Untangle the Knots Within: A Woman’S Passage to Find Answers to Her Sister’S Death in Police Custody

© 2010 Cynthia M. Andersen. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/5/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4343-8151-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-5828-3 (e)

It is an account from my own personal experiences and all research I conducted after my sister’s questionable and suspected in-police-custody death that includes initial reporting, subsequent reporting thereafter, and additional research on related subjects of her death.

To the readers and critics of this memoir, I claim to the maximum extent permitted by law, that I as the author of this book disclaim any liability both punitive and civil for any direct, third party, incidental, and consequential damages arising from the contents of this book

Cynthia M. Andersen.

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

This book is for Julie….

I miss you!

Untangle the knots within

So that we can mend our hearts’ simple ties to each other.

Do not let surface things delude us,

But free us from what holds us back from our true purpose.

Out of you, the astonishing fire,

Returning light and sound to the cosmos.

Part of The Lord’s Prayer, from the original Aramaic 

Translation by Neil Douglas-Klotz in Prayers of the Cosmos

"I was possessed with an agonizing kind of self-consciousness where I felt my insides tightening into a knot, where my face and hands grew clammy …

Everything happened so fast. I was a sad character. I was sad because of myself. I did not have any self-confidence. I did not believe I had any talent. I did not know how to have fun. I was afraid. I don’t exactly know of what—of life, I guess.

Gail Russell, Hollywood actress; died of alcoholism and heart failure

Contents

Prologue

An End to the Beginning

If People Are Trained

Immunity Serves No Purpose

Finding Help

The Conference Call

Building a Mystery

Quagmire

Obsessions

Untangle the Knots Within

Bad Moon Rising

The Sun Doesn’t Always Shine

Getting Ready to Say Goodbye

Wrecking Ball

I Will Call You Cynthia

Because I Never Knew Cindy Mae

Some Conjectures

Some Conjectures

Some Conjectures

Some Conjectures

Some Conjectures

Conclusion

Special Thanks To:

References

Prologue

The cold snap of 2006 was a winter in Colorado I do not want to relive. The snow and ice had not melted for a record sixty days, and the winter continued its cruelty into the first of the year 2007. The Greek god Boreas, the god of the north wind, seemed to be very angry; there seemed to be no end to his antagonism. Coloradoans had not had a long, harsh winter in Denver since the snowstorm of Christmas 1982.

A winter’s chill provides plenty of time to stay within your soul, in isolation. You incessantly think and contemplate your past, present, and future. You ask without reservation, Why am I here? Then I find myself asking, Why is she gone?

On one of those dark winter’s nights, I decided to find a movie to watch. I have always admired Jodie Foster as an actor, as she is passionate and versatile. I clicked on a cable movie channel and found a film produced in the 1980s that she starred in with Kelly McGillis, another talented actor, titled The Accused. It is a true story that is disturbing.

In one of the first scenes, Jodie’s character was running down a street, yelling for help, with her clothes half torn off her body. She had been gang-raped at a bar just minutes before, and there were no telling witnesses to help her. An anonymous phone-caller found his compassion and called the police. He was too scared to identify himself at the time. The raped woman subsequently fought in court to get the perpetrators prosecuted, with the help of her lawyer, played by McGillis. Jodie’s character had to fight for herself with the help of the attorney who believed in her. No one in the community believed Jodie’s story.

The general belief in the community about what happened to Jodie’s character at that time was that she had asked for it, because of the way she was dressed and her behavior at the bar where it happened. In this instant, I felt thrown back in time.

I suddenly felt dizzy, and I could feel an incredible wave of nausea overcome me. The scene made seasick movements within me. I was trying to hold on to myself, as opposed to running to the bathroom and letting all my grief expel there in the toilet. I began crying uncontrollably and trying to gasp for air all at the same time. Death had finally come to my door as I slumbered in non-existence for almost six years. I was in a numb state and living in a type of limbo, not moving, not in the present, I was hiding, sleeping, and waiting for death myself.

The movie took me back to a time when something happened to my family, a little over a week before 9/11. In those instantaneous thoughts, I had become the winter that I was experiencing. Entrapped in my own ice castle, I had ghosts to deal with in every part of my waking life. If I did not deal with them, then I truly felt in my heart that death would make its last call.

My sister, Julie, was a quiet statistic as a questionable in-police-custody death on Labor Day weekend, nine days before 9/11, when the Twin Towers disappeared into the depths of New York City. Haunted by her death, I could no longer pretend life was normal. This movie, for whatever reason, became a defining moment for me. It made me face her exit from this earth in such a brutal matter. It also made me face up to the fact that I could not or would not let it go.

After Julie died, I tried so hard to get answers through working with attorneys, the media, lawmakers—that included the governor of Colorado—and representatives from a county that I thought was internal affairs. I only found that the unresponsiveness from the majority of agencies I contacted, and whatever the responses that were made to me, were feeble attempts to cover their own backsides, or cover the real facts, or, they did not care at the time. All of it left me feeling almost as disheartened as when I found out my sister died. I felt caught in a web of never-ending questions.

I had decided that if I made some changes and moved to a different apartment in another suburb, looked for a different job, as I was not happy with my current job at the time, and made new friends, that all these things would help in letting go and moving on with my life, but they did not. The way my sis died, and how she died, did not feel right to me in my heart.

In that defining moment of seeing the movie, I made a promise to myself that I would not give up until the day I died. Her death, for me, as pointed out by a distant acquaintance, was like a sword in a fire pit that would melt and yield a new sword, and it would not be like the first one. I became a different woman.

After almost seven years of no answers and still being haunted, I decided immediately that I would write down the questions I had from the reports I was able to obtain. I would formulate conjectures based on the reports of what I thought Julie went through before she died. I wanted to convey what I went through after she passed. I wanted to touch briefly on the hardship she faced most of her life, both physically and mentally, so that she did not seem like just a statistic, someone who deserved what she got.

I believe the events that lead to her death are a mystery, or a possible cover-up to hide mistakes and procedures by the initial responders. At the break of dawn, on an almost fall-like holiday weekend, a security patrol, six county sheriffs, and three men from the nearby fire station found her in an unsafe and reportedly drug-infested part of town with no clothes on. She was all alone. She was undone.

I believe her controversial death minimized because of where and how she appeared. I believe classified as a subhuman on the spot by county responders that found her and treated as such to the point that she began dying in their custody within eight minutes of their response call. In another eight minutes, she lost consciousness, never to see daylight again. She was dead within fifty minutes from the time the county responders apprehended her. Though the first responders were a county sheriff’s department, I refer to them as police at times in this writing, as the Fraternal Order of Police would have defended their possible liability if it went to court.

All these years, I have tried not to talk about it—it being her death and the surrounding circumstances. I would act as if I was so strong, nothing could penetrate my soul, and I could overcome anything. However, in acting strong, sometimes you find yourself manifesting the sadness by trying to shock people and talking about it at probably the most inappropriate times. I just did not want people to forget her! The way my sister died was controversial, and people did not want to discuss it—it was an uncomfortable subject. The scene in The Accused had evoked memories that were hidden and primal.

I went to counseling, but in counseling, the only instruction was to quit picturing her death in my mind and to find other things to concentrate on in future. I do not recall the counselor ever giving me ways to stop picturing her death in my mind, or providing a resource group with others who might have gone through similar circumstances. My counselor was called out to help the 9/11 families, so it was difficult trying to follow through with appointments at that time. Frustrated and feeling empty, I quit seeing her.

I believe that, in the wake of 9/11, people in general were having a difficult time coping with the unbelievable tragedy of the invasion of terror on our own land and so many lives lost. Who would care about a woman who died while being apprehended by police, when so many others died in such a horrendous manner and not of their own choosing? The police were incredible heroes, and their heroism highlighted daily on the news. Nevertheless, Julie was my only sister, she was part of me, and the blood ties were strong. I cared. My history with her, good or bad, and a part of me, was missing now. Only a gentle tug remains when I see and hear reminders of her.

I had to deal with facing colleagues at work five days after her death. I had some special friendships there. I had some who understood my grief and anger—but did not have the energy, out of their own very busy and stressful lives, to deal with it, my moodiness, or me after a while. Some folks I alienated, as I just did not feel that they would ever understand or know how all this came to be. Some listened with compassion and tried to understand to the best of their wisdom on the subject. Some may have subconsciously associated me with her behavior.

One memory I will never forget is that of a co-worker, at the time of my sister’s death, distinctly calling me crack baby in jest. Normally, I could take teasing—but this was no joke now and very insensitive, and well, I wondered if this was how I was to be perceived if I lost my focus out of grief and made a few mistakes.

I had to travel for work right after my sister’s death, and in the wake of the atrocity of the 9/11 event, to an office across the Hudson River where the tall towers had stood two weeks prior. You could see them missing and the smoke and/or dust rising from Ground Zero from the windows.

On my flight into New Jersey, I sat by a very nice-looking man who said I looked familiar. We started talking, and it turned out that he had known my sister, and said the resemblance between us was uncanny. He and his wife had shared the same circle of friends that my sister had. He also knew my mother, as he occupied an office that was in the same building my mother had worked in after my father passed away years before. He was very complimentary toward my mother, that she was a beautiful and gracious woman, and said that Julie loved to have fun and was very funny herself—full of life.

I did not know if he knew that my sister had died, so I told him what had happened. He seemed a little shocked; then I felt bad for telling him, and I became stressed internally. I did not know if he was shocked out of the odds of us sitting together on a flight, or if he truly did not know if Julie had died.

I believe in hindsight, he sensed my anxiety and he was very kind to me the whole flight. He then escorted me to baggage, asking if I was okay. I said yes, even though I wanted to say no and just let out my anger, grief, and rage. He gave me a hug and said goodbye. I watched him walk away. Sometimes, I look back on that now and wonder if Julie sent me someone like that to accompany me on my way back east.

I had several anxiety attacks on the plane and during my visit to the office where I was to have my workshop. It was horrific, and I felt very alone. I zoned out the entire time I was there to learn a software program for tracking our private investment cash flows. We were all like zombies in the class as it was such a sad time, and some in the class had lost friends in the towers.

I felt like I was in the ocean and being tossed and turned—-so much to deal with, and my whole world was upside down. I was drowning. I shut my door at work and worked hard upon my return from back east, but could not deal with the outside world at all. The fire in me became hotter and hotter and then blazed into an internal torment.

My only counsel became my general physician of over ten years, and then a woman that worked for the same pension fund I did. My general physician was a great, compassionate doctor, and I trusted her—she understood me. She saw the reports I had because she wanted to see them, and she understood my anger and my distrust of how Julie died.

The woman at work I felt a special bond with because she supported my constant search and questions. She was of the opinion that she did not agree with the way the police conducted themselves with my sister. She knew my sister professionally, from the printing business, as my sister was one of her vendors. She was very fond of her. She also had a retired uncle who had worked for the Los Angeles police department and moved to Colorado, and she would eventually ask his expertise on the subject matter.

Today, when I blatantly tell people what happened to Julie, they could not imagine a death like hers, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the incident. They could not imagine her dying alone. People did not understand how something like this could slip by the community.

Others told me to quit feeling guilty over my sister’s death, that she chose her own path over her lifetime. My anger only grew. Clichés would pop up every once in a while that inferred that I needed to move on with my life or to do something good for others in order to see that others’ situations were much worse than mine.

I do not feel guilty. I feel so sad that she was alone and that no one was there to help defend her. I want to know what the