saw that they prayed before each meal— however meager the meal was.

She tried to give Ryan and Christopher a Christmas. She had no money for a Christmas tree, but she had an idea. A police officer saw her collecting discarded pine boughs from a tree lot. She planned to take them home and wire them together to make them look like a real tree. When she saw the officer watching her, she offered to put them back. He assured her that would not be necessary.

Alone in their trailer as the bitter winter winds buffeted it, Christine kept going over the sudden ending of her marriage. She took all the blame when it would have been so much better if she had been able to get angry at the man who deserted her. And, slowly, she went from regret to depression and then descended into insanity. She might have been Ophelia twisting blossoms in her hair, insane because she thought Hamlet had deserted her. Christine was just as frail, just as abandoned.

But dangerous.

As her thought processes were revealed later in court, she began to believe that she must be very evil indeed to have
failed as a wife. Soon she built on her delusions and thought that her husband was also terribly evil. Her disturbed conclusions got all tangled up with what she believed were Mormon beliefs, beliefs never taught by the Church that had been her guide for so long. Unable to distinguish between what the Church truly said and her own bizarre imaginings, Christine decided that she was what the Mormons called a “son of perdition.” Perdition was synonymous with Satan, and a son or daughter of perdition was an anti-Christ figure closely associated with the devil.

Christine felt that all hope was gone; she would be cast into “outer darkness” and “go away into a lake of fire and brimstone with the devil and his angels.”

The Church bishop who talked to the distraught young mother described a “son of perdition” as a person who has gone “beyond faith into absolute knowledge. They have to throw away that knowledge and actually fight Christ— deny that knowledge—become an enemy of Christ and deny that he exists. Judas was a son of perdition.”

He did not realize how fragmented Christine’s mind had become.

Christine, spinning deeper and deeper into psychosis, was terrified that her “evil” would become apparent to the Church elders and that they would come and take her children away from her. And yet, she somehow realized that it might be better if her children were removed from her for a while. Again, failing to recognize the danger in her, the bishop assured her that her children needed to be with her.

In early January, a home teacher of the Mormon Church went to the trailer home and talked with Christine. He was gravely concerned when he saw that her whole personality had changed. He found her on the verge of “being completely crazy and suicidal.” He took her to his
home and called the bishop. The two men spent the evening trying to counsel Christine, but she was too distraught to listen to them.

The men from her church set up two appointments with psychiatrists for Christine, but when they went to pick her up to drive her to the doctors’ office, she would not answer the door.

It was far too late. Christine Jonsen was consumed with a terrible guilt that her “evil” and her estranged husband’s “evil” would somehow contaminate the children she loved so much.

She had tried everything she knew how to try. She had begged the bishop to find a home where someone kind could take her boys for a few months. She would work two jobs, and she would get out of her terrible financial dilemma. But he had advised her gently that the boys needed her. Their father’s desertion was enough of a trauma for them to cope with. They could not have their mother go away, too.

The church offered to find a babysitter so that she could work afternoons, but Christine knew she couldn’t make enough money that way. They would all starve.

At a certain point, starving no longer mattered. Christine became worried about her babies’ immortal souls.

In her mental state, she felt that she would only become more evil, that the devil himself would drive her further and further from God. As a Mormon, she believed that if her babies died before their eighth birthday, they would be assured of a place in the Celestial Kingdom. Children could not be baptized in the Mormon Church until they reached the age of accountability, but if they died before they were eight, they would go to Heaven because they were without sin.

Christine agonized over what she should do. What if she became increasingly a daughter of perdition—to the point where she would no longer be concerned with her sons’ salvation? She couldn’t keep them from the cold and hunger now, and every day things got worse.

On February 4, the snow was deep and crusted with ice in the Tri-Cities area. Christine had heard that freezing to death wasn’t painful. She planned to join the boys as they went peacefully to sleep and froze. Holding them close, she sat in the snow outside the trailer home, waiting for death to overtake them. But Christopher began to cry and she realized that this plan would not be painless, and she could not bear to have them suffer—even for an instant— as she helped to free them from the wickedness that pervaded her life.

She took the youngsters back inside the trailer house and dressed them warmly, and then she carried them to her car. They drove around the Tri-Cities area all day while she tried to come up with a plan. Periodically, she stopped and parked so that she could think. Several times, she stopped to buy food for the little boys.

Now Christine knew what she had to do. She had decided that she must drown her two precious babies. But it was so hard to do.

The Pasco-Kennewick Bridge is suspended by cables forty feet above the Columbia River that roars beneath. In February, the river was as icy as death itself. Back and forth, back and forth, she drove. It was midnight, and then 2:00
A.M
. If she waited until daylight, it would be too late. Sometimes, there were too many cars on the bridge; sometimes there were cars just behind her. And then, finally,
there was no one—no one except the desperate mother and her two sleeping sons.

“By then,” she would say later, “I knew it had to be done. I did it.”

Christopher, the baby, was first. She carried the still-sleeping child to the center of the bridge and dropped him into the frigid water, hearing a splash far below—and then... nothing. Tears streaming down her face, Christine walked back to the car and got Ryan. He, too, disappeared under the black water below. And then she stood alone on the empty bridge, the wind tearing at her clothing. She had made the ultimate sacrifice.

They were gone from her, but they were entering the Celestial Kingdom.

Several hours later, a disheveled Christine Jonsen walked into the Pasco Police Department and asked to talk to someone. She had killed her children, and she wanted to turn herself in.

Detective Archie Pittman, horrified and disbelieving, interviewed Christine. He taped his interview with her as she described what she had done in a flat, emotionless voice. “I had to do it,” she said. “I dropped my babies into the water. I heard two ‘kerplunks’ a long way down.”

“Why?” Pittman asked in a strangled voice. “Why did you do this?”

She looked at him as if he could not understand, even though it was so clear in her mind. “You can’t know why I did it unless you look at my whole life. He [her estranged husband] is partner to this...This is how evil we are. Each of us have used people in our lives. We’re not pure at heart. Not loving people, but using them.

“I was lazy and rebellious and I fought against everything that’s good and I had degenerated, rather than grown. The only change was that I lied about it. I would always lie to myself.”

To the detective, the soft-faced woman before him looked like anything but a degenerate sinner. She looked as if life itself had risen up and crushed her. Pittman said a silent prayer that what she was telling him was not the truth, only the ramblings of a broken mind.

It might be impossible to prove what she was telling him. If the children were in the river, there was a good chance they would never be found. The Columbia was so deep as it passed through the city and its current so powerful that two tiny bodies would quickly disappear.

Pasco police detectives, all of them hoping this was only a nightmare from a psychotic mind, found the little trailer cold and empty. There were children’s clothes and toys there, teddy bears left behind—but no sign of Christopher and Ryan. They looked in the cupboards and found little food. There were only stacks of unpaid bills, and an almost palpable air of despair in the small mobile home.

Christine Jonsen was arrested, and she seemed relieved. She had asked to be taken into custody, saying that she was fully prepared to be hanged for what she had done. Long months of psychiatric evaluation lay ahead. Now there were so many “if onlys” spoken by her neighbors and the members of her church. If only they had known. But hindsight could not save either the little boys or Christine herself.

If Christine’s sons were to be found so that there could be a funeral or a memorial service, it would take some kind of a miracle.

•  •  •

Since the majority of detectives think in terms of hard evidence and things that can be seen, touched, smelled, and proven to a jury absolutely, they are rarely impressed by psychics. Three thousand miles away from the Tri-Cities area, a detective in Nutley, New Jersey, had overcome his own doubts about the positive results that could come from clairvoyance. Salvatore Luberpazzi, of the Nutley Police Department, was highly resistant when he first met a fifty-four-year-old grandmother named Dorothy Allison. Dorothy was a typical middle-aged woman in the Italian community, but there were many people who had turned to her in desperation when all other methods to find their missing loved one had failed. She was neither highly educated nor extremely brilliant, but Dorothy Allison had a remarkable gift, one that sometimes haunted her so much that she wished it would just go away. She could see where the bodies of lost people rested. She was especially psychic when she was asked to find children, particularly children who were under water.

Luberpazzi had very reluctantly agreed to let her work on some of his cold cases. “It’s a very strange feeling to go up to this woman and tell her what I’m looking for and she describes an area that’s miles and miles away.” He shook his head in wonderment as he said: “In the past eleven years, she has found twenty missing or deceased persons for us.”

Dorothy Allison had no axe to grind. Unlike many well-known psychics, she certainly wasn’t into clairvoyance for the money; she asked only for reimbursement for the cost of transportation and lodging when she had to travel far from her home. She had a family and would have preferred to be with them, but she accepted that she had been blessed—or cursed—with her ability to “see” what
was hidden to everyone else. By the time Christine’s boys vanished beneath the river’s surface, Dorothy had long since overcome police skepticism about her ability to locate those she called “my babies...my angels.” Although the earthly remains of missing children might be only decomposed skeletons, they were smiling, innocent children to her, and she was compelled by the visions that came to her.

Dorothy Allison’s involvement in the search for missing children began in 1968 when she woke from a nightmare. She had seen the image of a little boy stuck in a pipe. For a month, she tried to put it out of her mind, and then she went to the Nutley police. When she told the desk sergeant what she had dreamed, she described his reaction: “The officer jumped off his chair like a maniac and told me a little boy with that description was missing and believed drowned.”

The police followed Dorothy’s instructions, and she led them to that small boy. Michael Kurcsics, five years old, was found caught in a drainage pipe, and became the first picture in Mrs. Allison’s “book of angels.”