Practice to Deceive

Rhonda, “You cannot speak directly to the offender.”
    The parole board put Gilbert Thompson through the mill, demanding that he answer embarrassing questions. He finally admitted that he had gone home after he murdered Mary Ellen Stackhouse and masturbated in his garage, still excited because he had realized his fantasy.
    The prisoner whined that it wasn’t fair—that the whole case had been “sensationalized,” turning everyone against him.
    “Mr. Thompson,” the woman on the parole board spoke again. “How could anyone do more to sensationalize this story? You did that.”
    Mary Ellen’s daughters’ cheeks were wet with tears, but they were resolute, strong even in their grief. Lana spoke, too, her words sharp as actual blows as they blasted Gilbert Thompson. These were not helpless little toddlers anymore; these were strong women.
    It took only a few hours for the decision to come down. Parole was denied.
    When the sisters were led to a private room, the parole board members smiled at them. “Ladies, that was all done for you—because he’s not going anywhere.”
    Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda drove back to San Jose, passing acres and acres of orange and lemon groves. It was a beautiful day, a wonderful drive, and they felt that an oppressive weight had finally been lifted off their shoulders and their hearts.
    But there was something more the three sisters needed to do.
    Rhonda recalled, “We had gone to the funeral home, to our mother’s grave, and to her killer’s parole hearing, but that wasn’t enough.
    “I said, ‘I want to go back to the house. We’re here in San Jose . . .’ We found our old house. I started up that front walk, with Lana and Brenda behind me, and I knocked on the door.
    “When a woman answered, I said, ‘Hi, we used to live here when we were little’—and she suddenly burst into tears, and said, ‘I knew you would come back someday.’ ”
    Gloria Perez invited them in, leading them to the living room where their mother had been murdered so long ago. The furniture and the carpet were different, of course, and yet they had some recall of being in this room a very long time ago.
    Gloria, who looked to be about fifty, explained that she had raised five children there.
    “She told us, ‘We didn’t know what was wrong with the house.’ ” Rhonda recalled. “My husband kept saying, ‘I’m not gonna stay here—there’s something wrong. I don’t know what it is—but I’m not going to stay here.’
    “And then he left me and moved out,” Gloria told them. “I kept seeing shadows in the house. I’ve lived here nineteen years, but we weren’t the first buyer after your family left. Realtors didn’t have to tell house buyers about the history of houses back in those days.
    “We used to hear footsteps. The kids would hear them, too, and I’d tell them it was just the heater thumping. One time, I heard a noise in the kitchen, and I said, ‘I’m not scaring you and I don’t want you scaring me.’ But I’m sure she isn’t really here to scare me.”
    Gloria told them that one night about eleven, there was a knock on the door and they found a woman standing there, holding a rosary and a cross. The woman said, “You need to get out of this house!”
    Gloria, startled, had gasped, “What? Why?”
    “Someone was murdered here. Something evil happened here.”
    “I told her to stop,” Perez said, “because she was frightening my children. She looked at me with sad eyes and then she turned around and left. She just came out of nowhere that night. I had never seen her before—and I never saw her again.”
    Gloria Perez said she went next door the next morning and talked to her neighbor Madeline Cassen to see if she had any idea what the woman was talking about. Of course she did. Madeline was the same next-door neighbor the Stackhouse children had run to when they found their mother murdered in 1963. Madeline was the pretty young woman with the puffy blond hair. She was in her sixties now, but she hadn’t forgotten anything about that ghastly morning in June.
    “Apparently, we’d somehow gotten dressed,” Rhonda recalled. “I don’t know if that’s true or not—all I can remember are the pajamas that our mother made for us. But we were good little soldiers and we marched over to Madeline’s. Our mother taught us to be that way.”
    Gloria Perez said Madeline Cassen told her about what had happened there in the early summer of 1963.
    That