Killers' Families Left to Confront Fear and Shame
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PUEBLO, Colo. -- On a summer night not long ago, Maureen White sat alone in her living room staring at a DVD she had avoided watching for years.
On the screen was her older brother, Richard Paul White, the person who taught her how to ride a bike and who tried to protect her from their mother's abusive boyfriend when they were children. He was confessing to murdering six people.
Toward the end of the videotaped police interrogation, Ms. White reached for a razor blade and began to slice her left leg.
"I felt such rage and anger and so many emotions I did not know what to do," said Ms. White, 34. When she was done, she needed dozens of stitches and staples.
Mr. White, 39, will spend the rest of his life in prison for three of the murders, to which he pleaded guilty in 2004. Ms. White, whose life has always been fragile, is still struggling.
Like relatives of other violent criminals, she has found herself ill prepared to deal with the complex set of emotions and circumstances that further unhinged her life after her brother's crimes. Under treatment for anxiety and depression, among other conditions, she has nightmares about serial killers and snipers. She is startled by loud noises and gets nervous around strangers.
And for more than a year after viewing the video, she continued to cut herself -- something she had never done before.
"By cutting myself," she said, "I wanted people to see on the outside how ugly and bad I feel on the inside."
In a society where headlines of violence are almost commonplace, the families of the perpetrators are often unknown and largely unheard from. But now some relatives have decided to share their stories. In interviews with members of numerous families of varying social and economic status, siblings, parents, partners, cousins and children of convicted killers recounted the hardships they have experienced in the years since their relatives' crimes.
In the flash of a horrifying moment, they said, their lives had become a vortex of shame, anger and guilt. Most said they were overwhelmed by the blame and ostracism they had received for crimes they had no part in.
Yet many of these families stay in close touch with their imprisoned relatives. Nat Berkowitz, the father of David Berkowitz, the New York City serial killer known as the Son of Sam, said he regularly talked to his son on the phone more than 34 years after his arrest. "I am 101, and it still goes on," he said.
A Cousin's Livelihood
On Nov. 5, 2009, 13 people were killed and 32 others wounded at Fort Hood, Tex. By the next day, the repercussions had reached a small law office in Fairfax, Va. The head of the firm, Nader Hasan, is a cousin of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the man accused of carrying out the rampage, and the two had grown up together outside Washington.
First Published February 5, 2012 12:01 am
