The Girls from Ames (12 page)

The oldest child, Susan, was taller than Sheila, with long blond hair and blue eyes. She had an ethereal, graceful sort of beauty, in contrast to Sheila’s attractiveness, so rooted in her perkiness. Their three younger brothers were strikingly handsome; everyone thought they belonged in clothing catalogues or in movies. In fact, years later, when Princess Diana’s son Prince William hit his teen years, several of the Ames girls had the same thought: “He looks exactly like a Walsh boy.” One of Sheila’s brothers did end up becoming a model in adulthood.

Sheila’s mom and dad were also extremely good-looking; everyone in town said so. Her mom, a former flight attendant, was a classic beauty who dressed elegantly. Her dad, the dentist, was so handsome that the girls almost blushed when he entered the room. They looked forward to the days he’d come to class and give oral-care presentations. He liked to hand out these red dissolving tablets, which would temporarily stain kids’ teeth to show them where they needed to brush better. Sure, it was embarrassing for the girls when every tooth turned reddish-pink. But Sheila’s dad just didn’t seem judgmental about it. And his oral-care plan seemed to work. The girls agreed that the Walsh kids had the whitest teeth in Iowa; word was that none of them had ever had a cavity.

Several of the girls had Dr. Walsh as their dentist, and photos of his smiling family were all over his office. Every year there was a new family photo to add to the collection. “You sat in his chair, just looking at Sheila everywhere,” says Kelly.

Sheila’s dad made a good living as a dentist, and so, like Marilyn, the doctor’s daughter, she grew up a bit more privileged than some of the other Ames girls. The Walsh family belonged to a country club and had a finished basement with a big sofa, a pinball machine and a foosball table. They spent summers at a spacious house on Iowa’s Lake Okoboji.

Dr. Walsh, who hadn’t grown up with much, wanted his kids to work hard. And so he’d have all five of them at his office on Saturday mornings, mowing and tidying the lawn out front. The other girls would drive by with their parents, and there was Sheila, pushing a lawn mower, while her kid brothers picked up stray sticks.

One day in the mid-seventies, Sheila told the girls that something exciting was happening at her house.
Better Homes and Gardens
magazine had arrived to take photos of the Walsh family’s spacious new addition, a mudroom/laundry room. Mrs. Walsh’s decorator had let the magazine know about how creatively she had remodeled it. She’d taken bright green laminated dental cabinets from Dr. Walsh’s office and installed them in the laundry room, a creative way to alleviate storage issues with five kids. There was a place for mittens, a place for boots. The decorator would even bring out-of-towners to come visit!

When the magazine came out, Sheila proudly waved it around and acted like a celebrity. She was so cute about it, who could be jealous? And who knew? Maybe the photos would start a national surge of dental furniture in laundry rooms.

The Ames girls found Mrs. Walsh to be more formal than most of the other mothers. There was a fancy white living room in the Walsh’s house and no one was allowed to go in it. And Mrs. Walsh carried herself with a definite maturity. She wasn’t the type to gossip with her daughter’s friends or laugh it up with them. “Other girls’ moms would come up and hug you, but Mrs. Walsh was always a little distant,” Sally recalls.

Teenaged girls almost always have issues with their mothers, and Sheila and her mom had their share. Her dad, on the other hand, was more laid back, and in Sheila’s mind, he was her champion. One Christmas, Jenny got her brother a puppy. She didn’t want to give it to him until Christmas Day, so Sheila offered to keep the puppy at her house Christmas Eve. She asked her mother if that was OK, but her mom said no. Then her dad gave her a wink and said not to worry. He and Sheila conspired to hide the puppy somewhere in the house overnight, until Jenny came by in the morning.

In sixth grade, Sheila went to summer camp with Sally, and one night, the girls were sitting around talking about being homesick. Sheila kept saying how much she missed her father.

The girls got the sense that her mom got along better with Sheila’s sister, Susan. It wasn’t always easy for Sheila to live in the shadow of Susan, who was both glamorous and a quintessential good girl, always saying and doing the right things. Susan was calm, smart, popular—and Mrs. Walsh was close to her and proud of her.

“Then you had Sheila, who was more rebellious,” says Jenny. The girls suspected that Sheila sometimes wondered if she disrupted the image of the perfect family. In their observations, Sheila didn’t think she measured up to her family on a lot of fronts—in looks, in behavior, maybe in smarts.

Among the girls, she wasn’t as centered and introspective as Marilyn was, or as book smart as Jane and Sally. But she had an ability to connect with people that the other girls found not just impressive but inspiring. Starting in grade school, several of the girls volunteered together at a local nursing home, passing out cookies or reading aloud to residents with poor eyesight.

For most of the girls, the natural impulse was to gravitate toward the youngest, healthiest residents. Not Sheila. She’d head straight for the oldest and the sickest. She’d hold hands with the most wrinkled, the most senile, the most medicated old folks she could find. Oxygen tanks didn’t scare her off. She’d just sit there, smiling and chatting.

“People had hoses up their noses, and it would freak some of us out,” says Cathy. “But Sheila, she was so comfortable.” It was like she connected right to people’s hearts.

She’d been extremely close to her own grandmother, and in fact, she could get close to anyone’s grandparent. Later, in high school, Sheila got a job in an assisted-living facility, passing out and collecting food trays. Jenny’s widowed grandfather lived there, and every day, even if Sheila wasn’t on the schedule to service his room, she’d stop in to keep him company. “He thought she was adorable. He just loved her,” says Jenny. “He’d always flirt with her, and she’d flirt with him right back.”

 

 

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heila started turning boys’ heads at a very early age. When she was in first grade, Duffy Madden had a mad crush on her. His dad was one of Iowa State’s football coaches. As Duffy remembers it: “Sheila’s face just glowed when she smiled, and there was something in her eyes that made me stare at her all the time. I’d call her every night at dinnertime until her mother called mine and told me to knock it off.”

For Christmas, Duffy stole a half-empty bottle of his mother’s perfume, filled it to the top with water, and gave it to Sheila as a present. She wasn’t so taken with the perfume or with him, so he tried a new tactic: feigning dislike for her. Once, at the end of the school day, he chased her out of the front door of St. Cecilia’s—she was literally running away from him—and he slipped on ice at the entrance. He fell hard on his chin, as Sheila turned to giggle his way and then stepped into her mother’s car. “I was more stunned and hurt by that than the six stitches I got that day,” says Duffy, who was just the first in a long line of boys smitten with Sheila.

In the summertime, when Sheila was up at Lake Okoboji with her family, her letters to the other girls back in Ames chronicled her life precisely—“I have 31 mosquito bites. It’s so disgusting!”—and served as a travelogue of her interactions with boys. “I danced with these three creeps who just totally grossed me out!” she wrote to Sally in junior high. “But then I danced with Joe for three songs (slow!) and I was so happy! Now I like this other guy. His name is Ted Stoner and he is soooooo neat. I get butterflies in my stomach. (He is definitely 2320123!)”

Even though young Ted Stoner’s name made him seem like some bong-obsessed character in a seventies teen movie, Sheila’s description of him resonated with the girls. After all, if he was definitely “two-three-two-oh-one-two-three,” that meant Sheila considered him worthy of getting her phone number. In the Ames girls’ numeric code, he added up to a dreamboat.

Sheila loved coming up with her own words. She went to horse-riding camp with Jenny the summer before ninth grade and wrote to Sally: “The guys here are really duddy, but nice.” In other words, they were duds on the heart-palpitation scale, but she liked them. She called the sexier boys “naabs” (nice ass and body).

Sheila was a playful storyteller. In a long letter to Jenny when they were fifteen, she announced that she was in love with a boy named George. “I’ve slept with him,” she wrote, hoping to get a gasp out of Jenny. “I mean, I slept with his picture under my pillow. Fooled ya, didn’t I?”

Sheila wasn’t afraid to take charge when it came to boys. She and Darwin Trickle were longtime friends, but in eleventh grade, they’d go out driving and talking, and both started to feel something more. One day they drove to Brookside Park in Ames, pulled into a space and sat there talking. “I was very shy,” Darwin recalls. “I didn’t want to be aggressive. I always tried to be a gentleman. But all of a sudden, she says to me, ‘Well, if you’re not going to do it, then I will!’ ”

She leaned over and they shared their first kiss. And then she pulled back and just smiled at him, before leaning in for more.

 

 

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oung girls today can forward a come-on email or instant message from a boy to all their girlfriends. In one click, everyone can judge his ability to woo with words, or they can weigh in on the photos of him attached to his email. But back when Sheila was young, she didn’t even have access to a photocopy machine at her parents’ lake house, so she’d mail Jenny the actual original notes she received from boys. “No one has turned me on as much as you,” scribbled a boy named Tom. “I guess it’s a combination of things did it. You’re super looking. You’ve got an excellent body!!!! And the best part is your personality!” His two-page letter was littered with compliments, but Sheila never asked for it back from Jenny; for three decades, it has remained tied in a ribbon in Jenny’s stack of “Sheila letters.”

For a while, the love of Sheila’s short life turned out to be a classmate named Greg Sims, who was a year younger than the Ames girls. He was, of course, extremely cute—a short, stocky guy with reddish-brown hair—and his dad ran the local car wash. When Greg showed interest in Sheila, starting late in high school, she’d just melt. For a while, she signed all her letters and notes “Sheila Sims.” But she knew Greg was problematic. He was the kind of guy you couldn’t always count on. He’d say he’d call and then he wouldn’t. He’d say he’d stop at her house to take her to the movies, and then he didn’t. “If Greg doesn’t call within forty-five minutes, I’m giving up on him,” she’d say. But she never really did. Once, they had a fight and he told her to get out of the car. She was barefoot, and it was a long walk home.

“Sheila was the best thing that ever happened to Greg, but he ignored her,” recalls one of his friends, Steele Campbell. “She was going somewhere. She was great looking, she was fun, she had a head on her shoulders. We all thought: ‘What’s Greg thinking?’ ”

Sheila confided to Karla and Jenny: “I love him so much, but he’s just so frustrating.” Given her relationship with Kurt, Karla could empathize. But both she and Sheila soldiered on, smiling, and waiting for their guys to get it together.

In large measure because of the wilder boys they were hanging out with, the girls found themselves taking risks and making some bad decisions.

One night during high school, Sheila, Jenny and Angela were among those in a car drinking from a bottle of vodka. They saw the police coming, so Sheila opened the car door and threw the bottle out. Bad move. The cops arrested them for being underage and having an open bottle of liquor. Jenny’s dad had to come down to the police station to get them.

The girls were pretty freaked out, but most of their parents were forgiving, and tried to use the arrest as a wake-up call and a learning experience. Sheila’s mom was probably the angriest. For weeks, she wouldn’t let Sheila have any contact with the other girls.

“She’d just ignore me because her mother forbade her to talk to me,” says Jenny. “It was sad. I’d say, ‘This is stupid. Why won’t you talk to me?’ She’d just say, ‘I’m sorry, Jenny. My mom won’t let me.’ ”

 

 

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heila’s father had a premonition that he’d never make it to old age. That’s what Sheila told some of the girls. His own father had died young of a heart condition, and Mr. Walsh assumed the same fate awaited him.

Sheila’s dad was an excellent athlete, especially at tennis, and he often played basketball with guys half his age. Still, he had a sense that his good health and athleticism wouldn’t translate into longevity, and he was right. Eight months after Sheila graduated from high school, her dad was running up the basketball court and died of a heart attack. He was forty-seven.

The Ames girls saw how devastated Sheila was by his death. They noticed, too, how her mother, as a young widow, remained strong and kept the family on track. It seemed almost heroic to them. “I just remember how she held it together for those boys,” says Sally. “You’d walk in the house, and she’d be helping all the boys with their homework. She became a very focused single mom.”

Sheila ended up attending college at the University of Kansas and then Iowa State, and after her father died, she took a special interest in grief-related issues. Eventually, she designed a major that would train her to counsel families that had just learned that their kids were ill, often with terminal illnesses. In 1986, she got an internship doing that type of counseling at a hospital in Chicago.

At the time, she was hanging out with a gregarious man she knew from Iowa who worked for Budweiser. She called him “Bud Man”—most of the other Ames girls met him, but never knew his real name—and he was also in Chicago.

On a Saturday night in March 1986, she and Bud Man were driving home from a bar and she had to go to the bathroom. At least that’s the story the Ames girls recall hearing at the time. Sheila and Bud Man allegedly stopped at a friend’s apartment building to use his bathroom, and he wasn’t home. What happened next remains unclear, but somehow Sheila fell from that building. No one seems to know whether she was on a roof, a ledge, a balcony or a high porch. There were conflicting reports: She had jumped over a railing. Or she tried to jump between buildings, from one balcony to another. Or she tripped on wet leaves. Was she being pursued? Was she pushed? On a Saturday night, lots of young people are drinking. Was that a factor?