“The Events of October”: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus

Conclusion: Hauntings and Visitations

251 CONCLUSION: HAUNTINGS AND VISITATIONS 1 The college kept DeWaters 201 “offline”—unoccupied during regular academic sessions—until Neenef’s class had graduated, but not Maggie ’s. In the summer of 2000, Dan Poskey went to visit some friends housed in DeWaters while they worked on campus. Suddenly he realized that he was in 201. “No one really discussed it (most of the people in the room hadn’t been good friends of Maggie’s), but we all knew.” He walked toward the bathroom door, “trying to picture what the last few seconds of Maggie’s life were like and what her last thoughts were. Then I felt sick and wanted to leave.” In the fall of 2001, which would have been Maggie’s senior year, the room was occupied again. That September, the golf team was helping to move the new students into their lodgings. Maggie’s teammates Sara Church, Kelly Schulte, and Nisse Olsen were assigned to help in DeWaters . “Unfortunately,” Sara recalls, “when I walked past, the door was open, and the new occupants were playing Michael Jackson’s ‘Smooth Criminal,’ and I still can’t really enjoy the song anymore.” CONCLUSION 252 Some students were aghast that the room was not permanently closed—treated as a damned space, as it were. Others wanted it turned into a women’s resource center. The college, of course, needed the space to house students. Today, when I look up at the second-floor corner window, I wonder if the present occupants have any idea. “The murdersuicide ” is certainly part of vague campus lore, but the room number has not entered into collective memory. A few of us continue to gather, on or near October 18, at Maggie’s bench under the dogwood. A few Octobers ago, as I was approaching the site, I saw Martha Omilian coming slowly from another direction. I had heard that she developed multiple sclerosis, so I was not surprised to see her walking hesitantly, with a cane. But I was grieved. MS is stress-related; it seemed to me in that moment like the outward manifestation of the toll taken on her by Maggie’s death. I approached her and must have asked the appropriate stupid question, “How are you doing?” “Well,” she said, “you know I have MS?” I nodded and mumbled something. She shrugged. “But after you’ve been through the worst, nothing else much matters.” We walked together up to the bench. After a few words and a little silence as people gathered, Rick Omilian said, “I’m wondering if students hear about Maggie now. Do they know about her? Does some kind of education take place, so that the story gets passed on?” A silence fell over the group. As seconds passed, it became uncomfortable . Finally Vaughn Maatman spoke, saying something vague about how Maggie’s story had become part of the story of the college. It was all he could say; none of us could call up one consistent educational legacy specific to Maggie’s death, or Neenef’s. Later I went back to my files from the Task Force that met during the winter and spring of 2000 and found our report to the president. Looking over the second section, “Actions Taken During the 1999–2000 Academic Year,” I saw how many were to have been made permanent. Among them was an annual Violence Against Women Awareness Day, which I had hoped would be marked on the anniversary of Maggie’s death but which never got traction, probably because no one was assigned responsibility for HAUNTINGS AND VISITATIONS 253 making it happen. That’s the story with most of the recommendations, I suspect: they got lost in time, distance, budget shuffling, and staff turnover. Administrations change; hardly anyone in authority in 1999 is still there. No one has been assigned real responsibility for women’s safety, and individuals whose full-time jobs lie elsewhere in the college cannot take it on. A half-time position in women’s programming was indeed created in Student Development, thanks to some creative money-moving by Danny Sledge, and was filled successively by two talented, committed young women with very little institutional weight. The position has since vanished. As for the third section of the report, comprising our recommendations : the Task Force did not continue for three years, never did the recommended assessment, and never proposed continuation or replacement by...