wrote me letters and sent me homemade chocolate chip cookies through Todd and then we started to email. I called her for the first time on November 5th, too, after I got done talking with Shawnee. Did I mention how nervous I was to call either one of them? Even though they had been sending me letters and seemed to remember me, I was still nervous to call either one of them. Todd assured me that they both wanted to talk to me, but still, what if I didn’t know what to say? I still didn’t feel comfortable using a phone without permission. It’s taking some time to realize I don’t have to ask permission to do the things I want. I was shaking as I dialed each of their numbers. They both turned out to be very easy to talk to. The call to Jessie lasted an hour and a half. She did most of the talking, but I loved to listen to her talk and tell me about her life. I invited her to come up for G’s birthday and she started crying and said she would be there.
Jessie drove nine hours to get to us and brought her seven-year-old daughter and her mom, Linda. As she drove up the driveway, she was so excited she barely put the car in park before she jumped out and ran to me and embraced me in the fiercest hug I had ever had. We were both crying and in that moment I felt an old connection reestablish. It’s an odd feeling to know that a certain person will always be there for you, no matter what. It’s hard to describe. My friend was the old Jessie and the new combined. She was taller than me, which bugged me because growing up I had always been taller than her. She still had the same long dark brown hair and she was skinny just like before. She looked so much like her mom. After we let go of each other, she introduced me to her daughter and I introduced my two daughters. My mom and sister were there, too, and we were all hugging each other. Hugging Linda again was a wonderful feeling, too. Growing up I had spent a lot of time with her. And hugging her was like going back in time and smelling the salty sea air where she used to take us and tasting the sand in our sandwiches as we sat on the warm beach in Southern California. We talked until the wee hours of the night. It felt so natural and easy. The next day she helped decorate for G’s birthday party. We had invited all our new friends including Todd and his family and Beth. It was crab themed because my daughter loves her hermit crabs Kevin, Devin, and Cheese.
Therapeutic Healing
I nitially I assumed that I would be going home with my mom once we were released. I didn’t know what to think of this prospect. Honestly, I was doing what I had always done and was just going with the flow. I had absolutely nothing but the clothes I was wearing, my girls, and $500 that Todd gave me from one of his family members. So I had a total of $500 to my name. My initial reaction to this money was disbelief that a perfect stranger would give me so much. My thought was, “Why would a perfect stranger want to help me?” Officer Todd replied, “People just want to help you. There will be many more.” Officer Beth got us toiletries and pajamas the first night of our release, which I was very grateful for. I was scared of everything, to say the least. But deep inside something that had been dormant for so long was finally getting the chance to grow and I felt it glowing inside me. A light that I thought had been extinguished was slowly coming back to life. Every time things seemed overwhelming, I would look at my mom and that happy feeling came back and the warm light inside grew bigger.
I was told there was a reunification specialist located a couple of hours away from the hotel we were staying at who was willing to work with me and my family. I wasn’t sure what to say about this offer. Traditional therapy did not appeal to me. The therapy I kept envisioning consisted of me and a small room and someone I didn’t know, which was the last thing I wanted. I felt I had worked through what had happened to me and I had always kept my own counsel and thought I was my own best therapist. I didn’t want to meet another stranger. In the day and a half, I had met so many new people that I was really overwhelmed.
Ultimately, what convinced me to seek the help of this person was the mention of horses. The impression I got of this person was that of an older lady with a ranch and horses and plenty of room for us to come and get our feet on the ground for a few days. She was one of a few professionals specializing in the field of reunification in abduction cases. I have to confess that part of me wanted to do something for my oldest daughter that Phillip had always promised her he would do and never followed through on, and that was arranging horseback riding lessons. I figured if this person had horses, then chances are I could probably arrange some lessons. I have loved horses since that summer at Lake Tahoe with Shawnee and that summer that we planned to work on the dude ranch together.
I had another reason for wanting to talk to a psychologist, too. That being I wanted to tell her all about Phillip and ask her professional opinion. Everything I had been through with Phillip was so confusing, and I had always wanted a professional’s opinion because in my opinion the psychiatrist he was seeing was doing nothing to really help him, and day-by-day he was increasingly paranoid. Even when Phillip told his psychiatrist that he was hearing voices, nothing changed. Therapy did nothing to help him and certainly did nothing to help us who had to live with his continued delusion. So many things confused me about Phillip and the things he would say. I could never believe Phillip was anything but sane and thought about each and every thing he did before he did it; I felt that something about him was just not right. For example, I had always had my doubts about his special “ability” (i.e.: using his black box to let others hear him speaking with his mind). He always made everything sound totally logical and explained himself in all respects, but I still had my doubts. And all his preaching about how the angels control our thoughts and how they use Satan as a tool to control our minds.
I’ve learned that Phillip has never taken responsibility for his actions, so he invented a way to explain everything away. That being, his “angel theory.” Over time this theory evolved into him thinking that since he could hear the angels in his mind, he figured that others should be able to hear his voice in the same manner, too. After that the creation of the black box started. The black box was a black case with a cassette recorder inside that contained recordings of such sounds as football game cheering, random static from the radio, and other various sounds from the television that he would mix down into one cassette tape that he would play and amplify through speakers in the box. He would also use plastic cups from fast-food restaurants and glue them in the box to make the sound different. Then he would hook up the headphones to the box and take it with him to let others hear his “ability.” He used to make me sit in front of the air conditioner with headphones and one of those sound amplifiers called Bionic Ears and just sit there and listen to that sound for hours. He called it “tuning in.” He would leave me sitting in front of the air conditioner for hours trying to condition me to hear his voice coming out of it when he returned. He said since he could hear his voice and the angels’ voices in his head, that by using an outside device like the sound coming out of the air unit or the big overhead lights in warehouses like Costco and Sam’s Club emitting a humming buzzing sound, that allowed him to hear the voices coming from those things as well. I didn’t know what to make of all he said. On the one hand, I couldn’t just come out and say, hey, you’re crazy, I don’t hear a thing. I had enough sense to know this would not go well for me. So I tried to hear what he wanted me to hear. I really did try. I sat there, and when he came back and sat in front of me and moved his lips to the words “Can you hear me?” I really did try to hear it. I asked him, “If the sound comes from your mind, why do I need to look at your lips?” He said that my mind needed something to visually interpret into words. For some reason, I accepted this explanation and sat there until my legs fell asleep, trying to hear anything remotely like his voice.
One night, I was so tired I thought I did hear something. He had switched from the words “Can you hear me?” to counting “One, two, and three” and I thought I heard the vague sound of him counting. He told me to hold on to the fact that I had heard him because in the days to come, the angels would make me doubt myself. That was the one and only time I heard him, and now I think I was just so tired and I thought if I told him I heard him, that it would end his obsession. So I convinced myself I heard something that wasn’t there. It was the same thing with all our Printing for Less clients, too—they heard what they thought they should hear. It was a “shared delusion,” I’ve come to learn. But my hearing him didn’t end his obsession. It only seemed to make him more determined for others to hear his “ability.” He started to think God had given him this ability to help others, specifically those individuals that also hear voices but do bad things, such as the woman who threw her three children into the bay. He cited this case frequently as why we needed to “get going” and help these people. So that became our focus and
