Practice to Deceive

the original story about your mother’s death.”
    Rhonda says, “I talked to Pope, read the newspaper coverage from 1963, and I had proof that my mother had existed.”
    * * *
    F OR THE FIRST TIME, Lana, Rhonda, and Brenda saw the article that dominated the front page of the San Jose Mercury News on June 5, 1963. The headline was seven inches wide and stretched across the top of the page: HUNT SEX FIEND WHO KILLED MOTHER OF 6.
    They recognized their mother’s picture from seeing it in an old album. She was a lovely dark-haired woman wearing a cashmere sweater and a double string of pearls. The woman in the photo was years younger when she’d died than they were now.
    A smaller headline said: CHILDREN FIND BODY OF VICTIM, YOUNG WOMAN BEATEN, KNIFED.
    And there they all were, lined up on their back patio steps, squinting toward a photographer for the Mercury News . They had never seen a picture of themselves at that age; there were photos later—but not in 1963, not any they had seen.
Tommy, 8, Mike, 7, Robby, 18 months, Lana, 5, Rhonda, 2, and Brenda, 4.
    Their brothers and Lana half smiled, although they clearly had little idea of what had happened to their world. Robby, in Lana’s small arms, was crying, and Rhonda and Brenda had identical expressions of shock and suspicion.
    It seemed a transgression of their privacy to line them up that way, six little kids whose mother had been violently raped and murdered only twenty-four hours earlier.
    Rhonda wondered who had allowed them to be thrust into the strobe light of the photographer’s camera. Probably not their father; Jimmie was on his way home from Tennessee at that point. Perhaps one of the neighbors whom the paper said was taking care of them? Those neighbors’ quotes in the paper showed that they, too, were in shock. In the end, she knew it was the newspaper’s cameramen who had snuck up through the neighbors’ yards to get photos.
    None of the trio of sisters remembered that particular moment on that particular day.
    Thirty-two years later, it hurt to read the details about the very questions they had been afraid to ask. But there was also the beginning of cleansing. Until they read that newspaper article, the three sisters had all felt an amorphous terror, something waiting in the shadows that they couldn’t see clearly, something that frightened them. Of them all, Brenda had blocked any memory of her mother’s leaving.
    She seemed to be doing all right as they set out to learn more and to honor Mary Ellen in whatever way they could.
    There were things printed that would not have been allowed in the media of the twenty-first century, things revealed that could have interfered with a murder probe. Fortunately, in their mother’s case, they hadn’t.
    Deputy Coroner Richard Mayne told reporters that Mary Ellen had received “at least seven severe blows on the back of the head resulting in the basal skull fracture.”
    He added that a Cutco steak knife, taken from her own kitchen, had been used to stab her in the throat, severing her trachea while she was still alive. Her slacks were ripped from her body and dangled from her ankles. Her flower-print blouse was “in disarray.”
    Investigating officers had located a cast-off blood spot on the wall, and another stain on the living room chair. Although she had perished from exsanguination, all of her blood drained from her body, the red rug beneath her had absorbed that blood, disguising the scene so that her children weren’t aware of how grisly it was.
    There were remarkably few signs of a struggle. Mary Ellen’s cup of coffee was still precariously balanced on the arm of the chair.
    * * *
    A S THEY READ THE newspaper articles, Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda knew that they had to go back to San Jose. Most of all, they had to visit their mother’s grave, to be with her in any way they could.
    And they could not just glean what they could from old newspapers; they needed to look into her killer’s eyes. Maybe they could say something to him that would make him know what anguish he had caused.
    When they learned that Gilbert Thompson, who was forty-seven in 1995, was about to have another parole hearing, their minds were made up.
    “We needed some kind of closure, even though we knew there could never be true closure,” Rhonda said. “This would be our therapy.”
    Their half sisters—Sue and Peggy Sue—met the trio at Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle as they landed there after a flight from Idaho and