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134 | 11 Kathleen and Wayne A Mother’s Love Facts of the case: In November 1983, when Wayne was almost thirty years old, he murdered Judy, forty-six, an acquaintance he met at a bar. Judy had left the bar with him but refused his sexual advances. Angry at her refusal, he murdered her with a fifty-three-pound boulder. Although he maintained his innocence at the time, he was convicted and received a life sentence. The dialogue between Wayne and Judy’s daughter, Kathleen, took place in late January 2007 when Wayne was fifty-three years old. The VVH process was conducted primarily with Debbie, the volunteer facilitator. I interviewed both Kathleen and Wayne and had access to their case files, letters, and excerpts of trial transcripts. I conducted interviews with Kim and Debbie. Kathleen did not wish to have the dialogue audio- or videotaped, so my account of the face-to-face meeting is based on the recollection of those I interviewed and the case notes. I have corresponded or talked with both Kathleen and Wayne several times after our interviews for updates on their lives. In the years following the murder of Kathleen’s mother, anytime Kathleen wanted to feel close to her mother, she pulled out her crochet needles and started making another afghan. Her mother, Judy, loved creating brightly colored blankets for the people she cared about, and she taught Kathleen how to crochet when she was a young girl. Judy had old-fashioned values; she loved lilacs, dancing, and music, and she wore knee-high nylons and penny loafers. Shefaithfullyattendedschoolfieldtrips,fielddays,parent-teacherconferences, andschoolfunctionsinvolvinganyofherfourchildren,andsheorganizedfamily vacations at the beach. In those rare quiet times when she was alone, Judy wrote poetry. As Kathleen describes her, “She was a people person; she liked to talk as well as listen. If she was speaking to you, she usually would touch you in some way, whether she had her hand on your arm or put her arm around you.” Judy had an infectious laugh that made every family event full of fun. Kathleen and Wayne | 135 However, the idyllic times Kathleen remembers from her childhood had begun to crumble when she was about eight years old, when her parents got a divorce; her father gained custody of the children, and Judy became depressed and started drinking. Soon, depression was her constant companion , and alcohol was the only way Judy knew to ease the pain. Depression is a debilitating disease, especially if left untreated, and self-medication with alcohol is common.1 As Judy sank deeper into depression and alcoholism, her children were baffled and hurt by her behavior; only years later did they recognize their mother’s behavior as an illness.2 At the time of the murder, Kathleen and her mother had been estranged for a little over a year, which meant that Judy had no chance to meet her grandchildren, to be part of the special events in their lives such as weddings, birthdays, and graduations, or to reconcile with Kathleen. For Kathleen, losing her mother when they were estranged meant that Wayne, as she put it, “took away my tomorrow.” The Murder On the day before Thanksgiving, Wayne left his house following an argument with his wife and headed out to drink. He met Judy in a bar. They were both steady customers at the bar and were casual acquaintances who had seen each other a time or two before. They drank together for a while. At the trial, the owner of the bar testified that Judy probably had eight or nine Seagram’s Seven and Cokes over the course of the night and that “you could definitely say she was feeling good.” She stated that Judy “tended to get quite close to people when she talked to them. . . . Judy was a little bit flirtatious,” but not everyone who testified agreed that Judy seemed intoxicated. The bar owner also testified that Judy’s pocketbook was open and that her money was flopping around; Judy had just got paid, and the bar owner counted about $150. Wayne was present when the money was counted, and he suggested to Judy that she leave the money with the owner for safety. But Judy did not want to do so. When the bar owner was asked during cross-examination if it was her opinion that Wayne’s concern was genuine, she said, “I believe so. [Wayne] has never caused me any problems, as far as bothering anybody’s...

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