Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: This episode contains descriptions of violence. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1: Even after all these years, I'm too aware of the
Speaker 1: chef's knife. When my husband and I cook dinner. It
Speaker 1: might as well glow neon if I take it to
Speaker 1: the sync to rents, I say knife behind, as if
Speaker 1: we were still working in a restaurant together, because somewhere
Speaker 1: inside me, a video is constantly playing handle in hand,
Speaker 1: Blade in flesh.
Speaker 2: That's Aaron Mcreynold's essayist editor, self described problem solver. Erin's
Speaker 2: is a story on the one hand, of violence, trauma,
Speaker 2: and the complicated legacy of rage. It is, on the
Speaker 2: other hand, an extraordinary tale of compassion, strength, forgiveness, embassy
Speaker 2: and the resilience of one woman's spirit. I'm Danny Shapiro,
Speaker 2: and this is family Secrets. The secrets that are kept
Speaker 2: from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 2: secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape
Speaker 2: of your childhood, where you grew up, what it looked like,
Speaker 2: what it was like.
Speaker 1: I was born in Orange County, California, in nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 1: I always think of Orange County, California in the seventies
Speaker 1: as being very amber. And I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: just because all my pictures are amber, but everything was
Speaker 1: so beautiful, peaceful, hippyish, like a very fleetwood max feeling.
Speaker 1: Even the waves in California if you grew up there
Speaker 1: saying ssh all the time, and it was like an
Speaker 1: idyllic childhood for the first several years. Mom met dad
Speaker 1: when she was maybe nineteen and he was twenty five
Speaker 1: at a party where he was playing guitar. He was
Speaker 1: very handsome, very charismatic, and this incredibly talented singer and songwriter,
Speaker 1: and he had these ambitions of success in music. She
Speaker 1: got pregnant when she was about twenty one with me.
Speaker 1: They got married right away, and he was from a big,
Speaker 1: tight knit evangelical family. But my mom's family, grandma, got
Speaker 1: pregnant when she was seventeen, thought of high school, and
Speaker 1: she was an utter romantic who just bought the whole
Speaker 1: idea of a loving husband and fulfillment through motherhood. Bought
Speaker 1: the whole thing. And my grandpa was also seventeen and
Speaker 1: promised her the sun, moon and the stars. And then
Speaker 1: after she dropped out and they had the baby and
Speaker 1: had been married. He enlisted in the army and just disappeared.
Speaker 1: It was an excuse to party for two years. He
Speaker 1: didn't leave America. He was somewhere like Oklahoma, Tennessee, and
Speaker 1: only came home once in a while, and when he
Speaker 1: did he was just in a terrible frame of mind,
Speaker 1: terrible mood. My grandmother later told me that she felt
Speaker 1: like he was jealous of my mom and real bitter.
Speaker 1: And she once told me that on her wedding day
Speaker 1: in January nineteen fifty four, there was both an earthquake
Speaker 1: and snow in Los Angeles, and she always wondered if
Speaker 1: that was a bad omen, and it really did set
Speaker 1: the stage for the childhood my mom would have with them.
Speaker 1: Grandpa came home and became an alcoholic very quickly, was
Speaker 1: a chronic philander, and in spite of that, they had
Speaker 1: two more kids. So my aunt, my mom's sister, was
Speaker 1: a couple years younger, but she was much bigger and stronger,
Speaker 1: and she would beat my mom up a lot when
Speaker 1: they were kids. So I think the instant my mom
Speaker 1: graduated from high school, she was out of there. She
Speaker 1: went to live with friends by the beach, and this
Speaker 1: is around the time she met my dad. So, as
Speaker 1: the family lore has it, my grandfather never told my
Speaker 1: mom that he loved her. My dad would deride my
Speaker 1: mom's family as being crazy, as being violent, hostile, alcoholics.
Speaker 1: This became how I understood that family. I was around
Speaker 1: them all the time, and I was steeped in this
Speaker 1: low level violence. In fact, one of my earliest memories
Speaker 1: is around the time I was seven or eight, my
Speaker 1: aunt beat my mom up in a parking lot of
Speaker 1: a grocery store in front of all of us kids,
Speaker 1: Me and my brother and my cousin. We were all
Speaker 1: screaming and crying while she just beat the holy hell
Speaker 1: out of my mom, and people were walking by and
Speaker 1: they didn't know what to do. And that was just
Speaker 1: the vibe of that family. Things could go from zero
Speaker 1: to one hundred real quickly.
Speaker 2: How did that feel to you as a kid, That
Speaker 2: moment must have been terrifying. That was there, this feeling
Speaker 2: running alongside your childhood of this can happen at any moment.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, I felt like everybody was volatile and brimming
Speaker 1: beneath the surface was this rage and this violence. And
Speaker 1: I've heard from other kids who grew up in families
Speaker 1: like this, and you either become a clown or you
Speaker 1: become an eggshell walker, or a little bit of both.
Speaker 1: You can become a chameleon, you can become someone who
Speaker 1: chronically pleases. I feel like I did all those things.
Speaker 1: I grew up to be quite a ham. I was funny,
Speaker 1: I sang for my supper. But I also developed this
Speaker 1: extreme sensitivity and this radar for knowing the mood someone
Speaker 1: was in. If I was at my grandparentarent's house, my
Speaker 1: grandfather constantly had a drink tinkling in his hand. He
Speaker 1: would refill from a giant jug of vodka on top
Speaker 1: of the fridge, and he was cold and gruff, and
Speaker 1: if you wanted to hang out with him, you'd find
Speaker 1: him in the den watching any number of sports skins
Speaker 1: on TV, and you could come in and have a
Speaker 1: forward conversation with him. And I just thought it was
Speaker 1: delightful in some way. I didn't know what a grandpa
Speaker 1: was supposed to really be like, and I think I
Speaker 1: found him funny. And my grandmother had this. She took
Speaker 1: that utter heartbreak from believing in love and believing that
Speaker 1: having a family was going to be everything, and then
Speaker 1: having a husband who was a distant, cheating, alcoholic. She
Speaker 1: shoved all that grief and rage way deep down. And
Speaker 1: this is another really equally important part of my family's
Speaker 1: legacy is she modeled shoving down rage and sorrow for
Speaker 1: my mother, and my mother did the same, so that
Speaker 1: when she and my father started to fight more and
Speaker 1: more and they began to split up right around the
Speaker 1: time I was nine or ten, her outbursts would be
Speaker 1: so incredibly violent. They were just loud and not terribly physical.
Speaker 1: Yet this would come later. But over the years she
Speaker 1: I noticed she would drink more and more to what
Speaker 1: I thought of as access that rage. When she wasn't drinking,
Speaker 1: she was so quiet and shy, and she would pick
Speaker 1: her lip and just look thoughtfully like she was trying
Speaker 1: to gather her thoughts or gather her courage to say something.
Speaker 1: But when she drank, this other side of her came out,
Speaker 1: a side that was funny and brassy and brave and bold.
Speaker 2: We grow up in whatever family we grow up in.
Speaker 2: And that's like you said, I didn't know what a
Speaker 2: grandpa was supposed to be like, I describe it.
Speaker 1: As a seed. Not being able to describe the inside
Speaker 1: of a tusk, you don't know any separation between yourself
Speaker 1: and this world you're in. You just absorb. And what
Speaker 1: I think I absorbed was grief. Don't show it, don't
Speaker 1: feel it, don't express it. Rage. When you do express it,
Speaker 1: it's going to be big and it's going to be scary.
Speaker 1: So where do those things go? The kids have to
Speaker 1: hold it, and where do the kids hold it? They
Speaker 1: grow up to either drink it away shove it down
Speaker 1: where it becomes anxiety and depression. I wanted to distance
Speaker 1: myself from anger. Anger was dangerous and scary, and I
Speaker 1: don't think I ever saw anyone handle anger in a
Speaker 1: healthy way.
Speaker 2: If you felt anger, would you even know that you
Speaker 2: were feeling it?
Speaker 1: That's a good question. There's a couple of ways to
Speaker 1: answer that. When I developed some interesting nervous ticks, I
Speaker 1: compulsively cleaned, Like around the time my mom left us
Speaker 1: the first time, when I was nine or ten, right
Speaker 1: before they sat me down the table and said we're
Speaker 1: splitting up, who do you want to live with? She
Speaker 1: had left and it was just my dad, and I
Speaker 1: think he was probably a lot harder to live with
Speaker 1: than I can remember. I'm pretty sure I was absorbing
Speaker 1: some pretty scary anger on his side, and this is
Speaker 1: the guy that had been my best friend. And so
Speaker 1: to deal with it, I polished the furniture, I cleaned
Speaker 1: the glass. The things I understood how to clean, I
Speaker 1: would just clean them compulsively. I think I was trying
Speaker 1: to make the atmosphere better and more peaceful. And then
Speaker 1: sometimes I would just run away. And by run away,
Speaker 1: I mean I'd rent to the next apartment building over
Speaker 1: with my diary. And right, I hate them. I hate them.
Speaker 1: They're crazy. I hate them. I also started in third grade.
Speaker 1: I guess maybe fourth grade I started blacking out in class,
Speaker 1: or I might have even gone semi catatonic. I used
Speaker 1: to tense up my entire body, clench my eyes, my teeth,
Speaker 1: my fists, and just releaf and do that over and over.
Speaker 1: And it was so compulsive I couldn't stop myself doing that.
Speaker 1: And a teacher must have noticed, because she took me
Speaker 1: to lunch one day and said, I just went through
Speaker 1: a divorce, and this is what divorce is. And this
Speaker 1: is the early eighties, not a lot of people were
Speaker 1: getting divorced, so her just acknowledging that this was a
Speaker 1: thing that happens. I felt seen and safe in that moment,
Speaker 1: and believe it or not, she was able to actually
Speaker 1: convince my parents to let me come to her house
Speaker 1: for the weekend, which is such a thing I think
Speaker 1: teachers used to be able to do with students that
Speaker 1: they took a keen interest in in a really honest
Speaker 1: and pure way that now we don't acknowledge so much anymore.
Speaker 1: We just assume the worst intentions. But she wanted me
Speaker 1: to come experience some normalcy and peace. I imagine she
Speaker 1: knew my parents were fighting. I think it was the
Speaker 1: first time an adult in my life, without saying these words,
Speaker 1: sort of acknowledge that what I was going through was
Speaker 1: not normal or write or easy, that there could be
Speaker 1: another way. That special treatment made me realize that maybe
Speaker 1: my circumstances deserved a little extra sensitivity. I was too
Speaker 1: young to really cognitively understand any of that. When my
Speaker 1: parents split up, they sat me down at the table
Speaker 1: and said, Okay, mom's gonna leave this school district, So
Speaker 1: if you stay with her in the area, you are
Speaker 1: still going to have to leave your school and start
Speaker 1: over somewhere else, and you're gonna live with her and
Speaker 1: your brother, or you can live with your dad, your
Speaker 1: fun friend in Reno, Nevada, where he's gonna pursue a
Speaker 1: different business venture. And so I chose him like immediately,
Speaker 1: and later it made me really sad for my mother
Speaker 1: how fast I chose him. But I didn't really understand
Speaker 1: the full weight of the decision I was making.
Speaker 2: What about your brother Arin, Did he stay with your
Speaker 2: mother or did he also go with your father?
Speaker 1: He stayed with my mother because he was about three
Speaker 1: years younger. They agreed that, you know, a younger child
Speaker 1: does better with the mother. And also I was very
Speaker 1: kind of independent. I had a strong personality. Later I'll
Speaker 1: look back and think, of course, I would be the
Speaker 1: easier one to move with my dad, because what I
Speaker 1: didn't realize was that she was planning to just leave
Speaker 1: me alone all the time. I got left alone constantly.
Speaker 1: As soon as we moved to Reno. He left me
Speaker 1: with strangers, like a girl that worked reception at the
Speaker 1: apartment building and her boyfriend, and then a woman that
Speaker 1: he hired for the new office that they were working in,
Speaker 1: and often just alone. I'd come home from school alone.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't see him sometimes for days. I was only
Speaker 1: with him for a few months Reno was just a blip.
Speaker 1: It was the rest of fifth grade. And then he
Speaker 1: sent me back to live with my mom and they
Speaker 1: tricked me into it, and I was enraged, But I
Speaker 1: had to live with my mom and my brother, and
Speaker 1: I had to start a new school. In fact, I
Speaker 1: would start a new school every year for five years,
Speaker 1: bouncing back and forth between my mom and dad. My
Speaker 1: dad would dangle living with him in front of me,
Speaker 1: and I would go for it, and then he would
Speaker 1: leave me alone all the time, and then I would
Speaker 1: end up back with my mom. It was a lot
Speaker 1: of instability. So I learned how to get along, find
Speaker 1: my people, bring out the best parts of my personality,
Speaker 1: hide everything that was inconvenient or scary, and I really
Speaker 1: learned the value of seduction, seducing new groups of people
Speaker 1: and friends to stay safe. When my mom left us,
Speaker 1: she went to go live with this new boy friend
Speaker 1: and his family, and we would come visit her at
Speaker 1: this place, and it was just foreign and a little
Speaker 1: scary and weird, but also delightful in that way that
Speaker 1: things are when you're a kid and you're just adapting.
Speaker 1: I really liked their garden. I would go out and
Speaker 1: water these people's garden. Oh oh, they have ho hose
Speaker 1: in the fridge. I was excited about the ho hose
Speaker 1: and the fridge. But we went to go see Aliens
Speaker 1: opening night in the theater, me, my mom and all
Speaker 1: of her new friends, these adults I did not know
Speaker 1: who all represented this completely new part of my mom's wife,
Speaker 1: and they were all probably drunk. We were late to
Speaker 1: the theater, and the only seats we could get we're
Speaker 1: in the front row. And so there I am, ten
Speaker 1: years old in the front row of Aliens, a very
Speaker 1: scary movie, which is to this day my favorite movie.
Speaker 1: I'm completely obsessed with it. But we're watching Aliens, and
Speaker 1: I think I absorbed that everything that was happening, with
Speaker 1: the splitting up of my family and my mom becoming
Speaker 1: this different person and these people around her different and
Speaker 1: all this sudden certainty. And I started to have nightmares
Speaker 1: that night about Aliens, and I would have them, no joke,
Speaker 1: every night for the next ten years. It became a
Speaker 1: recurring nightmare for years, and I doped. A very strong
Speaker 1: sort of personal relationship with the Aliens franchise that continues
Speaker 1: to this day. Came up in therapy a lot, and
Speaker 1: my therapist was a union, and he pointed out that
Speaker 1: there's hr Geiger and Young have a lot of archetypal
Speaker 1: crossover in their work. And I used to think that
Speaker 1: Alien represented the anxiety of what was happening in my family,
Speaker 1: But I now understand it's where my ten year old
Speaker 1: rage went. That rage that I couldn't show anybody because
Speaker 1: my parents would be angry. They would already leave. They
Speaker 1: were threatening, believe all the time. And now if I
Speaker 1: was angry, all that rage I saw, not modeled well,
Speaker 1: would drive them even further away and really put me
Speaker 1: in danger. So I think I absorbed the rage and
Speaker 1: I expressed it in my dreams through this horrifying, hateful
Speaker 1: monster was just total bloodlust.
Speaker 2: So fascinating the way that that particular exposition of that
Speaker 2: film front row these people, these strangers in this strange
Speaker 2: place all conspired to be the perfect storm that had
Speaker 2: that happened, which is also an adaptation. That was you
Speaker 2: adapting in a way. Yeah, Did you tend to let
Speaker 2: people in and let them know what was going on
Speaker 2: at home or was that something that you kept very
Speaker 2: much to yourself at first?
Speaker 1: I really kept it to myself. I think around ninth
Speaker 1: or tenth grade, I got involved in theater, and theater
Speaker 1: is such a great place for people to go and
Speaker 1: share the most dramatic and horrible parts of their personal lives.
Speaker 1: For Cachet, like, yes, it was other kids, but it
Speaker 1: was theater, and theater really rewarded big stories, big outrageous personalities.
Speaker 1: So I didn't really let anybody know that I had
Speaker 1: this scary life at home because kids tend to push
Speaker 1: away from them to reject things that are not familiar.
Speaker 1: But when you get a little older, I really found
Speaker 1: my people around tenth grade in high school, when I
Speaker 1: was in theater and I started to let more of
Speaker 1: my story come out. And around this time, we were
Speaker 1: living with my mom's boyfriend and she was drinking more
Speaker 1: he drank. They had friends over, they all drank. I
Speaker 1: hated our life. We lived in a hovel full of
Speaker 1: like roaches and spiders, and I knew it wasn't normal
Speaker 1: to have your parents' friends over drinking all the time
Speaker 1: on school nights, and I lived across an alley from
Speaker 1: a liquor store. I couldn't bring my friends home. What
Speaker 1: teenage girl wants to bring her friends home to something
Speaker 1: like that? She was really showing her anger a lot more.
Speaker 1: I think she had all this really unprocessed rage at
Speaker 1: my father, and I found out later as I grew
Speaker 1: up with him too, that my dad could be kind
Speaker 1: of a shit. He could be emotionally abusive, verbally abusive
Speaker 1: in that way that really smart people who understand psychology
Speaker 1: can be, and it cut her in ways that re
Speaker 1: traumatized her father. Wound than never feeling loved by the
Speaker 1: male figure in her life and having no mother who
Speaker 1: could mirror that kind of self esteem to her, she
Speaker 1: would have to access it by drinking, and then when
Speaker 1: she drank, all that rage would come out, all that
Speaker 1: pent up rage. And this boyfriend, I think was starting
Speaker 1: to after a couple of years, feel the effects of
Speaker 1: having two teenage kids in his small home, and he
Speaker 1: would start staying out later and they would fight. And
Speaker 1: there was a couple of times where she threw something
Speaker 1: at his head and it went past him out the window.
Speaker 1: It broke the window and there was broken glass on
Speaker 1: the floor. And there was another time, maybe it was
Speaker 1: the same fight, where he had to grab her and
Speaker 1: hold her arms, and I, just fifteen years old, jumped
Speaker 1: on him and started punching him in the back, and
Speaker 1: one day he was telling me off in a pretty
Speaker 1: typical step dad to a brady teenager way. He got
Speaker 1: really in my face and he never laid a finger
Speaker 1: on me, but I wanted him to, because I needed
Speaker 1: all of this tension to just culminate and break into
Speaker 1: something I could point to. I felt like nothing that
Speaker 1: was happening to me was something I could point to
Speaker 1: and say, this is really bad, so I was waiting
Speaker 1: for something more universally recognizable to happen. And so he
Speaker 1: just looked at me in my face and said, you
Speaker 1: were a little brat, And I said, why don't you
Speaker 1: just beat it into me? And he just really, ever
Speaker 1: so softly snacked me the littlest bit on the cheek,
Speaker 1: not even enough to hurt. But I was already mad
Speaker 1: as a hornet, and I decided he was going down
Speaker 1: for that. And so the next morning I put on
Speaker 1: I makeup really convincingly, like a black eye, and I
Speaker 1: went to school and my idea was just to really
Speaker 1: wear sunglasses. And my mom was going to drop me
Speaker 1: off at school, and I thought, maybe she'll see it
Speaker 1: before I get there, and then we'll have a conversation.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'll get my mom's attention, but no, she dropped
Speaker 1: me off without even noticing. Now I have to commit
Speaker 1: to this. I'm walking into school, I've got these sunglasses on.
Speaker 1: My friend are going what is that? What's going on?
Speaker 1: And I, oh, it got into a fight with mom's boyfriend.
Speaker 1: Just very dramatic, theatrical. But when I get to a classroom,
Speaker 1: that's when a teacher notices and pulls me out of
Speaker 1: his class and says, who did this to you? And
Speaker 1: I think, well, I'm not going to outright lie and
Speaker 1: say he did it, but I'm not gonna not say
Speaker 1: he did it either. So the teacher went through a
Speaker 1: list of possible people in my life it could have
Speaker 1: hit me, and I said no to all of them
Speaker 1: until he said mom's boyfriend, and I just shrugged. And
Speaker 1: that night child Protective Services came to the house, and
Speaker 1: it was horrible. I had to admit that I had
Speaker 1: done this thing. I was so ashamed, and I was
Speaker 1: so angry that they were there, and I was so
Speaker 1: self conscious that they were there, and seeing like the
Speaker 1: hole in the window, the dog dying on a mattress
Speaker 1: in the front yard, is drinking parents, and now there's
Speaker 1: a witness to it, and not only that, but my
Speaker 1: mom's boyfriend was accused basically of Even though I said
Speaker 1: it was a hoax or that I made the whole
Speaker 1: thing up, it was a misunderstanding, it still gave him
Speaker 1: a record. And my mom was livid, and she said,
Speaker 1: you know, you gave this guy a record. This is
Speaker 1: going to be hit with him forever. And I was
Speaker 1: crying my eyes out and she was like, good you cry.
Speaker 1: And all I wanted was for somebody to just acknowledge
Speaker 1: that things were hard for me and that they were bad,
Speaker 1: and that I was growing up in violence and I
Speaker 1: didn't know how to get that attention any other way.
Speaker 1: And then I did this, and I went too far.
Speaker 2: It's interesting because in a way, I'm struck by that
Speaker 2: you didn't turn it, at least at that point in
Speaker 2: your life on yourself. This is where a lot of
Speaker 2: people end up turning the punishment inward.
Speaker 1: It is interesting. You know how I actually coped. I
Speaker 1: went into my fantasies of my future, my dreams, and
Speaker 1: I had these strong dreams about being an actress and
Speaker 1: being loved by the whole world and being successful and
Speaker 1: being in charge of my life. And I was going
Speaker 1: to flee this scene the minute I got a chance to,
Speaker 1: and by this scene, I meet the whole family, the
Speaker 1: whole sad family legacy. I was going to survive it,
Speaker 1: whatever that meant, and so I couldn't do any of
Speaker 1: the things they did. I wasn't going to drink or
Speaker 1: use drugs. I was going to go all the way
Speaker 1: through college, be the first person in my mom's family
Speaker 1: to go to college. I was going to just be
Speaker 1: a great success and have my shit together. That's how
Speaker 1: I was going to rebel.
Speaker 2: Rebelling by getting her shit together, by doing well on
Speaker 2: the essats, by getting into college at San Francisco State.
Speaker 2: Nobody helps Erin to accomplish all this. It's a rebellion,
Speaker 2: after all. She takes herself to school, drives up with
Speaker 2: a boyfriend. In her third semester, Erin finds out she's pregnant.
Speaker 2: She feels sick, immediately violently ill. She has to wait
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks before she can get an abortion.
Speaker 2: During this cascade of unfortunate circumstances, she ends up dropping
Speaker 2: out of school. She's just too sick to attend classes.
Speaker 2: Erin and her boyfriend break up. She moves back to
Speaker 2: southern California to attend another college, this one known for
Speaker 2: its theater department. She moves into her grandparents' house outside La.
Speaker 2: Her mom is living there at the same time, too,
Speaker 2: staying rent free so she can save up to put
Speaker 2: a down payment on a place of her own someday.
Speaker 1: And this is when she and I really have a
Speaker 1: different relationship than we ever had before.
Speaker 2: Was she at that point in a relationship herself in
Speaker 2: and out of relationships. She had one boyfriend who she
Speaker 2: met on a chat room. She was obsessed with chatrooms.
Speaker 1: And she met this guy who came to live with her,
Speaker 1: and he stole her identity and started running frauds from
Speaker 1: her computer. And the FBI showed up at her house
Speaker 1: one day and she said, I didn't know any of
Speaker 1: this was happening. I'll help you catch him. I remember
Speaker 1: she was on the phone with me crying, telling me
Speaker 1: she felt so bad. She had to drop a dime
Speaker 1: on this guy who defrauded her, used her computer to
Speaker 1: defraud people. And after that, I got her a dog
Speaker 1: from the shelter, a puppy, and I said, here, if
Speaker 1: you want to take care of something so badly, take
Speaker 1: care of this. It can't steal your credit cards. And
Speaker 1: so we had this dog together that both of us adored, Chloe.
Speaker 1: This dog becomes a really important figure in our life.
Speaker 1: And I'm living with her. She's drinking more and more.
Speaker 1: I'm doing theater at night. I come home one night
Speaker 1: from like Macbeth rehearsals, and she is wasted, and she'd like,
Speaker 1: watch this baby, and she dials her parents, my grandparents,
Speaker 1: and she yells at them about how they never loved her,
Speaker 1: and then they'd hang up on her. She'd call back
Speaker 1: and just cuss at them and yell at them, and
Speaker 1: then she was like, you should call your dad and
Speaker 1: tell him to fuck off too. We're on a roll tonight.
Speaker 1: I just went, oh, this is pathetic, and I grabbed
Speaker 1: my keys and I left and I went and slept
Speaker 1: at somebody's house. When I came back in the morning,
Speaker 1: she told me she had passed out on the floor
Speaker 1: and wet herself, and she kind of laughed it off, like, ah,
Speaker 1: I just can't do gin. I was like, mom, you
Speaker 1: can't do any of it around this time too, Like
Speaker 1: she lost the dog six months in she called me.
Speaker 1: I was like working in the scene shop at school,
Speaker 1: and she called me in a panic. I lost the dog.
Speaker 1: Chloe jumped out of the window when I was parked
Speaker 1: somewhere and she was beside herself. So I went up there,
Speaker 1: and I I drove around the streets of outside LA
Speaker 1: with my mom, up and down the streets, feeling so
Speaker 1: scared and devastated for this dog that I loved so
Speaker 1: much and afraid for her. And at the same time
Speaker 1: I wanted to protect my mom from what she had done.
Speaker 1: I was really felt just so bad for my mom.
Speaker 1: I wanted it was like, really important that I made
Speaker 1: her feel like she was going to be okay and
Speaker 1: this wasn't her fault. And there was nobody there mother
Speaker 1: and me in any of this, no one taking care
Speaker 1: of my feelings. And to add insult to injury, I
Speaker 1: was pregnant again. Nobody was telling me how not to do,
Speaker 1: but so not to keep getting pregnant. You would think
Speaker 1: it would sink in. It really didn't when you have
Speaker 1: no education but a man who's two or three years
Speaker 1: older than you. So I was pregnant again and just
Speaker 1: sick as the dickens and waiting for my appointment at
Speaker 1: Planned parenthood and driving my mom around trying to comfort her,
Speaker 1: and the dog shows up blow and behold after three
Speaker 1: days like Jesus, and everything goes back to the way
Speaker 1: it was.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 2: When Erin is around twenty three, she crashes with her
Speaker 2: mother again. She's struggling with depression. She can't finish school.
Speaker 2: She's waiting tables and trying to figure out what's next
Speaker 2: for her, how to get her energy back. The environment
Speaker 2: around her is anything but stabilizing. She's sleeping on a futon,
Speaker 2: listening to her mom coming in very late at night, drunk,
Speaker 2: blaring the radio, and fighting with the neighbors. During this time,
Speaker 2: Erin and her mom get into especially horrible fights. Her
Speaker 2: mom shoves Erin, calls her a loser, tells her she
Speaker 2: was sorry she'd ever been born. These are things her
Speaker 2: mom would never have said in the light of day
Speaker 2: at night when she was drunk. At one point, enough
Speaker 2: is enough and Aaron starts to crash at friends' houses
Speaker 2: the beach. Her car.
Speaker 1: I was sleeping at a friend's house with my mom
Speaker 1: paged me and again she had lost the dog. This
Speaker 1: time she tried to take the dog to a bar
Speaker 1: and got kicked out and like literally thrown out onto
Speaker 1: the street, got in her car and in a blackout,
Speaker 1: drove home and got into a road rage thing with
Speaker 1: some guy. She got out at a parking lot at
Speaker 1: McDonald's to yell at this guy. When she got back
Speaker 1: in the car, she realized that Chloe wasn't in the car.
Speaker 1: So she calls me in a panic, and it's like
Speaker 1: the middle of the night, and again I am devastated.
Speaker 1: I'm scared to death thinking of her just being hit
Speaker 1: by a car gotten by coyote. And at the same time,
Speaker 1: I felt that same level of devastation on my mom's behalf,
Speaker 1: and I really wanted to protect her from it. And
Speaker 1: after a few days of just constantly making posters, ca shelters,
Speaker 1: driving around calling the dog's name as how my mom, look,
Speaker 1: the only way we're going to get through this, the
Speaker 1: only way you and I are going to be able
Speaker 1: to survive this feeling, this horrible feeling, is if you
Speaker 1: start going to AA and maybe this is the thing,
Speaker 1: this is the change, and we can redeem this. I've
Speaker 1: always been so big on redeeming every pain, every sorrow.
Speaker 1: I think every bad thing can be redeemed later, and
Speaker 1: she got raised, and she's just so lost and so
Speaker 1: sad that okay, yes, And so we go to an
Speaker 1: AA meeting together the first time ever, and I'm sitting
Speaker 1: across from her at this table and everyone's going around
Speaker 1: and saying their names, and I'm an alcoholic. When it
Speaker 1: gets to her, she says, my name is Debbie, and
Speaker 1: I think I don't know, I might be an alcoholic.
Speaker 1: Even now, I want to cry. It was unbelievable. I
Speaker 1: never thought I would hear her say that, and it
Speaker 1: felt to me like the beginning name of a change.
Speaker 1: But the dog shows up.
Speaker 2: Wow, Chloe go, Chloe.
Speaker 1: Sees a miracle. This thing. She miraculously appeared at some
Speaker 1: ex boyfriends of my mom's down by the pier, and
Speaker 1: I have no idea how she got there. But it's
Speaker 1: been seven days and I know this and I still
Speaker 1: have it because my mom had pulled a page out
Speaker 1: of her daily calendar and she'd written on it day seven,
Speaker 1: meaning day seven of sobriety, with two exclamation points, love Mom,
Speaker 1: and she had put it on my windshield. That was it.
Speaker 1: She made it to seven days, and the dog was boxed.
Speaker 1: So it was kind of like carte blanche to go
Speaker 1: back to drinking. She said, in all honesty, I really
Speaker 1: like the AA meetings, but I'm gonna drink, and I
Speaker 1: don't want to be a hypocrite. So I took myself
Speaker 1: to my first allan On meeting, and I learned that
Speaker 1: she may not be able to quit, but I can.
Speaker 1: And I began the long, slow business of trying to
Speaker 1: quit my mother. We were just so enmeshed. I could
Speaker 1: not see my own feelings or my needs for hers.
Speaker 1: And in fact, there's this one moment where around this time,
Speaker 1: she was watching Oprah and somebody was on and they
Speaker 1: said sympathetic disdain, and my mom latched onto that phrase.
Speaker 1: I came home from work and she said this phrase.
Speaker 1: I heard, sympathetic disdain. I realized that's how I felt
Speaker 1: about my own mother all my life. And she said,
Speaker 1: that's not how you feel about me, is it? And
Speaker 1: I thought, oh my god, that's exactly how I feel.
Speaker 1: But there's no way in hell I'm going to tell
Speaker 1: you that. I said, of course not. Mom. You're awesome.
Speaker 1: You give me emotional license. You taught me to just
Speaker 1: be who I am and be so strong. And I
Speaker 1: never told her that. Yeah, absolutely, she nailed it. Sympathetic
Speaker 1: disdain is exactly how I.
Speaker 2: Felt for a couple of years. Erin attends Alan on
Speaker 2: meetings and has a lovely boyfriend. They're living in Coasta Mesa,
Speaker 2: a town about twenty miles up the coast from her
Speaker 2: mom in San Clemente, but Erin has learned to keep
Speaker 2: her distance. She wants no part of her mom's chaos,
Speaker 2: but she does worry about Chloe all the time. Her
Speaker 2: mom never put a collar on the dog, and often
Speaker 2: she's wandered loose around the apartment complex. Erin goes down
Speaker 2: and visits Chloe, takes her to the park, and continues
Speaker 2: to worry. Around two thousand and one, Erin notices that
Speaker 2: there's a guy who comes around a lot, an out
Speaker 2: of work contractor. The new boyfriend moves in.
Speaker 1: His name is j R. Anytime I called he answered,
Speaker 1: which I thought was annoying, and my mom started canceling
Speaker 1: plans on me a lot more, in canceling plans with
Speaker 1: my brother would come in from college in Pennsylvania, had
Speaker 1: a visit or for Christmas, she would no show on us.
Speaker 1: We would have plans to go see a movie or
Speaker 1: go to dinner, and she would, Oh, I just can't
Speaker 1: do it. I don't feel good, you know, this kind
Speaker 1: of really drained voice, and we were just we'd had
Speaker 1: it with her. We were so done. We were just
Speaker 1: exhausted and disappointed by her, and we just thought she's
Speaker 1: just drinking so much. And now at this point wasn't
Speaker 1: working anymore. If she had filed for disability from her job.
Speaker 1: She had a really stressful, abusive boss, so she took
Speaker 1: stress leave. And then also she had breathing problems. She
Speaker 1: was on a nebulizer a lot. She had horrible asthma.
Speaker 1: She had quit smoking, but she still had really bad asthma,
Speaker 1: and so she was just weaker and weaker. How old
Speaker 1: was she at this point, She's felt, you know, in
Speaker 1: her late forties. Whenever I go down there, he's perfectly
Speaker 1: nice to me, but he's constantly twelve deep into a
Speaker 1: twenty four pack of Natty Light. She has confided in
Speaker 1: me before that he likes to do meth and I
Speaker 1: was like, oh god, mom, She's like, I hate it.
Speaker 1: I would never I tried it once and I hated it.
Speaker 1: You know me, I like a downer. And I was like, okay, great,
Speaker 1: just not jin, just don't do gin again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, In two thousand and four, late June, Erin's mom
Speaker 2: calls her and says, I need to take you to lunch.
Speaker 2: Erin is surprised, really, She asks, just us without JR.
Speaker 2: Her mom says, yes, I need to tell you some stuff,
Speaker 2: so they go to lunch. She tells Erin that Jr.
Speaker 2: Has been acting increasingly controlling and frightening. He's been taking
Speaker 2: parts out of her car under the auspices of fixing it,
Speaker 2: but as a result, she now can't use it to
Speaker 2: go anywhere. He becomes vindictive when she wants to do
Speaker 2: anything without him. She'd gone out to the desert with
Speaker 2: her parents for Father's Day weekend, said she needed some space,
Speaker 2: and in lieu of space, JR. Gave her the exact opposite.
Speaker 2: He blew up her phone, calling every minute. He made
Speaker 2: sure to let her know that he knew a guy,
Speaker 2: a guy who could get him a gun at a
Speaker 2: moment's notice.
Speaker 1: She's telling me these things, and I am enraged. I
Speaker 1: just want to grab a baseball bat and go down
Speaker 1: there and deal with him myself. I'm not even thinking.
Speaker 1: And I grab a cocktail nap and I say, okay, Mom,
Speaker 1: this is what we're going to do. You're going to
Speaker 1: stay with grandma and grandpa. You're not going back there.
Speaker 1: You've got the dog. Stay away. Then she had no money,
Speaker 1: no income stream at all, and I said, you got
Speaker 1: to refinance at condo, get some cash. You're going to
Speaker 1: go out of state. One of her best friends lived
Speaker 1: in New Mexico. She told me that he had already
Speaker 1: invited her to come out there and get away. I said,
Speaker 1: you're going to go out to New Mexico. You're going
Speaker 1: to get away. I'm going to get this guy a
Speaker 1: vic did. I knew it was going to be really
Speaker 1: hard to get somebody squatting out of her place, but
Speaker 1: I was working for a property management company at the time.
Speaker 1: I just felt like I could do it, and so
Speaker 1: we had this whole plan to get her away and
Speaker 1: get her safe. That following fourth of July, I go
Speaker 1: to my grandparents' backyard for a barbecue and he's there,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, Mom, what are you doing? Why are
Speaker 1: you back with him? Why is he here? And she said,
Speaker 1: I'm refinancing. It's all going ahead. He's just being very
Speaker 1: sweet right now, and I just want to keep the peace.
Speaker 1: And I said, okay, fine. I don't like it as
Speaker 1: long as the plant is still going forward. She said
Speaker 1: it is a week later, on July eleventh, my grandmother
Speaker 1: called me and said, I'm really worried. Your mom isn't
Speaker 1: picking up the phone. I said, well, that's not unusual,
Speaker 1: and she said, well, she's not picking up the emergency
Speaker 1: cell phone I got her either. I didn't even know
Speaker 1: you had gotten her in an emergency cell phone. And
Speaker 1: that's when I found out my grandma had been hearing
Speaker 1: more about Jr. Than I had, and that my mom
Speaker 1: had come to stay with them, and he had, even
Speaker 1: though he didn't have a license, He drove up there
Speaker 1: and went to the window and said something to her
Speaker 1: that convinced her to come home. And my grandmother to
Speaker 1: this day will still say she thinks he might have
Speaker 1: threatened us in the family. He knew where I lived,
Speaker 1: he knew where they lived. Whatever the case, my mom
Speaker 1: went home with him and then was not heard from again.
Speaker 1: I guess. The night before July tenth, my grandmother received
Speaker 1: a call from my mother and my mom was sniffling
Speaker 1: and crying, and then the background, Jr. Was saying, you know,
Speaker 1: it's no big deal, She's just having an emotional reaction.
Speaker 1: I bought her all this wine. We're having a great time.
Speaker 1: We're having dinner and my mom is saying, I'm really scared,
Speaker 1: and my grandmother is saying, come over now, and my
Speaker 1: mom says, no, it's okay, I can handle it. I'll
Speaker 1: call you tomorrow. But my mom never calls and my
Speaker 1: grandma can't get a hold of her. And my first response,
Speaker 1: my first feeling was God, damn it, Mom again, I'm
Speaker 1: going to drop everything. I'm going to drive down there.
Speaker 1: I'm going to sort your life out for you. And
Speaker 1: I have my boyfriend in the car with me, and
Speaker 1: I'm just going ranting the whole way down there. I'm
Speaker 1: like ranting fifteen years worth the complaints about my mom
Speaker 1: and her drinking and the chaos and the boyfriends. And
Speaker 1: we get down there and it's dark, the condo's dark,
Speaker 1: the dog's not there, the windows, the blinds are all
Speaker 1: drawn shut, which is unusual. No one's there, and the
Speaker 1: car's not there. And a neighbor tells me that maybe
Speaker 1: they've gone to dry out. This is something that they
Speaker 1: would do, go camping somewhere to dry out, and.
Speaker 2: Their neighbors actually knew this. It's not like they're going camping.
Speaker 2: It's they're going somewhere to dry out, specifically.
Speaker 1: To dry out. Yeah, these neighbors, they're privy to a
Speaker 1: lot of fighting and screaming. But then these other neighbors
Speaker 1: apparently were friends that they would party with. And these
Speaker 1: neighbors are the ones that said sometimes they'll go dry out,
Speaker 1: they'll come back, you know. Do you try calling them, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: No one's picking up. So I drive down to the
Speaker 1: campsite that they told me that they go to the
Speaker 1: beach at Santa no Frey and I drive around looking
Speaker 1: for the car. I don't see the car anywhere, and
Speaker 1: now I'm getting really worried. But somehow this feels like
Speaker 1: the same kind of worry I've had over the years
Speaker 1: for my mom, and that it always works out okay.
Speaker 1: And in fact, it's just going to keep being like
Speaker 1: this for the rest of my life. It's just going
Speaker 1: to be like this forever, is what I felt. And
Speaker 1: the next day was a Monday, I had to go
Speaker 1: to work, but at my lunch hour I went back
Speaker 1: down to San Clementi and filed a police report. I
Speaker 1: had first tried to get back into the apartment, couldn't
Speaker 1: do it. Everything was locked no one's around, no one's
Speaker 1: answering phones. So I file a police report, and of
Speaker 1: course they're like, so, let me get this straight. It's
Speaker 1: a forty nine year old woman who drinks a lot,
Speaker 1: who sometimes goes to dry out in the desert or
Speaker 1: at a campsite with her boyfriend. We got nothing here,
Speaker 1: and it hadn't been forty eight hours yet, or maybe
Speaker 1: it had, I don't know. It was July tenth, was
Speaker 1: the last time my grandma talked to her, anyone had
Speaker 1: heard from her, And now it's July twelfth, and so
Speaker 1: they're just not alarmed. They're like, we'll keep an eye
Speaker 1: out kind of thing. So I get a call from
Speaker 1: the neighbor later that night and she says, oh, my
Speaker 1: husband is telling me that on that night he heard screaming.
Speaker 1: He heard her screaming help it hurts. And I thought,
Speaker 1: oh my god, why didn't you tell me this sooner?
Speaker 1: So I call the police and I say, I have
Speaker 1: more information. I think you need to bang down the door,
Speaker 1: you need to break in, and they said, okay, we'll
Speaker 1: send officers and let you know. They called me back
Speaker 1: a couple hours later and they said, well, we send
Speaker 1: officers down there. But we couldn't break in because there's
Speaker 1: no cause. I said, even the hearing that she was
Speaker 1: screaming a couple nights go isn't cause. I didn't understand.
Speaker 1: So they said, no, we have to see signs of
Speaker 1: something while we're there. And so on a Tuesday after work,
Speaker 1: Gwynn picked up my boyfriend I called the locksmith. I
Speaker 1: luckily my driver's license still had that address on it
Speaker 1: from when I lived with her. I said, Oh, wouldn't
Speaker 1: you know my mom went out of town and didn't
Speaker 1: have her keys or I didn't have my keys. Can
Speaker 1: you let me in? Here's my driver's license. We go
Speaker 1: in and it's dark and it's quiet, and it's cool,
Speaker 1: and we're by the ocean. Nothing unusual. The place seems neat,
Speaker 1: but I'm not like really looking around. I just see
Speaker 1: that the bedroom door is closed. It's one bedroom condo,
Speaker 1: very small, and I go to open the door and
Speaker 1: nothing is just a big rumpled bed in the middle
Speaker 1: of the room, and so I go over to open
Speaker 1: the blinds. I was like, finally I can see something,
Speaker 1: and start looking around and I think maybe I'll get
Speaker 1: a clue as to where they went. Oh, there's a
Speaker 1: duffel bag on the bed, and I go to move
Speaker 1: the duffel bag to see what's inside of it, and
Speaker 1: there's her hand sticking out of the blankets. And I
Speaker 1: knew the rest of her was under there, and I
Speaker 1: knew I did not need to see I didn't need
Speaker 1: to see anything else.
Speaker 2: And you're twenty seven years old.
Speaker 1: I'm twenty seven. My mom was forty nine, one month
Speaker 1: away from her fiftieth birthday. The neighbor that they partied
Speaker 1: with came running in when she heard me screaming. I
Speaker 1: was screaming, no, and he killed her. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: he killed her. And she comes running in and she
Speaker 1: ripped back the blankets. I wasn't in the room. I
Speaker 1: didn't see, and I was screaming at her to leave
Speaker 1: the scene, leave her alone, don't touch anything. She's my mother.
Speaker 1: She's my Mother's what I kept saying. Sorry, I've told
Speaker 1: this story hundreds of times, but it's still yeah. I said,
Speaker 1: she's my mother. Get away, And I smashed a number
Speaker 1: of buttons on any phone I could find, and somebody
Speaker 1: managed to make a call to nine one one get through,
Speaker 1: And once that business was done, I just went to
Speaker 1: the floor and that night I would go to the
Speaker 1: police station and give my testimony about their relationship what
Speaker 1: I knew of it. And when they said, so was
Speaker 1: your mother an alcoholic? And I said, oh, yeah, big time,
Speaker 1: Like it just came out of me that way. And
Speaker 1: I know that because years later at the trial, they'll
Speaker 1: make me repeat those words back. The defense will make
Speaker 1: me say these words out loud to everybody, as if
Speaker 1: she had it coming.
Speaker 2: In the coming days, Erin learns more the police determine
Speaker 2: that her mother had been stabbed multiple times around her
Speaker 2: throat and ear. They didn't find a weapon, said it
Speaker 2: probably was some kind of small knife. They didn't know
Speaker 2: where Jr. Was. They didn't know where the dog was.
Speaker 2: Erin assumed he must be in Mexico. By now was
Speaker 2: her mom's car, and wrenchingly, her mom's dog, Chloe.
Speaker 1: And actually what happened is a couple days later, the
Speaker 1: police Stition calls and says, we have him. He turned
Speaker 1: himself in and I said, did he have the dog
Speaker 1: with him? And they said no. He says he never
Speaker 1: had the dog. That afternoon, the animal shelter behind my
Speaker 1: mom's house in the hills behind her house calls and
Speaker 1: they said, we think we have the dog. The police
Speaker 1: put an APB out on her. The police figured wherever
Speaker 1: the dog is, he is and they said, we think
Speaker 1: we have your dog. And I went and I got
Speaker 1: her and I just grabbed her and I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm your mom now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Chloe, Chloe, God.
Speaker 1: If I tell you that dog went on to live
Speaker 1: to be seventeen and a half years old, and that
Speaker 1: I had to put her down because she wasn't going
Speaker 1: to die like her body kept going even though she
Speaker 1: had dementia and she was really suffering. This dog is
Speaker 1: the world's strongest dog. Yeah. I had her until I
Speaker 1: was thirty six.
Speaker 2: Wow, So what then happens? Also, it begs the question,
Speaker 2: was your brother anywhere in any of this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great question, because this is the hardest
Speaker 1: thing I've ever had to do is tell my brother
Speaker 1: that our mother had been murdered. He was across the
Speaker 1: country at Penn State getting a PhD in physics, and
Speaker 1: I did not want him to find out with no
Speaker 1: people around him over the phone. He's something of an introvert.
Speaker 1: He didn't have a ton of friends or a partner.
Speaker 1: I knew he'd be alone, and I was very afraid
Speaker 1: for him to find out. At the same time, I
Speaker 1: felt like what happened, I couldn't even begin to absorb
Speaker 1: it until my sibling knew. I needed him to also
Speaker 1: know for it to really be real. So right after
Speaker 1: the place station, first person I called was my mom's brother,
Speaker 1: and I said, you have to tell Grandpa and grandma.
Speaker 1: I'll meet you over there later. Then I called my
Speaker 1: dad and I told him, and he said, I'm coming
Speaker 1: right down there, and he sent his sister, my aunt,
Speaker 1: because she was closer, to come be with me. And
Speaker 1: I told him, Sean cannot find out that's my brother.
Speaker 1: He cannot find out on the phone. Someone has to
Speaker 1: be with him. So my dad called his brother who
Speaker 1: lived in Michigan that was the closest relative, and said,
Speaker 1: can you please take a red eye and go find Sean.
Speaker 1: I was sitting by the phone the whole next day,
Speaker 1: just on pins and needles, waiting, And once my uncle
Speaker 1: finally had my brother in hand and was with him,
Speaker 1: I could tell him over the phone that our mother
Speaker 1: had been killed. I started sobbing and I said something like, oh, baby, brother,
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, And he said, why
Speaker 1: are you sorry? It's not your fault and then he
Speaker 1: dropped the phone and my uncle picked it up and said, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to handle it from here. I think we
Speaker 1: just need to get him on a plane and get
Speaker 1: him home. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: As this a grieving process wasn't hard and consuming enough,
Speaker 2: there would be another layer to this process for Aaron
Speaker 2: and her family, a murder trial.
Speaker 1: So victim services came immediately, told us what to expect
Speaker 1: and what was going to happen. And around this time,
Speaker 1: I wanted to go to graduate school for writing. I'd
Speaker 1: finally slogged my way through a bachelor's degree in theater,
Speaker 1: and I knew I wanted to go further, but I
Speaker 1: just didn't really have the self confidence. And then this happened,
Speaker 1: and I just thought, but fuck it. You know, nothing
Speaker 1: bigger will ever happen than what just happened, and I'll
Speaker 1: survive rejection, I'll survive whatever comes my way because this
Speaker 1: is bigger. And I the week after we put my
Speaker 1: mom's ashes in the sea, I wrote an essay about
Speaker 1: being with that family on a boat, trapped with them
Speaker 1: three miles off the coast, and I submitted it to
Speaker 1: a couple of low residency MFA programs because I knew
Speaker 1: wherever I was going to go to school, I was
Speaker 1: going to have to work full time. I was going
Speaker 1: to have the dog with me. That was my biggest
Speaker 1: priority with Chloe, and so I couldn't go live on
Speaker 1: a campus and be like a full time student. So
Speaker 1: I got into Queen's University of Charlotte, North Carolina, and
Speaker 1: the kicker was I could live wherever I wanted, and
Speaker 1: I really did not want to live in Orange County anymore.
Speaker 1: And in fact, I realized the only reason I had
Speaker 1: I'd stuck around for so long in a rut was
Speaker 1: I was waiting for my mom to get sober or
Speaker 1: to be ready to need me to help her get sober.
Speaker 1: And now that was over, that was never going to happen,
Speaker 1: and had all this trauma in me as rocket fuel,
Speaker 1: and I was finally horribly free and I could do
Speaker 1: whatever I wanted. And so I told the victim Service,
Speaker 1: this person, you know, she's walking us through these processes
Speaker 1: over the ensuing month or two. She's saying, trial could
Speaker 1: take years. I've seen this take years to go to trial,
Speaker 1: and when it does happen, it's going to be long.
Speaker 1: It's going to be like a month long trial, and
Speaker 1: I thought that she was saying, I can't leave California
Speaker 1: until the trial's over. I just broke down crying, and
Speaker 1: she said, Oh, Aaron, don't wait to start your life.
Speaker 1: I've seen this take years. Just go start your life.
Speaker 1: And so I did. I moved to Austin, Texas. This
Speaker 1: is two thousand and five. Now I broke up with
Speaker 1: my boyfriend and I moved here and I was completely alone,
Speaker 1: and that was horrifying. As soon as I got here
Speaker 1: and realized what I had done, I thought I was
Speaker 1: stepping into some big, brave new life as a writer,
Speaker 1: and I was going to find a partner that was
Speaker 1: a lot more like for me and find people that
Speaker 1: were more like me. But now I was alone with
Speaker 1: this horrible trauma. I was having unwanted thoughts all the
Speaker 1: time of her hand. Just images of her hand would
Speaker 1: flash in front of my face constantly. I was having nightmares,
Speaker 1: and the trial kept getting dangled in front of me,
Speaker 1: like Okay, we have a date, and then three weeks
Speaker 1: later I'd get a call and say, Okay, the date's
Speaker 1: been moved and it's for any number of reasons, staffing issues,
Speaker 1: the judge isn't available the courtroom, they got a higher
Speaker 1: priority case. Whatever the deal, they kept getting moved further
Speaker 1: and further down the field, and finally, in May two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, we got a date that's stuck. And
Speaker 1: I had a new boyfriend at the time who would
Speaker 1: later become my husband, and I asked that boyfriend to
Speaker 1: take care of Chloe and watched my house while I
Speaker 1: went back to California for a month long trial that
Speaker 1: brought everything not only brought everything back up again, but
Speaker 1: told me things I didn't know the first time, details
Speaker 1: about how it happened, or at least from his point
Speaker 1: of view, what happened, stories from the neighbors. It turns
Speaker 1: out that they had been fighting quite publicly for a
Speaker 1: long time before this. The security from the apartment complex
Speaker 1: had been involved. There were instances of her running into neighbors'
Speaker 1: houses with bruises and then him showing up later with
Speaker 1: his own bruises, and all the neighbors that I knew
Speaker 1: testified for the prosecution for our side. And then there
Speaker 1: were these strange people that the defense got, like bouncers
Speaker 1: from bars my mom frequented, or coworker from the former
Speaker 1: job she had.
Speaker 2: How did you feel when all of this was unfolding?
Speaker 1: Just like a bag of electrified trauma. I felt like
Speaker 1: somebody lit off a thousand volcanoes inside of me. And
Speaker 1: every day I had to be there, and I had
Speaker 1: to sit in there and look at pictures or hear
Speaker 1: are these testimonies and just relive all this. I was
Speaker 1: taking notes because now you know, I'm a writer, and
Speaker 1: I'm taking myself seriously as a writer, and I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: someday I'm going to tell this story and I'm going
Speaker 1: to need these notes, and so I'm taking notes. And
Speaker 1: I always have a friend with me every day at
Speaker 1: the trial for support. And I'm pretty much ignoring my
Speaker 1: family because my family still represents a lot of why
Speaker 1: this happened to her, all their rage and all of
Speaker 1: their dysfunction. I'm blaming it on that. So I stay
Speaker 1: away from them, and I do this really weird thing
Speaker 1: during the trial where I seek out the defense attorney
Speaker 1: and he's not a high powered, expensive defensettorney. He's like
Speaker 1: a state appointed one. He's just doing his job. And
Speaker 1: I said to him, I think you're a really nice guy.
Speaker 1: I feel really bad that you have to do this
Speaker 1: and he said, oh my god, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: You don't need to say that. But no one has
Speaker 1: ever said that to me from the victim's family. And
Speaker 1: I took that as such a I know, I was
Speaker 1: so proud of myself for that. That was something my
Speaker 1: family would not do. My family was over there going
Speaker 1: I hate him, that fucking guy, that fucking guy, the
Speaker 1: defense attorney. So I went over there almost as a
Speaker 1: show that I wasn't so low and so base. I
Speaker 1: wasn't on their level. But in terms of letting myself
Speaker 1: feel anything like rage or grief, I did not. I
Speaker 1: would go to my friend's house immediately after the trial
Speaker 1: let out and drink and drink, and we would party
Speaker 1: and we had music on and we would just have
Speaker 1: a big old time and we would go bar hopping,
Speaker 1: and they were always exciting people around. I just gave
Speaker 1: absolutely everything to them, and I gave them all my attention.
Speaker 1: I just avoided myself so completely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting that you drank too,
Speaker 2: just in a I was so struck by what you
Speaker 2: said before about you didn't turn against yourself. You said, yeah,
Speaker 2: I wasn't going to do that. During that period of time,
Speaker 2: was this like you were just in this kind of
Speaker 2: dissociated state and just needing to be out of all
Speaker 2: the firecrackers going on inside your body and away from
Speaker 2: any possibility of feeling rage, because if you felt it
Speaker 2: rage or grief, if you felt it, I imagine it
Speaker 2: would feel bottomless. And rage for you was always something
Speaker 2: that the way it was modeled for you was that
Speaker 2: it absolutely was bottomless.
Speaker 1: And it led to now it literally led to death. Right,
Speaker 1: that's what I saw. I learned during the trial. Is
Speaker 1: happened during a fight where she was saying I want
Speaker 1: you out, I want you out of my house, and
Speaker 1: he alleges that, you know, she hit him over the
Speaker 1: head with a cutting board. I actually have no doubt
Speaker 1: that happened, but he's conveniently left out everything leading up
Speaker 1: to that moment, Right, My mom was fighting for her
Speaker 1: life in one way or another. She was fighting to
Speaker 1: get this man out of her house. Maybe he had
Speaker 1: said something really threatening and that was the final straw.
Speaker 1: Maybe he put his hands on her, but whatever the case,
Speaker 1: she hit him over the head with a cutting board
Speaker 1: and that's when he says he grabbed the knives she
Speaker 1: had been using to cut steak for fajitas, and he
Speaker 1: grabbed the knives away from her and she got stabbed.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That language, she got stabbed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't you love that? It's admission of something happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, all that's missing from that phrase is she
Speaker 2: got herself stabbed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she got herself stabbed. And I absorbed this message
Speaker 1: over the years anyway, that her rage was so dangerous
Speaker 1: and scary, and that then this happens. And now if
Speaker 1: you think I'm going to show rage at all, he'll
Speaker 1: know because I'll get killed. Is what I still to
Speaker 1: this day. Even though I have a much healthier relationship
Speaker 1: with rage, I still can't express rage without thinking it's
Speaker 1: going to mean violent death.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and seven, Jr. Is tried and convicted
Speaker 2: of second degree murder manslaughter, which carries with it a
Speaker 2: sentence of fifteen years to life sixteen actually with an
Speaker 2: additional year for using a knife. After JR. Is behind bars,
Speaker 2: Erin goes on with her life. She works hard on
Speaker 2: healing her trauma to the degree that it can be healed.
Speaker 2: She gradually accesses her grief. She learns to get in
Speaker 2: touch with her rage. She marries her boyfriend and finds
Speaker 2: a great therapist. Now it's twenty seventeen, a decade since
Speaker 2: the trial. Aaron has gone on to graduate school and
Speaker 2: has an MFA in writing. She's published a few essays,
Speaker 2: but she wants to write a book about what happened.
Speaker 2: She takes a gamble on herself, quits her job, and
Speaker 2: she and her husband moved back to California so she
Speaker 2: can research this story, the story of her life, the
Speaker 2: story of her mother's death. In the following year, Jr.
Speaker 2: Applies for early parole.
Speaker 1: And this is the first time now that I've had
Speaker 1: to go through the parole process and actually think about
Speaker 1: all of this and get into it again since two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven. And one of the things I've done
Speaker 1: is I become really obsessed with needing to collect all
Speaker 1: the information, evidence, everything having to do with this case.
Speaker 1: So I've called for the coroner's report, I've gotten my
Speaker 1: nine to one to one transcripts, I've got my police
Speaker 1: station interview transcripts. The one thing that I was too,
Speaker 1: I think, just traumatized to like even deal with I
Speaker 1: would hear white noise and associate every time I started
Speaker 1: to deal with it was the trial transcripts. I knew
Speaker 1: this was going to be a month of some crazy stuff,
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, you know, maybe that's outside the scope,
Speaker 1: so I won't deal with it. But then when they
Speaker 1: told me that he was applying for parole in that
Speaker 1: I could write a victim impact statement something that would
Speaker 1: help influence their decision, I thought, Okay, I'm going to
Speaker 1: get the trial transcripts. And I went through the process
Speaker 1: of ordering them, which was funny because I kept getting
Speaker 1: faint and foggy, and I kept forgetting whose number to
Speaker 1: call and how to do it, or I get ten
Speaker 1: steps of the way through and then not be able
Speaker 1: to finish the last thing, like give them my credit card.
Speaker 1: But eventually I finally got these transcripts, since like fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred pages of trial transcripts, and I just go forget it.
Speaker 1: I can't look at that, and I dash off some
Speaker 1: sort of letter that's like, I don't love the prison system,
Speaker 1: I don't believe in it. I don't think it's effective,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's just, and it sounds like hell
Speaker 1: on Earth to me. So as long as you guys
Speaker 1: can promise he's not going to hurt another woman or
Speaker 1: her family, then do thy will. It was somewhat passive,
Speaker 1: like I took them through the experience, the traumatic experience
Speaker 1: of finding her body, and I say, this will be
Speaker 1: with me forever, what this guy did. But I also
Speaker 1: I'm not a fan of keeping him in prison or
Speaker 1: I just didn't want that power. And so you guys
Speaker 1: just I leave it up to you. More or less.
Speaker 1: My mom would not want anyone to never feel the
Speaker 1: sun on their face again or the surf on their ankles.
Speaker 1: It's pretty much what I said.
Speaker 2: And when you were writing that victim impact statement, what
Speaker 2: did that feel like? I can imagine that it could
Speaker 2: have felt like you're just washing your hands of it
Speaker 2: in a certain way, or like a some kind of
Speaker 2: repair or reparation. It was something you said earlier about
Speaker 2: always wanting to find redemption. Was there something in there
Speaker 2: in that moment that felt like maybe this is some
Speaker 2: sort of strange I can affect this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, just like how when every time Chloe disappeared
Speaker 1: and showed up again, it was like a redemption. It
Speaker 1: was like, as long as things change, this will have
Speaker 1: all been worthwhile. And it's what I felt about my
Speaker 1: whole sad childhood and adolescence too. As long as X happens,
Speaker 1: this will have all been worthwhile. And so as I'm
Speaker 1: writing this letter, I'm feeling myself like rise above everything
Speaker 1: and just going maybe I can redeem all of us here.
Speaker 1: And when this first happened and he turned himself in,
Speaker 1: people would say things to me like, good, I hope
Speaker 1: he gets shived in prison. Are you kidding me? Or
Speaker 1: they'd say, oh, I wish it. California is still have
Speaker 1: the death penalty for things like this. Are you kidding me?
Speaker 1: When you're that close to death, when you're that close
Speaker 1: to a violent death, you're done. I just was done.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to be near anyone's violent murder again
Speaker 1: for the rest of my life. I understand for some
Speaker 1: people that revenge or that quid pro quo feels like closure,
Speaker 1: but for me, it would have just been further traumatizing,
Speaker 1: and I just did not no way. Redemption is what
Speaker 1: I want, not revenge. So this is my first victim
Speaker 1: impact statement. In twenty eighteen, he gets parole denied, which
Speaker 1: was not surprising, and then COVID happens, and there's a
Speaker 1: couple of years where all conversations about parole just shut down,
Speaker 1: and then suddenly, in April twenty twenty three, the Deputy
Speaker 1: DA from Orange County calls me and he says, JR
Speaker 1: Is applying for parole again, wondering if you were planning
Speaker 1: to be there, and I said, absolutely not. I don't
Speaker 1: want to be there. I don't want to be on camera.
Speaker 1: I just want to send you a letter I wrote
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen because it still applies. I still feel
Speaker 1: all these things. And he said, yeah, I saw that letter.
Speaker 1: And I call the Deputy da velvet hammer because he
Speaker 1: has this way of getting really to the point the
Speaker 1: way a good lawyer would. But he's also a little
Speaker 1: careful with me. He's not an insensitive jerk. And he says,
Speaker 1: can I just read to you what JR says in
Speaker 1: his psych evaluation? And I'm thinking, oh my god, there's
Speaker 1: more documentation out there. This need for me to grab
Speaker 1: all the coroner's report, the transcripts, just to have this
Speaker 1: information around me feels like I'm going to need it someday.
Speaker 1: I'm going to want to write with the stuff. And
Speaker 1: I said, yeah, tell me everything.
Speaker 2: So he tells you things that JR. Has said that
Speaker 2: shift you away from that sense of equanimity about his redemption,
Speaker 2: his redemption, the possibility of his redemption or the possibility
Speaker 2: that his being out there would be safe for womankind.
Speaker 1: So one of the things I did was I returned
Speaker 1: to the numbers, the statistics of women who had been
Speaker 1: severely harmed at the hands of a male partner in
Speaker 1: the United States, and it was one in four and
Speaker 1: that is just what's reported, and we know that number
Speaker 1: is a lot higher. And that number went up during
Speaker 1: COVID lockdown two, which we knew from many news articles.
Speaker 1: And I said, this man is in his early to
Speaker 1: mid sixties. He's still a threat, he's still dangerous. But
Speaker 1: the real deciding factor for me was when the deputy
Speaker 1: da velvet Hammer tells me, yeah, he's saying that she
Speaker 1: got stabbed somehow, and I'm remembering, Oh my god, that's right.
Speaker 1: That's the language he used in the trial. She got stabbed. Nonsense.
Speaker 1: And then he talks about I think one of the
Speaker 1: evaluators asked, JR. What do you see when you look
Speaker 1: at all the relationships you've had with women, Because one
Speaker 1: of the really important things is during the trial, his
Speaker 1: ex wife testified via satellite she had left the state,
Speaker 1: taken the kids, and changed her name. And that is
Speaker 1: something I did not know. I don't know if my
Speaker 1: mom knew the full story when she started going out
Speaker 1: with him. But he had the sex wife who was
Speaker 1: so afraid of him because he'd made death threats and
Speaker 1: held a gun door ahead in front of the kids.
Speaker 1: And when the psych evaluators are asking him to explain himself,
Speaker 1: to explain these relationships, he says something like, I never
Speaker 1: started these things. I never instigated. I just subdued the offenders,
Speaker 1: meaning that all these women in his life that had
Speaker 1: filed charges against him or had testified against him is them.
Speaker 2: What did that do to you? Reading that, I'm going
Speaker 2: back to the whole idea in a way of ultimately rage,
Speaker 2: which has such a negative connotations victually for women and
Speaker 2: in your case exponentially, so that rage can be the
Speaker 2: secret that we keep from ourselves, that that was in you,
Speaker 2: but you couldn't access it because it was too terrifying. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and now it seems like, oh, something was unleashed there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now I can't get away from it. So what happens? Okay,
Speaker 1: he's on the phone with me, and I just heard
Speaker 1: that in the psycha ow and how he wasn't taking
Speaker 1: responsibility still and he was using this passive language, and
Speaker 1: I said, wait, we need to look at the trial
Speaker 1: transcripts because our attorney, the prosecutor, had this amazing thing,
Speaker 1: she said in closing statement, closing argument, what was it.
Speaker 1: I go to open the transcripts, and mind you, this
Speaker 1: is the first time I've looked at the transcripts since
Speaker 1: I ordered them, and it was something I was too
Speaker 1: afraid to do in the past. But now this guy
Speaker 1: is with me, velvet hammer, my attorney, and I'm doing
Speaker 1: it with him, and so I'm able to launch myself
Speaker 1: into looking at this thing that was very hard for
Speaker 1: me to look at because he's there and we have
Speaker 1: this common mission. And my eyes fall on this phrase
Speaker 1: that I'd forgotten, which was that my mother had defensive
Speaker 1: wounds on her hands. And that's what did it. I
Speaker 1: could not hold this knowledge inside my body that my
Speaker 1: mother died with defensive wounds on her hands and have
Speaker 1: this guy say she got stabbed. She was defending herself
Speaker 1: against him to her last motion, for their last seconds.
Speaker 1: And I had to sit there with that knowledge and go,
Speaker 1: what am I going to do with this now? Am
Speaker 1: I going to show up? Am I going to be
Speaker 1: on screen? I still couldn't see myself doing that. I
Speaker 1: think I was just going to unload this inarticulate screaming.
Speaker 1: I would just banshee wail. I would be no good.
Speaker 1: What I can do is right. And so I wrote
Speaker 1: a second, different letter, And this letter held a lot
Speaker 1: more of the rage that I didn't let myself feel
Speaker 1: for all those years, the rage I didn't want myself
Speaker 1: feel for the first letter. Where the first letter was
Speaker 1: a little more do that I will, this second letter
Speaker 1: was absolutely not.
Speaker 2: He is remorseless, and that letter ends up having an impact,
Speaker 2: and he is denied parole. That's right, But our stories
Speaker 2: are rarely neat and tidy, tied up in a bow. Recently, Jr.
Speaker 2: Was granted parole, a development that was simply not in
Speaker 2: Eron's control. She could not influence our enigmatic justice system.
Speaker 2: But what she could do. What she did do was
Speaker 2: fully embody and inhabit her truth. There's a comfort in that.
Speaker 2: There's also, if not exactly a comfort, a clarity in
Speaker 2: Erin's understanding that though her relationship with her mother was
Speaker 2: far from perfect, she loved her, and after her mother's murder,
Speaker 2: Erin was able to break the cycle to learn to
Speaker 2: make meaning of her own grief, to make peace with
Speaker 2: her own rage, and to turn her sympathetic disdain into
Speaker 2: embassy nuance and a powerful display of love.
Speaker 1: I felt. I proved that I could hold rage in
Speaker 1: my body and that it was lightning. It was very strong,
Speaker 1: it was a thousand volcanoes. I could hold it and
Speaker 1: wield it and write something that had power. You know,
Speaker 1: it didn't get me killed. I could express my rage
Speaker 1: in ways that I could control, role that I felt
Speaker 1: were in line with my integrity, and they had a
Speaker 1: good effect. They had the effect I wanted, this thing
Speaker 1: that I'd been afraid of for so long, feeling and
Speaker 1: expressing my anger, thinking that I came from a family
Speaker 1: where anger was like alcoholism. It was a disease, and
Speaker 1: there's no healthy way to be angry. In all those
Speaker 1: years that I had nightmares, recurring aliens, nightmares, the rage
Speaker 1: had to go somewhere, and it went within, and it
Speaker 1: created anxiety, and I suffered from panic attacks all through
Speaker 1: my twenties. And now that I have excavated that rage
Speaker 1: and held it outside of my body, in my hands,
Speaker 1: in a pen, metaphorically on the page, it doesn't have
Speaker 1: that hold on me anymore. I really haven't had a
Speaker 1: panic attack since I very rarely have nightmares, and I
Speaker 1: know that if I need to feel rage, it's not
Speaker 1: going to burn me up or kill me or kill
Speaker 1: somebody else. I can feel it, I can let it pass.
Speaker 1: I can feel it and I can write with it.
Speaker 1: I can feel it and I can go for a run.
Speaker 1: I now have a relationship with rage that I never
Speaker 1: thought i'd have, and that no one else in my
Speaker 1: family ever had.
Speaker 2: Speaking of making meaning, here's erin reading a passage from
Speaker 2: an essay she published in the Sun.
Speaker 1: I feel like a superhero now. I don't know how
Speaker 1: else to put it. I let the rage come, and
Speaker 1: it did not kill me. I let the rage come,
Speaker 1: and it did not kill anyone else. It didn't ruin
Speaker 1: my job, my marriage, my friendships. It even served a purpose.
Speaker 1: It gave me power and clarity. Let the record show
Speaker 1: I held lightning and did not burn up.
Speaker 2: Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zaccor is
Speaker 2: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 2: If you have a family Secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 2: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 2: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 2: eight secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 2: find me on Instagram at Danny Rider, and if you'd
Speaker 2: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 2: check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 2: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 2: to your favorite shows.