Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Once upon a Time I disappeared. I was one person
Speaker 2: one day and the next someone else, both the same
Speaker 2: woman I'd always been, and also utterly eerily unfamiliar. There
Speaker 2: was a story in this, I felt, one built around
Speaker 2: a universal question, how do you know who you are?
Speaker 2: Answers would be grounded in the body and bound to memory.
Speaker 2: But for many years I could not write it. I
Speaker 2: couldn't figure out where to begin, and I had no ending. Moreover,
Speaker 2: trauma had scrambled my understanding, the need to make meanings.
Speaker 2: Stymied by an inability to see, I was unable to
Speaker 2: sink beneath the surface of events down to the truth
Speaker 2: of who had done, what and why.
Speaker 1: That's Karen Palmer, author of several novels and the memoir
Speaker 1: She's Under Here. Karen's a harrowing story of a vulnerable
Speaker 1: young woman who finds herself in the wrong place, at
Speaker 1: the wrong time, in the wrong circumstances, without the tools
Speaker 1: or experience to recognize the danger she's in until finally
Speaker 1: she does. It's also a story of extraordinary resilience and
Speaker 1: the power of love to transcend seemingly impossible odds. I'm
Speaker 1: Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that
Speaker 1: are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 1: and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2: I am an adopted only child, and my parents were
Speaker 2: transplanted New Yorkers. They were both children of Irish immigrants
Speaker 2: who moved to New York City, probably around the turn
Speaker 2: of the century. And both my parents grew up during
Speaker 2: the Depression, and my father went off to World War Two,
Speaker 2: and my mother, who was I guess about five years
Speaker 2: younger than him at the time he left the neighborhood
Speaker 2: in New York. She was still in high school and
Speaker 2: he kind of knew her from seeing her around, but
Speaker 2: he didn't know her know her.
Speaker 3: By the time he got.
Speaker 2: Back after the war, she was all grown up and
Speaker 2: she had a job as a secretary down on Wall Street,
Speaker 2: and she caught his eye as a returning serviceman. He
Speaker 2: was still wearing his uniform and going out drinking, you know,
Speaker 2: with his friends. And my mother used to tell this
Speaker 2: story that when she first saw him, she was very disdainful,
Speaker 2: you know, she called him, oh, those flyboys, you know
Speaker 2: that they were showing off in their uniform, and she
Speaker 2: was at the time engaged to marry a navy guy,
Speaker 2: and within two weeks of having met my father, she
Speaker 2: broke off her engagement and was wildly in love with
Speaker 2: this man that she thought was not for her on
Speaker 2: first sight. My mom was the youngest of seven children,
Speaker 2: and my grandmother raised all the kids on her own
Speaker 2: because her husband had run off with another woman in
Speaker 2: the middle of the depression. So, you know, these kids
Speaker 2: lived in Hell's Kitchen in you know, in a small apartment,
Speaker 2: all seven of them.
Speaker 3: The boy that was just above.
Speaker 2: Her in age died when he was seven years old.
Speaker 2: He fell down an elevator shaft in the building, and
Speaker 2: so there was, you know, there was a certain amount
Speaker 2: of that kind of Irish tragic aura to her family,
Speaker 2: whereas my father's family was more what they used to
Speaker 2: call lace curtain Irish, so they, you know, my mother
Speaker 2: would have put it that his family put on airs.
Speaker 2: There were only three children in his family, which was
Speaker 2: quite unusual for that era to only have three. So
Speaker 2: they had they had different kinds of upbringings. And after
Speaker 2: the war, my dad was very ill. Towards the end,
Speaker 2: he came down with something that they thought was Hodgkins lymphoma,
Speaker 2: and Walter Reed gave him these massive doses of radiation
Speaker 2: to treat it. When it turned out that wasn't what
Speaker 2: he had, but it had the side effect of making
Speaker 2: him sterile, which they didn't know for many years. You know,
Speaker 2: in those days, they didn't put the lead apron over you.
Speaker 2: They just you know, blasted you. So they tried for
Speaker 2: ten years to have a baby and couldn't, and then
Speaker 2: they adopted me. So I was brought into this this
Speaker 2: situation where my dad, who was a fairly serious alcoholic,
Speaker 2: cleaned up his act for a couple of years while
Speaker 2: they were adopting me, you know, because they had social
Speaker 2: workers come around and interview them and all that. My
Speaker 2: mom was very hopeful that the marriage, which had gotten
Speaker 2: rocky over those ten years, would get back on track,
Speaker 2: and he cleaned up for the adoption, but as soon
Speaker 2: as it was all over, he was a heavy drinker again.
Speaker 2: He was a binge drinker, so you never knew when
Speaker 2: he was going to go off. He would be fine,
Speaker 2: and then all of a sudden he'd be holed up
Speaker 2: in the bedroom, you know, with bottles of whiskey and
Speaker 2: wouldn't come out for two weeks, and the situation in
Speaker 2: the house was tense and there was a lot of fighting.
Speaker 2: And my mother was extremely religious and wouldn't have gotten
Speaker 2: a divorce because she believed, you know, you get married,
Speaker 2: you make the value in it for life. But she
Speaker 2: was extremely unhappy in the marriage, so she put a
Speaker 2: lot of her attention on me as her child and
Speaker 2: the only one in the house that she could talk to,
Speaker 2: because she and my father had really a very bad marriage.
Speaker 1: And you were in la by that time, right, Your
Speaker 1: parents had moved west.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my parents moved west right after the war, and
Speaker 2: then ten years later they adopted me. They were the
Speaker 2: only ones in their families to move. Everybody else stayed
Speaker 2: back east. Everyone and my dad wanted to be a
Speaker 2: newspaper man. He had a brother in law who worked
Speaker 2: for the Washington Post, and he admired this brother in
Speaker 2: law so much that he thought that what he wanted
Speaker 2: to do after he got out of the service was
Speaker 2: worked for a newspaper. So he faked his graduation from
Speaker 2: high school for his mother's sake, so that he could walk,
Speaker 2: you know, in the auditorium up on the stage and
Speaker 2: pretend to get his diploma. When he did not in
Speaker 2: fact graduate, because he had ditched so much school as
Speaker 2: a youngster. But when he got out of the army,
Speaker 2: he went on the GI bill to Columbia for a
Speaker 2: year and study journalism, and rather than go all the
Speaker 2: way through a degree program, he was very impatient, and
Speaker 2: he thought the best way to get a job on
Speaker 2: a newspaper would be to first work for a small
Speaker 2: town paper, which after my parents got married, they lived
Speaker 2: for a year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and he got
Speaker 2: a job working on their newspaper, and then from there
Speaker 2: they moved to Los Angeles, and he went through this
Speaker 2: series of maneuvers, you know, with phony clips and you know,
Speaker 2: all this stuff in order to get a job at
Speaker 2: what was then called the Herald Express, which was kind
Speaker 2: of a slightly yellow newspaper, very sensationalist, and that was
Speaker 2: his first newspaper job.
Speaker 1: Karen grows up on a steep hill in Silver Lake,
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, as an only child in a neighborhood without
Speaker 1: many other kids. She learns early how to keep herself company,
Speaker 1: building elaborate inner worlds to fill the quiet. Her mother's
Speaker 1: attention is intense consuming, her father's is almost non existent.
Speaker 1: Karen lives in the space between too much and not enough,
Speaker 1: and then at fifteen, everything shifts. She becomes pregnant. In
Speaker 1: her Catholic family. During that era, there is no debate
Speaker 1: about what will happen. She'll carry the baby, and the
Speaker 1: baby will be placed for adoption, and so forms a
Speaker 1: certain symmetry.
Speaker 2: She was very volatile during that time. On the one hand,
Speaker 2: she was supportive in her way, given that there was
Speaker 2: only one outcome for this, but she was you know.
Speaker 2: She early on took me to the doctor and she
Speaker 2: was kind, which was very unexpected. I expected her to
Speaker 2: be furious. But as the pregnancy progressed, she became obsessed
Speaker 2: with what she termed my lack of remorse.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like she was looking for something from me that
Speaker 2: she wasn't seeing. And part of the form that that
Speaker 2: took was that because I was adopted myself, and because
Speaker 2: the implication of that was that my birth mother had
Speaker 2: also had sex.
Speaker 3: Outside of marriage, you know, So.
Speaker 2: I always felt that she at that point it was
Speaker 2: when she first started to think of me as less
Speaker 2: her child and maybe more related to the woman who
Speaker 2: gave me up. It's like she didn't understand me once
Speaker 2: I became a teenager. We were very close to when
Speaker 2: I was a child, but once, you know, the hormones
Speaker 2: hit and the rebellion and all that normal teenage stuff.
Speaker 2: She was beside herself and wanted desperately to control me
Speaker 2: and I wasn't having it, and so she didn't know
Speaker 2: what to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes so much sense. And then you're sent
Speaker 1: to this institution called Saint Anne's where you're going to
Speaker 1: have the baby. Do you know at that time that
Speaker 1: you were also adopted from Saint Anne's. Did you know
Speaker 1: that that's where you started out your life?
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, I did know.
Speaker 2: One thing my parents did about my adoption is I
Speaker 2: don't ever remember not knowing, so they must have told
Speaker 2: me really early on. And I was raised to feel
Speaker 2: that I had been chosen and that it wasn't that
Speaker 2: somebody didn't want me. It's that my adoptive parents wanted
Speaker 2: a child so badly that they, you know, they went
Speaker 2: and picked me out of all the so their children,
Speaker 2: and that was kind of the fairy tale that they
Speaker 2: constructed for me. I knew I had been born in
Speaker 2: Saint Anne's because it was not far from our house,
Speaker 2: and I think my mother must have talked about it
Speaker 2: so that when I got pregnant, it was, you know,
Speaker 2: rather than look for some home for unwed mothers that
Speaker 2: was at a distance, which I got. I have never
Speaker 2: thought about this before. That might have made more sense.
Speaker 2: She just picked this place where I had myself been born.
Speaker 2: They had a hospital ward in this facility, so it
Speaker 2: wasn't just dorm rooms in a place to live while
Speaker 2: you were waiting out your pregnancy. You also gave birth
Speaker 2: on the premises.
Speaker 1: Karen gives birth to a son when she's just sixteen.
Speaker 1: She holds him for only an hour, an hour that
Speaker 1: feels both infinite and unbearably brief. The decision to relinquish
Speaker 1: him has already been made. Verurse reassures her that it'll
Speaker 1: be fine. She'll have other children. The nurse tells her.
Speaker 1: Karen receives one polaroid snapshot of her child, the only
Speaker 1: trace of him once the door closes. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: unbeknownst to her, another loss is looming. Her father has cancer,
Speaker 1: information that's been kept from her until after she returns home.
Speaker 1: When he dies soon after his illness is revealed to her,
Speaker 1: she is suddenly a teenager carrying two profound absences at
Speaker 1: once and all. Before finishing high school, Karen takes a
Speaker 1: part time job at an office supply company. She's seventeen,
Speaker 1: her boss, Gil is thirty six. Here with Gil, her
Speaker 1: vulnerability becomes a kind of magnet. She is raw from
Speaker 1: all she's endured, grief, secrecy, shame, and Gil steps into
Speaker 1: that space. There is an intoxicating world of attention and attraction,
Speaker 1: a heady combination that distracts Karen from a sense that
Speaker 1: something might be a miss, And in those early days,
Speaker 1: what happens between them begins to shape the rest of
Speaker 1: her life.
Speaker 2: I was drawn to him initially because after the experience
Speaker 2: I had with the pregnancy and giving up my son,
Speaker 2: I could no longer deal with teenage boys. It's like
Speaker 2: they were a completely different species to me now. And
Speaker 2: he was older, and he had a business, and he
Speaker 2: was so interested in me, you know. It's like he
Speaker 2: wanted to know what I had to say, and I
Speaker 2: was so grieving. Something that I have thought since is
Speaker 2: that I mistook grief for maturity.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: I thought I was a way more mature person than
Speaker 2: I was because I had had this hard experience, and
Speaker 2: so I didn't see the age difference. Clearly, when I
Speaker 2: look back on what he was doing now, it seems
Speaker 2: very clear that it was grooming. I would not have
Speaker 2: had the language for that at the time at all.
Speaker 2: And then also, it was the seventies and you had
Speaker 2: Roman Polanski and you had Jack Nicholson, and you had
Speaker 2: all these semi famous men running around with teenagers and
Speaker 2: nobody thought anything of it. So there was also this
Speaker 2: atmosphere of anything goes and a level of promiscuity that
Speaker 2: disappeared once the AIDS crisis hit.
Speaker 3: So this was just ahead of that.
Speaker 2: And again I had been through this experience and I
Speaker 2: thought I was perfectly prepared to step into a life
Speaker 2: with someone this month than me.
Speaker 1: So how long before you marry him?
Speaker 2: Well, we lived together for I think six years, so
Speaker 2: it's like we were married, but we didn't actually do
Speaker 2: this ceremony until I was twenty two.
Speaker 1: And how did your parents feel about it? Your mom,
Speaker 1: because your dad had passed away.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think my mom. See this is sort of
Speaker 2: a terrible thing to say about her, but I think
Speaker 2: my mom, who never really liked him that much, she
Speaker 2: you know, she recognized him. He was also a New Yorker,
Speaker 2: he had moved from New York to California after being
Speaker 2: in the service, and I think she felt like she
Speaker 2: had his number, but he was older. She thought he
Speaker 2: would take care of me, and she also thought that
Speaker 2: he would understand this experience I had gone through and
Speaker 2: not think of me as spoiled goods, you know, because
Speaker 2: I think that's the way her mind ran is she
Speaker 2: you know, some part of her was like, well, no
Speaker 2: man is ever going to want her like what she did,
Speaker 2: and so she swallowed it, even though she was wary.
Speaker 1: But Karen doesn't feel like spoiled goods, not at all
Speaker 1: for starters. She feels very mature and also does not
Speaker 1: believe her teenage pregnancy to be a disqualifying thing. Besides,
Speaker 1: Gill is intoxicating sexy. He also tells her that he'll
Speaker 1: take care of her always, that he'll be there for
Speaker 1: her no matter what, that as long as she's with him,
Speaker 1: she'll be safe. There are red flags waving all over
Speaker 1: the place, but she's a teenager and she doesn't see them.
Speaker 2: There's a word I ran across when I was working
Speaker 2: on the project that it's like the frog the boiling
Speaker 2: frog metaphor, But to me, it's more specific it's called mithradatism,
Speaker 2: which is the process of ingesting self administering small amounts
Speaker 2: of poison so that when you get the full dose
Speaker 2: it won't affect you. I feel like I participated in
Speaker 2: some of the things that I saw in him that
Speaker 2: should have been huge red flags, like you know this
Speaker 2: this sort of petty criminality, and you know, selling stolen
Speaker 2: goods and having multiple identification and I thought, oh, this
Speaker 2: just makes him interesting. He's kind of an outlaw. And
Speaker 2: I went from seeing him that way to as I
Speaker 2: got older and I had children and I grew up,
Speaker 2: then it became clearer and clearer to me that he
Speaker 2: was actually a very dangerous person. And I spent fourteen
Speaker 2: years learning that lesson. So it is a long time.
Speaker 1: Karen and Gil are seven years into their relationship when
Speaker 1: their daughter, Erin is born. Erin is followed four and
Speaker 1: a half years later by another daughter, Amy. Gil already
Speaker 1: has kids from his first marriage, and Karen sees him
Speaker 1: as a loving and involved father, a huge draw given
Speaker 1: her own father's emotional absence, so she ignores a lot
Speaker 1: of things. There's the fact that he denies owning a gun,
Speaker 1: a lie. There is physical violence. Gil is regularly unfaithful,
Speaker 1: and Karen is diagnosed with numerous venereal diseases. Even as
Speaker 1: Gil gaslights her, telling her she must have picked them
Speaker 1: up on toilet seats, but then he goes too far.
Speaker 1: He locks her in a broom closet.
Speaker 2: There was a breaking point because that particular incident actually
Speaker 2: happened during a phase in which things were pretty good
Speaker 2: between us. You know, he had gotten a new job,
Speaker 2: and he was doing well in the job, and the
Speaker 2: kids were at a really fun age, and you know,
Speaker 2: it was cyclical. Things would be good and then they'd
Speaker 2: be bad, and good and then bad, but they were good.
Speaker 3: We were living in Marin.
Speaker 2: County and we were due to go into San Francisco
Speaker 2: that day with the girls, just to spend the day
Speaker 2: in the city, and they were out in the car.
Speaker 2: I was getting some stuff ready in the house to
Speaker 2: bring in the car, and he came back in and
Speaker 2: shoved me in the broom closet and locked it and left.
Speaker 2: I cannot remember that it was precipitated by something. Perhaps
Speaker 2: it was, but I really think it was just casual cruelty.
Speaker 2: You know, he was annoyed for some reason that I
Speaker 2: wasn't aware of. You know, he was always telling me
Speaker 2: things like, get your head out of your ass. You know,
Speaker 2: you're being dumb, you're stupid, you know, all those kinds
Speaker 2: of criticisms. And so he, for whatever reason, did this
Speaker 2: and then left me in there for several hours. And
Speaker 2: I had a lot of time to think. When I
Speaker 2: was in there. You know, I was a young mom.
Speaker 2: I had these two young kids, I had a job,
Speaker 2: I went to school. I never had any time to myself,
Speaker 2: and I had some time to myself in this closet.
Speaker 2: And by the end of my time there, what occurred
Speaker 2: to me, because I couldn't think of a precipitating event,
Speaker 2: was that he didn't love me. You know, I thought, oh,
Speaker 2: this is a revelation, he doesn't love me. But the
Speaker 2: more important thing that I came to after that event
Speaker 2: was that I realized I didn't love him anymore. And
Speaker 2: that's what changed everything, was my falling out of love
Speaker 2: with him.
Speaker 1: An other important revelation is soon forthcoming when Karen and
Speaker 1: her family take a trip to la and stay with
Speaker 1: their friends, Vinnie and his wife.
Speaker 2: We had been friends for such a long time, and
Speaker 2: because we knew each other while we were involved with others,
Speaker 2: we never thought of each other as for us. I
Speaker 2: thought he was wonderful, I thought he was interesting. I
Speaker 2: thought he was very sexy guy, very smart. I never
Speaker 2: thought of him as someone for me, and I don't
Speaker 2: think he necessarily thought of me as.
Speaker 3: Someone for him.
Speaker 2: Like I used to joke around with him that of
Speaker 2: all my husband's friends, he's the only one that never
Speaker 2: made a pass at me. So we didn't see each
Speaker 2: other that way. And then on this trip, I don't
Speaker 2: remember for sure what was going on with him and
Speaker 2: his wife. Things weren't good between them. He was really
Speaker 2: unhappy and I was really unhappy. And we took this
Speaker 2: walk in the middle of the night because we were
Speaker 2: making too much noise talking and we were told, you know,
Speaker 2: or get out and go talk somewhere else, so we did,
Speaker 2: and at some point over the course of this walk,
Speaker 2: we just kind of looked at each other and it
Speaker 2: was like, oh, you you know, we had no idea,
Speaker 2: and it was really just like it was the thunderbolt.
Speaker 1: And after that thunderbolt, fairly quickly you're both resolved that
Speaker 1: you have to be together, and you both end your marriages.
Speaker 1: And this is when Gil, who already was such a
Speaker 1: dangerous human. This is when he sort of kicks into
Speaker 1: high gear. Yeah, and it seems like he's willing to
Speaker 1: let you go, but he is definitely not willing to
Speaker 1: let you go with Vinnie.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Although I sometimes if I think about this, it was
Speaker 2: worse because it was Vinny, but I think it wouldn't
Speaker 2: have mattered as soon as there was somebody else in
Speaker 2: the picture.
Speaker 3: He would not have tolerated it.
Speaker 2: It was a thousand times worse because it was a
Speaker 2: friend of his, So that had the effect of accelerating
Speaker 2: every awful thing he did in his effort to get
Speaker 2: me to do what he wanted me to do.
Speaker 1: So there's this night that you're on the phone with
Speaker 1: Vinnie and you're making plans and you think that you're
Speaker 1: in a safe space to be talking to him, and
Speaker 1: that it comes clear that Gil has been lurking right there,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's very sort of chilling moment. There
Speaker 1: are so many places where it feels like this could
Speaker 1: just be it right here, and you know he's kind
Speaker 1: of like you hang up and he's muttering like what
Speaker 1: to do? What to do? What should I do? And
Speaker 1: you ask him what are you thinking? And he says
Speaker 1: snakes and filths, baby snakes and silts. What did that
Speaker 1: mean to you?
Speaker 2: I think what it meant to me is that what
Speaker 2: went on in his head was so much worse than
Speaker 2: anything I could have imagined. It wasn't just him him
Speaker 2: lying there. He was lying on the floor with his
Speaker 2: head partly into the room, and the room was dark,
Speaker 2: so I didn't see him. So he had been lying
Speaker 2: there listening, and I thought it was okay to talk
Speaker 2: because he had gotten very drunk and passed out, so
Speaker 2: I assumed he was asleep. And it's not like he
Speaker 2: could have said to me, you know, you did this
Speaker 2: terrible thing to me, or you're betraying me, or it wasn't.
Speaker 2: I'm hurt, you know. I we're married and you're my
Speaker 2: wife and we have children, and I'm hurt to discover
Speaker 2: that you're doing this.
Speaker 3: It was you're going to pay.
Speaker 2: The stuff that's running through my head is all about
Speaker 2: how you're going to pay.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: Karen does what she has to do. She gets her
Speaker 1: daughters and goes drives hours and hours away to Carlsbad,
Speaker 1: where her mother is now living in a mobile home. Park.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of practice run, a rehearsal for leaving
Speaker 1: Gil for good. When they arrive, her mother's reaction is blunt,
Speaker 1: almost dismissive. Why are you leaving him? Is it the drinking?
Speaker 1: Karen tells her the truth that she's in love with
Speaker 1: someone else. Her mother scuffs love, She says, grow up.
Speaker 1: A woman disappointed by love too many times has little
Speaker 1: patience for her daughter's hope. While Karen is hiding out,
Speaker 1: Gil tracks her down. She hopes their conversations will be reasonable,
Speaker 1: but reasonable they are not. He wants her to come home,
Speaker 1: and in truth, Karen wants to come home to her
Speaker 1: older daughter, Erin has school routines a life Aarin doesn't
Speaker 1: want to disrupt. Gil promises he won't be there, that
Speaker 1: he'll clear out so that she and the girls can
Speaker 1: return safely. So she drives back, bracing herself, and what
Speaker 1: she finds when she walks through the door will mark
Speaker 1: yet another inflection point.
Speaker 2: We left in the late afternoon and got home probably
Speaker 2: around midnight, so the kids were very sleepy, and we
Speaker 2: came into the apartment. Apartment was dark, and it had
Speaker 2: you know that feeling even when you can't see the
Speaker 2: feeling of an empty house or in an empty apartment.
Speaker 2: It's like I could feel that he wasn't there. But
Speaker 2: there was this very faint smell of fire, and I thought, well,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't know we had a fireplace, so
Speaker 2: he had a fire, but he's not here. So I
Speaker 2: put the kids to bed, and I was putting toys away,
Speaker 2: but my gaze falls upon this row of pictures that
Speaker 2: we had on the wall over the kid's toy box,
Speaker 2: and like, there's something wrong with the way the pictures
Speaker 2: look to me. So I got up and went over
Speaker 2: to them and looked at them, and they seem normal,
Speaker 2: until I realized that in one of the frames, you know,
Speaker 2: the matting is there, but the photograph is gone. And
Speaker 2: I couldn't, for the life of me, remember what the
Speaker 2: photograph was. And then the next one, which was a
Speaker 2: picture from our wedding, his head has been cut out
Speaker 2: of the picture. So it was on the steps of
Speaker 2: the church and the wedding party standing there, and I'm
Speaker 2: standing beside him, and all the you know, the grooms
Speaker 2: are on one side and the bride'smaids are on the other,
Speaker 2: and he's taken this big chunk out of the photograph.
Speaker 2: What it made me think then, is, oh my god,
Speaker 2: what has he done to the photographs? So I ran
Speaker 2: into the kitchen. We had this cabinet where we kept
Speaker 2: all our you know, photo albums and paperwork, you know,
Speaker 2: all the stuff that we that we owned, the lease
Speaker 2: and the birth certificates and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: And I pulled out the box where we kept the
Speaker 2: recent snapshots of the girls, and they seemed to be fine,
Speaker 2: like the pictures. I was worried that he had done
Speaker 2: something to the pictures of the girls and that I
Speaker 2: would have lost them, and they seemed to be fine.
Speaker 2: But as I was shuffling through them, I saw that
Speaker 2: there were more of these photos of him.
Speaker 3: With his head cut out.
Speaker 2: And it took some looking at them to finally realize
Speaker 2: that he'd only done that in the photos where he
Speaker 2: was with me, you know. There were other photos of
Speaker 2: him with the kids or with friends or his family
Speaker 2: or whatever, and there he is in the photograph is intact.
Speaker 2: But in these photographs where we're in it together, he's
Speaker 2: cut his head out. And I got scared. So I
Speaker 2: pulled out my mother's photo albums. When she retired to
Speaker 2: this mobile home park, she gave me all the family
Speaker 2: photo albums because I think she was trying to.
Speaker 3: Ease the emotional clutter.
Speaker 2: You know, she was starting a new phase of her
Speaker 2: life and she was not a big one for dwelling
Speaker 2: on the past, and she knew I loved all that stuff,
Speaker 2: like I loved the family photo albums. So I open
Speaker 2: up like my baby book, you know, where my mom
Speaker 2: had all my pictures, and they were all gone, everything,
Speaker 2: and it was gone, all of it. And then I
Speaker 2: pulled out other albums you know that my mom had
Speaker 2: from her family in New York. Everybody gone, everybody whatever
Speaker 2: pictures we had in my dad all gone.
Speaker 3: So he had gone through.
Speaker 2: And again, because of the smell of fire, I assumed
Speaker 2: that he had burned all this stuff, and that is
Speaker 2: in fact what he did.
Speaker 1: You know, it's striking me that the psychological warfare of
Speaker 1: that is particularly I mean, it would be awful for anyone,
Speaker 1: but it's particularly awful for an adoptee. It's like, yes,
Speaker 1: you've had your adoptive family, all proof of it ripped
Speaker 1: out from underneath you, having also, as an adoptee, never
Speaker 1: known anything about your birth.
Speaker 2: Family, right right, It wasn't erasure yeah, you know, it's
Speaker 2: like he was trying to erase me.
Speaker 1: But Gil takes the erasure further. When Karen opens her
Speaker 1: lock box for which Gil knows the combination, she opens
Speaker 1: the envelope where she's kept the single existing polaroid of
Speaker 1: her newborn son, and it's gone. The envelope is empty.
Speaker 1: Gil has burned it.
Speaker 2: After finding all these this discovery that he'd burned everything,
Speaker 2: I did finally go to bed and slept for a
Speaker 2: couple of hours, and then I got up and started
Speaker 2: making breakfast for the girls. And I was carrying the
Speaker 2: pot of water over to the stove to boil it
Speaker 2: for oatmeal, and in between the burners there was a
Speaker 2: single bullet sitting there between the burners. So that was
Speaker 2: this message that he had left for me to find.
Speaker 1: So you proceed to hide further, you and Vinnie. You
Speaker 1: go away from there with the girls.
Speaker 3: Ninety miles south.
Speaker 2: Ninety miles is how far you can go without having
Speaker 2: to petition the court night.
Speaker 1: So you go right to the edge. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: sinal lisun an apartment there. Gil doesn't know where you are.
Speaker 1: And then again there's one of these moments where it
Speaker 1: seems like maybe a reasonable conversation can be had. I mean,
Speaker 1: tell me about that.
Speaker 2: Well, Vinnie was just there initially to help me move in.
Speaker 2: He still had his business down in Los Angeles and
Speaker 2: was living there, and we were trying to figure out
Speaker 2: how we could live together without making the situation worse.
Speaker 2: So we were willing to wait on moving in with
Speaker 2: each other until, you know, until it's settled down a
Speaker 2: little bit. So I do finally talk to Gil and
Speaker 2: he says he wants to meet me at a restaurant
Speaker 2: halfway between Santa Cruz in our apartment in Brinn, and
Speaker 2: he has some stuff he wants to give me, and
Speaker 2: he just wants to talk. And it felt to me like, Okay,
Speaker 2: he gets it. Now, he gets it. Now I've left.
Speaker 2: I've left, I've moved, you know this ninety miles and
Speaker 2: I would have never gone so far if he hadn't
Speaker 2: been so threatening, you know, because the idea was that
Speaker 2: he wouldn't be able to just get in the car
Speaker 2: and come down, you know, that he'd have to make
Speaker 2: arrangements to come down because it's too long a drive otherwise.
Speaker 2: So I thought, well, okay, I'll go talk to him,
Speaker 2: and I do remember Vinnie didn't want me to do it.
Speaker 2: He's like, don't do it, and I'm like, no, if
Speaker 2: you'd think after all these years, i'd know better. But
Speaker 2: as you say, it looks like a moment where maybe
Speaker 2: it can break the other way. So I got there first,
Speaker 2: and I was waiting for him, and he finds drives
Speaker 2: in in some strange car that I don't know, and
Speaker 2: he gets out of the car and he's all banged up.
Speaker 2: He's clearly been in some kind of accident or gotten
Speaker 2: in a terrible fight or something. And over the course
Speaker 2: of this conversation, which seems like okay, he's got stuff
Speaker 2: in the car, some kitchen goods that he's going to
Speaker 2: give me, and he's trying very hard to get me
Speaker 2: to tell him where we are. It wouldn't give him
Speaker 2: the exact address I wanted to settle in.
Speaker 3: I wanted to have.
Speaker 2: A couple of weeks free of being hounded before I
Speaker 2: let him know where we were. And he made me
Speaker 2: feel so bad about keeping that secret and seemed so
Speaker 2: contrite that, against all my better instincts, I told him,
Speaker 2: and the instant I told him then he told me
Speaker 2: that he would throw me in the back of his
Speaker 2: car and drive me out to the desert and bury
Speaker 2: me where no one would ever find me.
Speaker 3: So I learned nothing.
Speaker 1: So Gil now knows where Karen, Vinnie, Aaron, and Amy are.
Speaker 1: Shortly after the encounter in the parking lot, Gill leaves
Speaker 1: a bunch of dynamite twined together in Vinnie's truck, with
Speaker 1: a lit cigar in the center, presumably so that when
Speaker 1: the cigar burned down far enough, the truck would explode.
Speaker 1: The cigar burned out before it could detonate the bundle
Speaker 1: of dynamite, but if it had, the truck was parked
Speaker 1: right underneath the bedroom window where her girls were sleeping.
Speaker 1: It was a lot of dynamite. When the police came,
Speaker 1: they told Karen that it was enough to blow the
Speaker 1: building sky high. But the police did nothing. There was
Speaker 1: seemingly nothing they could do. There was no proof it
Speaker 1: was Gil, and they didn't like to get involved in
Speaker 1: domestic conflicts.
Speaker 2: It was very frustrating because we couldn't really get any
Speaker 2: help out of them, and I didn't have any proof
Speaker 2: because even though I was in this abusive marriage, I
Speaker 2: had never gone to a shelter.
Speaker 3: I had never talked to a psychologist.
Speaker 2: I never knew anyone that had been abused, which is
Speaker 2: probably incorrect, but no one ever told me, so I
Speaker 2: never knew anyone that was abused, So I didn't know
Speaker 2: what I was dealing with early on, and then when
Speaker 2: I finally did know what I was dealing with, they
Speaker 2: either didn't take it seriously or couldn't do anything.
Speaker 1: And something else is on the horizon too, something incredibly dangerous,
Speaker 1: frightening and malevolent, something that perhaps, had Karen's mom been
Speaker 1: able to grasp just how bad it was between the
Speaker 1: two of them, how high the stakes could have been avoided.
Speaker 2: I had sent our older girl, Aaron, down to see
Speaker 2: my mom for a week after out. We had lived
Speaker 2: in Santa Cruz for about a year then, and she
Speaker 2: went down there for a vacation and I stayed up
Speaker 2: in Santa Cruz with Amy and Vinnie had work to
Speaker 2: do and he couldn't come up, so I was there alone.
Speaker 2: So she was down there. She had a great time
Speaker 2: with mom, you know, they did all the beach things
Speaker 2: and went shopping and they had a lovely time. And
Speaker 2: then my mom calls me to tell me that Gilla's
Speaker 2: there and that he wants to go back on the
Speaker 2: airplane with Aaron and what should she do? And I
Speaker 2: was sort of flabbergasted, like what is he doing there?
Speaker 2: How does he even know she's there? And what does
Speaker 2: he mean he wants to come back? And she says, well,
Speaker 2: he says he has to get back to San Francisco.
Speaker 2: He's got some business stuff he's got to do, and
Speaker 2: he wants to spend time with Aaron on the plane.
Speaker 2: So I thought, well, okay, will you be sure to
Speaker 2: put them on the plane, like see them on because
Speaker 2: he had been making noises that he was going to
Speaker 2: take the girls, and I just didn't think he would
Speaker 2: do it because I didn't know what on earth he
Speaker 2: would do with them. He wasn't working at that point,
Speaker 2: and he was doing a lot of drugs and drinking,
Speaker 2: and he was such a mess, and I thought it
Speaker 2: was a threat and not something that he would actually do.
Speaker 2: So they got on the plane, and it turned out
Speaker 2: my mom did not see them onto the plane, and
Speaker 2: I found out later that he had tried to take
Speaker 2: Aarin on another flight that went to New York and
Speaker 2: the only reason he didn't get on that flight was
Speaker 2: because she could read and she made a stink, And
Speaker 2: so they went This is when you could buy a
Speaker 2: ticket at the gate. There was no security, there was
Speaker 2: no nothing. You just walked up to the gate and
Speaker 2: purchased your fare. So they went to San Francisco and
Speaker 2: I met them with Amy at the airport. It was
Speaker 2: very late, and she was, you know, half asleep and
Speaker 2: very heavy in my arms. And they came off the
Speaker 2: plane and I needed to hug Aaron, and Amy was squirming.
Speaker 2: She wanted down, and he was holding his arms out,
Speaker 2: and so I gave her to him to hole and
Speaker 2: it was just so instinctual. I mean, I spent fourteen
Speaker 2: years with this man, and he was their father. And
Speaker 2: I passed her over, and then we started walking to
Speaker 2: baggage claim, and again at some point Aaron was behaving strangely,
Speaker 2: and I bent down to talk to her, and when
Speaker 2: I stood back up, Gil and Amy were gone. And
Speaker 2: what they had actually done is walked straight through the
Speaker 2: airport and out and got on a bus. But I
Speaker 2: didn't know that. I spent hours and hours trying to
Speaker 2: find them in the airport.
Speaker 1: And at this time Amy's three and Erin's seven.
Speaker 2: Amy was two and a half and Aaron was seven.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: This then proceeds to unfold over a period of ten
Speaker 1: days where you don't know where Amy is and Gil
Speaker 1: has her.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean we looked everywhere for her. We did flyers,
Speaker 2: We went to police stations, we checked with bus stations,
Speaker 2: and did what we could do, and nobody could really help.
Speaker 2: I mean, the airport wouldn't even let us put the
Speaker 2: flyers up. They said they would distribute them to their
Speaker 2: security people and they would keep an eye out, but
Speaker 2: it was not very helpful.
Speaker 1: There's this eerie moment right where I mean, it's all eerie,
Speaker 1: but there's this moment where you do get the least
Speaker 1: get a tip that there is a man living in
Speaker 1: a building with a child and something doesn't seem right.
Speaker 1: But then the tip doesn't pan out because the child
Speaker 1: is a boy. Right, Except that's not what happened.
Speaker 2: No, And if I had no, I still don't think
Speaker 2: it was them, because I think by that time he
Speaker 2: had already left the city. He couldn't afford to stay
Speaker 2: in the city anymore. He went north and stayed. It
Speaker 2: was up in Santa Rosa, which is a town maybe
Speaker 2: an hour and a half north of San Francisco. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but this idea that oh, it's a boy it couldn't be.
Speaker 2: Her turned out to be sort of a red herring
Speaker 2: because he had changed her appearance to make her look
Speaker 2: like a boy.
Speaker 1: He dyed her hair and cut it short. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: after ten days he does get in touch, right, But
Speaker 1: what he wants in exchange for returning amy to you
Speaker 1: is that you promise to give up Vinnie. That's the
Speaker 1: only way that you're getting your daughter back is if
Speaker 1: you promise. You swear that you are going to give
Speaker 1: up Vinnie.
Speaker 2: Yes, which of course I did instantly. I swore that
Speaker 2: I was not telling the truth, but I swore it instantly.
Speaker 1: This is the moment when everything breaks open. After the
Speaker 1: terror of not knowing where her youngest daughter is or
Speaker 1: what Gil might have done, Karen returns home and turns
Speaker 1: to Vinnie with a single, urgent sentence, We've got to run.
Speaker 1: They had talked about the possibility before, in the abstract,
Speaker 1: what they would do if things didn't get better, But
Speaker 1: this is different. This is now. The situation has been escalating,
Speaker 1: despite everyone around them continuing to insist that no one
Speaker 1: can sustain this level of rage forever, that it'll peter out.
Speaker 1: But it won't. It hasn't. It's only grown, and then
Speaker 1: comes a threat that makes the decision for her. Gil
Speaker 1: takes Amy and warns Karen that if he ever breaks
Speaker 1: her promise to him, he'll take her again, or take
Speaker 1: both girls, or kills them all. That's the moment she
Speaker 1: understands they can't wait, can't plan, can't hope for a
Speaker 1: safe window. They have to disappear immediately. What follows is
Speaker 1: essentially a DIY witness protection effort. With no guidance, no support,
Speaker 1: and absolute secrecy. Karen and Vinnie gather what they can,
Speaker 1: decide to change their names and start driving east.
Speaker 2: We went that direction because I was told Gil that,
Speaker 2: you know, I would never live anywhere except on a coast.
Speaker 2: I was used to being near an ocean, and so
Speaker 2: the middle of the country was not ever a place
Speaker 2: that I contemplated moving to. So I figured, somewhere in
Speaker 2: the interior it makes sense to go there, because he'll
Speaker 2: look for me first in places like Washington and Oregon,
Speaker 2: and you know, maybe Florida and North Carolina, places that
Speaker 2: he could see me living.
Speaker 3: And so we drove east, and.
Speaker 2: Vinnie, whose sister and or husband had lived in Colorado
Speaker 2: for a while, had once spent a day in Boulder,
Speaker 2: and he thought it was a cute town and it
Speaker 2: had a university, and it was, you know, forty minutes
Speaker 2: from a big city, so we could probably find jobs.
Speaker 2: And just on a whim, that's where we wound up
Speaker 2: deciding while we were driving.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, and also there's such a flurry of things
Speaker 1: that you're deciding things that no one ever thinks about
Speaker 1: unless they were suddenly in a position of having to
Speaker 1: think about, which is, well, what does that mean? We
Speaker 1: don't have any id at what do you do about that?
Speaker 1: How can you rent a place to live, much less
Speaker 1: buy a place to live if you don't have documentation?
Speaker 1: And so you do end up for a little while
Speaker 1: in a condo that was empty, that hadn't sold yet,
Speaker 1: and the landlord, you know, there were these angels along
Speaker 1: the way. No, yes, definitely you didn't ask too many questions,
Speaker 1: but also who at a certain point if you did
Speaker 1: let them into your i mean, letting anybody into your
Speaker 1: circumstances felt like the most dangerous thing imaginable.
Speaker 3: It did.
Speaker 1: Yes, So tell me about I mean, just a little
Speaker 1: bit about buying the house, because this is again like
Speaker 1: you're relying on the kindness of strangers. Or the reliability
Speaker 1: or the trustworthiness of strangers, because at a certain point
Speaker 1: you have no choice but to do that.
Speaker 2: Well, something we had when we ran is we cashed
Speaker 2: out our bank accounts and you know, took what cash
Speaker 2: we had and put it in a paper sack that
Speaker 2: we had under the front seat. So we had this
Speaker 2: small stake of money and we weren't sure what we
Speaker 2: would do with it. It would it be enough to
Speaker 2: buy something in you know, leaving California, it's like the
Speaker 2: prices are completely different when you go into the interior,
Speaker 2: and Colorado was just coming out of a pretty bad recession,
Speaker 2: and so prices were very depressed. And this realtor that
Speaker 2: had exchanged painting this condo for rent. I think he
Speaker 2: looked at us and he thought, well, Okay, this nice
Speaker 2: young family and they, I don't know, they might like
Speaker 2: a house. I'm going to show them houses. And we
Speaker 2: would go because it was kind of a fun fantasy
Speaker 2: to go look at this stuff. And he would drive
Speaker 2: us around Boulder and we'd walk around houses. And there
Speaker 2: was this one house that Vinnie kind of fell in
Speaker 2: love with, and in a way that it wasn't with
Speaker 2: the other ones. I could tell he wanted it, and
Speaker 2: he thought it was doable, and I'm like, no, we can't.
Speaker 2: We'll never get alone. We don't have any paperwork, We
Speaker 2: have nothing. So he said, let's talk to the realtor
Speaker 2: and tell him enough of our story so that he'll
Speaker 2: understand why we can't give him a credit report, why
Speaker 2: we don't have any work history. And the realtor was like, well,
Speaker 2: this house has been on the market for a really
Speaker 2: long time, and I think maybe the owner can be
Speaker 2: talked into carrying the note on it rather than having
Speaker 2: to go through a bank. And he thought it was
Speaker 2: probably a decent deal for her because if it turned
Speaker 2: out that we defaulted, then she would just keep our
Speaker 2: down payment and put it up for sale again. It
Speaker 2: was not the worst thing in the world, although you know,
Speaker 2: she wanted to sell it, and I'm sure she wanted
Speaker 2: a regular sale, so she agreed to that, and then
Speaker 2: she demanded a credit report, and we couldn't do it.
Speaker 2: So we wouldn't tell anybody our real names. We never
Speaker 2: did all the years we lived in hiding. We never
Speaker 2: set our real names to anybody.
Speaker 1: Including to each other.
Speaker 2: Oh well, to each other, yes, I mean. And we
Speaker 2: fiddled with our identification stuff, so that the name I
Speaker 2: was born with is Carrie the first name, and I'm
Speaker 2: Karen now because I wanted to change it to something
Speaker 2: that was close and that if I could, you know,
Speaker 2: was signing something.
Speaker 3: If I screwed up, I could kind of cover it up.
Speaker 2: So I picked the name that way, and then we
Speaker 2: told people that Carrie was a nickname, so you know,
Speaker 2: so Vinnie would call me Carrie.
Speaker 3: Other people called me Karen, but.
Speaker 2: It was not you know, that way, we could still
Speaker 2: be who we were anyway, This lady, the realtor, said,
Speaker 2: let's call her up and put her on speakerphone and
Speaker 2: you can give her a shortened version of what you
Speaker 2: told me and maybe she'll take mercy on you. And
Speaker 2: so we did that and Vinnie did all the talking
Speaker 2: because I was a wreck. And at the end of
Speaker 2: it he said to her, well, this is the situation.
Speaker 2: We cannot give you our real names, and we can't.
Speaker 3: Show you this stuff. This is what it is, and.
Speaker 2: We understand if you want to pass and don't want
Speaker 2: to do it, and it's a small world. You can't
Speaker 2: even tell anybody the story we've told you. And she
Speaker 2: was very quiet for this long moment, and then she
Speaker 2: told us a story about a safari she had been
Speaker 2: on in Africa. She was an academic and she had
Speaker 2: been on a safari with a bunch of academics from.
Speaker 3: All over the country.
Speaker 2: And in the evenings they would sit around this campfire
Speaker 2: and get drunk and tell stories. And there was a
Speaker 2: young woman who one night was telling a story about
Speaker 2: having had an affair with a married man, and she
Speaker 2: was very upset and she was crying. And the woman
Speaker 2: whose house we wound up buying said she realized as
Speaker 2: the woman was talking that she was talking about her
Speaker 2: next door neighbor. But she recognized the man in the story,
Speaker 2: and so she said to us, it is a small world,
Speaker 2: I understand, And she agreed to carry the note.
Speaker 3: As you say, another angel.
Speaker 1: Will be back in a moment with more family secrets. Karen,
Speaker 1: Vinnie and the girls live that house in Boulder for
Speaker 1: a good long time. They've tried to build new lives
Speaker 1: for themselves, and for four years there's no sign of Gil.
Speaker 1: But then Karen hears from her mother her mother's house
Speaker 1: has been broken into and there's only one thing missing,
Speaker 1: her address book. This is nerve wracking, of course, but
Speaker 1: still Gill stays away. Then Karen's mom gets a call
Speaker 1: from one of Gil's older daughters. Gil has been arrested
Speaker 1: for murder and is in prison.
Speaker 3: It was a.
Speaker 2: Garbled story which didn't get straightened out for a while
Speaker 2: on my end, because I just thought, oh my god,
Speaker 2: he finally did it. He finally killed somebody. And I
Speaker 2: don't know if the garbling was my stepdaughter or.
Speaker 3: If it was my mom.
Speaker 2: I kind of think it was probably my mom that
Speaker 2: she got the story wrong. What I eventually found out
Speaker 2: that he did was he was charged with a temp
Speaker 2: did murder where he had one night he was back
Speaker 2: living in New York in the apartment he grew up in,
Speaker 2: and there was a bar across the street that was
Speaker 2: very noisy, and apparently at two o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 2: he went down there with a gun and started firing
Speaker 2: into the bar because he was mad at them because
Speaker 2: they were making noise. I mean, it's the whole thing
Speaker 2: is just outrageous in my mind. But that's what actually happened,
Speaker 2: and that was plea bargained down to illegal possession of
Speaker 2: a weapon, and then he went off to prison for
Speaker 2: a number of years for.
Speaker 1: Karin how and where did it? I mean, because now
Speaker 1: there's a lot of years go by, you begin to
Speaker 1: publish novels, your daughters grow up, they go to college,
Speaker 1: they start lives of their own. And yet what is
Speaker 1: so palpable is always this sense of han like is
Speaker 1: it ever over? And what would over even mean? You know,
Speaker 1: you learn that he's back out of prison, does it
Speaker 1: continue to feel for you like your one ring of
Speaker 1: a doorbell or one knock on the door away from
Speaker 1: there he is he's finally caught up with you.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 2: I always felt like that, and I felt like that
Speaker 2: long past when he was probably capable of doing that, because.
Speaker 3: It was a black hole.
Speaker 2: And also I had such unresolved guilt about having taken
Speaker 2: the girls away. You know, I did the thing that
Speaker 2: he did to me, and I did it permanently, and
Speaker 2: so like, what does it mean to take a man's
Speaker 2: children away? Even a man as disturbed and dangerous as this,
Speaker 2: The children are still part of what makes him human.
Speaker 2: And so I struggled for years with feeling like should
Speaker 2: I try to reach out and see if there's a
Speaker 2: way to have some kind of rapperschement here? Is there
Speaker 2: a way to resolve this? And of course, I never
Speaker 2: did it because I was fairly certain, I would say
Speaker 2: ninety nine point nine percent certain that it was just
Speaker 2: me fantasizing again about the way it could be and
Speaker 2: not the way it was.
Speaker 1: Karen has begun to have success as a writer. Her
Speaker 1: first novel is published in nineteen ninety six, followed by
Speaker 1: a second novel, but her story, this story continues to
Speaker 1: hunt her. She decides to fictionalize it to write it
Speaker 1: as a novel. The girls are now grown and out
Speaker 1: of the house, so Karen decides to take herself on
Speaker 1: a solo writing retreat. While there, the edges blur. Revisiting
Speaker 1: this time is just too much for her, and she
Speaker 1: breaks down.
Speaker 2: Was unexpected. We decided at a certain point that we
Speaker 2: were going to sell the house in Bolder and move
Speaker 2: closer to the ocean and go live in a place
Speaker 2: that was kind of smaller and quieter even than Bolder,
Speaker 2: and get more for our money.
Speaker 3: The house in Boulder had appreciated quite a bit, and.
Speaker 2: We thought we could sort of semi retire, which was
Speaker 2: really totally unrealistic, it turns out, but that's what we thought.
Speaker 2: And I was in charge of reconnaissance and went out
Speaker 2: there and looked around and looked for a house to
Speaker 2: get and all this stuff. And I was by myself
Speaker 2: in this place that was very mysterious to me, and
Speaker 2: trying to write this novel which fictionalized the absolute worst
Speaker 2: time in my life, and I was trying to disguise
Speaker 2: elements of it and also be true to it. And
Speaker 2: I start did disappearing. You know, all the stuff that
Speaker 2: I had been through, I had never had a breakdown.
Speaker 2: I certainly had very rough times, but I was always
Speaker 2: pretty sound mentally. And this was the first time in
Speaker 2: my life where I felt completely unsound, and it was it.
Speaker 3: Was not good.
Speaker 2: Trying to write about this in that way was definitely
Speaker 2: a part of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. The haunting continues, right,
Speaker 1: and you don't write that book, which is great because
Speaker 1: then you write this book, which is the book that
Speaker 1: you needed to write, Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: But you know, you kind of everyonce in a while
Speaker 1: you look up to see if there's any news of Gil,
Speaker 1: Is there anything that you can find? Is there any
Speaker 1: and there's you know, usually the same couple of things
Speaker 1: that aren't useful, you know, just he's been a person
Speaker 1: of interest in various places or whatever. But then there
Speaker 1: is this moment what year is it when this happens
Speaker 1: where you're searching for Gil and you learn that Gil
Speaker 1: is dead.
Speaker 2: This was Christmas two thousand and eight where the girls.
Speaker 2: Amy was in the Navy and Aaron was back east
Speaker 2: in her first job as a lawyer, and they both
Speaker 2: came home for Christmas. We were living again in Los
Speaker 2: Angeles by that point, and we had this, you know,
Speaker 2: this very nice Christmas dinner and everybody went out for
Speaker 2: a walk. And one of the gifts that my older daughter,
Speaker 2: the new lawyer, had given Vinnie was this book that
Speaker 2: was a guide to adoption in California, and like Vinnie's
Speaker 2: opening it and looking at it and sort of puzzled,
Speaker 2: the girls wanted to make it official after all these years.
Speaker 2: They wanted him to adopt them as adults. So we
Speaker 2: had this tremendously emotional Christmas, you know, where we were
Speaker 2: all crying and everybody goes out for a walk except me,
Speaker 2: and I was thinking, well, I don't know what happens
Speaker 2: with Gil here. It's like, is there some kind of
Speaker 2: legal thing that he's the father? Do we have to
Speaker 2: track him down and get him to sign something? And
Speaker 2: so he was on my mind, and after everybody went
Speaker 2: to bed, I decided to google him, which I did
Speaker 2: periodically without any particular information, but this on this particular night,
Speaker 2: I googled him and I added a search term, which
Speaker 2: was Santa Maria, California, because I had had a private
Speaker 2: detective at one point track him as far as Santa Maria,
Speaker 2: and I didn't know if he was still there or what,
Speaker 2: but I added that term and up popped this item
Speaker 2: that was in their little local newspaper there about a
Speaker 2: body having been found in a park and that they
Speaker 2: initially thought it was foul play. They thought that perhaps
Speaker 2: the person had been murdered, and then determined that they
Speaker 2: died of natural causes. And in the course of looking
Speaker 2: at this article and another article and kind of triangulating
Speaker 2: between them, it was clear to me that it was Gil. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: so that's how I found out he died.
Speaker 1: What did that? I mean, this is such a huge question,
Speaker 1: but like, what did that feel like? There's probably some
Speaker 1: complicated German word for all of the different feelings, you know.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, yeah, I was heartbroken because you know, again,
Speaker 2: I think I still had this thing in my head
Speaker 2: that there would be some sort of deathbed reconciliation somewhere
Speaker 2: along here, and the idea that he was gone forever.
Speaker 3: Was overwhelming to me.
Speaker 2: There was that, but then there was also, you know,
Speaker 2: tremendous relief because right up until that moment, I still
Speaker 2: thought he was capable of finding me and doing great harm.
Speaker 1: So you and Vinny have three grandchildren. Aaron has three boys. Yes,
Speaker 1: you know, you have these daughters who have thrived, and
Speaker 1: you have this marriage that has endured. Where are you
Speaker 1: now in like just inside yourself in terms of your
Speaker 1: own sense of your life and peace?
Speaker 2: You know, I think actually committing to finishing the book
Speaker 2: and writing down what happened in as truthful a way
Speaker 2: as I could. I mean, it's a cliche, but it
Speaker 2: kind of set me free, you know, where It released
Speaker 2: my final feelings of not the kuilt, but that I
Speaker 2: have come come to some sort of peace with this story.
Speaker 2: You know, I did what I had to do, and
Speaker 2: I think, I write this somewhere also, I would do
Speaker 2: it again. I did what I termed the only thing
Speaker 2: I could do, and I would do it again. And
Speaker 2: putting that in black and white settled the issue for me.
Speaker 2: It's very weird reliving all this stuff. You know now
Speaker 2: that it finally is out in the world. But it
Speaker 2: settled for me, so I actually feel at peace. And
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Good is not the right word, but good about it? Yes.
Speaker 1: Here's Karen reading one last passage from her memoir She's
Speaker 1: Under Here.
Speaker 2: Vinnie was in the kitchen making sauce, a pot bubbled
Speaker 2: with tomato and garlic, a frying pan sizzled with browning sausages.
Speaker 2: What happened, he asked? I told him, was it enough?
Speaker 3: Carrie? It was? And it wasn't.
Speaker 2: I didn't know when will it be enough? I don't know, never, probably,
Speaker 2: And Vinnie kissed me. What can I say about love?
Speaker 2: How can I ever convey a depth of feeling? All
Speaker 2: I can show you is the warmth of our kitchen,
Speaker 2: filled with fragrant steam. All I can give you is
Speaker 2: the sound of Vinny breathing, the rise and fall of
Speaker 2: his chest against mine, the warmth of his arms, the
Speaker 2: feeling of utter safety and desire, desire in the moment
Speaker 2: and desire in memory, desire that rushes or meanders or
Speaker 2: runs underground, only to surface when least expected, with force
Speaker 2: and full joy.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
Speaker 1: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 1: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 1: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 1: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 1: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 1: find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd
Speaker 1: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 1: check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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