287: What if you couldn’t explain his heinous act?
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I just remember being in such shock and then everything after that is sort of having the air just sucked out of the room. It was just such a surreal moment. It's like our family was just kind of erased after that. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 287. What if you couldn't explain his heinous act?

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And her father owned all this property. They were extremely wealthy. Even though they had all this money, her father was an alcoholic, as was her mother and her brothers. And when she was growing up and she was a teenager, she wasn't allowed to have things. My dad, he grew up in poverty, I would say. And that was always an issue on my dad's side of the family as well, that he never had much money.

My mom was the only person in her family to go to university. She became a teacher. And back then when you got pregnant, there was no maternity leave. It's like you gave up your career. And she wasn't really satisfied with the homemaker lifestyle that she'd been put into.

My dad, meanwhile, was always jumping around professions. He was a commercial fisherman at one point, and then he eventually ended up becoming a glazier and owning his own glass business.

My mom loved art. She studied art at school. She loved movies. She was just like a real like culture vulture. And my dad was this very working class guy who liked to watch hockey and boxing on TV and war documentaries. My parents growing up, they did not like each other. You didn't see much love between them. They fought quite often.

They were very, very, very different. They really got together to kind of escape their family situations. I was born in the early 70s and I have an older brother. I was a breech birth, a premature baby. And my mom liked to tell us kids that we were both accidents victims.

The narrative around that was just that I was kind of difficult from birth. And one of my mom's stories of like how I was when I was a small child was that she would go to hug me or something because I was so cute and I would just like push her away. I don't remember doing that, but that was her story. And she called me strange kid, strange girl, weirdo.

My nickname was Boo because apparently I was super, super quiet. And I was quite strange. I had some delayed language development early on.

I had this security blanket that I'm embarrassed to say I capped until I was 16. I remember my parents staying up to watch TV and I can just see myself with the blanket and two holes ripped into it, kind of looking at someone else's life, feeling like I was dissociated from my environment, from the family, but kind of liking it at the same time, like kind of liking that outsider status.

So I was given a late-in-life diagnosis of high-functioning autism about two years ago, but we didn't know that I had any of those issues growing up, basically. There was this overarching narrative that I was strange, that I was weird, but I just always felt really different from other people, especially in terms of speech and language.

I think that there is a frustration to communicate there. Even if you're high functioning, you still have these frustrations to communicate socially. You might have a very advanced vocabulary, yet you don't really know how to associate the emotions of words and words don't have the same weight or emotional weight that they might have for other people. I was a bully at school.

I remember I probably hit or punched some kids maybe once or twice, but a lot of my bullying was verbal. And it was very much around a kind of obsession with language. So, for example, this one poor young woman, I made a sign for her desk that said, kiss my zits.

Because she had acne. I just feel so terrible telling this. I was just obsessed with the sound of Kiss My Zits. I thought it was so funny. I liked the way that it sounded. Being a bully was this kind of impulse control issue. I still don't really understand. But I can almost feel in a very visceral way that my bullying was coming from a place of pain. You feel less weird when you're bullying somebody because you're speaking up.

Maybe it was a kind of distraction by inflicting pain on other people through the words that I was using. I remember that one teacher was really, you know, fed up with my bullying of kids and brought my mom in. And she said to my mom, Andrea has this incredible ability to find somebody's weakest spot and say something about it in a way that's really hurtful.

And my mom wouldn't reprimand me or say anything, but I think I was clearly struggling and I was lashing out and I was really nasty. My neighbors called me garbage mouth because even from a really young age, like I was, you know, eight years old and I was out in the backyard, like just swearing up a storm.

I think I felt really isolated, actually. You know, I think I wanted to connect with people. And I certainly did have friends, you know, when I was younger. But I think there was just some kind of social disconnect as somebody who didn't really understand what was going on with me as well and why I felt different. I think I shocked people. And I don't know how much of that is my autism or how much of that was just not enjoying being like this little blonde blue eyed doll.

I had this weird relationship with the way that I looked and the darkness that I felt inside. My mom, she would say things like, you look like this blonde-haired, blue-eyed cherub. You look so angelic. But if only people knew what a monster you were. She used those kinds of words quite often. So monster, monstrous, angelic.

I also felt this dichotomy, what she was talking about, you know, this kind of darkness inside. And so a lot of her sort of negative attention went on to singling out these dichotomies in me.

But she showed me a lot of love. I mean, we had some really good times together. She was a really exceptional person to be around. She thought differently from the people in her generation. She was a real free thinker who really didn't have an outlet for any of that. Whereas my dad, he was just this person that I saw in the garden on the weekends or lying on the couch at night, you

My dad coached our softball and he went to my horse riding competitions and they were pretty involved in that sense. But there was a lot of emotional distancing. I think parenting kids who were neurodivergent and especially me, I think it was really challenging and it was just all so toxic and unhealthy. I was 14 when my mom was diagnosed with colon cancer.

So I just remember her on the sofa looking very pale. And, you know, it was pretty striking to see somebody in that situation. But the hard part is when you have a difficult relationship with a parent,

When that parent becomes sick, it's really hard to know how to react because you have these resentments, you have these negative feelings towards them. And I just remember always feeling like really uncomfortable about

As her cancer progressed, she was having a sense of her own mortality at that point. She was probably really struggling with her mental health, I'm sure. And the relationship between me and my mom started to sort of seep through the guilt and the shaming. There was a lot of really insane fights between my mom and I.

You shouldn't fight with somebody who's really sick like that. But what people didn't know is that I was born into that dynamic. And the fighting with my mom, it came from somewhere.

You could say it was like this inherent darkness or maybe I'm just a bad person or something. But I knew that this dynamic came from a whole host of other things. And I just remember this crazy doctor. He apparently told my dad that all the fighting with me and over the years how stressful I was as a teenager had given my mom cancer.

The doctor also said that my mom had a hysterectomy when the colon cancer was just developing. She had a hysterectomy because I was a breech birth. So apparently, the fact that I was a breech birth, I was also responsible for spreading my mom's cancer more thoroughly throughout her body. And I remember thinking, like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, that does not sound scientific.

And I was the one who was looking at the colostomy bag. I was there when my mom was like sick in bed. But at the same time, I really internalized it. And I think because of the comments that she had made towards me growing up, there was a part of me, I think, that believed it. None of these things made sense to me logically.

But because it was about me and my mom and because it had already been part of our relationship that she called me a monster, I felt it kind of become a part of me and a part of who I saw myself as. So that later on in my life, it's very easy for me to think, okay, it's because I'm a bad person or it's because there's something monstrous about me.

I went to university after high school, but then I dropped out after a year or two. And so I was home a lot. I was sculpting and I was helping take care of my mom. So it was just watching somebody decline to that extent. Meanwhile, my brother was no longer living at home and my dad suddenly took up blacksmithing.

He would go on these blacksmithing trips. And I remember my mom getting really mad about it. I just remember at the time being like kind of puzzled about my dad's sudden passion for blacksmithing. And he was also always on the cordless phone in his greenhouse, which was kind of his man cave.

One night I was downstairs sleeping and my dad knocked on the door and he said, mom's gone. And I went in and said goodbye. I saw her in the middle of the night being wheeled out on the gurney. I wish that I could talk about that in a way that was maybe a bit more poetic.

When someone's on their deathbed, people tell you, like, you should say your goodbyes. Somebody said, oh, you know, tell your mom it's okay. You forgive her. She can go now. Like, there's all these, like, things that people say. But she was so pissed. She was so mad that she had to die.

That's how she was as a person. And that's how she wanted to go out. She didn't want any of this, like, let's make peace with people. You know, let's say something wise. Like, that was not her personality. She was pissed. And basically, like, I was just waiting for her to die because I knew she, like, hated being like that. Just you're so happy at the end to see that somebody is not suffering like that anymore. Yeah.

After my mom died, it was really quite fragmenting in that we didn't necessarily bring us closer. It was pretty isolating, to be honest. But I think also it speaks to a bigger issue in my family, which is just not talking about some of those harder topics. Addressing some of the deeper issues was just not on the table for us.

I moved out of the family home and my dad took me for a walk one day and announced that he had a girlfriend. And he was going to sell the family home, sell his business and move into the interior of BC with his girlfriend and start a new life there basically.

So the first Christmas after my mom died, apparently she just wanted to have like an intimate Christmas with the two of them. So the new home that they had in the interior of BC, we were not invited, my brother and I. It was just not a good feeling. And that was kind of the first inclination that there was something a bit off about this relationship between my dad and his partner. And then things started coming out differently.

One of my mom's friends told me that my mom had known that my dad was actually starting up a relationship with this woman when my mom was basically on her deathbed. She'd picked up the phone when my dad was on the phone one night and heard like a woman's voice. And my mom was so mad because she said, we told each other we would stay together till the kids were out of the house. And then he can't even wait till I'm dead, basically.

It was just like lacked any kind of integrity. You just kind of thought for both of these people, my dad and his partner, why couldn't you have done that in a way that was like a bit more compassionate?

There was just something so immediately dysfunctional about how they sort of decided to start their life together. And this kind of idea sort of brewed in my head a little bit. And after my mom's friend told me that my mom was really angry, that my dad had kind of like broken the rules, then I think this idea sort of festered in my mind that my dad and his partner's life was kind of cursed.

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Hire high-quality, certified pros at Angie.com. Everything felt like it was just wrong. It didn't make me love my dad any less. I feel like maybe actually I kind of worried about him in a sense because I felt like it maybe wasn't really him.

He was just like suddenly such a different person and he was so like sweet, like baby talk, like all these things that we had never heard. So on one hand, it was kind of scary because it's like he's changing in some ways that seem a little bit suspect. Yeah.

Like he's not making good decisions. He seems unstable. But on the other hand, you're like, but this is nice. He's never been like that. It's nice to see somebody in love.

His money situation was really, really not stable. They poured a lot of money into renovating this home and building an African violet greenhouse, which was the dream of his partner to have an African violet mail order business.

Meanwhile, she did not work. So she was in her mid 40s, I think maybe 45, and she had retired. She told me that it was because my dad didn't want her to work.

He had this kind of old school idea about I'm the provider of the family. So it didn't surprise me, but it was pretty clear early on that their lifestyle, you could tell, was just not going to be sustained by his income, which was not a lot.

It just made me feel unsettled. It became very clear that he was struggling financially because of the odd jobs that he was taking and the fact that he was always hitting people up for money. At the same time, if you ever needed money, he would also find a way to give it to you as well. So he was extremely generous, but he just started borrowing all over the place.

Around the same time, I moved to a different province to go to architecture school for three years and really loved it, but was having some mental health issues. In retrospect, after my autism diagnosis, I think I was really struggling with the study environment that you have at architecture school. So I dropped out after three years and went and did a master's degree back in Ontario and

My impression of my dad during that time was always I wasn't quite sure how he was surviving financially and how they were maintaining their lifestyle. But he went back to the glass business that he had sold because it went bankrupt. But my dad had already by that point gone bankrupt twice, maybe three times. And he was just constantly struggling financially.

When I saw him during that period, he just looked always really stressed out. He didn't look good. In 2004, I moved to Paris to do research for my PhD. That was in September and I was kind of getting settled at the time. And I kept in touch with my family and called pretty often.

In February 2005, just kind of out of the blue, I called my brother. And the thing that's weird is there was just no reason for me to call him. So I don't know why I was calling him. I don't know if it was a coincidence. But when I called him, he said to me that my dad had killed himself and that he had killed his partner as well.

I grew up with animals and my dad loved animals and his partner loved animals. And so to hear that he also killed the dog inside the house, he killed his partner, probably first the dog as well, both with gunshots and then himself with a shotgun. There was absolutely no struggle, no sign of violence. My dad had no history of violence whatsoever.

But I can feel, you know, what that must have been like, you know, what it felt like. It was something that really haunted me for a really, really long time. And it is a hard place to go. Here I was, you know, in this really, like, dingy, old stone medieval building in Paris. Yeah.

And I just remember being in such shock. And then everything after that is sort of having the air just sucked out of the room. It was just such a surreal moment. It's like our family was just kind of erased after that. When my mom died, for example, I was in the house. So something that was so visceral, you know, I saw her in the last week's

It's really, really, really vivid for me. But the events around my dad's passing, I don't know whether it's because of the shock, the trauma, or also just how we weren't really a family unit and everything was so fragmented at that point. I felt so distanced. I felt really, really alone. And I felt really, really isolated.

Then to find out the details of what my dad had done, because he had pretty meticulously prepared the crime scene so that nobody would come upon it and be shocked because he knew the police in that community. So he had signs up the street and the driveway that said, do not enter, call 911. He had signs on the front of the house saying the same thing.

He wrote a confession letter to the police so they wouldn't have to conduct an investigation. And then he wrote suicide notes to my brother, myself, my grandmother, and I think one of my uncles. When all of that information became clear, it became so graphic.

It was the kind of thing where it's somebody else's trauma, but it just became so visual in my mind. Even the suicide note to me, like it looked a little bit blurry at the end, like he had been crying a little bit. I felt like there was just this gaping hole in my life, but then now it was like just full of the scene and this aftermath.

When I got home, it was quite strange because we didn't really come together as a family. There was no funeral. We didn't have any service. One thing that became kind of difficult at a certain point was the fact that my dad's siblings decided to cremate the two of them together. So my dad and his partner cremated.

And her family didn't want to have anything to do with her ashes either, which was quite sad. I never went to the farm after that. I never recovered anything from my childhood. I had asked to keep his eyeglasses, his comb and his wallet and his Swiss Army knife. Those are the things that I asked to keep.

And to get the original of his suicide letter to me, because that had just been an email previously, the letter was an explanation.

It started with the financial situation. I guess you would say his justification for what he was about to do and saying that the government was coming for the farm and that his partner would lose all the animals, would lose her beloved farm. Quite a lot of detail. Painting the picture, like I think it said, I got locked out of the business. I was losing everything.

And that I was the only person who would understand what he was doing. I kind of bristled at that statement because I kind of think it's not fair to ask somebody to understand why you would do something like that.

To some extent, I could understand because he knew that I had mental health issues. And also, I was doing my PhD at the time in psychoanalytic theory. So he knew that that was a very integral part of my personality. But in all honesty, I felt some shame when I found out he had killed himself. Literally, the first thing that went through my mind was, oh, he beat me to it.

I don't really know where that thought came from. And I, like I said, I'm a bit ashamed of it. Pretty much everybody in my family who was related to him were just really angry at him. My grandma, who had been really close before this, she thought that he had just lost his mind. And it kind of caused a rift in our relationship.

I kind of wasn't willing to accept that he'd lost his mind. For me, it was perfectly lucid and he made a very horrible decision and just morally wrong. He did reference once or twice in the letter and certainly at the end, I'm going to hell, pray for me.

And that was probably the hardest part to read because my dad had been, as my mom put it, elapsed Catholic his whole life. And he seemed very much an atheist to me. That, I think, is when I realized he knows that that's morally wrong. But now with some distance and thinking about it, maybe he did lose his mind. Maybe if he'd had support, maybe somebody could have helped.

The other hard part too is if that is the case, I then feel guilty. When I was studying, doing my master's degree, I remember writing him an email and said in the email that they had started their relationship out the wrong way. And because he did it when my mom was dying, that his relationship was cursed.

And that he should just be cognizant. He should be aware that we know. We never talked about it. He never said anything to me, but I did feel guilty.

I felt like maybe that planted a seed in his head. It was almost like a bit of a curse because it made him think this life that I'm living with this person, it's cursed. It's never going to work out. Things are going to go wrong. I think that's kind of where I was coming from with the guilt because I had told him that he was cursed and now he's saying he's going to hell.

It's kind of like the reactions that I had when the doctor said that I had given my mom cancer because I was such a stressful teenager. There was a bit of that with the email as well, where I knew that I was being superstitious, but there was a kind of this underlying illogical guilt. And I just felt an overall burden. He kind of left me with instructions that

He said, please explain me to the kids when they are older. And he meant my brother's kids, he could have written. Be there for the kids when they're older, if they have any questions, maybe you can talk to people about it. It was, explain me. I don't know why I was given that job. I guess it tied into the, you're the only person who will understand what I'm about to do.

There's a bit more than desperation and depression. There's a lot of delusion going on there to think that that's reasonable to ask of somebody that you're leaving behind, essentially, and whose life you're just about to completely fuck up.

Maybe it's easier to think of him as he was deluded in that moment or he lost his mind or he wasn't himself. Maybe that's actually easier for people to accept than the fact that that's incredibly narcissistic, that entire letter itself.

The letter was in a way all about him. There was nothing like, I love you so much, have a good life, take care of yourself. There was nothing pertaining really to other people or to the other people that he was leaving behind.

I think he wasn't really able to think about that, to be honest. Like, I don't think he would have been able to do any of that if he'd actually thought, how is that going to impact my daughter? How is that going to impact my son, my siblings, my friends, my mother, his partner's family as well, you know, her friends, her family. The focus was him. He was not a violent person and he was not the kind of person in a million years who would murder somebody. And to kill the woman that he was so in love with,

In his mind, he was so convinced that what he was doing was altruistic. I got that from one of the psychiatrists in France that I was working with at the time. He said, we call it an altruistic suicide. It's a kind of suicide where he really thought that he was doing her a favor by killing her, as well killing the dog. He felt like the dog would not be able to live without them. And he thought that his partner wouldn't be able to live without him either, either.

in order to kill the woman that he loved and kill their dog and create all this terrible aftermath. I think that the only way he could do that was probably by just focusing on himself and then passing the responsibility to me, explaining, you know, it's something that he had to do and you could tell he was so devastated. It almost came across as being self-sacrificing. Look how self-sacrificing I am.

To me, that's really the sort of the height of a toxic masculine stereotype that was my dad's generation is that he was the one in charge, the breadwinner in charge of your survival, in charge of your comfort, in charge of putting food on the table, and that he made those decisions for everybody. Yeah.

It was a way that he was raised and it was his generation, but it was really, really, really toxic. And it became really toxic in his relationship. And the altruism for me is connected to that because it's saying, I know what's best for my partner. I know what's best for our dog. I know what's best for my daughter. I'll tell her sort of what to do. It was really sort of about him and the sacrifice that he was about to enact. Yeah.

I definitely thought like he would commit suicide before he would be in a homeless shelter or had to rent an apartment and sell the animals and downsize and get rid of the African violet greenhouse. He would kill himself before that. But the added part of then I'm going to decide for my partner, it was quote unquote altruistic because he was getting rid of that family because he could no longer provide for it.

And if he can't provide for it, it doesn't exist because he doesn't exist. There's a huge amount of narcissism in that.

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When this happened, I was doing a PhD and then that was impossible to continue along that trajectory. I think that I was just lost, even if it was hard for me before, to kind of project into the future and think about what do I want to do with my life? What he did erased all traces of it.

It was just like, I really can't see any future to my life at all. At the time, I was in a relationship and my boyfriend had come to live with me in Paris. And I just remember having a lot of mental health issues. It was really challenging for him. And then when that relationship ended, I did talk quite a bit about wanting maybe to be hospitalized for my own suicidal thoughts.

I had a really great psychiatrist at the time. And he said, listen, I just really don't think that that would benefit you right now. And I don't really think you belong there.

You know, he was a trained psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst as well. And his idea was so brilliant to just say, you know, I'll set you up with an appointment. Go talk to the head of the unit at the hospital. You go meet with the nurses. I'll take you on a tour. And I think it was so effective because I was in a depressed state where I was also relapsing.

really feeling overwhelmed by any kind of external stress or stimuli or anything like that. And that might have something to do with my autism as well.

I had nothing left to kind of put up with anything that stressed me out, even the tiniest amount. And when I went to visit the unit and saw the other people there, this was a loud place. There was a lot of very nervous energy. And I just kind of remember thinking like, wow, I don't have the energy to be in here right now. And I don't think I could handle this.

I said to myself, listen, like, you need to find another way out. I really look back on that interaction with that psychoanalyst psychiatrist as something that really gave me a lot of agency. I decided that I don't want to dishonor my parents not having had the chance to live out their lives. I don't want that to be my path.

For me, that was a real eye opener. And I kind of need to snap out of it. I was never like a freewheeling spirit as a teenager. I wasn't very freewheeling spirit when I was in my 20s and 30s. And I just kind of went wild in my 40s.

Once I'd gotten over my own mental health issues, I just went into this period of my life where I just wanted to sleep around and drink and have fun and not take anything seriously. It was really bizarre when I think back to it because it's really not my personality. Everything was so not serious for a good seven years.

It was very imbalanced. It was quite chaotic. I still managed to work, but I was always, always broke. It was definitely escapism, just not really wanting to show up for life 100%. But it just felt like something that I needed to do, kind of reliving a youth that I didn't have. I think that part was really appealing.

One of the things when I was having my fun period in Paris, it involved a lot of online dating in the very early days of Tinder. And there were some French online dating sites. And I feel like I was kind of struggling there in a lot of ways, but I loved it so much. I loved my independence. I loved my freedom. But I really couldn't connect with French men.

So when I met my partner who lived in the UK and had two young kids recently divorced, I think I was looking for a family, to be honest with you.

That was part of the appeal, I think, with my partner is that he loves being a dad. He was a stay-at-home dad when the kids were young. He was the one who did the primary caregiving and stuff. I don't think that that's a coincidence. I think that, you know, the fact of my family relationships being so dysfunctional, toxic, fragmented, that it just...

just was something that I wanted to go from this really independent, bohemian type lifestyle in Paris to London. It's family, it's home. It's led me to a place here today where I do have support. I have a family here. And I also feel able when I need to reach out for help, if I need to reach out for mental health support and things, I kind of know what to do now.

But I've always carried around this guilt that when it comes to this event, I can't explain. You know, I can barely explain it to myself. I can barely talk about it. I'll talk about pretty much any subject and do my best to engage with it, you know. But there's this one subject that I really just draw a blank on.

There's just this incredible guilt that almost 20 years later, that I still haven't talked to my niece and nephews about it. I haven't told his story. But every time I try to sort of make any sense of it or talk about it in a way that I feel is first respectful to the victims, the people who have died, the dog even, respectful to that sadness, right?

I feel like I can't articulate that event and sort of what happened and everything afterwards because there's a lot of things that just feel like, is that something somebody told me? Who told me that? Did I see that? Did I read that somewhere? Or is it something that I made up myself? I have good memories of my mom. I feel like I'm able to share that with people, like the good, the bad, the

I feel like I can remember it. I feel like it's so visceral or I can see it. Whereas with my dad, it's still just that black hole. I do kind of feel like the way that I've processed this trauma might be different. I recognize that I'm pretty emotionally stunted

Certainly with the autism, things that I think are perfectly logical don't sound logical to other people and sometimes might sound a bit unemotional or, you know, like I'm trying to rationalize things. But I'm just trying to make sense of it like everyone else and then put it into words.

At age 50, I feel a lot stronger than I've ever been. I feel like I understand things a lot more than I did 20 years ago or even 10 years ago. But I still struggle because it's something that I haven't really been able to process that well. There's a doctor in the UK who's like studying PTSD in people who are on the spectrum.

And I think there is something about that. Like it's if my brain processes a lot of things in different ways, certainly the language, like the fact that with the letter, with writing, with trying to put in words how I was feeling or even the order of events, for example, this issue with like not being able to remember things and feeling this superstitious burden that I should be talking about it.

I think that has a lot to do with my autism, actually. And I think it has a lot to do with how my brain was able to process that. It's slow. I think it's delayed in some ways. I have the awareness, but maybe I'll have a delayed reaction in terms of healing. Or maybe I'll find that that's something that you don't ever really heal from, whether you're neurotypical or neurodivergent.

With my autism, I have pretty bad ADHD and I've tried so many different things. I've gone down so many different paths. And I think what happened with my professional life today, for example, is just I let things happen. I don't make choices. I'm definitely at a crossroads right now.

It's a really scary place to be, but I am kind of excited to choose the kind of work that I want to do that are meaningful to me. I'm ready to make decisions about what I do and just practice being a little less fearful.

Today's episode featured Andrea Schwamm. If you'd like to contact her, you can email at [email protected]. That's A-N-D-R-E-A-S-C-H-W-A-M @ gmail.com. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

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