Pam

Pam

b
y

Jacqueline Druga

Pam by Jacqueline Druga

Copyright 2012 by Jacqueline Druga

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Pam Cover Image -  © Andreas Gradin - Fotolia.com

Special thanks to Rita Knits and Sonia Rudolph

‘They’re dead. They’re dead. They’re all dead. Oh, God. They’re all dead.’

I got the message
.
H
ad it not been for the desperation in her voice, I would have thought it was a joke. Pamela’s voice quivered and was barely understandable through her emotions.

I remembered
the time specifically. 5
:48 pm.

“Oh, God
,
”
s
he sobbed over the answering machine.

“
Pam,
put
the
phone
down
now,
”
said
a voice in the
background
.

“They… they … think … they think I did it.”

Click.

I rewound the tape and listened again. My jacket was still over my arm. I hadn’t even settled
in
from work. I had my own routine, walk in, hit the machine, toss my jacket
,
and figure out what I was going to eat for dinner.

But not that day.

The message was still playing the second time when I flew from my home.

October
7, 1986
.
A day I’ll remember for the rest of my life. My day of infamy. It changed me, the whole ordeal changed me.

My life, I’d say
,
was marred by tragedy from that day forward
,
and all I could do was run. Keep moving, never stay still. Death and bad could never find me if I ran.

That’s what I thought.

And
that day
I ran to my car
and
dr
ove
frantically to Pam’s house.
It was a time before cellular phones, when you couldn’t just contact anyone at anytime. If I could
,
I certainly would have called my fat
her. He was the chief of police
in Willow Brook.

Who was dead? It could have been anyone. And of all people, why
would
Pam
be immediately accused
?
I had known her since high school.

Pam was ‘that girl’ who got pregnant in high school. Back then, no one really got pregnant in school
.
If they did, we didn’t know about
it;
they mysteriously dropped out. Not Pam, she was showing when we graduated and married Richie, the baby’s father
,
in a quick summer wedding.

We joked about the fact that Richie was my first boyfriend in junior high. I dumped him because he started getting acne before everyone else. And how she ignored the acne, gaining a handsome guy.

Richie was a good man.

But who was dead?

I kept thinking her mother or father. Maybe her sister. I didn’t know.
But Pam was hysterical
so
it had to be someone close to her.

Willow Brook
, Connecticut, wasn’t a big town
, so getting to her house didn’t take long.

A few turns and a couple blocks at high speed got me there before I got a third of the way through my cigarette.

I couldn’t get close to the house. There were three local police cars, Willow Brook’s entire fleet, and one
S
tate
P
olice car. A black v
an parked in front of the house, as well.

My cigarette burned
in
the ashtray as I hurriedly parked the car and jumped from it. The beat of my heart increased and my stomach knotted, not just from the sight of the police, but
from the
balloons that floated on the porch. Tied there.

Mandy’s sixth birthday.

Pam was having a family party for
her
that night
,
t
hen Mandy was
going
to have a sleep over. I
was supposed to go to the party
but declined because Richie and I had another fight. We were always fighting. The most recent was over the fuel line he replaced in my car.

Pam had used the word ‘they’re’, meaning more than one was dead.

I ached inside
,
fearful of who ‘they’
might
b
e
.

How tragic it was
,
h
appy colored balloons dancing about
amidst
the
tragedy
of police.

I ran toward the house.

“Stop.” The one officer held me back.
He knew me. “Sharon, just stop.”

“
My
friend, that’s my best friend’s
house
.”

“
I know that.
I’m sorry
,
you can’t go any
further
. Just … wait.”

“
Is
my father in there?”

He
nodded.

“What happened?” I asked, frantic. “She called. I didn’t understand her message. What happened?”

His nonverbal response told me a lot. His swiped his
hand
over his face with a sicken
ed
expression,
then slowly
sh
ook
his
head;
he turned
his back to me.

It was then I saw the
m
carry out the first body bag. It was
large;
it had to be Richie or another adult. The
n
I dropped to my knees as three more
bags were brought from the house. Those were small.

My knees banged against the pavement in my emotional collapse and I sobbed, “The babies. The babies.”

Pam had three children.

Mandy. Doyle who was four
,
and the
n
Lizzy, who had just
turned
six months
.

Three small body
bags
left no room for guessing errors.

“Sharon!” Pam called my name and my head
lifted
. I weakly stood, but
I
found it impossible to think or hear clearly
through
the
rushing
sounds
of my own adrenaline.

I saw her and wanted to vomit.

Pam was covered in blood from head to toe. “My
children
, oh God, my children.” Pam cried hysterically as they forcefully led her to the squad car. “I didn’t do this.” They tried to shove her inside the car. But fighting them, she aimed her
voice
toward me. “I wouldn’t hurt my babies. Sharon … help. You know who did this.
Tell them...”

Every ounce of my breath escaped me when she said that.

Her words
,
‘you know who did this’,
emerged as
t
he
y
closed the door of that squad car. I watched them pull away. Her head was down
,
h
er long hair drenched with blood. Her
shoulders
bounced
,
heaving up and
down;
I knew that was from crying.

How would I have a clue who did such a horrendous thing, when I didn’t even fully understand what all had occurred in that home
?

All I knew was my best friend’s children were dead, her husband
or someone else
was dead
,
and immediately, without investigation or hesitation, they took her way.

I was unable
to
think, to move, or
even
to get in my car and drive. B
owled
over by emotion, I just stood there like an onlooker. Like the dozens of others who watched. But I was more than just a gawker. I was impacted. Pam’s family was like my family and I was devastated.

Acquittal doesn’t mean immediate. It’s not a matter of new evidence was found
, open the door,
and you’re free. It takes days, maybe weeks. Weeks of waiting to get out.

It doesn’t matter to me.

I just want to know with the evidence found that clears me, if any w
as
found that indicated the
identity of the
real killer
s
.

Of course when I asked that, I was
told
th
at it didn’t
lift suspicion on me, only over
turned the verdict.

That made no sense.

I was found guilty over three things
:
My demeanor, a
n
eyewitness
testimony, and a scratch
,
o
ne that graced my left arm
that
I got it when I
tried
to fix the kitchen drawer.

Mandy, they say
,
fought who
ever it
w
as that came into our home.
She scratched
this per
son
;
skin was found under her
nails.

Back then DNA testing wasn’t known. It didn’t make
its
first appearance for two years.
So there was no way to pull that skin and know whose it was.
And because of that scratch
on my arm
,
the shocking eye
witness testimony,
and
my silence
i
n
the courtroom, I was sentenced.

The eye
witness testimony was out of control, bog
us. How could there be an eye
witness to me murdering my children and my mother when I didn’t do it.

But when Richie said he saw me do it, that sealed the deal.

Even with witnesses placing me at the grocery store
, the bank
,
and the local bargain shop
a
round
the time of the murder,
I was found guilty.

You know what? I didn’t care.
The worst part about it, I was pregnant and didn’t care if I lost that child or not.

What could be worse than losing your entire family? Seeing what I saw? I loved my children with everything I was. They were all I had and lived for.
I didn’t know the baby in me. Not yet. My grave error was never acknowledging the child within me.

When the guilty verdict was read and I appeared for sentencing, I
pleaded
for the judge to kill me. Put me out. Kill me. I didn’t want to live.

Because I proclaimed my innocence and asked for death
in the same breath
,
I was ordered for mental evaluation.
No wait, that’s not all true. In the four months that I
awaited
trial, I was in isolation for fear the
other
prisoners would hurt me. Not
a fear of mine.
Again,
I didn’t care.

Guards said I ate the minimum,
didn’t
speak
,
and
just
stared out
.

No shit. I lost my entire family
.
W
hat I saw that day when I walked in
to
the house destroyed me. I was in shock and mourning. I was hurti
ng so badly
that I was convinced there was nothing that could hurt worse.

Nothing
.

The
evaluation
showed that I was
delusional
,
and after being diagnosed as a dangerous
s
chizophrenic
, I was sent to
Norwich
Institution.
I was u
nder
constant
evaluation.

Three months after I got there, I gave birth. I never saw the baby. The state took it.

Things have changed since I entered that particular institution. For some reason
,
the diagnosis never changed
,
and I never went to prison
, was
o
nly shipped to another
institution
after Norwich closed.

I was under constant observation.

I was convinced at first
that
their
di
ag
nosis
of me was to cover up the
error in
the investigation.

Then for the longest
time
I aided the
m
in
keeping me, not on purpose, but because I did doubt my own sanity.

What if I did do it? What if the
heinous
nature of my acts
caused me to block it all out. The
doctors
all said that
;
hell
,
they tried everything. Hypnosis, shock
therapy
,
medicine,
everything
to get me to remember.

I swore I wanted to remember.
Even if I committed the crimes, I wanted to remember because then I would know. I would have closure. But I didn’t remember. T
hat was because I didn’t do it.

I couldn’t have done it.

They even tried to pin a murder in Hartford on me because I happened to be in Hartford the same week as the murder
.
I also happened to ha
ve
gone to school with the girl. She was pregnant, murdered. Her six
-
month fetus was cut out of her belly and stabbed. Stabbed? It
wasn’t
bad enough that they removed the child, but they had to make sure it was dead? Adding to the sadness of the story was the fact the she wasn’t found for over a month
,
s
o it was hard
to
say when she was killed.

They didn’t have enough evidence to charge me with that.

They
tried
,
though.

T
he more I stared
a
t just four walls, alone, no one to talk to but those doctors, the more I second
-
guessed my mental state.

I struggled with that every day of my life. Every single day. Norwich didn’t help
;
it was old and dirty and I was in a room that I rarely left. And when I did leave, I was in restraints.
Even when I delivered the child, I was removed for no more than eight hours, taken to the infirmary,
and then
brought back to my room.

Once they moved me
from Norwich
, I was relieved of the restraints, but my time with
general
population was limited.

They m
oved me b
ecause Norwich was closing down
,
not because they felt I was better.

T
hen in 1999
,
I was visited by a representative of a project that worked on freeing the wrongly convicted. They had been contacted by my sister about my case. I don’t know what possessed her to do so. It wasn’t like my sister proclaimed my innocence
.
At least not to me
.
She came to see me at the hospital.
But
my visitation was limited to once a month and her visits were short
.
Then again, at times I was so heavily medicated, I barely could speak.

She didn’t even come to the trial. But Project Freedom told me
she
presented her own suspicions that perhaps my case wasn’t an isolated case
and was related to other murdered families and women.

Oddly enough, these murders occurred in the same places that Richie had moved.

It would be like my sister to uncover all this. She told Project Freedom in a letter that she had always suspected Richie, and like a stalker she followed him for years
, watched
his every step.

She even had a restraining order placed against her.

But that didn’t stop her. The problem still remained … the scratch.

Richie and the scratch had sealed the deal.
I had a mark on my arm
;
he didn’t.

It took years of interviews, finding old witnesses, getting the evidence back from the case. There was even a chance the evidence had been destroyed.

Finally, they got it. I only wish my sister
had
lived to see the outcome. She was killed in a car accident just two weeks before the DNA results were known.

It didn’t match me. Not at all. It did
,
however
,
match DNA found at a murder scene
in Maine. An unsolved murder.

Richie, however, had died in 1996. They were able to exhume his body, obtain a culture to get a DNA sample.

It didn’t match Richie
,
either.

Why he would say I murdered my family would forever be a mystery
,
and he took that to his grave.

But I was acquitted. After eighteen years, I was going to be free. I was told my diagnosis of mental
illness
remained and I needed treatment, but that diagnosis of
s
chizophrenia was no longer a viable reason to keep me
,
e
specially since I was no longer
deemed
a danger.

I had no one left
, only
o
ne friend I could call.
If they were still a friend.
That was it. Despite having no one, I did have one thing. Motivation.

I was leaving, but I was determined, if it took the rest of my life,
that
I would find out who killed my family.