So you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain?
- "Wish You Were Here," Pink Floyd
The 1980 Junior Prom. Suzy is wearing the yellow corsage.
Everyone liked Suzy. It was hard not to. She was funny and beautiful and she radiated energy.
We lost touch after we graduated from college and stopped going home on breaks, but we knew what the other was doing thanks to a few mutual friends (the type who live to keep old groups connected). "Suzy and David broke up!" "Suzy married some Army guy!" "Suzy had a kid!" "Suzy had two more kids!"
I never expected to hear, "They found Suzy's body in a ditch."
It happened four years ago today. Of course, it was someone she knew. Her husband. A lieutenant colonel and former Sunday School teacher, one of those internally emasculated guys who represses everything and communicates nothing. The kind who snaps when his wife finds all the porn he's been hiding on their home computer. The kind who shoves her up against a wall, strangles her with his bare hands, picks up a metal pestle, bashes her head more than 20 times, and then strangles her again. This time with his computer cord.
His attack was so severe that the coroner was forced to name two causes of death.
When found, it appeared the body was that of a female because a bra strap was visible across an exposed shoulder. The body was naked from the waist down, floating against a rock. Bruising and lacerations were found all over the victim's face and head. Numerous bones in the skull and jaw had been broken, and the victims sexual organs showed signs of assault.
Suzy's husband eventually pled guilty. "In all the years I knew Suzanne, I never once threatened her," he said at his military trial. "I never took action against her in a physical way."
Well, not until the end.
He's serving 25 years in an Army prison now, and the kids live with Suzy's family back home. I think about those kids a lot. How would it feel to grow up knowing your father savagely murdered your mother?
I'll always remember my junior prom - and not just because my date's mother called me a "shiksa" and came very close to refusing to let her son take me. I'll remember it because we went as a gang of six, and Suzy was one of the six. It was as awkward and silly as any prom, with bad music, tacky decor and clumsy dancing, all of it capped by (in my case, anyway) a fumbling, largely innocent makeout session.
More than anything, though, I'll remember standing in the bathroom with Suzy, fixing each other's dresses, laughing, and gossiping about everyone out on the dance floor.
We had our entire lives in front of us.
2 comments:
That is a very sad story. It makes me want to stop wasting time.
A friend of mine wrote me a note this morning to tell me how a childhood friend of hers was also murdered recently by her husband (who then killed himself as well).
Our conversation expanded from there, and I hope she won't mind if I reprint a few of her later thoughts here:
"someone not knowing it's their last day on earth i find so poignant - having breakfast, hassling over what to wear, having a pointless quick argument and then that's it. appts for next week left uncancelled, doesn't matter what's for dinner..
not for nothing the great philosophies say live for the moment, and live well in it. maybe if obituaries covered nothing but the final day of life - still unknown to us - we'd all be amazing - productive, kind, patient.."
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