Practice to Deceive

waited to catch a plane to San Jose. Sue and Peggy Sue, of course, had no blood bond with Mary Ellen Stackhouse; Doris Matz was their mother.
    Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda boarded the plane headed for a place they scarcely remembered.
    They found the funeral home that had overseen their mother’s funeral services, and learned that she was buried in Golden Gate Cemetery in San Bruno. They went there first and pored over the huge registry, hoping they could find Mary Ellen’s grave.
    “We found it quickly,” Rhonda said. “It was just off the main road. I had brought a wreath all the way from Bonners Ferry, and I carried it to my mother’s grave.”
    They knelt beside the headstone and posed for pictures. They traced the names and dates from the grave marker with onionskin paper.
    And then they poured some of Rob’s ashes on his mother’s grave.
    They gasped as they saw the steel pins mixed in with his cremains. These were put in to brace Robby’s broken bones after he’d been run over by the bus so many years before.
    So many losses. So many tears.
    They were shocked to learn that Gilbert Thompson had not been in prison over all the years since his conviction. In the late seventies, the state of California released a number of prisoners on parole. Correctional facilities had become more and more crowded, and even some “lifers” were being considered for parole. “Rehabilitation” was the magic word and life didn’t mean life literally.
    William P. Hoffman, chief assistant district attorney of Santa Clara County, was appalled when his office was notified in the summer of 1977 that the California Men’s Colony was about to “set” Gilbert Richard Thompson’s term.
    “When I prosecuted Mr. Thompson, Judge Callahan sentenced him to life in the state penitentiary. I most respectfully suggest to you that this is the proper term, and this is the term which ought to be set.
    “Mr. Thompson has a severe disability,” Hoffman wrote sarcastically. “He thinks about knifing women and girls and having intercourse with them. Unfortunately, he doesn’t just think about it, he does it.
    “Releasing people like Thompson into society is something like releasing an elephant in a china shop. It is completely predictable that other innocent people are going to be killed and, in the analogous case, a lot of china is going to be broken.”
    Hoffman offered to furnish those making a parole decision with eight-by-ten color copies of Gilbert Thompson’s “handiwork” to help them understand what he had been found guilty of thus far.
    His warning did no good. Gilbert Thompson, then in his early thirties, had been released on parole after only fourteen years. He lasted just forty-three days before he grabbed a woman in a mall parking lot in broad daylight. She screamed and clung to her steering wheel as he threatened her with a knife and tried to wrestle her out of her car.
    It took nine bystanders to pull him off the terrified victim. Clearly, Gilbert Thompson was not a candidate for rehabilitation and he never would be.
    He went back to the San Luis Obispo prison, but remained eligible for parole every five years. In prison, he earned a college degree, and although his college professor knew of his record, she married him !
    When that didn’t work out, he began to court her mother.
    * * *
    B RENDA, RHONDA, AND LANA drove next to San Luis Obispo to attend Gilbert Thompson’s 1995 parole hearing. Exhausted, they stayed in a small motel there. In the morning, they would finally see the man who had stolen their mother from them.
    He was there, monitored by two guards. The room was almost empty except for themselves and the three parole officers who sat at a table facing the prisoner.
    The charges against Thompson were read, and they heard their mother’s name—Mary Ellen Stackhouse—as the victim. It somehow made her more alive to them. She wasn’t just a name on a headstone or a blurred memory.
    “That’s when my grief really started,” Rhonda says. “We finally had proof that our mother had existed, and that she was a victim of murder!
    “My mother was real !”
    The sisters had decided to let Rhonda make their statement opposing any parole for Gilbert Thompson. When she began to speak, he averted his eyes.
    “ You look at me,” she said angrily.
    Thompson looked up briefly.
    “There was no one there behind his eyes,” she recalled. “They were just blank.”
    The female member of the parole board warned