Defensive Wounds

Erin grows up in and around violence and anger. But nothing could have prepared her for the tragic discovery she makes at age twenty-seven.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
This episode contains descriptions of violence. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
Even after all these years, I'm too aware of the
chef's knife. When my husband and I cook dinner. It
might as well glow neon if I take it to
the sync to rents, I say knife behind, as if
we were still working in a restaurant together, because somewhere
inside me, a video is constantly playing handle in hand,
Blade in flesh.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
That's Aaron Mcreynold's essayist editor, self described problem solver. Erin's
is a story on the one hand, of violence, trauma,
and the complicated legacy of rage. It is, on the
other hand, an extraordinary tale of compassion, strength, forgiveness, embassy

(01:00):
and the resilience of one woman's spirit. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is family Secrets. The secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the

(01:21):
secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape
of your childhood, where you grew up, what it looked like,
what it was like.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
I was born in Orange County, California, in nineteen seventy six.
I always think of Orange County, California in the seventies
as being very amber. And I don't know if it's
just because all my pictures are amber, but everything was
so beautiful, peaceful, hippyish, like a very fleetwood max feeling.
Even the waves in California if you grew up there

(01:57):
saying ssh all the time, and it was like an
idyllic childhood for the first several years. Mom met dad
when she was maybe nineteen and he was twenty five
at a party where he was playing guitar. He was
very handsome, very charismatic, and this incredibly talented singer and songwriter,

(02:18):
and he had these ambitions of success in music. She
got pregnant when she was about twenty one with me.
They got married right away, and he was from a big,
tight knit evangelical family. But my mom's family, grandma, got
pregnant when she was seventeen, thought of high school, and
she was an utter romantic who just bought the whole

(02:41):
idea of a loving husband and fulfillment through motherhood. Bought
the whole thing. And my grandpa was also seventeen and
promised her the sun, moon and the stars. And then
after she dropped out and they had the baby and
had been married. He enlisted in the army and just disappeared.
It was an excuse to party for two years. He

(03:02):
didn't leave America. He was somewhere like Oklahoma, Tennessee, and
only came home once in a while, and when he
did he was just in a terrible frame of mind,
terrible mood. My grandmother later told me that she felt
like he was jealous of my mom and real bitter.
And she once told me that on her wedding day

(03:24):
in January nineteen fifty four, there was both an earthquake
and snow in Los Angeles, and she always wondered if
that was a bad omen, and it really did set
the stage for the childhood my mom would have with them.
Grandpa came home and became an alcoholic very quickly, was
a chronic philander, and in spite of that, they had

(03:47):
two more kids. So my aunt, my mom's sister, was
a couple years younger, but she was much bigger and stronger,
and she would beat my mom up a lot when
they were kids. So I think the instant my mom
graduated from high school, she was out of there. She
went to live with friends by the beach, and this

(04:08):
is around the time she met my dad. So, as
the family lore has it, my grandfather never told my
mom that he loved her. My dad would deride my
mom's family as being crazy, as being violent, hostile, alcoholics.
This became how I understood that family. I was around

(04:28):
them all the time, and I was steeped in this
low level violence. In fact, one of my earliest memories
is around the time I was seven or eight, my
aunt beat my mom up in a parking lot of
a grocery store in front of all of us kids,
Me and my brother and my cousin. We were all
screaming and crying while she just beat the holy hell

(04:50):
out of my mom, and people were walking by and
they didn't know what to do. And that was just
the vibe of that family. Things could go from zero
to one hundred real quickly.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
How did that feel to you as a kid, That
moment must have been terrifying. That was there, this feeling
running alongside your childhood of this can happen at any moment.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
Yeah. Absolutely, I felt like everybody was volatile and brimming
beneath the surface was this rage and this violence. And
I've heard from other kids who grew up in families
like this, and you either become a clown or you
become an eggshell walker, or a little bit of both.

(05:36):
You can become a chameleon, you can become someone who
chronically pleases. I feel like I did all those things.
I grew up to be quite a ham. I was funny,
I sang for my supper. But I also developed this
extreme sensitivity and this radar for knowing the mood someone

(05:57):
was in. If I was at my grandparentarent's house, my
grandfather constantly had a drink tinkling in his hand. He
would refill from a giant jug of vodka on top
of the fridge, and he was cold and gruff, and
if you wanted to hang out with him, you'd find
him in the den watching any number of sports skins
on TV, and you could come in and have a

(06:19):
forward conversation with him. And I just thought it was
delightful in some way. I didn't know what a grandpa
was supposed to really be like, and I think I
found him funny. And my grandmother had this. She took
that utter heartbreak from believing in love and believing that

(06:39):
having a family was going to be everything, and then
having a husband who was a distant, cheating, alcoholic. She
shoved all that grief and rage way deep down. And
this is another really equally important part of my family's
legacy is she modeled shoving down rage and sorrow for

(07:00):
my mother, and my mother did the same, so that
when she and my father started to fight more and
more and they began to split up right around the
time I was nine or ten, her outbursts would be
so incredibly violent. They were just loud and not terribly physical.
Yet this would come later. But over the years she

(07:23):
I noticed she would drink more and more to what
I thought of as access that rage. When she wasn't drinking,
she was so quiet and shy, and she would pick
her lip and just look thoughtfully like she was trying
to gather her thoughts or gather her courage to say something.
But when she drank, this other side of her came out,

(07:43):
a side that was funny and brassy and brave and bold.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
We grow up in whatever family we grow up in.
And that's like you said, I didn't know what a
grandpa was supposed to be like, I describe it.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
As a seed. Not being able to describe the inside
of a tusk, you don't know any separation between yourself
and this world you're in. You just absorb. And what
I think I absorbed was grief. Don't show it, don't
feel it, don't express it. Rage. When you do express it,

(08:19):
it's going to be big and it's going to be scary.
So where do those things go? The kids have to
hold it, and where do the kids hold it? They
grow up to either drink it away shove it down
where it becomes anxiety and depression. I wanted to distance
myself from anger. Anger was dangerous and scary, and I
don't think I ever saw anyone handle anger in a

(08:39):
healthy way.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
If you felt anger, would you even know that you
were feeling it?

Speaker 1 (08:45):
That's a good question. There's a couple of ways to
answer that. When I developed some interesting nervous ticks, I
compulsively cleaned, Like around the time my mom left us
the first time, when I was nine or ten, right
before they sat me down the table and said we're
splitting up, who do you want to live with? She
had left and it was just my dad, and I
think he was probably a lot harder to live with

(09:11):
than I can remember. I'm pretty sure I was absorbing
some pretty scary anger on his side, and this is
the guy that had been my best friend. And so
to deal with it, I polished the furniture, I cleaned
the glass. The things I understood how to clean, I
would just clean them compulsively. I think I was trying
to make the atmosphere better and more peaceful. And then

(09:33):
sometimes I would just run away. And by run away,
I mean I'd rent to the next apartment building over
with my diary. And right, I hate them. I hate them.
They're crazy. I hate them. I also started in third grade.
I guess maybe fourth grade I started blacking out in class,
or I might have even gone semi catatonic. I used

(09:55):
to tense up my entire body, clench my eyes, my teeth,
my fists, and just releaf and do that over and over.
And it was so compulsive I couldn't stop myself doing that.
And a teacher must have noticed, because she took me
to lunch one day and said, I just went through
a divorce, and this is what divorce is. And this

(10:16):
is the early eighties, not a lot of people were
getting divorced, so her just acknowledging that this was a
thing that happens. I felt seen and safe in that moment,
and believe it or not, she was able to actually
convince my parents to let me come to her house
for the weekend, which is such a thing I think
teachers used to be able to do with students that

(10:37):
they took a keen interest in in a really honest
and pure way that now we don't acknowledge so much anymore.
We just assume the worst intentions. But she wanted me
to come experience some normalcy and peace. I imagine she
knew my parents were fighting. I think it was the
first time an adult in my life, without saying these words,

(11:00):
sort of acknowledge that what I was going through was
not normal or write or easy, that there could be
another way. That special treatment made me realize that maybe
my circumstances deserved a little extra sensitivity. I was too
young to really cognitively understand any of that. When my

(11:22):
parents split up, they sat me down at the table
and said, Okay, mom's gonna leave this school district, So
if you stay with her in the area, you are
still going to have to leave your school and start
over somewhere else, and you're gonna live with her and
your brother, or you can live with your dad, your
fun friend in Reno, Nevada, where he's gonna pursue a

(11:45):
different business venture. And so I chose him like immediately,
and later it made me really sad for my mother
how fast I chose him. But I didn't really understand
the full weight of the decision I was making.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
What about your brother Arin, Did he stay with your
mother or did he also go with your father?

Speaker 1 (12:05):
He stayed with my mother because he was about three
years younger. They agreed that, you know, a younger child
does better with the mother. And also I was very
kind of independent. I had a strong personality. Later I'll
look back and think, of course, I would be the

(12:25):
easier one to move with my dad, because what I
didn't realize was that she was planning to just leave
me alone all the time. I got left alone constantly.
As soon as we moved to Reno. He left me
with strangers, like a girl that worked reception at the
apartment building and her boyfriend, and then a woman that

(12:48):
he hired for the new office that they were working in,
and often just alone. I'd come home from school alone.
I wouldn't see him sometimes for days. I was only
with him for a few months Reno was just a blip.
It was the rest of fifth grade. And then he
sent me back to live with my mom and they
tricked me into it, and I was enraged, But I

(13:10):
had to live with my mom and my brother, and
I had to start a new school. In fact, I
would start a new school every year for five years,
bouncing back and forth between my mom and dad. My
dad would dangle living with him in front of me,
and I would go for it, and then he would
leave me alone all the time, and then I would

(13:33):
end up back with my mom. It was a lot
of instability. So I learned how to get along, find
my people, bring out the best parts of my personality,
hide everything that was inconvenient or scary, and I really
learned the value of seduction, seducing new groups of people
and friends to stay safe. When my mom left us,

(13:57):
she went to go live with this new boy friend
and his family, and we would come visit her at
this place, and it was just foreign and a little
scary and weird, but also delightful in that way that
things are when you're a kid and you're just adapting.
I really liked their garden. I would go out and
water these people's garden. Oh oh, they have ho hose
in the fridge. I was excited about the ho hose

(14:19):
and the fridge. But we went to go see Aliens
opening night in the theater, me, my mom and all
of her new friends, these adults I did not know
who all represented this completely new part of my mom's wife,
and they were all probably drunk. We were late to
the theater, and the only seats we could get we're

(14:39):
in the front row. And so there I am, ten
years old in the front row of Aliens, a very
scary movie, which is to this day my favorite movie.
I'm completely obsessed with it. But we're watching Aliens, and
I think I absorbed that everything that was happening, with
the splitting up of my family and my mom becoming

(15:02):
this different person and these people around her different and
all this sudden certainty. And I started to have nightmares
that night about Aliens, and I would have them, no joke,
every night for the next ten years. It became a
recurring nightmare for years, and I doped. A very strong

(15:22):
sort of personal relationship with the Aliens franchise that continues
to this day. Came up in therapy a lot, and
my therapist was a union, and he pointed out that
there's hr Geiger and Young have a lot of archetypal
crossover in their work. And I used to think that

(15:42):
Alien represented the anxiety of what was happening in my family,
But I now understand it's where my ten year old
rage went. That rage that I couldn't show anybody because
my parents would be angry. They would already leave. They
were threatening, believe all the time. And now if I
was angry, all that rage I saw, not modeled well,

(16:06):
would drive them even further away and really put me
in danger. So I think I absorbed the rage and
I expressed it in my dreams through this horrifying, hateful
monster was just total bloodlust.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
So fascinating the way that that particular exposition of that
film front row these people, these strangers in this strange
place all conspired to be the perfect storm that had
that happened, which is also an adaptation. That was you
adapting in a way. Yeah, Did you tend to let

(16:45):
people in and let them know what was going on
at home or was that something that you kept very
much to yourself at first?

Speaker 1 (16:52):
I really kept it to myself. I think around ninth
or tenth grade, I got involved in theater, and theater
is such a great place for people to go and
share the most dramatic and horrible parts of their personal lives.

(17:13):
For Cachet, like, yes, it was other kids, but it
was theater, and theater really rewarded big stories, big outrageous personalities.
So I didn't really let anybody know that I had
this scary life at home because kids tend to push

(17:37):
away from them to reject things that are not familiar.
But when you get a little older, I really found
my people around tenth grade in high school, when I
was in theater and I started to let more of
my story come out. And around this time, we were
living with my mom's boyfriend and she was drinking more
he drank. They had friends over, they all drank. I

(18:01):
hated our life. We lived in a hovel full of
like roaches and spiders, and I knew it wasn't normal
to have your parents' friends over drinking all the time
on school nights, and I lived across an alley from
a liquor store. I couldn't bring my friends home. What
teenage girl wants to bring her friends home to something
like that? She was really showing her anger a lot more.

(18:26):
I think she had all this really unprocessed rage at
my father, and I found out later as I grew
up with him too, that my dad could be kind
of a shit. He could be emotionally abusive, verbally abusive
in that way that really smart people who understand psychology
can be, and it cut her in ways that re

(18:46):
traumatized her father. Wound than never feeling loved by the
male figure in her life and having no mother who
could mirror that kind of self esteem to her, she
would have to access it by drinking, and then when
she drank, all that rage would come out, all that
pent up rage. And this boyfriend, I think was starting

(19:07):
to after a couple of years, feel the effects of
having two teenage kids in his small home, and he
would start staying out later and they would fight. And
there was a couple of times where she threw something
at his head and it went past him out the window.
It broke the window and there was broken glass on

(19:27):
the floor. And there was another time, maybe it was
the same fight, where he had to grab her and
hold her arms, and I, just fifteen years old, jumped
on him and started punching him in the back, and
one day he was telling me off in a pretty
typical step dad to a brady teenager way. He got

(19:48):
really in my face and he never laid a finger
on me, but I wanted him to, because I needed
all of this tension to just culminate and break into
something I could point to. I felt like nothing that
was happening to me was something I could point to
and say, this is really bad, so I was waiting
for something more universally recognizable to happen. And so he

(20:13):
just looked at me in my face and said, you
were a little brat, And I said, why don't you
just beat it into me? And he just really, ever
so softly snacked me the littlest bit on the cheek,
not even enough to hurt. But I was already mad
as a hornet, and I decided he was going down
for that. And so the next morning I put on

(20:37):
I makeup really convincingly, like a black eye, and I
went to school and my idea was just to really
wear sunglasses. And my mom was going to drop me
off at school, and I thought, maybe she'll see it
before I get there, and then we'll have a conversation.
Maybe I'll get my mom's attention, but no, she dropped
me off without even noticing. Now I have to commit
to this. I'm walking into school, I've got these sunglasses on.

(20:59):
My friend are going what is that? What's going on?
And I, oh, it got into a fight with mom's boyfriend.
Just very dramatic, theatrical. But when I get to a classroom,
that's when a teacher notices and pulls me out of
his class and says, who did this to you? And
I think, well, I'm not going to outright lie and
say he did it, but I'm not gonna not say

(21:20):
he did it either. So the teacher went through a
list of possible people in my life it could have
hit me, and I said no to all of them
until he said mom's boyfriend, and I just shrugged. And
that night child Protective Services came to the house, and
it was horrible. I had to admit that I had

(21:41):
done this thing. I was so ashamed, and I was
so angry that they were there, and I was so
self conscious that they were there, and seeing like the
hole in the window, the dog dying on a mattress
in the front yard, is drinking parents, and now there's
a witness to it, and not only that, but my

(22:02):
mom's boyfriend was accused basically of Even though I said
it was a hoax or that I made the whole
thing up, it was a misunderstanding, it still gave him
a record. And my mom was livid, and she said,
you know, you gave this guy a record. This is
going to be hit with him forever. And I was
crying my eyes out and she was like, good you cry.

(22:24):
And all I wanted was for somebody to just acknowledge
that things were hard for me and that they were bad,
and that I was growing up in violence and I
didn't know how to get that attention any other way.
And then I did this, and I went too far.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
It's interesting because in a way, I'm struck by that
you didn't turn it, at least at that point in
your life on yourself. This is where a lot of
people end up turning the punishment inward.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
It is interesting. You know how I actually coped. I
went into my fantasies of my future, my dreams, and
I had these strong dreams about being an actress and
being loved by the whole world and being successful and
being in charge of my life. And I was going
to flee this scene the minute I got a chance to,

(23:18):
and by this scene, I meet the whole family, the
whole sad family legacy. I was going to survive it,
whatever that meant, and so I couldn't do any of
the things they did. I wasn't going to drink or
use drugs. I was going to go all the way
through college, be the first person in my mom's family
to go to college. I was going to just be
a great success and have my shit together. That's how

(23:42):
I was going to rebel.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Rebelling by getting her shit together, by doing well on
the essats, by getting into college at San Francisco State.
Nobody helps Erin to accomplish all this. It's a rebellion,
after all. She takes herself to school, drives up with
a boyfriend. In her third semester, Erin finds out she's pregnant.

(24:09):
She feels sick, immediately violently ill. She has to wait
a couple of weeks before she can get an abortion.
During this cascade of unfortunate circumstances, she ends up dropping
out of school. She's just too sick to attend classes.
Erin and her boyfriend break up. She moves back to

(24:30):
southern California to attend another college, this one known for
its theater department. She moves into her grandparents' house outside La.
Her mom is living there at the same time, too,
staying rent free so she can save up to put
a down payment on a place of her own someday.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
And this is when she and I really have a
different relationship than we ever had before.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
Was she at that point in a relationship herself in
and out of relationships. She had one boyfriend who she
met on a chat room. She was obsessed with chatrooms.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
And she met this guy who came to live with her,
and he stole her identity and started running frauds from
her computer. And the FBI showed up at her house
one day and she said, I didn't know any of
this was happening. I'll help you catch him. I remember
she was on the phone with me crying, telling me
she felt so bad. She had to drop a dime

(25:25):
on this guy who defrauded her, used her computer to
defraud people. And after that, I got her a dog
from the shelter, a puppy, and I said, here, if
you want to take care of something so badly, take
care of this. It can't steal your credit cards. And
so we had this dog together that both of us adored, Chloe.
This dog becomes a really important figure in our life.

(25:48):
And I'm living with her. She's drinking more and more.
I'm doing theater at night. I come home one night
from like Macbeth rehearsals, and she is wasted, and she'd like,
watch this baby, and she dials her parents, my grandparents,
and she yells at them about how they never loved her,
and then they'd hang up on her. She'd call back

(26:10):
and just cuss at them and yell at them, and
then she was like, you should call your dad and
tell him to fuck off too. We're on a roll tonight.
I just went, oh, this is pathetic, and I grabbed
my keys and I left and I went and slept
at somebody's house. When I came back in the morning,
she told me she had passed out on the floor

(26:31):
and wet herself, and she kind of laughed it off, like, ah,
I just can't do gin. I was like, mom, you
can't do any of it around this time too, Like
she lost the dog six months in she called me.
I was like working in the scene shop at school,
and she called me in a panic. I lost the dog.

(26:51):
Chloe jumped out of the window when I was parked
somewhere and she was beside herself. So I went up there,
and I I drove around the streets of outside LA
with my mom, up and down the streets, feeling so
scared and devastated for this dog that I loved so
much and afraid for her. And at the same time

(27:15):
I wanted to protect my mom from what she had done.
I was really felt just so bad for my mom.
I wanted it was like, really important that I made
her feel like she was going to be okay and
this wasn't her fault. And there was nobody there mother
and me in any of this, no one taking care
of my feelings. And to add insult to injury, I
was pregnant again. Nobody was telling me how not to do,

(27:38):
but so not to keep getting pregnant. You would think
it would sink in. It really didn't when you have
no education but a man who's two or three years
older than you. So I was pregnant again and just
sick as the dickens and waiting for my appointment at
Planned parenthood and driving my mom around trying to comfort her,
and the dog shows up blow and behold after three

(28:00):
days like Jesus, and everything goes back to the way
it was.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
When Erin is around twenty three, she crashes with her
mother again. She's struggling with depression. She can't finish school.
She's waiting tables and trying to figure out what's next

(28:31):
for her, how to get her energy back. The environment
around her is anything but stabilizing. She's sleeping on a futon,
listening to her mom coming in very late at night, drunk,
blaring the radio, and fighting with the neighbors. During this time,
Erin and her mom get into especially horrible fights. Her
mom shoves Erin, calls her a loser, tells her she

(28:54):
was sorry she'd ever been born. These are things her
mom would never have said in the light of day
at night when she was drunk. At one point, enough
is enough and Aaron starts to crash at friends' houses
the beach. Her car.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
I was sleeping at a friend's house with my mom
paged me and again she had lost the dog. This
time she tried to take the dog to a bar
and got kicked out and like literally thrown out onto
the street, got in her car and in a blackout,
drove home and got into a road rage thing with
some guy. She got out at a parking lot at
McDonald's to yell at this guy. When she got back

(29:32):
in the car, she realized that Chloe wasn't in the car.
So she calls me in a panic, and it's like
the middle of the night, and again I am devastated.
I'm scared to death thinking of her just being hit
by a car gotten by coyote. And at the same time,
I felt that same level of devastation on my mom's behalf,

(29:53):
and I really wanted to protect her from it. And
after a few days of just constantly making posters, ca shelters,
driving around calling the dog's name as how my mom, look,
the only way we're going to get through this, the
only way you and I are going to be able
to survive this feeling, this horrible feeling, is if you
start going to AA and maybe this is the thing,

(30:16):
this is the change, and we can redeem this. I've
always been so big on redeeming every pain, every sorrow.
I think every bad thing can be redeemed later, and
she got raised, and she's just so lost and so
sad that okay, yes, And so we go to an
AA meeting together the first time ever, and I'm sitting

(30:38):
across from her at this table and everyone's going around
and saying their names, and I'm an alcoholic. When it
gets to her, she says, my name is Debbie, and
I think I don't know, I might be an alcoholic.
Even now, I want to cry. It was unbelievable. I
never thought I would hear her say that, and it

(30:58):
felt to me like the beginning name of a change.
But the dog shows up.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
Wow, Chloe go, Chloe.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
Sees a miracle. This thing. She miraculously appeared at some
ex boyfriends of my mom's down by the pier, and
I have no idea how she got there. But it's
been seven days and I know this and I still
have it because my mom had pulled a page out
of her daily calendar and she'd written on it day seven,

(31:29):
meaning day seven of sobriety, with two exclamation points, love Mom,
and she had put it on my windshield. That was it.
She made it to seven days, and the dog was boxed.
So it was kind of like carte blanche to go
back to drinking. She said, in all honesty, I really
like the AA meetings, but I'm gonna drink, and I

(31:50):
don't want to be a hypocrite. So I took myself
to my first allan On meeting, and I learned that
she may not be able to quit, but I can.
And I began the long, slow business of trying to
quit my mother. We were just so enmeshed. I could

(32:10):
not see my own feelings or my needs for hers.
And in fact, there's this one moment where around this time,
she was watching Oprah and somebody was on and they
said sympathetic disdain, and my mom latched onto that phrase.
I came home from work and she said this phrase.
I heard, sympathetic disdain. I realized that's how I felt

(32:33):
about my own mother all my life. And she said,
that's not how you feel about me, is it? And
I thought, oh my god, that's exactly how I feel.
But there's no way in hell I'm going to tell
you that. I said, of course not. Mom. You're awesome.
You give me emotional license. You taught me to just
be who I am and be so strong. And I

(32:55):
never told her that. Yeah, absolutely, she nailed it. Sympathetic
disdain is exactly how I.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
Felt for a couple of years. Erin attends Alan on
meetings and has a lovely boyfriend. They're living in Coasta Mesa,
a town about twenty miles up the coast from her
mom in San Clemente, but Erin has learned to keep
her distance. She wants no part of her mom's chaos,

(33:23):
but she does worry about Chloe all the time. Her
mom never put a collar on the dog, and often
she's wandered loose around the apartment complex. Erin goes down
and visits Chloe, takes her to the park, and continues
to worry. Around two thousand and one, Erin notices that
there's a guy who comes around a lot, an out

(33:44):
of work contractor. The new boyfriend moves in.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
His name is j R. Anytime I called he answered,
which I thought was annoying, and my mom started canceling
plans on me a lot more, in canceling plans with
my brother would come in from college in Pennsylvania, had
a visit or for Christmas, she would no show on us.
We would have plans to go see a movie or
go to dinner, and she would, Oh, I just can't

(34:10):
do it. I don't feel good, you know, this kind
of really drained voice, and we were just we'd had
it with her. We were so done. We were just
exhausted and disappointed by her, and we just thought she's
just drinking so much. And now at this point wasn't
working anymore. If she had filed for disability from her job.

(34:35):
She had a really stressful, abusive boss, so she took
stress leave. And then also she had breathing problems. She
was on a nebulizer a lot. She had horrible asthma.
She had quit smoking, but she still had really bad asthma,
and so she was just weaker and weaker. How old
was she at this point, She's felt, you know, in
her late forties. Whenever I go down there, he's perfectly

(34:58):
nice to me, but he's constantly twelve deep into a
twenty four pack of Natty Light. She has confided in
me before that he likes to do meth and I
was like, oh god, mom, She's like, I hate it.
I would never I tried it once and I hated it.
You know me, I like a downer. And I was like, okay, great,
just not jin, just don't do gin again.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, In two thousand and four, late June, Erin's mom
calls her and says, I need to take you to lunch.
Erin is surprised, really, She asks, just us without JR.
Her mom says, yes, I need to tell you some stuff,
so they go to lunch. She tells Erin that Jr.

(35:41):
Has been acting increasingly controlling and frightening. He's been taking
parts out of her car under the auspices of fixing it,
but as a result, she now can't use it to
go anywhere. He becomes vindictive when she wants to do
anything without him. She'd gone out to the desert with
her parents for Father's Day weekend, said she needed some space,

(36:03):
and in lieu of space, JR. Gave her the exact opposite.
He blew up her phone, calling every minute. He made
sure to let her know that he knew a guy,
a guy who could get him a gun at a
moment's notice.

Speaker 1 (36:18):
She's telling me these things, and I am enraged. I
just want to grab a baseball bat and go down
there and deal with him myself. I'm not even thinking.
And I grab a cocktail nap and I say, okay, Mom,
this is what we're going to do. You're going to
stay with grandma and grandpa. You're not going back there.
You've got the dog. Stay away. Then she had no money,
no income stream at all, and I said, you got

(36:39):
to refinance at condo, get some cash. You're going to
go out of state. One of her best friends lived
in New Mexico. She told me that he had already
invited her to come out there and get away. I said,
you're going to go out to New Mexico. You're going
to get away. I'm going to get this guy a
vic did. I knew it was going to be really
hard to get somebody squatting out of her place, but
I was working for a property management company at the time.

(37:00):
I just felt like I could do it, and so
we had this whole plan to get her away and
get her safe. That following fourth of July, I go
to my grandparents' backyard for a barbecue and he's there,
and I'm like, Mom, what are you doing? Why are
you back with him? Why is he here? And she said,
I'm refinancing. It's all going ahead. He's just being very

(37:21):
sweet right now, and I just want to keep the peace.
And I said, okay, fine. I don't like it as
long as the plant is still going forward. She said
it is a week later, on July eleventh, my grandmother
called me and said, I'm really worried. Your mom isn't

(37:43):
picking up the phone. I said, well, that's not unusual,
and she said, well, she's not picking up the emergency
cell phone I got her either. I didn't even know
you had gotten her in an emergency cell phone. And
that's when I found out my grandma had been hearing
more about Jr. Than I had, and that my mom
had come to stay with them, and he had, even
though he didn't have a license, He drove up there

(38:05):
and went to the window and said something to her
that convinced her to come home. And my grandmother to
this day will still say she thinks he might have
threatened us in the family. He knew where I lived,
he knew where they lived. Whatever the case, my mom
went home with him and then was not heard from again.
I guess. The night before July tenth, my grandmother received

(38:30):
a call from my mother and my mom was sniffling
and crying, and then the background, Jr. Was saying, you know,
it's no big deal, She's just having an emotional reaction.
I bought her all this wine. We're having a great time.
We're having dinner and my mom is saying, I'm really scared,
and my grandmother is saying, come over now, and my

(38:51):
mom says, no, it's okay, I can handle it. I'll
call you tomorrow. But my mom never calls and my
grandma can't get a hold of her. And my first response,
my first feeling was God, damn it, Mom again, I'm
going to drop everything. I'm going to drive down there.

(39:11):
I'm going to sort your life out for you. And
I have my boyfriend in the car with me, and
I'm just going ranting the whole way down there. I'm
like ranting fifteen years worth the complaints about my mom
and her drinking and the chaos and the boyfriends. And
we get down there and it's dark, the condo's dark,
the dog's not there, the windows, the blinds are all

(39:33):
drawn shut, which is unusual. No one's there, and the
car's not there. And a neighbor tells me that maybe
they've gone to dry out. This is something that they
would do, go camping somewhere to dry out, and.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
Their neighbors actually knew this. It's not like they're going camping.
It's they're going somewhere to dry out, specifically.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
To dry out. Yeah, these neighbors, they're privy to a
lot of fighting and screaming. But then these other neighbors
apparently were friends that they would party with. And these
neighbors are the ones that said sometimes they'll go dry out,
they'll come back, you know. Do you try calling them, yes, yes,
No one's picking up. So I drive down to the

(40:12):
campsite that they told me that they go to the
beach at Santa no Frey and I drive around looking
for the car. I don't see the car anywhere, and
now I'm getting really worried. But somehow this feels like
the same kind of worry I've had over the years
for my mom, and that it always works out okay.
And in fact, it's just going to keep being like
this for the rest of my life. It's just going

(40:33):
to be like this forever, is what I felt. And
the next day was a Monday, I had to go
to work, but at my lunch hour I went back
down to San Clementi and filed a police report. I
had first tried to get back into the apartment, couldn't
do it. Everything was locked no one's around, no one's
answering phones. So I file a police report, and of
course they're like, so, let me get this straight. It's

(40:56):
a forty nine year old woman who drinks a lot,
who sometimes goes to dry out in the desert or
at a campsite with her boyfriend. We got nothing here,
and it hadn't been forty eight hours yet, or maybe
it had, I don't know. It was July tenth, was
the last time my grandma talked to her, anyone had
heard from her, And now it's July twelfth, and so

(41:19):
they're just not alarmed. They're like, we'll keep an eye
out kind of thing. So I get a call from
the neighbor later that night and she says, oh, my
husband is telling me that on that night he heard screaming.
He heard her screaming help it hurts. And I thought,
oh my god, why didn't you tell me this sooner?

(41:39):
So I call the police and I say, I have
more information. I think you need to bang down the door,
you need to break in, and they said, okay, we'll
send officers and let you know. They called me back
a couple hours later and they said, well, we send
officers down there. But we couldn't break in because there's
no cause. I said, even the hearing that she was
screaming a couple nights go isn't cause. I didn't understand.

(42:02):
So they said, no, we have to see signs of
something while we're there. And so on a Tuesday after work,
Gwynn picked up my boyfriend I called the locksmith. I
luckily my driver's license still had that address on it
from when I lived with her. I said, Oh, wouldn't
you know my mom went out of town and didn't
have her keys or I didn't have my keys. Can

(42:24):
you let me in? Here's my driver's license. We go
in and it's dark and it's quiet, and it's cool,
and we're by the ocean. Nothing unusual. The place seems neat,
but I'm not like really looking around. I just see
that the bedroom door is closed. It's one bedroom condo,
very small, and I go to open the door and
nothing is just a big rumpled bed in the middle

(42:46):
of the room, and so I go over to open
the blinds. I was like, finally I can see something,
and start looking around and I think maybe I'll get
a clue as to where they went. Oh, there's a
duffel bag on the bed, and I go to move
the duffel bag to see what's inside of it, and
there's her hand sticking out of the blankets. And I
knew the rest of her was under there, and I

(43:09):
knew I did not need to see I didn't need
to see anything else.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
And you're twenty seven years old.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
I'm twenty seven. My mom was forty nine, one month
away from her fiftieth birthday. The neighbor that they partied
with came running in when she heard me screaming. I
was screaming, no, and he killed her. Oh my god,
he killed her. And she comes running in and she
ripped back the blankets. I wasn't in the room. I

(43:37):
didn't see, and I was screaming at her to leave
the scene, leave her alone, don't touch anything. She's my mother.
She's my Mother's what I kept saying. Sorry, I've told
this story hundreds of times, but it's still yeah. I said,
she's my mother. Get away, And I smashed a number
of buttons on any phone I could find, and somebody

(44:01):
managed to make a call to nine one one get through,
And once that business was done, I just went to
the floor and that night I would go to the
police station and give my testimony about their relationship what
I knew of it. And when they said, so was
your mother an alcoholic? And I said, oh, yeah, big time,

(44:23):
Like it just came out of me that way. And
I know that because years later at the trial, they'll
make me repeat those words back. The defense will make
me say these words out loud to everybody, as if
she had it coming.

Speaker 2 (44:40):
In the coming days, Erin learns more the police determine
that her mother had been stabbed multiple times around her
throat and ear. They didn't find a weapon, said it
probably was some kind of small knife. They didn't know
where Jr. Was. They didn't know where the dog was.
Erin assumed he must be in Mexico. By now was

(45:02):
her mom's car, and wrenchingly, her mom's dog, Chloe.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
And actually what happened is a couple days later, the
police Stition calls and says, we have him. He turned
himself in and I said, did he have the dog
with him? And they said no. He says he never
had the dog. That afternoon, the animal shelter behind my
mom's house in the hills behind her house calls and
they said, we think we have the dog. The police

(45:29):
put an APB out on her. The police figured wherever
the dog is, he is and they said, we think
we have your dog. And I went and I got
her and I just grabbed her and I was like,
I'm your mom now.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
Yeah, Chloe, Chloe, God.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
If I tell you that dog went on to live
to be seventeen and a half years old, and that
I had to put her down because she wasn't going
to die like her body kept going even though she
had dementia and she was really suffering. This dog is
the world's strongest dog. Yeah. I had her until I
was thirty six.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
Wow, So what then happens? Also, it begs the question,
was your brother anywhere in any of this?

Speaker 1 (46:14):
Yeah, that's a great question, because this is the hardest
thing I've ever had to do is tell my brother
that our mother had been murdered. He was across the
country at Penn State getting a PhD in physics, and
I did not want him to find out with no

(46:35):
people around him over the phone. He's something of an introvert.
He didn't have a ton of friends or a partner.
I knew he'd be alone, and I was very afraid
for him to find out. At the same time, I
felt like what happened, I couldn't even begin to absorb
it until my sibling knew. I needed him to also

(46:56):
know for it to really be real. So right after
the place station, first person I called was my mom's brother,
and I said, you have to tell Grandpa and grandma.
I'll meet you over there later. Then I called my
dad and I told him, and he said, I'm coming
right down there, and he sent his sister, my aunt,
because she was closer, to come be with me. And

(47:18):
I told him, Sean cannot find out that's my brother.
He cannot find out on the phone. Someone has to
be with him. So my dad called his brother who
lived in Michigan that was the closest relative, and said,
can you please take a red eye and go find Sean.
I was sitting by the phone the whole next day,
just on pins and needles, waiting, And once my uncle

(47:40):
finally had my brother in hand and was with him,
I could tell him over the phone that our mother
had been killed. I started sobbing and I said something like, oh, baby, brother,
I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, And he said, why
are you sorry? It's not your fault and then he
dropped the phone and my uncle picked it up and said, Okay,

(48:02):
I'm going to handle it from here. I think we
just need to get him on a plane and get
him home. We'll be right back.

Speaker 2 (48:27):
As this a grieving process wasn't hard and consuming enough,
there would be another layer to this process for Aaron
and her family, a murder trial.

Speaker 1 (48:37):
So victim services came immediately, told us what to expect
and what was going to happen. And around this time,
I wanted to go to graduate school for writing. I'd
finally slogged my way through a bachelor's degree in theater,
and I knew I wanted to go further, but I
just didn't really have the self confidence. And then this happened,

(48:59):
and I just thought, but fuck it. You know, nothing
bigger will ever happen than what just happened, and I'll
survive rejection, I'll survive whatever comes my way because this
is bigger. And I the week after we put my
mom's ashes in the sea, I wrote an essay about
being with that family on a boat, trapped with them

(49:22):
three miles off the coast, and I submitted it to
a couple of low residency MFA programs because I knew
wherever I was going to go to school, I was
going to have to work full time. I was going
to have the dog with me. That was my biggest
priority with Chloe, and so I couldn't go live on
a campus and be like a full time student. So
I got into Queen's University of Charlotte, North Carolina, and

(49:43):
the kicker was I could live wherever I wanted, and
I really did not want to live in Orange County anymore.
And in fact, I realized the only reason I had
I'd stuck around for so long in a rut was
I was waiting for my mom to get sober or
to be ready to need me to help her get sober.
And now that was over, that was never going to happen,

(50:04):
and had all this trauma in me as rocket fuel,
and I was finally horribly free and I could do
whatever I wanted. And so I told the victim Service,
this person, you know, she's walking us through these processes
over the ensuing month or two. She's saying, trial could

(50:26):
take years. I've seen this take years to go to trial,
and when it does happen, it's going to be long.
It's going to be like a month long trial, and
I thought that she was saying, I can't leave California
until the trial's over. I just broke down crying, and
she said, Oh, Aaron, don't wait to start your life.
I've seen this take years. Just go start your life.

(50:50):
And so I did. I moved to Austin, Texas. This
is two thousand and five. Now I broke up with
my boyfriend and I moved here and I was completely alone,
and that was horrifying. As soon as I got here
and realized what I had done, I thought I was
stepping into some big, brave new life as a writer,
and I was going to find a partner that was

(51:11):
a lot more like for me and find people that
were more like me. But now I was alone with
this horrible trauma. I was having unwanted thoughts all the
time of her hand. Just images of her hand would
flash in front of my face constantly. I was having nightmares,
and the trial kept getting dangled in front of me,
like Okay, we have a date, and then three weeks

(51:33):
later I'd get a call and say, Okay, the date's
been moved and it's for any number of reasons, staffing issues,
the judge isn't available the courtroom, they got a higher
priority case. Whatever the deal, they kept getting moved further
and further down the field, and finally, in May two
thousand and seven, we got a date that's stuck. And

(51:58):
I had a new boyfriend at the time who would
later become my husband, and I asked that boyfriend to
take care of Chloe and watched my house while I
went back to California for a month long trial that
brought everything not only brought everything back up again, but
told me things I didn't know the first time, details

(52:20):
about how it happened, or at least from his point
of view, what happened, stories from the neighbors. It turns
out that they had been fighting quite publicly for a
long time before this. The security from the apartment complex
had been involved. There were instances of her running into neighbors'
houses with bruises and then him showing up later with

(52:44):
his own bruises, and all the neighbors that I knew
testified for the prosecution for our side. And then there
were these strange people that the defense got, like bouncers
from bars my mom frequented, or coworker from the former
job she had.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
How did you feel when all of this was unfolding?

Speaker 1 (53:07):
Just like a bag of electrified trauma. I felt like
somebody lit off a thousand volcanoes inside of me. And
every day I had to be there, and I had
to sit in there and look at pictures or hear
are these testimonies and just relive all this. I was
taking notes because now you know, I'm a writer, and
I'm taking myself seriously as a writer, and I'm thinking,

(53:27):
someday I'm going to tell this story and I'm going
to need these notes, and so I'm taking notes. And
I always have a friend with me every day at
the trial for support. And I'm pretty much ignoring my
family because my family still represents a lot of why
this happened to her, all their rage and all of
their dysfunction. I'm blaming it on that. So I stay

(53:50):
away from them, and I do this really weird thing
during the trial where I seek out the defense attorney
and he's not a high powered, expensive defensettorney. He's like
a state appointed one. He's just doing his job. And
I said to him, I think you're a really nice guy.
I feel really bad that you have to do this
and he said, oh my god, thank you so much.

(54:14):
You don't need to say that. But no one has
ever said that to me from the victim's family. And
I took that as such a I know, I was
so proud of myself for that. That was something my
family would not do. My family was over there going
I hate him, that fucking guy, that fucking guy, the
defense attorney. So I went over there almost as a
show that I wasn't so low and so base. I

(54:39):
wasn't on their level. But in terms of letting myself
feel anything like rage or grief, I did not. I
would go to my friend's house immediately after the trial
let out and drink and drink, and we would party
and we had music on and we would just have
a big old time and we would go bar hopping,
and they were always exciting people around. I just gave

(55:01):
absolutely everything to them, and I gave them all my attention.
I just avoided myself so completely.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting that you drank too,
just in a I was so struck by what you
said before about you didn't turn against yourself. You said, yeah,
I wasn't going to do that. During that period of time,
was this like you were just in this kind of
dissociated state and just needing to be out of all
the firecrackers going on inside your body and away from

(55:32):
any possibility of feeling rage, because if you felt it
rage or grief, if you felt it, I imagine it
would feel bottomless. And rage for you was always something
that the way it was modeled for you was that
it absolutely was bottomless.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
And it led to now it literally led to death. Right,
that's what I saw. I learned during the trial. Is
happened during a fight where she was saying I want
you out, I want you out of my house, and
he alleges that, you know, she hit him over the
head with a cutting board. I actually have no doubt

(56:07):
that happened, but he's conveniently left out everything leading up
to that moment, Right, My mom was fighting for her
life in one way or another. She was fighting to
get this man out of her house. Maybe he had
said something really threatening and that was the final straw.
Maybe he put his hands on her, but whatever the case,
she hit him over the head with a cutting board

(56:28):
and that's when he says he grabbed the knives she
had been using to cut steak for fajitas, and he
grabbed the knives away from her and she got stabbed.

Speaker 2 (56:40):
Yeah. That language, she got stabbed.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
Yeah, don't you love that? It's admission of something happened.

Speaker 2 (56:47):
Yeah. Well, all that's missing from that phrase is she
got herself stabbed.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
Yeah, she got herself stabbed. And I absorbed this message
over the years anyway, that her rage was so dangerous
and scary, and that then this happens. And now if
you think I'm going to show rage at all, he'll
know because I'll get killed. Is what I still to

(57:12):
this day. Even though I have a much healthier relationship
with rage, I still can't express rage without thinking it's
going to mean violent death.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
In two thousand and seven, Jr. Is tried and convicted
of second degree murder manslaughter, which carries with it a
sentence of fifteen years to life sixteen actually with an
additional year for using a knife. After JR. Is behind bars,
Erin goes on with her life. She works hard on

(57:44):
healing her trauma to the degree that it can be healed.
She gradually accesses her grief. She learns to get in
touch with her rage. She marries her boyfriend and finds
a great therapist. Now it's twenty seventeen, a decade since
the trial. Aaron has gone on to graduate school and

(58:05):
has an MFA in writing. She's published a few essays,
but she wants to write a book about what happened.
She takes a gamble on herself, quits her job, and
she and her husband moved back to California so she
can research this story, the story of her life, the
story of her mother's death. In the following year, Jr.

(58:27):
Applies for early parole.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
And this is the first time now that I've had
to go through the parole process and actually think about
all of this and get into it again since two
thousand and seven. And one of the things I've done
is I become really obsessed with needing to collect all
the information, evidence, everything having to do with this case.
So I've called for the coroner's report, I've gotten my

(58:54):
nine to one to one transcripts, I've got my police
station interview transcripts. The one thing that I was too,
I think, just traumatized to like even deal with I
would hear white noise and associate every time I started
to deal with it was the trial transcripts. I knew
this was going to be a month of some crazy stuff,
and I thought, well, you know, maybe that's outside the scope,

(59:18):
so I won't deal with it. But then when they
told me that he was applying for parole in that
I could write a victim impact statement something that would
help influence their decision, I thought, Okay, I'm going to
get the trial transcripts. And I went through the process
of ordering them, which was funny because I kept getting
faint and foggy, and I kept forgetting whose number to

(59:41):
call and how to do it, or I get ten
steps of the way through and then not be able
to finish the last thing, like give them my credit card.
But eventually I finally got these transcripts, since like fifteen
hundred pages of trial transcripts, and I just go forget it.
I can't look at that, and I dash off some
sort of letter that's like, I don't love the prison system,

(01:00:01):
I don't believe in it. I don't think it's effective,
I don't think it's just, and it sounds like hell
on Earth to me. So as long as you guys
can promise he's not going to hurt another woman or
her family, then do thy will. It was somewhat passive,
like I took them through the experience, the traumatic experience
of finding her body, and I say, this will be

(01:00:23):
with me forever, what this guy did. But I also
I'm not a fan of keeping him in prison or
I just didn't want that power. And so you guys
just I leave it up to you. More or less.
My mom would not want anyone to never feel the
sun on their face again or the surf on their ankles.
It's pretty much what I said.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
And when you were writing that victim impact statement, what
did that feel like? I can imagine that it could
have felt like you're just washing your hands of it
in a certain way, or like a some kind of
repair or reparation. It was something you said earlier about
always wanting to find redemption. Was there something in there

(01:01:04):
in that moment that felt like maybe this is some
sort of strange I can affect this.

Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
Yeah, absolutely, just like how when every time Chloe disappeared
and showed up again, it was like a redemption. It
was like, as long as things change, this will have
all been worthwhile. And it's what I felt about my
whole sad childhood and adolescence too. As long as X happens,
this will have all been worthwhile. And so as I'm

(01:01:32):
writing this letter, I'm feeling myself like rise above everything
and just going maybe I can redeem all of us here.
And when this first happened and he turned himself in,
people would say things to me like, good, I hope
he gets shived in prison. Are you kidding me? Or
they'd say, oh, I wish it. California is still have

(01:01:52):
the death penalty for things like this. Are you kidding me?
When you're that close to death, when you're that close
to a violent death, you're done. I just was done.
I didn't want to be near anyone's violent murder again
for the rest of my life. I understand for some
people that revenge or that quid pro quo feels like closure,

(01:02:17):
but for me, it would have just been further traumatizing,
and I just did not no way. Redemption is what
I want, not revenge. So this is my first victim
impact statement. In twenty eighteen, he gets parole denied, which
was not surprising, and then COVID happens, and there's a
couple of years where all conversations about parole just shut down,

(01:02:39):
and then suddenly, in April twenty twenty three, the Deputy
DA from Orange County calls me and he says, JR
Is applying for parole again, wondering if you were planning
to be there, and I said, absolutely not. I don't
want to be there. I don't want to be on camera.
I just want to send you a letter I wrote

(01:03:00):
in twenty eighteen because it still applies. I still feel
all these things. And he said, yeah, I saw that letter.
And I call the Deputy da velvet hammer because he
has this way of getting really to the point the
way a good lawyer would. But he's also a little
careful with me. He's not an insensitive jerk. And he says,

(01:03:25):
can I just read to you what JR says in
his psych evaluation? And I'm thinking, oh my god, there's
more documentation out there. This need for me to grab
all the coroner's report, the transcripts, just to have this
information around me feels like I'm going to need it someday.
I'm going to want to write with the stuff. And
I said, yeah, tell me everything.

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
So he tells you things that JR. Has said that
shift you away from that sense of equanimity about his redemption,
his redemption, the possibility of his redemption or the possibility
that his being out there would be safe for womankind.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
So one of the things I did was I returned
to the numbers, the statistics of women who had been
severely harmed at the hands of a male partner in
the United States, and it was one in four and
that is just what's reported, and we know that number
is a lot higher. And that number went up during
COVID lockdown two, which we knew from many news articles.

(01:04:25):
And I said, this man is in his early to
mid sixties. He's still a threat, he's still dangerous. But
the real deciding factor for me was when the deputy
da velvet Hammer tells me, yeah, he's saying that she
got stabbed somehow, and I'm remembering, Oh my god, that's right.

(01:04:47):
That's the language he used in the trial. She got stabbed. Nonsense.
And then he talks about I think one of the
evaluators asked, JR. What do you see when you look
at all the relationships you've had with women, Because one
of the really important things is during the trial, his
ex wife testified via satellite she had left the state,

(01:05:11):
taken the kids, and changed her name. And that is
something I did not know. I don't know if my
mom knew the full story when she started going out
with him. But he had the sex wife who was
so afraid of him because he'd made death threats and
held a gun door ahead in front of the kids.
And when the psych evaluators are asking him to explain himself,

(01:05:31):
to explain these relationships, he says something like, I never
started these things. I never instigated. I just subdued the offenders,
meaning that all these women in his life that had
filed charges against him or had testified against him is them.

Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
What did that do to you? Reading that, I'm going
back to the whole idea in a way of ultimately rage,
which has such a negative connotations victually for women and
in your case exponentially, so that rage can be the
secret that we keep from ourselves, that that was in you,

(01:06:10):
but you couldn't access it because it was too terrifying. Yeah,
and now it seems like, oh, something was unleashed there.

Speaker 1 (01:06:19):
Yeah, now I can't get away from it. So what happens? Okay,
he's on the phone with me, and I just heard
that in the psycha ow and how he wasn't taking
responsibility still and he was using this passive language, and
I said, wait, we need to look at the trial
transcripts because our attorney, the prosecutor, had this amazing thing,
she said in closing statement, closing argument, what was it.

(01:06:42):
I go to open the transcripts, and mind you, this
is the first time I've looked at the transcripts since
I ordered them, and it was something I was too
afraid to do in the past. But now this guy
is with me, velvet hammer, my attorney, and I'm doing
it with him, and so I'm able to launch myself
into looking at this thing that was very hard for
me to look at because he's there and we have
this common mission. And my eyes fall on this phrase

(01:07:07):
that I'd forgotten, which was that my mother had defensive
wounds on her hands. And that's what did it. I
could not hold this knowledge inside my body that my
mother died with defensive wounds on her hands and have
this guy say she got stabbed. She was defending herself

(01:07:30):
against him to her last motion, for their last seconds.
And I had to sit there with that knowledge and go,
what am I going to do with this now? Am
I going to show up? Am I going to be
on screen? I still couldn't see myself doing that. I
think I was just going to unload this inarticulate screaming.

(01:07:56):
I would just banshee wail. I would be no good.
What I can do is right. And so I wrote
a second, different letter, And this letter held a lot
more of the rage that I didn't let myself feel
for all those years, the rage I didn't want myself
feel for the first letter. Where the first letter was
a little more do that I will, this second letter

(01:08:19):
was absolutely not.

Speaker 2 (01:08:21):
He is remorseless, and that letter ends up having an impact,
and he is denied parole. That's right, But our stories
are rarely neat and tidy, tied up in a bow. Recently, Jr.

(01:08:43):
Was granted parole, a development that was simply not in
Eron's control. She could not influence our enigmatic justice system.
But what she could do. What she did do was
fully embody and inhabit her truth. There's a comfort in that.
There's also, if not exactly a comfort, a clarity in

(01:09:05):
Erin's understanding that though her relationship with her mother was
far from perfect, she loved her, and after her mother's murder,
Erin was able to break the cycle to learn to
make meaning of her own grief, to make peace with
her own rage, and to turn her sympathetic disdain into

(01:09:26):
embassy nuance and a powerful display of love.

Speaker 1 (01:09:32):
I felt. I proved that I could hold rage in
my body and that it was lightning. It was very strong,
it was a thousand volcanoes. I could hold it and
wield it and write something that had power. You know,
it didn't get me killed. I could express my rage

(01:09:56):
in ways that I could control, role that I felt
were in line with my integrity, and they had a
good effect. They had the effect I wanted, this thing
that I'd been afraid of for so long, feeling and
expressing my anger, thinking that I came from a family
where anger was like alcoholism. It was a disease, and

(01:10:20):
there's no healthy way to be angry. In all those
years that I had nightmares, recurring aliens, nightmares, the rage
had to go somewhere, and it went within, and it
created anxiety, and I suffered from panic attacks all through
my twenties. And now that I have excavated that rage

(01:10:41):
and held it outside of my body, in my hands,
in a pen, metaphorically on the page, it doesn't have
that hold on me anymore. I really haven't had a
panic attack since I very rarely have nightmares, and I
know that if I need to feel rage, it's not

(01:11:02):
going to burn me up or kill me or kill
somebody else. I can feel it, I can let it pass.
I can feel it and I can write with it.
I can feel it and I can go for a run.
I now have a relationship with rage that I never
thought i'd have, and that no one else in my
family ever had.

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):
Speaking of making meaning, here's erin reading a passage from
an essay she published in the Sun.

Speaker 1 (01:11:36):
I feel like a superhero now. I don't know how
else to put it. I let the rage come, and
it did not kill me. I let the rage come,
and it did not kill anyone else. It didn't ruin
my job, my marriage, my friendships. It even served a purpose.
It gave me power and clarity. Let the record show

(01:11:56):
I held lightning and did not burn up.

Speaker 2 (01:12:18):
Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zaccor is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family Secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also

(01:12:38):
find me on Instagram at Danny Rider, and if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

(01:13:14):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.