Cold Roses

Vermont’s Green Mountains jut into the horizon like the dramatic, unlikely slopes I drew as a child. They seem so close, as if walking a few miles in their direction I might suddenly bang my knee against the incline. That illusion—that the mountains were only a mile or so around the bend—was unshakable during my drive here. Now, walking the hills above town, I feel it again.

I take a few pictures, but the February day is bright, so I mostly capture sun flares against dark hills. I’m at an artists’ residency, and I should be writing in my cozy little studio. But it’s a rare sunny day, and I’ve been eating rich dining hall food with no exercise. Stretching my legs in sun, luxuriating like a cat, I strip off my coat and tuck my phone into my back pocket, earbuds connecting me to a true crime podcast for company.

Back in my room, I post my bad pictures on Facebook and make a joke about how much I’ve missed my murder podcasts.

“A lovely place for murder!” a friend comments.

Amused, curious, I look online. And in no time at all, I find one.

________

Jodie Whitney was 35, with brown hair and a toothy smile. She worked at Stoweflake Mountain Resort in Stowe; she was married, and had a three-year-old daughter. On May 24, 2004, her husband reported her missing, saying he last saw her that morning before he left for work. She never showed up at the resort that day, and she never came home. Her Jeep was found behind a barn, not far from her house. Jodie wasn’t in it.

________

The podcast I had listened to during my walk was indeed about a murder, or rather, a likely murder. Eight-year-old Relisha Rudd was living with her mother in a homeless shelter; Relisha was taken by a friend, a man the mother trusted. She didn’t, at first, perceive that her child was in danger, and didn’t report her missing.

Relisha was Black, so it was somewhat unusual to hear her case covered by a popular podcast. Crimes involving people of color or marginalized victims such as drug users or sex workers are underrepresented in the media. The most popular stories are about murdered and missing white women, especially if they’re young, especially if they’re middle- to upper-class, especially if they’re blonde and beautiful. Think Natalee Holloway, JonBenét Ramsey, Gabby Petito.

The podcast made a point of this underrepresentation, suggesting the police’s initial failure to investigate Relisha’s disappearance may have been linked to her race and her family’s precarious economic status. By the time police got involved, Relisha had missed over a month of school, and her mother hadn’t seen her in 18 days. When police did start to ask questions, the man who had taken her killed his wife, then himself. Relisha has never been found.

________

Police began searching for Jodie right away. Like most Vermonters, she was white. In all, 50 officers and a canine unit conducted a ground search in a one-mile radius around Jodie’s abandoned Jeep. There was an expanded search, an aerial search, a search of three miles of the nearby Gihon River.

An unidentified woman at a hospital in Dartmouth, New Hampshire seemed to fit Jodie’s description, but she wasn’t Jodie.

Soon people were comparing Jodie’s disappearance to those of two other young women in the area. On February 9, 2004, U Mass Amherst student Maura Murray vanished after an apparent car crash in rural New Hampshire. Then, just over a month later, 17-year-old Brianna Maitland disappeared after leaving her job at a restaurant in northern Vermont. The similarities—missing women, abandoned cars, geographical proximity—were compelling. People began to murmur about a serial killer.

Then, on June 2, just over a week after she went missing, Jodie’s body was found. Her husband was already in custody, giving his confession.

________

My writing studio at the artists’ residency overlooks the Gihon River. I have a desk, an office chair, an additional reading chair with a little pillow, a bookshelf on which I’ve stacked a rhyming dictionary and a few other books I brought with me. I’m working on poems, trying to complete a new manuscript. My fascination with true crime documentaries and podcasts is crossing over into the poems; they’re dark and wry and describe a great deal of violence, most of it perpetrated against women.

One of the books I brought with me is No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder. I read it months ago but was so moved and enraged that I returned the library copy and bought my own, which I’ve been rereading and underlining in the cozy reading chair overlooking the river. On average, Snyder writes, “137 women each and every day are killed by an intimate partner or familial violence across the globe.” The first time I read that sentence I took a picture and angrily posted it on Twitter. I’m still angry.

Snyder describes some of the typical patterns of intimate partner violence and the types of abuse—financial control, isolation from family and friends, threats, stalking, physical violence including strangulation—that often precede a homicide. The pattern is obvious in retrospect, but very difficult to detect while it’s happening, in part because both the abuser and the victim often conceal that the abuse is happening. It happens in the home, with the people they love.

________

Jodie’s husband has a name, but I won’t use it here. I’m not interested in her killer. I want to write about Jodie.

In the articles, news reports, and Reddit posts I’ve read, Jodie’s name is sometimes misspelled as Jodi or Jody. The Find-a-Grave site has a picture of her tombstone, a heart-shaped block of pink stone etched with roses. On it, her full name is given as Jodie Lynne LaMare Whitney.

Jodie’s husband said they’d been having problems in their marriage; they’d been previously separated, and Jodie had once taken out a restraining order against him. The night of her murder, he claimed he and Jodie fought about whether Jodie’s teenage stepdaughter could move in with them. Her husband said no; Jodie said yes “and that’s that.” She wouldn’t give way to him, and he “snapped.” A newspaper quotes him telling a psychiatrist, “Pretty much when she said my opinion didn’t matter and I could get out, and all I was trying to do was be level-headed, that’s pretty much when. I knew I couldn’t do that again.”

After their three-year-old daughter was asleep in the next room, Jodie’s husband attacked her in their bed. He struck her in the head and strangled her. He wrapped her body in a bedsheet, loaded her into her Jeep, and dumped her in a marshy area near an abandoned talc mine. He left the Jeep behind a barn, hid the keys, and walked home. On the way, he stopped to buy beer and ice cream.

________

Oh, this is fucking textbook, I think as I read about Jodie’s death, her husband’s abuse. And it is, from the failed restraining order and previous attempts to leave her husband, to the strangulation, to the attempted rationalization and narcissism afterward. My opinion didn’t matter. All I was trying to do was be level-headed. He’d lost control of Jodie, so he took it back.

When I was a child, my grandmother was murdered by her husband. That was textbook, too. She was in the process of leaving him—had left him before, in fact, only to return and leave again, like so many women. At the time of her murder, she was living in a makeshift guest room in my family’s house, and had driven back to her town to pick up some of her things. She was staying with friends, a couple. Her estranged husband, my step-grandfather, walked into their house and shot all three of them, then drove to the sheriff ’s station and turned himself in. The man he’d shot survived; both women were killed. My parents concealed the newspaper articles from me, but a friend saved clippings; from them, I learned he’d shot my grandmother multiple times, at least one blast directed at her face.

I don’t want Jodie to be a textbook. I walk through the town where she lived, gaze at the same mountains she gazed on, cross the same frozen river thawing under late winter sun. This feeling of connection is an illusion, of course; the artists’ center is a bubble, an isolated campus of self-indulgence and privilege. The locals eye me warily at the grocery and liquor store; they know where I’ve come from. The poverty rate in this town, according to Welfareinfo.org, is 22.7%, much higher than the national average of 13.1%. When I walk into the laundromat, the other women look at me as if I’ve just stepped off an invading spaceship.

But Jodie was used to dealing with outsiders, working with the Stoweflake tourists, helping them make their reservations for ski packages and the spa. In the one photo I can find, her smile seems genuinely warm. I like to think she would have given me a little smile if I passed her on the sidewalk or in the post office. I like to think of her walking here, maybe with her daughter, laughing at the silly artists across the street.

________

Jodie’s husband attempted suicide by swallowing 150 Tylenol PMs the night before his arrest. The next morning, he woke and drove himself to a medical center; the police questioned him there and later arrested him. They also found an audiotaped confession he’d recorded and tossed out the window of his car as he drove to seek treatment.

It’s unkind, but I can’t help but think this suicide attempt wasn’t meant to kill him, but to demonstrate remorse for use in a future defense. He almost certainly knew he was going to be arrested. He also knew how to take a life, if he really wanted to.

After he dumped his wife’s body, he stopped to buy beer and ice cream. I can’t get over that detail. Beer and ice cream.

________

Maura Murray’s disappearance has become a famous case in true crime circles. It’s been covered in an episode of 20/20 and other TV shows, a book, and several podcasts. Two podcast series, Missing Maura Murray and 107 Degrees—Maura Murray, are dedicated entirely to her story.

Brianna Maitland is like Maura’s little sister, always trailing in Maura’s wake and being compared to her. Still, her disappearance also receives significant attention.

Jodie Whitney’s case—an abused wife murdered by her husband—is too commonplace for the celebrity true crime treatment. Her story was retold on the lurid ID Discovery show Fatal Vows; the reenactments are cringe-inducing, but the interviews with Jodie’s stepdaughter—the girl whose future Jodie and her husband fought about the night she was murdered—are heartbreaking. When she speaks of her mother, it’s clear her murder is the singular event of this young woman’s life, the deepest scar in a lifetime of wounds.

I can find only one podcast that mentions Jodie. In that episode, she’s briefly compared to Maura Murray and Brianna Maitland, then dismissed.

________

There isn’t much about Jodie online. She has no Facebook page, not even a memorial, and I can only find the one black-and-white smiling photo. Her obituary says she graduated high school in 1987, that she had two daughters (the one she shared with her killer and one with another partner), that she was “known for her order of two cups of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts on her way to work every day.” The obituary says she “died unexpectedly.”

Then I find an article from the Barre Montpellier Times Argus, published three months after Jodie’s death. “Decade-old murder case is reopened,” it reads. The article describes the unsolved 1993 shooting death of Cheryl Degree Peters.

She’s Jodie’s mother.

Cheryl’s body was found on her living room sofa, a single gunshot wound in her head. She and her husband had separated, and she was in the process of seeking a divorce; family members said her husband had been stalking her. He was the prime suspect in her murder but was never charged with that crime. However, a 2000 civil suit ordered him to pay damages to Cheryl’s family for sexually assaulting her a month before her death.

Two women, a mother and daughter, both abused. Both (likely) killed by their husbands.

The common question asked about abusive relationships is, Why don’t they just leave? Rachel Louise Snyder’s book spends some time answering that question, which is complicated by factors like money, custody and protection of children, access to transportation and shelter. But the short answer is, leaving an abuser is incredibly dangerous. Snyder cites research showing that “dangerousness spiked when a victim attempted to leave an abuser, and it stayed very high for three months, then dipped very slightly for the next nine months.” She writes, “as dangerous as it is in [victims’] homes, it is always far more dangerous to leave.”

Cheryl left—and was dead eight months later. Jodie tried to leave, was taking steps to leave. She died with her husband’s hands around her throat.

________

Should I try to interview Jodie’s family members and people who knew her? Should I tell them I’m writing about her? I absolutely do not want to. Just thinking about it brings a guilty flush. Does that mean I’m doing something wrong? Appropriating her story? What’s the difference between raising awareness and exploitation?

A journalist would attempt to contact surviving family members and ask questions. A podcaster probably wouldn’t. I imagine a stranger calling or emailing me, saying they were writing about my grandmother’s murder, and asking me for comment. I can’t imagine I’d feel grateful; more likely I’d be angry, both at the intrusion and at having old wounds reopened. I’d probably delete the message and block their account. Jodie’s daughter would now be 19, the same age as some of my students. Could I possibly call her, introduce myself, and ask her to talk about the worst thing that’s ever happened to her?

In the end, I do the easy thing: nothing.

________

The warm weather lasts just long enough for sheets of snow and ice to slough from rooftops, for the waterfall over the Gihon to crack open. On the last day of my residency, morning rain stiffens to thick white clumps by lunchtime. All the artists and writers are feeling sentimental, taking selfies and hugging goodbye. I like several of the people here, but I haven’t made a lot of friends; the person I feel closest to right now is Jodie Whitney.

In the afternoon, when there’s a break in the snowfall, I drive a few miles north to the cemetery where Jodie and Cheryl are buried. The landscape is all black and white, bare trees and fresh snow, and I miss the unmarked road, have to turn around. My impractical little Honda fishtails in the unplowed road.

There’s the tiny cemetery, an iron archway over the entrance. I start to walk in but sink to my calves in a season’s unbroken snow; I return to my car and trade my leather ankle boots for the bulky snow boots that have sat unused in the trunk for weeks. As I trudge back to the cemetery, I keep looking over my shoulder. There’s a residential street a couple hundred yards away, but not another soul in sight, only the occasional crow on a dark branch.

Jodie’s grave is easy to find; the pink heart stands above the snow, back along the far right edge of the cemetery. Cheryl, her marker made of the same pink stone, rests a few feet away. Other members of their family are buried nearby, which gladdens me. I don’t have any flowers, but I use the snowbrush from my car to clear the powder from their stones, sweeping the base of Jodie’s so her roses can see the light. I tell the women that I’m sorry they’re there. They shouldn’t be there. I notice for the first time that Jodie’s birthday is the day after mine; she would have been almost exactly three years older than me.

Relisha Rudd is still missing. Maura Murray is still missing. Brianna Maitland is still missing.

Jodie’s husband, her murderer, is in prison; he will be eligible for parole in 2029. Cheryl’s husband, suspected of her murder, has remarried and still lives, free, in Vermont. My grandmother’s husband, her murderer, died in prison.

I say goodbye and lumber back through my own footprints to my car. Over the Green Mountains, snow tumbles down like stuffing from a ruptured pillow.