This book I am struggling to write, this mystery I want to see solved is a koan, a riddle without an answer.
I fumed when I heard a podcast about a case that spanned nearly four decades getting solved. On “January 16, 1980 21-year-old Helene Pruszynski was found fatally stabbed in a field on Daniels Park Road in Castle Pines. Just this year a beer mug served as the lynchpin of a web that slowly tightened around suspect James Curtis Clanton, 62.” This according to the Denver Post. All I could think was that if only someone would try a little harder, why couldn’t this happen for Patty Vance? “Detectives used online genealogy databases and help from private companies to wade through Clanton’s unorthodox family and numerous aliases to identify him as the suspect.” There are at least two obvious reasons why this case looks so different from Patty’s. First, the evidence used to get a DNA profile on Clanton was from a semen sample.
The SFPD detective originally handling Patty’s case, Detective Pierucci, did not state explicitly the reason semen could not be used in Patty’s case, but I deduced it was because there were multiple samples. This according to the medical examiner’s report. But Pierucci intimated it. Plus, she didn’t appear to be raped. Secondly, the SFPD detectives refused help from private companies when I told them there were companies stepping forward to offer it for free. And I suspect that since they were so unwilling to reach out to other companies, they aren’t likely to spend the time using online genealogy databases. But all these point are moot. SFPD are convinced that they know who it is that committed the murder. So none of my complaints apply. The two cases are quite different. One a rape and murder, the other presumably only a murder. One without a suspect, the other with a clear suspect. They share only a few features. Both took place in 1980. Both victims were young women. “This was a young girl who was just starting her life, Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock said.” He goes on to describe Pruszynski as being a good girl. There was a time when Patty had gotten away from herself, when very few people would have described her that way. But she was when I met her. Somewhere inside of her that good girl still lived. In my jumble of confusing impressions of our friendship, our falling out, our estrangement, of this at least I can be sure.
I wrote down the phrases “emotional maltreatment” and “risky adolescent behavior” in my journal where I keep whatever scraps of thoughts might help me write this book. But these phrases sound so vague now. I want to create an equation for us, like Einstein did for energy — em=rad. I remember that look in Patty’s eyes, as if she were always staring at something way off in the distance, at something far far away that no one else could see. I want to forgive her everything because I believe at thirteen years old she felt like I did, as if I weren’t so much a person, but an amorphous shape carved into the world. I never asked her, perhaps because I was afraid, but I wanted to know if she too found herself habitually glancing into mirrors simply to check if there was an actual person staring back.
I think of how my mother expressed, and still expresses this refrain “I’ll never forgive them.” She is referring to the list of people who having done her wrong.
And I am always questioning how much of my behavior is a knee jerk, or should I stay a duck step, reaction to what I heard growing up. I find myself reaching for that sentiment, that position of unforgiving, like a handkerchief balled in a bra cup. It is always within arm’s reach. Yet that metaphor is not quite accurate. It is less like a balled up swath of cloth and more like a tumor. It is lodged in me. My mind seems always at work creating black lists of the perpetrators who have wronged me, those who will be turned away at the door of my heart.
I fight my own mind, tell it to be more accepting of flaws, of people. Remind it that many a time I have backed into my own shortcomings by dwelling on what’s lacking in others. I set on repeat the phrase “I am no better.” Yet, struggle as I may, I can’t shake judgement. It is a survival skill, I tell myself. If you open that door, your heart will get pillaged, I tell myself.
Maybe I have forgiven Patty. But I certainly haven’t forgiven everyone on the blacklist. It is a process I remind myself. Just as in the practice of a loving-kindness meditation, I strive to send love to those I feel are the least deserving. Then I work my way down the list to those whom it is easier to wrap my arms around.
I was listening to Zadie Smith today on a podcast, listened to her talk about becoming impatient with people. I was struck by the word impatient. It was such a gentle way to put it. I was acquainted with someone once who ended up blowing his brains out at the home of a woman he was dating. I happened to know the woman, a bar tender in the small, cloistered town in Northern California where I’d lived. I didn’t know him well, our only intimacy being a night of dry humping in his hotel plunked so close to the 101 Freeway, you could hear cars whizzing through town, could see their headlights flash through the dingy smoke stained curtain. This young man fancied himself a jeweler, and gave me a pendant, a polished rock wrapped in copper wire I still have to this day crammed into a jar with smooth colored shards collected from glass beach minutes up coastal Highway 1 in Fort Bragg. The bartender was a woman I’d liked and reminded me of myself; she was petite, brunette and spent a good deal of time and resources fighting looking her age. Yet when she first informed me of the fate of this young man she was dating, one of many lost boys who drifted in and out of town to find work among the local growers, I didn’t know it was the jeweler. He’d killed himself in her living room, and although I didn’t know him well, it saddened me. I’d assumed it was because she needed to share her grief, so I lingered at the bar, hands around my pint of ale as if I needed to wrap them around something, anything at that moment.
“It must have been awful. How sad. He was so young and full of life,” I’d said.
“Fuck that,” she’d said. “That asshole splattered his brains all over my walls. It took me a week to clean up the mess.”
Instantly, I despised this woman, thought her cold and selfish. And maybe she was. I wished I could be as generous as Smith, could call my response to her impatience. It is at times like these that I don’t resent that I am becoming my mother, that I feel as if there is clearly a place for being unforgiving. Mostly I think of feelings like a weather system, coming and going like a tempest. But these feelings are not fleeting. They refuse to dissipate.
Project Cold Case wrote me an email recently advising me to put their number into my contact list. If a call came in, they didn’t want anyone ignoring it. A flutter of hope went through me. Could it be that they might one day call me and tell me that some progress has been made on her case? They also encouraged people to reach out to them, if for nothing else than to express grief. I want to do that. I want to draw attention to Patty because of course this organization has hundreds of cold cases. I don’t know if there’s an official count. Let’s just say way too many for Patty’s to stand out as anything unique. Yet I know the founder and everyone who works for that organization sees each of those cold cases as different from the other. But there is an immunity in the numbers. You must become unable to see the exceptional at some point when the numbers become so overwhelming. What would I say to them? That I don’t think the SFPD is putting in the work? That I’m too chicken to contact the DA, or to rattling anyone’s cage too strongly? I am not the confrontational sort. I blame that as the reason I flunked out of journalism school, yet I know it was more complicated than that. Go to the media I was informed by a woman who wished to remain anonymous because she is afraid she won’t be hired if she is known as someone who is outspoken.
