Practice to Deceive

mother at all, even though as an adult she consulted therapists to help her open up that padlocked part of her brain.
    Mary Ellen died three weeks before Rhonda’s third birthday, and she would retain only fractured memories, blurred scenes of being with her mother. She can recall sitting in a high chair near a big window and watching Tom, Mike, and Lana walk down the sidewalk to catch the school bus, and she remembers sitting on the landing of the stairs, while Brenda, who was sixteen months older, was trying to tie her shoes.
    “I could picture waking up and my mom was carrying me to her bedroom—and having a warm washcloth put over my eyes because I couldn’t open them. I must have had an eye infection. There were small things like sitting on the kitchen counter, with my mom holding me and reaching to get something out of the cupboard.”
    When Jimmie Stackhouse hopped off the plane, he had immediately gathered his children around him.
    “My dad never went back into our house,” Rhonda said. “I think my Aunt Ellen flew down from Whidbey Island to be with us. And I believe we lived with her and Uncle Cat—who was a tugboat captain when we first moved up there, and Dad was building us a house.”
    When someone praised Jimmie for keeping his family together, he was puzzled. Why was that so brave?
    “Of course I took care of my children,” he said. “I would never walk away from my family. I had six small children. My main concern was to get them out of the house, out of San Jose—where reporters were hounding us—and get them settled. I didn’t discuss it with the children. I didn’t know they wanted to.”
    He was still young, a man who had truly loved his beautiful wife, now suddenly widowed. His adult life was well nigh perfect until sometime between 10 and 11 P.M. on that warm June night. Jimmie Stackhouse was doing the best he could, believing that if his children didn’t know all the horrifying details about their mother’s death, they would adjust soon enough.
    Jimmie had learned to be stoic. His mother had died from childbirth complications when he was only nine days old, and he was raised by an angry and abusive grandmother. At seventeen, he left her South Carolina house and never went back.
    “No one explained a thing to us,” Rhonda said. “It took years to forgive my dad for the hell us kids went through and his part in brushing it all away without really investigating if his children were okay. It was right there in front of him that we were not, but I don’t fault him. He coped the way he knew how.”
    They didn’t have therapy; therapy wasn’t the automatic answer to post-traumatic stress disorder (in 1963, the term itself was yet to be coined).
    Lana felt overwhelming guilt, Rhonda needed to know the truth, and Brenda had been struck dumb. Robby was too young to even remember his mother, and the big boys were doing their best to be brave.
    When they fled their house on the morning of June 5, Tom, eight, had insisted on taking his toy pistol, saying, “I’m going to get the person who hurt Mommy.”

C HAPTER T WENTY-TWO
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    M ARY ELLEN’S MURDER MADE the kind of headlines newspaper editors in the sixties cherished. Words like “sex fiend,” “bloody enigma,” and “telltale clues” were common in describing homicides.
    The hunt didn’t last long. Mary Ellen had recently confided to a close friend that she was afraid of prowlers who might be watching her. She had received several obscene phone calls from a man who seemed to be disguising his voice.
    “He’s threatening to kill me,” she said fearfully.
    For some reason, she did not report the calls to the police, but she had her phone number changed to an unlisted number, telling herself that it was just a prank caller and if he didn’t have her number, he couldn’t call.
    Although tracing phone calls to their source is much easier today than it was fifty years ago, there were ways police and phone companies of the sixties could have put a pen register on her phone and kept a record of the numbers her threatening caller had used. Unless he was calling from a pay phone, or hung up too quickly, or used other methods to hide his identity.
    Would it have saved Mary Ellen Stackhouse’s life? Quite possibly—but one can never be sure. The caller might have been her killer or someone else entirely. Many pretty women whose husbands are often away on military duty receive weird phone calls.
    If it was the murderer who