154: What if your mom was murdered by a serial killer?
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I had total grief and sadness and fear and just also incredulousness, like just disbelief that it happened. But it's different when you lose somebody who hurt you. Welcome to the Permatemp Corporation, a presentation of the audio podcast, This Is Actually Happening. Episode 154, What If Your Mom Was Murdered By A Serial Killer?

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My mom and dad were what some people called back to the landers. It was a movement in the 60s and 70s to live out in the country or live on a commune. And they decided when I was born to leave all the family behind and go from South Carolina all the way to Washington State.

So my childhood, my early childhood was spent in the back of a pickup truck crossing the country several times and living at a campgrounds. And my dad would go into town and get some construction work to feed us. And I think we were on food stamps. So that was in the early 70s.

They were into macrobiotic eating and not drinking alcohol and not smoking cigarettes, but they had started out meeting each other in college doing hard drugs, especially my dad. And they met right away. She was a freshman. He was a senior at Mars Hill College in North Carolina.

I had been raised with my mother telling me that she lost her education because she became pregnant with me. And in fact, she had to drop out, even though she had a full scholarship, to this college in North Carolina because she was doing drugs. She had to drop out. She lost her scholarship and didn't know what to do with her life. And so she went back home to New York City to her mother to try and figure out what to do.

When I knew them, like when I was conscious of them as a daughter,

They were clean and sober, and there was literally, to my memory, hardly even any beer in the house. And that sobriety was most of my childhood until I was 13. That's when the drug problems really started. So most of my childhood, they were very clean and sober and super healthy. And we're talking brown rice and carob chips and grow your own vegetables in the backyard and...

Really out in the country where we didn't even have a refrigerator. We used the cellar, the root cellar, to refrigerate our food. We had a tiny black and white TV. We had no phone. We had one Ford, 73 Ford pickup.

And yeah, and then we ended up having to move to the city because we had to be close to services because we were young babies and it wasn't safe to have my mom be out in the country with no vehicle. And so we moved, I think I was in first or second grade, but when we moved in right into the suburbs of Seattle.

My mom was mentally ill and it's really hard to describe what mental illness looks like to people who might not have experienced it. Even though the house was clean and sober, she was super abusive and she just had very strange ideas about reality and she isolated herself. She didn't really have any friends.

Her mental illness would get bad enough that sometimes she would hallucinate. She had a Jesus complex. She thought that she had seen him and started seeing black dots and thought she was having a vision of Jesus. Childhood was not happy. I remember that she was having us kneel down and do evening prayers. But I remember thinking...

starting to have doubts about her religious beliefs and questioning her in my head that like maybe these prayers were inauthentic. I feel like very early on I approached her with disbelief because she didn't seem to be able to accurately report her own life stories and her own memories.

I don't think she ever was intentionally lying. I think that she just emotionally and mentally didn't have a good picture of the truth. And then the heavy drug use, like the actual drug addiction, only really came into play in the late 80s with the crack epidemic and when I was about 13. The event that started

My mother on hard drugs, again, after 13 to 15 years of sobriety, not counting pot, was that she had spent too many years being a mother where she didn't feel completely comfortable being a mother, I guess. And she had a breakdown. And all these details are not really known to me because my dad was dealing with it and not really briefing us

I think my mother actually saw a psychiatrist because they admitted her to a hospital. And then the psychiatrist wrote up a piece of paper which said something about a bipolar diagnosis.

She potentially had something more serious in addition to bipolar. But I think what started the heavy drug use is that she just couldn't take being a mom anymore after all those years of potentially not really being that comfortable being a stay-at-home mom.

And so she broke out and I don't know when she had a breakdown. I know she had like a couple big ones. And she broke out and just decided to take off. She went from being completely isolated in the house, no friends, to she went and got a job at a chocolate factory and started just hitting the streets. My dad was kind of like,

For all intents and purposes, he was the stable one, the one that made sense. But later, he ended up getting just as addicted to crack as she did and abandoning us equally. It was really quick, the process of she's starting to leave home, and now all of a sudden they're never home. And there's a phone in the house so that they can do drug deals.

My dad got into it as well. My dad ended up prematurely withdrawing his like 11 year retirement fund for the city and blowing it all, blowing all his money and spending most of his adult life trying to repay the IRS.

My dad tried to save my mom from the streets, from doing hard drugs. He took her to Kauai thinking he could get her healthy and spend a lot of the money there. But he just wasn't able to control what was going on. And I know very little of what was going on. I just know that the worst part of the story is that she did end up resorting to prostitution.

And I became the surrogate parent and I have three younger sisters. So my journals are, have this refrain of I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted. I mean, I'm 14 years old, but I'm taking care of like my four year old sister, like a mother and my trying to keep track of my other two sisters feeding, you know, making dinner, cleaning the house, doing my homework. I don't even know what I did. I just know that,

that I recorded that I gave my sister a bath every night and that I was exhausted. Our family started breaking apart when I was 13, which is when you might think, oh, that's when you're really starting to form your clear ideas of self and separating the parent from yourself. I had to skip being a teenager, and that really has impacted me the rest of my life just because

Teenagers do really important things developmentally to transition between being a child and an adult. And so I still have this sense that I never was a teenager and that I have to make up for that somehow. But I mean, yeah, I just have a sense that I haven't played enough yet.

A relative reported us to Child Protective Services, and I got a note from the counselor's office at my high school that was signed CPS, and I didn't know what CPS meant. And I came home to a social worker saying, pack your stuff, we're taking you to a home, and where are your sisters? And I'm like, I don't know where they are. They go off every afternoon and find homes to feed them.

We were put in foster care when I was about 16. And we ended up at a suburb probably about 30 miles away from where we were living. I developed IBS when I was pretty early on, when I was like in junior high. Irritable Bowel Syndrome. And that just feels like your bowels are on fire. That's how I can describe it. So all my stress went into my stomach.

I had a warped sense of self and thought that I was very ugly and undesirable. And I think that all comes from being emotionally abused and being told you're not good enough in many different ways. Deep down, I don't trust people to completely be there for me.

I don't think that I was angry. I don't know. It's all pretty whited out. A lot of my memory is convoluted and whited out or just gone. Trauma alters things so much. I've tried to write poems about it. I have a poem that I really like called The White Field, which is about my memory being whited out and about there just being this desert.

It's like a lifetime process of trying to get to know myself that I think everyone goes through. Everyone goes through, why am I the way I am, the human condition. And sometimes the questions about who we are or understanding ourselves just remain unanswered.

I think outwardly I seemed fine. I was still getting like not straight A's but pretty close to straight A's in school and going to school regularly. Foster care was really different for me than it was for my sisters because I've always been like a rule follower and I always have liked structure and order and

And so for me, a really disorderly situation of our parental abandonment was being made orderly and the problem was being solved by putting us in foster care. And I was grateful. Our foster family was just a single mom. So it was six kids in a very small house and one parent, and she had a temper.

So I got along with her because I wasn't rebellious and I was like grateful for social services because someone else is going to cook dinner for me every night so I can do my homework. Someone's going to make sure that we go to the doctor and the dentist and normalcy was reinstated.

She fostered us for about a year, and then my dad was getting his life together, and social services gave him a list of conditions that he had to complete before he could regain custody. Together they came up with an arrangement that he would take two of us out of four of us back, and I chose not to go back with him. And I felt like he had forfeited his parenting rights.

Once you do hard drugs and abandon your kids, it's over. I don't care that you got your life back together and you're sober and you're working your field again. There's no trust. And so me and one of my sisters went on to a second foster home. And that home was lovely and problem-free. And I got my own bedroom for the first time in my life. And it was a very sweet Hawaiian family home.

With my dad, we started out having supervised visits with Child Protective Services. I just remember I won a scholarship to study abroad between 16 and 17, and I remember telling him, not asking him, that I was going to go to Germany for a year. So I was a sophomore. I applied for a scholarship to Germany. I got a full scholarship to be an exchange student there.

I was in the process of getting all my paperwork and my passport and stuff ready to be an exchange student and my foster father was helping me. And my dad was not telling us anything about my mom. I don't even know if my dad told us that our mom was missing. We just knew that we weren't hearing from her. So she could have been in Seattle cutting off contact with my dad.

Or she could have been gone, like completely gone. There was a point in early spring of 1990 where he stopped hearing from her. Until then, she would check in via phone on a daily basis or throughout the day. I don't know how often. Or maybe it became less and less frequent.

In September of 1990, some mushroom hunters in Enumclaw, Washington were foraging in some forest and found her bones.

My dad had filed a missing persons report and was shuffled around because we lived in a small suburb called Edmonds, but the bones had been discovered and put in a morgue somewhere in Seattle. And so basically just due to paperwork, there was no connecting the dots for like those several months from September to January.

We will never know when she was killed. She disappeared around February or March of 1990. The day that my dad told us that our mom had died was January 1991.

I found out that our mom had been killed in my dad's kitchen in this little apartment and he just said, "Your mom's gone to heaven," which was really, really insufficient for me. I was 16, but he had to tell us in a way that I guess that was appropriate for a 10-year span and age of kids.

For me, it wasn't really appropriate to hear your mom's gone to heaven. It was totally insufficient. And he was sitting on her cremated ashes. They were in his closet and he wasn't telling us. He wasn't telling us anything. One thing that I clearly remember in the process of taking in her death was that I felt that she would have left us either way.

It's obviously the least ideal way to quote-unquote leave, to be killed. But she was going to break up the family and stop being our mother. I felt strongly that she was going to find a way to do that, no matter what. After about six months after hearing that she had been killed, I went on exchange here. I studied abroad in Germany. It was incredible, and it was...

The first time in my life where I got to totally be enriched and have everything, I mean, it sounds selfish, but have things be focused on me. So I went from being kind of Erzat's parent to I get to be a kid, I get to be a student. I was the first exchange student admitted to this school because it was ex-East Germany and the wall had just come down.

I remember having a really, really amazing time and it helped me come out of my shell of being this abused, abandoned foster kid to being this like nourished, treasured, special kid. You're very special when you're an exchange student. Everybody knows you. And I was really accepted. And my host mom said that I had nightmares about murder. She remembers more probably than I do.

I know over my lifetime I've had a couple dreams where I'm the killer. I'm somebody who says, I've got a gun and we're on a rooftop and it's like a movie and I'm giving you the ultimatum. You can jump or I can shoot you.

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After a year abroad, I came back and I proceeded to set up my life. And I feel like I was in darkness or like as if I were underwater. I didn't have a grasp on my emotions. I was just putting one step in front of the other. But I did find a way to support myself, paid for college myself, had like very brief first boyfriend.

Finding out that my mother was missing, starting when she disappeared and after finding out that she had been killed, had an impact that I can't define. But I know for years it felt like I was in the dark.

I was just, I can't describe what it was like, but you don't fully know where you're at emotionally. You don't know. There's no way you can introspect your way to some clarity when that's happened to you. I remember encouraging my sisters to like, let's talk about mom. Let's have a conversation about mom because no, we wouldn't talk about her.

I was the only one of my sisters that really wanted to pursue the truth. And so I didn't go through an extensive period of searching and following up with detectives, but I do remember that I was holding on to all the questions for years. And her case had become a cold case. It still exists, but it's like open, but it's closed.

Anyone who grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 80s knew about the Green River Killer.

The Green River Killer picked up younger-looking women who were runaways, not necessarily prostitutes, but women who were just on the streets for whatever reason. And he has, I could be wrong, but to my knowledge, he has the record, the U.S. record for most victims. He has 49 victims.

The Green River is somewhere in South Washington. I don't know exactly where it is, but it was named that because the first two victims were found dumped in the river. From my understanding, bodies would often be found in states of decomposition, so it was hard to solve the case.

Washington State is a really thick, ripe, growing area. It's a lot of greenery, a lot of forest, and it's easy to dump a body and have it not be discovered because things grow so fast. His first victims were killed when I was in second grade. The only thing that you knew when you were growing up was that there was this guy at large and that he kept killing people.

So you grew up with the fear of this man all through the 80s and 90s and the knowledge that nobody knew where he was or who he was.

I was a college journalist and I remember calling the King County detective from the newsroom using the phone, calling the Green River Task Force and ask if any progress had been made in the case and talking to them and them saying, "Well, we're just a two-man task force at this point."

I think our family suspected that our mom was a victim of this serial killer and it was unsolved. So I'm guessing that I was calling to ask them, do you think my mother is part of this case? And I feel like I remember the detective saying it was a cold case, but that they had not ruled out the possibility of my mom being part of the Green River killers of his victims.

There was a rumor that he might be a police officer because that was why, that was people's theory of why he would get away with it for so long. I remember that being one rumor. And it turned out that he was just this ordinary guy. He was just, for some reason, just able to cover his tracks. He was a truck painter and he had a family. He was married. He was caught in 2003, I think.

when I was 29. It takes 12 years for my mom's case to be solved. And the reason it was solved is because DNA technology advanced. So the police were able to give Gary Ridgeway a piece of gauze to chew on, and they analyzed his saliva and matched it

At that point, I had moved to California. I was living in Sacramento, California. And somehow, I want to say this to anybody out there, no matter how off the grid you think you are, the media can find you. I had people from Hard Copy, this true crime, I don't even know what kind of show it is, that was very popular at the time, calling me up and asking me to go on and do an interview, which I turned down.

And I wasn't on the lease, and I wasn't on the phone bill. I had no utilities in my name. I had no cell phone. They found me, and that's how I found out. I must have gotten called by the police first, but my memory has selected that out and has decided that getting contacted by a national TV show was more important than the police. Finding out who killed her

Knowing the answer after 12 years is at once a relief and then also a total new beginning of now I'm going to start processing the death. I had my first breakdown that year in 2003 and it was kind of a big one. I think I had it because I went back home to the Seattle area and her case was just all over the papers.

And it's really reopens, it re-traumatizes you when you have to see stuff on the front page of the Seattle Times. Your brain just switches channels and you're no longer really in your regular space anymore. You don't sleep for three to five days. When it's still unknown, you feel like maybe you're underwater, your head's underwater, your whole consciousness is kind of in the dark and then you get the answer

your case is solved and then yeah and then you start processing but i mean obviously you're processing death and grief and loss the whole time but you're processing in a different way when you know the answer because then you have to start thinking i mean imagine having the visual in your head of like your mom getting murdered in the forest

I think about my mom being on the ground in the forest and this man, and that never goes away. In the 17 years since we found out, since her case has been solved, my processing has been constant. What is it like to have the case be so public again?

to see our name in print and our mom's face and mugshot in newspapers. The case was in People magazine. It was in the New York Times. It is super strange. It's completely hard to describe how it feels to have to be in the newspaper.

I personally wish that people would not sensationalize serial killers. It's so understandable to me. Like when I watch a murder mystery and I'm fascinated, you know, and it's just a fictional account, I understand, oh, people really get into this because it actually has happened and it's like a hobby. But part of me just really is disgusted by

Anytime someone is a true crime fan, I kind of just try to accept them as they are, but it puts some distance between me and them because they really have no idea.

And out of the four of us, one of us, one of my sisters and I is actually a true crime fan. And the other three of us are like, let's just keep all of this at arm's length and 10-foot pole distance, like we don't need to watch. So even among us, there's dissent, you know, as to how to handle the case.

I actually did meet a true crime fan who was fascinated with my case and he bought my zine and contacted me. He's the only one who's contacted me.

And he distributed my zine to like people in different countries who were interested in the case. And I just think this guy was not completely sane. Like he literally wanted as a job, he wanted, he was seeking a job cleaning up crime scenes and,

He wanted to be on the scene of murders to see the blood and stuff. And he just had a very, very strange look in his eye and wanted to be my friend. And I just made some copies of my zine and let him send them out and then just cut it off from there, basically.

I spent years searching for my mom's identity, trying to understand her, not understand the murder case, but to understand her, because I wanted to understand why she was the kind of mother that she was, how she went from being like a very, very self-disciplined, like holistic health nut to being a crack addict within a few years.

That was the nature of my processing alongside the processing of she's been murdered. How do I, how do I handle that? I'm a poet and I'm a writer and I've been writing poems to her all along and

imagining her childhood, imagining what it's like to be her. I've written a zine, which is a self-published booklet that's composed of all the newspaper articles of her case in chronological order, and it's interspersed with poems that I've written to her. And it just became easier and easier to understand what had happened and easier to conceive of my own identity as someone this had happened to.

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I heard back from two or three people only, and one was the classmate who ended up sending me the birth announcement for my birth that she had received, and letters, about three letters that my mother had written to her talking about becoming a citizen, a U.S. citizen, because my mother was born in Hungary.

And she emigrated here, didn't speak the language at all when she came to New York when she was 12. And one that had said that my dad was her drug dealer. One teacher answered my letter and she ended up being this nun who was living and working in Chiapas, Mexico.

So I started corresponding with Carlotta, asking her over the years about her work. And basically she teaches indigenous Mayan women photography.

So after 10 years of correspondence, I came into some money and bought a ticket and went down there. And this woman who was roughly 70 years old, who had been my mother's teacher in the 1970s in Albany, New York, took me through the streets and the markets of San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, and told me all these details about my mom's personality.

that no one really, hardly anyone, there's one other person who will talk to me about her, my great aunt. She told me that my mother was just very smart and very classy, European, and that they spent a lot of late nights talking, having long talks in the dorms because my mother was a boarder, so she didn't go home on the weekends.

To hear that my mom was like a normal person and that she was lovable and likable, which I tend to think that my mom was not, that she only had negative characteristics. But this woman was like, no, I really enjoy talking to her and we were really close. And she remembered her like yesterday.

Most of the time these days, like it's been 30 years, I feel so solid and able to deal with the reality and so fully in acceptance.

And once or twice a year, something like, let's say I'm on a bus, I'm visiting my family in Seattle, and I'm going by the airport. And it just will make me think there's women out here in this area, because my mother had been in that area, that are lost and that might be getting picked up by a serial killer right now.

And that thought seems so benign. It doesn't come with like sharp stabbing pains or memories or the whole case coming up or anything. It's just a real, real like thought. I think somewhere there's a woman down there who's like lost and is out on the streets.

And then you have as a woman, you have the fear that stranger things happen. What if this repeats in your life? What if a boyfriend kills you? Which is like probably the deepest, darkest fear. Like what if my fate repeats?

I had it last night. I'm going on a date tonight with someone I haven't met, and he wants to use his scooter to take me around, and I'm going to tell him in person that I don't feel comfortable with him taking me around in a scooter because I have this thought in my head that, like, you know, men aren't that safe, and how do I know?

And I just was like, I don't want that thought. I don't want any kind of manifestation or anything to even enter my mind. I want to feel safe. Our mind is constantly cycling through repeatedly over and over again everything that's happened to us all the time. We think we're pretty in control, but if we sit down and you meditate, you realize your thoughts are

doing insane things all the time. And I can tell the difference between a PTSD type response. I was told that I had PTSD at one point and just a kind of thought that I'm having. And so the thoughts that I'm having now are not PTSD. But when I was about 30, within the few years after the case got solved, I was diagnosed with PTSD and I was having kind of like flashback type thoughts.

It was just not healthy and not good. So I live a physical distance away from the case, away from the cemetery, away from the Seattle Times. And a lot of people in California haven't heard of the case, even though it's such a big one.

So I don't have to do any explaining ever when things are in the paper because it reoccurs. I mean, dude is in Walla Walla prison for life. I don't even, I'm assuming I'll hear when he dies, but I'm sure his days are numbered at this point because of his age. But I don't have to walk around like,

being outed. I am the one who chooses to get this information out and no one would have a clue. The reason why I'm in a strong place now, in a very strong place, and that I have been in a very strong place for a long time is because I've been so vocal about my mom's case. Apart from writing poetry, publicly reading the poetry, writing a zine, I contacted

organization for family members of murder victims. So I contacted one of these organizations and told them, "I have an op-ed piece that is against the death penalty. Can you help me get it published?" And years later I've had this op-ed in three different papers. And the argument is thus that

First of all, I'm a pacifist and whether or not my mom had been killed by a serial killer, I would still be against the death penalty for murderers. But in our case, our case was specifically solved because Gary Ridgeway was given a deal, life in prison in exchange for information. And when he was told that he would not be put to death,

he said, "Oh yes, I remember. Let me give you some names." And our mother's name was one of the names, Marta Reeves. And if the sheriff, Dave Reichert, had he not chosen to go that route,

And had he chosen to say, vengeance is more important. Let's put this guy to death. He's killed so many women. Then our case would never be solved. And I don't think I would have healed as much as I've healed at all. Through being vocal and constantly telling people about my mom's case, that has all caused me to heal so much. And of course, time heals everything. So...

I no longer feel like my mom is this mystery that needs to be solved. I understand that she was really conflicted about being a mom and that's why she just split and that that happens sometimes. She would have left either way, but doing crack in the crack epidemic basically took her out of the house and into the hands of a serial killer.

It's really weird, but I don't hold any anger towards him. I had total grief and sadness and fear and just also incredulousness, like just disbelief that it happened. But it's different when you lose somebody who hurt you.

I've finally forgiven her, but I think for years I felt like a lot of anger because I felt like she was the one who's made my life hard, who's made it hard to be me. And so the anger was more or the estrangement was more towards her and not towards the killer.

It was more like just total grief. Grief and loss and maybe part of me deep down feels guilty that I don't feel anger. And I don't think I've like consciously asked myself, "Do I forgive him?" It's just that I've let go. What's strange is like I have more of a sense of identity after the Murrer case than from before.

Because it's my early childhood where most of the memories are completely either just gone or unreliable. The murder is kind of one of the central, if not the central event of my life that I've had to survive. Everything else is around that central event.

My identity is that I'm really strong and courageous and that I've survived and I've thrived. And yeah, I think I felt special because I feel like losing my mom, dealing with a murder case in the news, in the media for 20 years makes you so strong.

And definitely sets you apart completely from the general public. So I do have like the secret sense of myself as like, yeah, I think everyone should think that they themselves are special, you know, and everyone should have their reasons for why they think that they're unique and they're special.

Going through this case and being part of this famous serial killer case really does set me apart. I am diagnosed bipolar and I live a really healthy life.

And so I tend to think of things other than bipolar as more serious. The spectrum starts out as depression and anxiety. Bipolar really sucks. It can be really a challenge. It depends how you handle it. Then when you're getting really, really serious, it's schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder. I think for a long time, I thought that I needed to understand my mother as a mentally ill person and why she had abused us.

and why she had mothered the way she had mothered. And as you get older, your perspective shifts finally away from being that of the daughter or the child to, okay, I could put myself in this position of a parent.

And especially dealing with bipolar, like you start to get, really get, oh, this is why she got angry. This is why she lost her temper. This is why she didn't really have a good grasp on reality. I can see how if she had not been on medication, she wasn't on medication. I could see what would happen in my brain.

I could see how I would start to construct stories about stuff. I'd get paranoid. I've definitely gotten paranoid on medication. I came to realize, yeah, my mom's treatment of us was about her and not about us, and it's not our fault.

And then I have to, on the other hand, put up with the frustration that my memory is so imperfect that I'm just not going to completely get it. And I'm fully okay with that. At this point, if I want to know things, I can look in my journals. Mostly I don't. I feel like, yeah, my searching is done.

I don't think that my trust issues are so deep that they're going to prevent me from being in a long-term relationship. But I do just hold people deep down. I hold them at a little bit of a distance. The longest I've been in a relationship is three and a half years. Most of my friends at this point have gotten married and they're staying together with the same person and I continue to have relationships.

different partners for short-term periods. And I don't know if that's because of trauma or bipolar disorder or just also like a part of it is just our generation. And so part of me is always wondering, you know, is that pattern ever going to switch? Could it change? Can I find somebody that I end up staying with for a really long time?

I have faith that there's possibility of that happening, but I think people are very imperfect.

And we want them to be perfect and we want them to love us completely and love us unconditionally. And it could be that not very many people are capable of that kind of love. And at the same time, the catch-22 is that you have to have some faith and belief that love is real. And no matter what kind of parents you had or how they treated you when you were a kid and

how that informs like your sense of self. You still have to believe like I'm completely lovable just the way I am.

Today's episode featured Nova Reeves. To find out more about Nova, you can Google her article on the death penalty in the Tacoma Tribune. You can hear her reading her poetry on YouTube by searching for Quiet Lightning. And you can also get a copy of her zine by emailing her directly at NovaReeves at gmail.com. That's N-O-V-A-R-E-E-V-E-S at gmail.com. This Is Actually Happening is brought to you by me, Whit Misseldein.

If you love what we do, you can join the community on our official Instagram page at ActuallyHappening. You can also rate and review the show on iTunes, which helps tremendously to boost visibility to a larger community of listeners. Thank you for listening. Until next time, stay tuned.

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