Dream Path: Search for Meaning, Search for Truth

1

In April, 1975, our family of six was living at 8200 feet in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, amidst the beauty of blue-shadowed hills and distant snow-capped peaks, shimmering aspens, and a lot of dust from a gravel road, when the unthinkable, the unbearable happened.

We had moved the family to Magnolia Road in the mountains west of Boulder when our three children were in sixth, seventh and ninth grades. We had a small acreage with horses, dogs, cats, and from time to time other pets. Suzi, our middle child, could not resist tiny kittens in need of a home. One was so young she and I stayed up all night feeding it with an eyedropper; it thrived.

In addition to the pets we brought in, there was a wealth of wildlife in the area. Violet-green swallows and mountain bluebirds built nests in the eaves. Magpies were in the trees and yard daily, talking and teasing the dogs, as were the Stellar jays and ravens. And, of course, my favorite little chickadees, calling their names, chick-a-dee-dee-dee. Evening grosbeaks, when they came flying through, crowded the feeders and the limbs of the ponderosa pine around them. A noisy busy bird, they stayed for weeks each summer, gorgeous ochre, black and white. The tiny gray pine squirrels were frequent visitors and occasionally we’d have visits from the rare black tuft-eared Abert’s squirrel. One winter a small white ermine came into the yard. In the light snow cover, it stood tall on its hind legs as though tiptoeing to see into the window where I stood. We remained very still as we watched each other, enchanted, for many minutes before it flicked away. Deer were frequent visitors and several times elk came calling just beyond the fence, capturing the curious fancy of the horses.

We hiked, picnicked with friends and rode horseback; the young ones made great music, singing, playing guitars and banjos and an assortment of other instruments. Our house was a center for lots of kids and for community meetings. Looking out our front door beyond the aspens to the road, and beyond that the meadows and forested hills with blue Mount Thoridan rising in the distance, I often thought of all the people who came to our door for help, and it felt good to live in a house by the side of the road/ and be a friend to man sang the line from a poem I heard in childhood.

All three children had very early loved the outdoors. We looked closely at plants to study how they vary, at flowers to count the petals and marvel at the amazing variety of form and color. We watched birds and had feeders for differing species. Cris was able to mimic the call of a pheasant before he was two. We brought home three baby chickens from the Unitarian Church School’s Easter program, a pet for each child. Cris and Bobby had bad luck with their chickens, probably coyotes, for we were living out on the plains at the time. But tiny Suzi, at three, dressed in her requisite cowboy boots, jeans and a flannel plaid shirt, carried her very fat contented hen in a one-arm embrace that whole summer.

What joy I knew sharing the pleasures of the natural world with my three Little Ones. I loved being a mother. The amazing experience of mothering my firstborn brought me bliss I had never before known or imagined. Bobby was beautiful and sweet, bright and eager, listened with such attention, loved stories and exploring new places and meeting new people. Bob and I bought a set of storybooks when he was only six months old and began reading to him and to each other. Very early Bobby’s eyes followed as my finger moved along the line of words where I was reading, and at three he was picking out words and repeating them.

Suzi was born when Bobby was two. By ten months she was walking, so eager was she to go! If she came to me with a hurt, I would hug her to me for a comfort-cuddle, loving those tiny arms around my neck. But she would quickly push me hard to get down, to run, to caper off in her dance of freedom. At three, she saw a friend galloping a horse across the field. I can do that, she said, not to me, but quietly to the world. She learned fast, was bright and quick, when she wasn’t somewhere faraway. When she was three years old her favorite book was about a baby rabbit eager to be big and wise enough to leave the nest. At age six she wanted very much to try out for a musical to be staged by a group in Boulder. From the audience, when the opportunity for audition came, she was the first to raise her hand and stepped boldly on to the stage to sing. She was not accepted for a part but we were so proud of her eager assertiveness.

When Suzi was just eighteen months old Crissy was born. He was a sweet, languorous baby, always happy and contented. Almost always. Sitting in his high chair for breakfast at about a year old, he reached for the spoon I was using to feed him cereal. I handed him a substitute, hoping to please him with that. With vehemence he threw it across the room. He wanted the real one and he wanted to feed himself! Once when he was three, bedtime had arrived, stories all read, each child in his/her own bed. As I bent over him for a goodnight kiss he had an angelic smile on his rosy lips; he reached up with his little hands, patted my face, and said, Love cheeks! It was enough to melt my heart. Crissy was a sunny child who brought laughter into the house, especially with words, for he talked early, named and nick-named everyone, and was able to put together sequences of ideas before he was two.

Moving from the valley to Magnolia Road meant a change of schools. The new school was a pretty good fit for Young Bob, for he was tall and strong and loved sports, reveled in football and basketball, had several good pals who were his Buds, was liked by his teachers and did good work. Neither Suzi nor Cris had as good an experience in that mountain school somewhat forgotten by the district. Inspiration was at times spotty, some classes dull and unfulfilling. But they were both good students, Suzi participating in those classes that she liked and that seemed relevant. For a time she had fun working with the coach recording basketball statistics. She enjoyed art class and took photos for the school annual. Cris loved playing the guitar and at ten had formed a musical group with two other boys in the old neighborhood. He began master classes on guitar at age sixteen. He enjoyed basketball, was fast and a good ball-handler. An outstanding student, upon graduation he won a scholarship to the University. All three kids loved reading, loved words and putting them together in a variety of ways.

A year after moving to our mountain home we adopted a little girl of racially mixed parentage, twenty-two-month-old Michelle. All members of the family eagerly anticipated our new addition and it was a sweet day when we brought her home with us to stay. For some of the townsfolk, it was somewhat shocking to see the little dark-skinned girl chee-leading with her blond friend before the all-white bleachers at basketball games. It was gratifying for us to see the old-timers become more warm and friendly with the passage of time. Our big kids were built-in baby-sitters, each one willing and capable of putting our baby girl to bed. Suzi taught her a song that they sang together, accompanied by Suzi’s guitar.

"Everything goes in a circular motion,

Love is like a little boat upon the sea,

Everybody is a part of everything anyway,

You can be happy if you let yourself be."

Melanie Suzanne. Suzi. The name, the names, never did quite suit, the fit was wrong. Although I am not religious in any traditional sense, names to me are important for I feel the power of the Holy Word in them. I called her my little Gingerbread Girl, for her hair and brows were the color of rich gingerbread, her cheeks an apricot pink. I have looked at names since to see if anything would seem appropriate but have found nothing in the usual spectrum of traditional names. She was greatly drawn to the Native American, especially to the way of being in the world, the spiritual relationship to life, to earth and the natural world. Many of her poems are paeans to mountain streams, wind, earth and sky and all their creatures. She praised rain and exalted snow, gloried in the honied sun of autumn. She might better be called Child-Woman of the Mountain Who Reached for a Star.

That spring of ‘75 Suzi was eighteen years old, a senior in high school with only six weeks left before graduation and freedom. Her little sister Michelle was six. Cris was a year behind her in high school, her older brother Bob, Jr., was in his second year at the University, where she, too, planned to go after high school. Or, I might go traveling, she would say. I want to get a jeep and just drive! Freedom was her watchword, and had been always. My husband Bob, her dad, was an airline pilot, gone several days at a time, and I was driving down the hill to classes, working toward my Bachelors’ degree in Anthropology and English at the University of Colorado.

The mid-seventies was a difficult era, especially for young people, after the heady idealism of the sixties, the air still toxic with the war in Vietnam. Their music sang of alienation, of wandering, of injustice, of troubled waters and the bridges one might build between people in the Aquarian age to come. Sexual freedom and drugs were the twin roads to higher consciousness, liberation from social strictures, and an idealistic vision of greater understanding among individuals.

As a family we protested the Vietnam war, and Suzi shared in the work to try to end it. She and the boys also joined us in demonstrations for civil rights. She was twelve, the boys ten and fourteen when thousands of us slowly marched at night carrying lighted candles across Boulder to the University campus in complete silence but for the eerie whispering of our shuffling shoes. It was a powerful spectacle, the line of twinkling lights as far as one could see, a dramatic and moving experience. The solidarity we felt as we solemnly walked, as we, thousands strong, raised our voices together in We Shall Overcome, made us feel invincible, we could do anything, we could overcome anything, we could control our lives. Suzi had always believed that. I continued to believe it in the years to come – sporadically, in the face of evidence that I could not.

Living in the mountains we were accustomed to seeing Hippies, for many groups, couples, and even individuals came to raise their tents and tepees in the National forests nearby. Of course, there were some who were criminal hardcore druggies, but most were idealistic young people disillusioned with the world of war and what they saw as crass materialism. A few had cars, most hitchhiked. We gave them rides, access to a phone, and a hand in time of trouble. A stranger is a friend we haven’t yet met. That was the way we lived, my husband and I, simple, idealistic, we were children raising children, ourselves naively ignorant of life.

As she grew older it often seemed I could do nothing right for Suzi, as though that girl-child had found me inadequate. I took it personally and how it hurt, lost as I was in my own neediness to be loved, I could not see her great need for separation-from-mother and independence of her unique self — and her need for the love and guidance of a mature mother.

Always audacious and bold, and as a teenager needing to rebel, Suzi found the areas of social concern with which we were not in agreement: drugs and sexual promiscuity. Hitchhiking, too, was a point of contention, yet I realized, even then, that our giving rides to others encouraged her to do so. She had always been the family safety valve, the one who acted out for the system, as we say in family therapy. Of course I had not the eyes, the psychological discernment, to see that then. She was defiant, visionary, willful. Driven by my fear for her I was often angry with her; she was as often incensed at me, at my rules, and what I see now were, in part, my unexamined platitudes of the collective. She intimidated me. I worried about her all the time and about the friction between us. I kept thinking surely she will grow out of it; it will be better tomorrow.

TOMORROW

Tomorrow, my hope said aloud:

tomorrow.

Today the rapier words are parried

and thrust,

drawing blood.

Had I but known what wealth of gore

was doomed to flow

Staining all my life in April snow

Would I have waked?

Nina

As a teenager Suzi spent hours alone in her room reading, writing, listening to music, playing guitar, composing songs, doing macramé, drawing, journaling, painting, creating poems and stories, and we knew, smoking pot. We only learned later that she was also experimenting with hard drugs. Her poems, stories, and journal entries cry out for the freedom to be herself and do as she would, for the freedom of all victims of oppression of every kind. She chafed aloud with outspoken honesty against rules at home, at school, in the culture, railed against ignorance, hypocrisy, waste, excess, and what seemed to her blind and stupid destruction of earth’s precious gifts. She drew people to her or she repelled them. Her first grade teacher feared and disliked her openly, overtly. The teacher of her second grade class adored her, took her to lunch and on special trips, gave her books of poetry. The pattern continued into high school.

She was desperate to learn. But she wanted to learn about life, and so little in school seemed relevant. She saw the absurdity, the burning irony, of being imprisoned in an institution of learning while life was going on all around her out there! Her impatience and frustration knew no bounds. So much to learn and so little time, speak the words of her journal, over and again.

She loved the solitude of the woods. She went there often to find peace and healing, to lie against the earth and look up through the towering trees as they gently swayed, dark against the blue, blue Colorado sky, to listen to the myriad musical sounds of soft winds playing through the branches, percussion of woodpeckers, smaller sounds of birds and other forest dwellers, to breathe in the fragrance of spruce, fir and pine – and of freedom. She was never afraid, even camping alone overnight. Once she came home from one of her outings for provisions. I returned with her, for she was eager to show me her beautiful campsite some three miles distant. Meantime, a bear had visited her camp, had moved a big log to get at ants beneath, and had put claws or teeth through a hard plastic jar that had earlier contained beef jerky. These were indisputable signs, yet she insisted that she was safe and would return to sleep the night.

She hiked, skied, and rode her half-Arab bay mare bareback. I can see them now cantering across the green mountain meadow cradled among deep blue hills, the little mare’s black tail and mane and her own long coppery-brown hair flying in the wind.

2

April is capricious in the mountains, mirroring the many moods of Melanie Suzanne. She and I had had a pleasant sharing in her room the evening before. I thought the mood might carry over, but when I heard her step upon the stair that April morning, I knew it was another bad day for her: she sounded impatient, out-of-sorts. It was spring, a lightness to the air, and warm. Although the weather, we all knew, could turn to snow with little warning, she left wearing only a jean jacket for a wrap, one she had embroidered herself, a bright design on the back. How clear the memory is! Her long hair was pinned up prettily in a kind of French role, a small comb to each side. She had on jeans, a colorful shirt of soft peachy-tan background with both small orange flowers and a geometric figure a shade darker. Her knee-high leather boots struck the floor in a decisive manner. She walked past the breakfast table, picked up a small piece of toast, and strode from the house ten paces ahead of her younger brother, scolding about having to ride the school bus.

Suzi was not on the bus with her brother that April afternoon. Hours went by, I thought she would call. Bob arrived home from his scheduled trip to Chicago. I told him I was worried. Oh, you know how she is, all drama! he said, We’ll hear from her. I called her two closest friends, but she had said nothing to either of them of her intentions. One girl told us that Suzi had spoken of a Pink Floyd concert she was really keen to get tickets for, but the girl knew no more than that. I called other kids, asking if they had heard her speak of making plans with anyone. Someone thought she might have left school early but the school was up in the hills and she had no transportation. Where was she?

Night came on and there was still no word from her. That was not like her. Although she was not above having us worry a bit, she never waited long to call. In fact, a few weeks earlier, she had been frustrated at not getting the car and had gone home with a girl friend; she had called home to say her friend’s mother had invited her to stay for dinner. That was typical, come dinnertime she would always let us know where she was. Where is my little girl? This night we went to bed around ten and I lay, dozing, sleeping fitfully. At 12:20 I sat bolt upright in bed, trembling, gasping, not knowing what terror had so roused me. Bob wakened, worried now, too. I prayed for the phone to ring. Neither of us slept much the rest of the night; I would get up and pace, between visions of Suzi sinking slowly down through murky water, her hair floating in soft swirls about her face.

We called the Boulder County Sheriff’s department next morning to report her missing. They could do nothing, the deputy said, for forty-eight hours. There were so many young people on the move, wandering, forgetting or choosing not to call home. We haven’t got the people to go out after every missing kid. Do you have any idea how many kids are on the run right now? Then he softened, remembering his job, I’m sorry but we just don’t have the personnel to follow up on all the reports of missing teenagers. "But I know she would have called! I pleaded. Sorry," he said.

Bob and I went to the school the next morning. Many students, among them a number of kids we knew, were sitting on the stone ledge by the steps in the sunshine outside the main entrance waiting for the first bell. Suzi didn’t come home last night. Did you see her leave yesterday, or overhear her making plans? Have you any idea where she might have gone? we asked. Heads wagged. A boy grinned and smirked as though he knew something, but nobody seemed to have any idea. We talked with the principal, teachers, other students, to learn anything we could. A girl from her class we encountered in the hall thought she might have left school, had seen her out by the road around two o’clock.

Snow that had been threatening began to fall early Thursday. By daylight two or three inches had collected and it was falling fast. I was paralyzed with fear, looking out at the snowfall, thinking of her out there with only her jean jacket. I tried to still the fantasies of what might have happened, of what was perhaps at this moment happening. Was she crying out, calling for us, terrified that we would not come?

Thursday afternoon a call came from the high school principal, A man came into the office today and brought a wallet that must be your daughter’s. He says he found it near his property and thinking it must be a student from the high school he brought it in. It has Melanie’s name in it, her driver’s license. I’ll be turning it over to the Boulder County Sheriff’s Department, but I thought you’d want to know. Later that day, or the next, a detective from the Boulder County Department came to talk with us, to get information and a picture of her to begin the search. With that the official waiting period began.

Snow continued fitfully throughout the weekend; Monday was overcast, gray, chilling with the dampness of thaw. We had heard nothing. I could stand it no longer and declared my intention to go to the place, some six or seven miles away, where her billfold had been found. Yes, Bob agreed, we should both go.

A few minutes after we arrived at the site, two vehicles from the Boulder County Sheriff’s Department pulled up, and four officers joined us in the search. We ranged over the area, the now vacated site of a hippy commune, looking for we knew not what, in sheds and outbuildings, around piles of old lumber, barrels of trash and rusted auto bodies. A few feet from the road I came upon a small pink plastic case, a personalized container for birth control pills with Suzi’s name in it. Oh, My God! It was not the sort of thing she would have lost, dropped carelessly, nor would it have been stolen from her, as the billfold might have been. I held it, staring at it, unbelieving, the implication coming slowly. Then, as though felled by a great blow, I dropped to the ground, stunned.

I remembered clearly the day she had told me she was going to start using the pill. I’m eighteen now, she had said, I’m going to Planned Parenthood for birth control pills. But, why? I had asked with unfeigned disbelief. You don’t even have a steady boy friend! She shrugged as though that had nothing to do with it. But you don’t need that, I said, there’s plenty of time for that when you have someone special! She went on down to her room as I gave in to tears of frustration that escalated into sobs. I felt so distant, so alienated from her, and she from my own long-held values. But now! Today! How unimportant it seems to me suddenly. If she walked up to me now, I would simply hand her the pill case, tell her I am proud of her for taking proper measures. There would be no charge to it, no drama, only my enormous relief at seeing her again. Oh! My Suzi!

The days passed with long hours of numbing terror alternating with frenzied calls, meetings of young people, our sons with their buddies, and we with our older friends too, all racking our brains for scenarios, our memories for possible leads. We watched passing cars, looked at panel trucks with suspicion, listened for a voice crying out, the phone to ring. Nights were long, dark, and difficult.

Two weeks went by. On May first Sheriff Brad Leach called with news. Some time later he came to the house with one of his deputies to pay his respects and to inform us more fully of what had been found. My husband answered the door. Our sons Bobby and Cris and several of their friends sat at the table, I was on the stairs, had just come from putting Michelle to bed when the sheriff arrived. Bob and the two officers stood just inside the door.

What the sheriff told us was far worse than any fantasy we could have conjured. Her body, fully clothed, was found by the driver of a bulldozer on a little mountain track up Coal Creek called Twin Spruce Road, a few miles from where the billfold and pill case were recovered. The body was frozen. At those words the glass our son Bob was holding shattered against the table. Identification was positive, Leach continued, turning back from the sound and answering the question my mouth wanted to ask, but could not — surely there was a mistake, some other poor little girl. He continued, Report card in her pocket, birthmark on her thigh, clothing, dental records all match. She had been dead for ten days to two weeks.

Sheriff Leach paused, sighed, and went on with the story. She had been Bludgeoned perhaps with a stone. Her hands were tied in front with a yellow nylon cord, many, many feet of it, wrapped around and around. She died from a blow to the head and strangulation. Her face had been beaten repeatedly by a rock. One contact lens was missing. The body was in pretty bad shape. What with freezing and thawing, and the wild things — two weeks lying there.

The birthmark was like the print of a tiny shoe. I had told my baby girl, when the tiny brown mark was less than a quarter inch long, that it was the footprint left by a fairy because she was such a special child.

Her body had been found in a neighboring county, thus the case was changed to that county’s jurisdiction. It seemed, by the conduct of the detectives from the two territories, that law enforcement was set back fifty years just crossing the county line. Two detectives from that office, big bruisers, came that same night to search her room for evidence, anything they might be able to use. They confiscated a dozen drawings, all of her notebooks and numerous other items, walked out with several large plastic bags of her personal effects.

3

Each morning I had wakened my three big kids for school bringing cups of hot Earl Grey tea to their rooms. Suzi liked a little sugar. I would set the cup on her desk and stand looking at her sleeping so peacefully. She often laughed in her sleep, a soft little dream-laugh. How fragile she looked, a petal-translucence to her cheek, the dark hair sweeping away from her face, back from the pearly shell of her ear. How filled with love I always was as I looked at her there, as she lay, so young, so innocent, so vulnerable. I could never understand why I should feel so threatened by her at times, why I could not be the mature adult she so needed. I could see it so clearly in those brief moments! My eyes would fill with tears as I stood looking down at her, thinking these thoughts, wishing for wisdom. But I would kiss her cheek, or that place just behind her ear, wish her a brisk wake-up-good-morning, and leave the room. I never shared those thoughts with her nor ever let her see my tears.

Within days of the recovery of the body we were summoned to appear at the offices of the detectives working the case, the two who had searched her room. Bob phoned our friend David, an attorney, and asked if he thought there was any way that the officers could come to our house to question us. David called the detectives to make that request, explaining that we were having a difficult time functioning. That’s impossible; that’s against protocol! the officer responded, It has to take place here in our offices. So our friend drove us the following day to the sheriff’s offices in the neighboring county seat.

With the formal greeting David introduced himself as our attorney. The three of us were seated before the wide desk, the two detectives opposite. Questioning will take place in the interrogation room, big blond Detective Brewer who seemed to be the one in charge explained, We’ll take you in one at a time.

David, his right hand gesturing a ‘wait just a minute,’ broke in with: That won’t be necessary. You can ask your questions right here and Mr. and Mrs. Cooley will tell you whatever it is you want to know. The two men looked at each other, Detective Brewer cleared his throat, and the questioning began. So on April fifteen….?

After what seemed a very long time and many questions, the other detective, Danks I think his name was, left the room and returned with a paper grocery sack, held it in front of us and pulled up a small portion of cloth, a bit of sleeve, I think, avoiding the bloody parts, and asked us to identify our daughter’s blouse and asked too if that was what she was wearing on the fatal Tuesday as she went off to school. Yes, it is, I managed to say, trying hard to continue breathing.

Seventeen-year-old Cris, also without our knowledge or permission, was taken out of class at school and interrogated. A gentle boy, he was having a tough time just keeping himself together and in school in the wake of his sister’s horrible death. He was bewildered, confused, hardly knew what was going on. Both our sons were still in grievous shock. Our youngest child Michelle was just six years old when her big sister was murdered. Several weeks later she said to me, Suzi always said she wanted to be free. And now she’s free! But little Michelle had nightmares for many years, would wake in the night crying out in fear. Indeed, a terrible nightmare had begun for all of us, from which we might never awaken.

Neither Bob nor I saw the body. How many times since then I have wished that I had, to touch that slender hand whose lineaments I knew so well, to say goodbye. They say it is harder to accept a death if there has been no viewing of the tangible evidence. We could have insisted upon seeing her body, but that would have required a presence of mind and a degree of initiative, and we were like robots and had neither. And we certainly could not project into the future to decide the better plan of action. It is possible that the sight of her thus would have driven me completely insane. I know the shock would have been immeasurable. Yet I have wondered if the experience would have been more terrible to look upon than the intolerable images conjured since by my own mind.

My memory of the period after Suzi’s body was found is spotty, erratic. The house, I know, was often filled with people. One incident emerges as in relief: our pediatrician and long-time friend sent a vial of tranquilizer tablets. He did not come, although he had visited in our home and had made evening house calls to attend one or another of our children (in an era when the practice of home visits by doctors was already a thing of the past) and stayed on long hours talking. My heart aches for him now, for it seems such a hopeless little gesture coming as I know it did, from his own feelings of pain and helplessness in the face of awesome tragedy.

The memorial service was a loving tribute to her, fashioned by people who knew and loved her well, and directed by a Unitarian minister, an old friend sensitive to our family. Several of Suzi’s poems were read and her drawings graced the printed program. Our children’s friends, who with our own young had filled our house with music on innumerable occasions, played folk music for the service. Friends hosted a wake, a great gathering; many came whom we had not seen for months, some for years. The weather was beautiful; people laughed and chatted, children chased across the grass in the