Practice to Deceive

could explain the shadows, her husband’s refusal to live in the house, and her own strange feelings of anxiety. Finally, she told Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda that she had contacted a priest and asked to have her house blessed.
    “After that, we weren’t afraid any longer.”
    There was no way to find out who the mysterious woman with the rosary was. Another of the neighbors from the sixties? Someone a little deranged who had read the newspaper articles about Mary Ellen’s murder? Some member of her killer’s family?
    Or could it have been the ghost of Mary Ellen herself, her spirit somehow back from the other side? That, of course, was far-fetched, but the sisters were learning how caring and loving their mother had been in life. In some way that was impossible to explain, could she have been watching out for the new family that replaced her own in the house of shadows?
    Gloria’s daughter wasn’t there when the Stackhouse sisters visited, but later she wrote to them.
When I heard you were all here, I couldn’t believe it. My mom gets so emotional about your mom, you, and your family. There’s a connection. When I was little, and I was afraid, I would talk to your mom sometimes. I just knew she would look after me—us—and she wouldn’t let anything happen to us because of what happened to her. Our house was unhappy for so many years. It wasn’t because of Mary Ellen, but because of what happened to her.
    Gloria’s daughter wanted to stay in touch, and Rhonda sent her and her mother a photo of Mary Ellen.
    “All these years,” Gloria told Mercury News reporter Ed Pope, “I’ve wondered what happened to those kids. And now I’ve seen her [Mary Ellen’s] face, I feel complete. Maybe now that her kids have been here, she can rest.”
    What they had learned so far was oddly comforting to Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda. They realized that there were still people who cared about their mother, and had never forgotten her.
    It was as if long-locked floodgates were opening.
    “My first email to the Mercury News column ‘Action Line,’ ” Rhonda said, “drew so many responses from people who had known my father or my mother.”
    Rhonda wrote to everyone who was involved—the DA, detectives.
    The “Dear Action Line” column received many responses from the Stackhouses’ neighbors and friends who had lived in San Jose in the early sixties.
    “Our children played together,” one began. “We didn’t know what happened to you. You were just gone.”
    Through the following years, Rhonda and her sisters heard from people who were able to fill in some of their early history. This mattered a great deal to them.
    In 2002, Lana Galbraith and one of her cousins returned to San Jose to witness yet another parole hearing for Gilbert Thompson. He was close to fifty now and had been turned down for all his petitions to have his sentence reduced. Prison psychologists still considered him dangerous, particularly after his one early release where he attacked a woman only weeks later.
    Thompson looked up as Lana and her cousin entered the room, grimaced, and asked to leave the room. Remembering how he had been castigated and shamed before, he was ready to withdraw his plea for parole rather than face his victim’s family again.
    Gilbert Thompson died at the California Men’s Colony prison shortly before Christmas in 2004.
    Jimmie Stackhouse’s first three daughters heard from their San Jose neighbors and their mother’s friends occasionally over the next eight years. As late as 2012, Rhonda Vogl received an email from a woman who worked for a university in Kansas. She had come close to living the same nightmare the Stackhouse children endured.
    “Every once in a while, I’ve done a search on the Internet for Gilbert Thompson,” Cathleen Wilkinson wrote. “And I found the story about how you and your sisters confronted him—”
    Cathleen explained that her own mother had been attacked and beaten by Thompson a few months before he murdered Mary Ellen Stackhouse. The assault had happened at the Fort Ord military base.
    “My mom was on her way to walk to work, which was probably a couple of miles away across a wide open field [with a] dense shrub area. Every day, she took our German shepherd with her so they could both get some exercise. On the one and only day that she did not take our dog, a ‘soldier’ came out of the trees and came up behind her. When she turned around to see who it was, he hit her in the