Redemption (24 page)

I devoured the book and the workbook that went along with it. In the workbook, I had to write answers to questions I’d never even considered before, questions such as:

What is still unsettled for me?

How can I cope with my feelings in healthy ways that do not hurt others?

How can I forgive myself?

Can I make the decision to heal?

The experience opened me up—not much, but a little bit. Because of what I was learning, I was able to connect with my mother again. If she wrote me, I was able to write back. Through that course, I learned that no matter what she had done or not done, Deborah was still my mother—and despite her shortcomings, she was the only mother I would ever have, and she loved me. I wasn’t getting another mother, so I knew I had to love her, too.

Freeing Christy

wo weeks before I went to trial, in October of 1992, Christy was released from prison. She was lucky to serve only two and a half years of her five-year sentence. I was relieved that she had her life back. Her freedom validated everything I had done. It had been for something.

Christy went to live with Mom and John, but that lasted only about five seconds. John was too strict for her. The three of them couldn’t get along. Christy just wasn’t happy there. She lived with Aunt Deanna and then on her own after that. She was wild and hard to keep track of.

She had a great body, and she wasn’t ashamed of it. So by the time she was nineteen, she was working at Hooters. She did that job for several years. She’d send me pictures of her hugging one of her sugar daddies in Vegas. She went through a string of guys who were overpossessive jerks.

She began partying hard when she got out, and I thought she had a problem with drugs and alcohol. She almost became a drug addict at one point, but thank God, she didn’t quite get there. I didn’t know everything that was going on as she spiraled downward. In the beginning, she didn’t come to see me, and she didn’t want to talk to me.

I missed her, but I wasn’t mad at her.

I understood how painful it was for her to see me in prison. She would even say so.

“I just can’t think about you being there,” she would tell me if I caught her on the phone. “It makes me feel so bad.”

“I’m here so you can be happy,” I’d tell her. “Go out and have a good life. Stop getting into trouble. Knock it off.”

I told her if she threw her life away, then my life meant nothing.

We both knew I was right, but I realize now that she was carrying a heavier burden than she could bear. Mostly, she hadn’t received any rape counseling—she still hasn’t. She was still suffering from our father’s abuse. She didn’t say so, but I could tell. Then she had me to contend with me. I know she missed me, and I know how guilty she felt because I was still behind bars.

To top off the mess that was Christy’s life, she had no guidance. There was no relative to show her how to be a productive and happy adult. She must’ve felt so alone. I couldn’t help her anymore. The only place she found any comfort was in her bad relationships with men.

She was so lost for so many years. I saw her every now and then and always hoped our relationship would become constant instead of distant. But that didn’t happen until many years later, not until she became a mother.

Although Christy couldn’t talk about what our father did to her, I was proud of her when, despite her problems, she donated her portion of Dad’s estate. Shortly after her release, she received $90,000, and she sure could’ve used that money. But instead, she split it into three chunks of $30,000 each and gave it all to charity. She chose a children’s hospital that specialized in noninvasive testing for abused children, a battered woman’s shelter, and an organization for abused children. She didn’t want a cent of his money.

My Trial

otion in limine
. I had no idea what the term meant before I was charged with a felony. But in my late teens, I became familiar with many Latin legal terms. My public defender, Mr. McGraugh, was kind to me. He was firm and businesslike, but he had sympathy for my story. At times, he seemed truly sorry about my plight.

I was twenty years old, and I still couldn’t use the word
rape
. I couldn’t tell Mr. McGraugh how I got a scar on my wrist. I couldn’t tell anyone what Tom Lannert did to me on my eighteenth birthday. I couldn’t explain the details of a lifetime of abuse because I didn’t yet have the vocabulary. I was just starting
The Courage to Heal
, and I didn’t believe there was good inside myself. The words—
rape, molestation, fellatio
, and
sodomy
—were dirty. I still viewed myself as weak and worthless for letting such unspeakable things happen to me. So Mr. McGraugh didn’t know all that much. If he had known the severity of my abuse, maybe he’d have wanted to move mountains for me. Maybe he would have seen me as more than just another troubled kid who needed a public defender. He did want to help me, but I didn’t give him enough to go on. My words could only scrape the surface of what really happened between me and my father.

Mr. McGraugh filed motions in limine before the start of my trial requesting that certain pieces of evidence be introduced to the jury. The prosecuting attorney, Mr. J. D. Evans, filed his own motions that worked to block bits of my story. Mr. Evans’s boss was the prosecuting attorney of St. Louis County, Robert McCulloch. Mr. McCulloch doggedly went after me, calling me a bald-faced liar. He believed I killed my father in cold blood for his money; he wanted me punished to the full extent of the law.

All of the motions took forever to make their way through the legal system. Then my original trial judge was replaced with another, the Honorable Steven H. Goldman. I had been in police custody—in a jail notorious for its twenty-three hours a day of lockdown—since July 5, 1990. My trial began on October 27, 1992.

I was in big trouble. The prosecuting attorneys could have shown sympathy and given me a lighter charge—anything other than murder one. But according to Bob McCulloch, my father had never laid his hands on me. It didn’t matter that Wendy, my former babysitter, and a psychologist testified that I was abused. It didn’t matter that Detective Schulte believed I was abused. Schulte was never called to testify. The prosecutor had him removed from my case.

Mr. McCulloch believed that Thomas F. Lannert was a “drunk and violent man, but that didn’t make him a rapist.”

Mr. McCulloch was famous for being skeptical about sex crimes. Even when a high school principal had sex with three of his students at Hazelwood High School, Mr. McCulloch refused to prosecute him because the victims could offer no physical proof. He didn’t take the girls at their word, and the principal got only 120 days of time. In a way, Bob McCulloch seemed to relate posthumously to my dad. They both belonged to the Good Old Boys network in St. Louis. They were both members of the Missouri Athletic Club. The Edge, my father’s favorite bar, was a big meeting place for the judges and lawyers. In my gut, I felt that Bob McCulloch had it in for me.

Meanwhile, my lawyer, Mr. McGraugh, did what he could. He filed in vain to use self-defense in my case. That motion was denied because neither my sister nor I was in immediate danger when the crime took place. The victim—my father—had been sleeping. The public defender’s next option was to try a battered spouse syndrome defense. The state of Missouri had just adopted it for use in abuse cases, but battered spouse didn’t apply to me. I was not the wife, and Missouri had no provisions for abused children at that time. Mr. McGraugh had only one more option for me: insanity.

The judge allowed the jury to hear some evidence of my father’s abuse. Then a court-appointed psychologist went on the stand to say I suffered from post–traumatic stress disorder, which can happen after a person experiences life-threatening events. Symptoms include nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of detachment. According to another expert, I suffered from dissociative disorder, a condition that caused me to lose memory, awareness, and functioning for periods of time. It meant I could detach from my body and leave reality to cope with abuse.

I didn’t like these psychiatric terms, but they definitely described me.

Yet, they were not enough to prove my insanity. What I did was completely, heartbreakingly insane. I just wasn’t insane when I did it.

Mr. Evans tried to show how I planned and plotted the murder. He brought Jason to the stand. Jason knew my father had money, and he had overheard the conversation I had with Ron when I said I wished Dad were dead. I had been planning a hit, Mr. Evans suggested.

This part of the trial nearly made my heart stop beating. Yes, I had spoken those words to Ron, but that wasn’t why I pulled the trigger on the night of July 4. I had done that on my own. I had never considered having my father killed. The allegation made me want to vomit, and there I was stuck with it on the public record.

Mr. Evans showed further evidence to damage me. He had copies of checks I had written, forging my father’s name. But of course I forged his name; I ran our household. I had a small moment of victory when my attorney pulled out proof of my dad’s signature okaying the monthly bank statements. Those documents proved that Dad knew I was writing checks, and I was obviously doing it with his permission. I did not want the jury to believe that money had anything to do with my crime. That was the one character scar I refused to live with. The jury didn’t know I had rejected the plea bargain—the one that offered me fifteen years of prison for saying I killed him for monetary gain. But I knew I had rejected it; the lawyers knew it; and the judge knew it. I wasn’t walking down that road of lies and deception anymore. Taking the plea would’ve been the cheap and tawdry way out of my already desperate situation. I wanted to be a better person, and I had to start somewhere.

In his closing arguments, Mr. Evans told the jury I was in full control of myself when I shot my father. He stated that I knew right from wrong. He proved I was not legally insane at the time of the shooting.

The jury deliberated for five hours.

I did not freak out while I waited for their verdict. The days during the trial weren’t that different from the last seven hundred or so I had spent in Gumbo. I spent a little bit of time with my mom—she and John had moved back to Illinois by this time. She had watched the trial when she was allowed to—after giving testimony on my behalf. Her side of the family hated me, and they blamed my mother for letting things go so wrong. Dad’s side attended the trial, glaring at me the whole time. Only John sat behind me every day. He said, “We failed you before, Stacey, and we’re not going to fail you now.”

Mom and John were it. While we waited, my mother gave me a Twenty-third Psalm prayer pamphlet, and I focused on those words of comfort and hope. I told myself,
Okay, God, you’re getting ready to take me on a journey. Here I am, Lord. Do with me what you will
. Maybe I would be in prison for the rest of my life. I would leave it up to God.

On October 30, 1992, I was found guilty of first-degree murder. In December, Judge Goldman handed down the mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. In his posttrial report, he wrote, “The sentence is severe for a twenty-year-old. It is also somewhat surprising considering the sexual abuse by the victim’s father … a conventional life sentence would be more appropriate from a comparison standpoint.”

In a conventional sentence, the guilty party gets to make her case before the parole board after serving a certain period of time. Even Charles Manson got the possibility of parole. But not me.

———

When he learned I had been found guilty, Grandpa Paulson marched over to my mother’s house with everything she had ever given him—Father’s Day presents, photos, cards—in a box. He dumped it at her front door.

He told her, “You left your man. You left your daughters. You’re no daughter of mine.” She did not speak to him again until he was on his deathbed, many years later.

With that gesture, the entire Paulson side of the family cut her off—and me, too. Mom was heartbroken that I’d just received a sentence of life without parole. She was eaten up with guilt that she could have prevented it, and now she was denied the comfort of a family to fall back on.

Instead, they blamed her.

Instead of sympathy, nearly all of the Paulsons built up a huge wall. Then they threw her—and me—to the other side.