Enlarge John G. Mabanglo/AFP/Getty Images Wanda
Kaczynski and her son David Kaczynski (right background) are escorted
to their car by defense lawyers after Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski
pleaded guilty Jan. 22, 1998, in Sacramento, Calif.
At 5:45 a.m. on Friday, July 20, Arlene Holmes
woke to the sound of the telephone. On the line was a man from ABC News.
There had been a shooting in Aurora, Colo., the man explained. Her
24-year-old son, James, was the suspect. Did she have a comment?
In
the wake of a tragedy like the Colorado shooting, the families of
victims must navigate a complicated emotional landscape. But so, too,
must the families of those charged with the crimes, as they suddenly
face all kinds of deeply disturbing questions.
"Is there something wrong with us that this could emerge from us? That someone capable of murder could emerge from our family?"
That, says David Kaczynski, was the question that hung over his family after his brother, Ted, was arrested as the Unabomber.
David
had actually played a role in his brother's arrest. In 1996, he went to
the FBI with his suspicion that his brother and the Unabomber might be
the same man.
For months he and his wife,
Linda, worked with them in secret; no other family member knew. And then
came the moment that David Kaczynski dreaded, the moment he had to
introduce to his mother the incredible idea that her oldest son could be
a killer.
Kaczynski remembers driving to his
mother's apartment in Schenectady, N.Y., and knocking on the apartment
door. He remembers the way the look of happiness on her face slowly gave
way to a look of concern, and then, several minutes into his rambling,
elliptical explanation, a look of horror.
When
he had finally finished, Kaczynski says, his mother got up from her
chair, put her arms around his neck and lightly kissed him on the cheek.
Then, he says, she told him three things: That she knew this must be
hard for him. That she knew he was a good man who loved his brother.
That she knew David was wrong. She knew her oldest son, Ted, knew how
fragile he was, and she knew Ted wasn't capable of murder. When the FBI
really looks into all this, she explained to Kaczynski, they would see
the same thing.
"They're going to investigate
this, and they're going to find out that Ted is completely innocent,"
Kaczynski remembers her saying. "This is all going to go away like a bad
dream."
But it didn't.
'Beyond Words'
About
a week after Kaczynski's mother sweetly kissed his cheek and explained
that he was wrong, he and his mother found themselves sitting in a house
surrounded by television camers, watching Ted's arrest on the news.
"My
wife, Linda, my mother, Wanda, and I are in our house," Kaczynski says.
"Paradoxically, we're kind of the focus of the world's attention, but
you couldn't have felt more isolated than we felt at that moment."
To
protect themselves from the media, the family had disconnected the
phone and covered the windows with blankets. They were totally alone,
had no idea if they would lose their jobs, if their friends would
abandon them, if they would have to move and change their identities.
Their most basic sense of themselves as a good and decent family had
been shaken.
And so inside the house,
Kaczynski says, instead of conversation there was mostly silence. "To
some extent, what had happened was beyond words," he says.
Enlarge AP This undated family photo shows brothers David (left) and Ted Kaczynski (center) in a sandbox with neighbors.
For the eight days that his family was
essentially under this media siege, and for many years after, Kaczynski
says his family was plagued by a question — the same question that many
of us find ourselves asking every time a mass murder occurs. Is it
possible for such a terrible act to emerge from a normal family? Or does
evil come from evil? That's the issue quietly being raised every time a
family like this opens their mouths. Are you responsible, in some way,
for unspeakable horror?
'We ... The Parents Of A Mass Murderer'
In
1982, Larry Robison brutally killed five people. The crime was
incredibly ugly. One victim was a 6-year-old boy; another was maimed and
decapitated.
At the time, his mother, Lois
Robison, was a school teacher; so was her husband, Ken. She remembers
talking to her husband the night of her son's arrest — how clear it was
to him that the life they'd built toegether was now gone.
"He
said, 'We will no longer be Lois and Ken Robison, the school teachers,'
" Lois Robison says her husband told her. " 'We will be Lois and Ken
Robison, the parents of a mass murderer.' "
But
this was not a title that Lois Robison felt her family deserved. If the
question these families face is — Are you responsible for evil? — from
the perspective of Lois Robison, the answer was clearly no.
"If
there was anything you could do to keep it from happening, we did it,"
she says. "We were in church every time the doors were open. We took our
kids to Sunday school from the time they were born. Larry was in
Scouts, the girls were in Scouts. Ken was a Scout leader."
And
when, as a young man, her son Larry started having mental health
problems, Robison says, she did everything she could to help him.
She
had him hospitalized several times for his problems, but the
institutions, she says, would never hold him longer than 30 days.
"I fought the state of Texas, I fought the county, I fought everybody to get him help," Lois Robison says.
At
trial the state of Texas rejected the insanity defense, and Larry
Robison was eventually put to death. But from Lois Robison's
perspective, it was the mental illness, and not her son, that was
responsible for those crimes. And this belief both neutralized her guilt
and shaped her feelings about what it was that she should do next.
"We
can crawl into a cave and pull a rock in after us," she says, "and
just, you know, hibernate and stay away from the world. ... Or we can be
up front and tell the truth and hope that it helps somebody in the
future."
And so after her son was arrested,
Robison started advocating for mental health issues. She went all over
the country talking about access to care. "If I hadn't done that," she
says, "I would have laid down and died."
For Most Families, A Silent Struggle
David
Kaczynski made a similar choice. He didn't turn away; he stepped
forward. His professional life is now defined by what happened with his
brother. And while he says he's heartbroken about the pain his brother
Ted caused, like Robison, he views the murderer in his family as
mentally ill — schizophrenic — not evil.
A
former social worker, Kaczynski speaks frequently about mental health
issues and is executive director of a group that fights against the
death penalty.
But most families who've found
themselves in a similar position don't seem to settle the question that
way. For whatever reason they turn in, not out, to struggle with the
issue of whether they bear any responsibility for the crimes of their
kin.
Kaczynski understands this struggle in a
unique way; over the years he's made a habit of reaching out to other
families in similar circumstances. Last year, after the shooting of
Gabrielle Giffords, he contacted the lawyer for the family of Jared Lee
Loughner. He says he also contacted the Cho family after their son,
Seung-Hui, went on a rampage at Virginia Tech.
"I
left a phone message for the sister, I think, some years ago," he says.
"And Linda and I have talked about writing to the Holmes family as
well, so we'll probably send them a letter, just to let them know that
if they need someone to talk to, we're open to that."
Just
days after the shooting, a lawyer for the Holmes family stood in front
of a gaggle of reporters and, after reminding everyone that James Holmes
had not yet been convicted of a crime, asked that the media respect the
family's privacy.
Sixteen years ago, a
lawyer for the Kaczynski family stood in front of a bank of microphones
and essentially said the same thing. A little while later, David
Kaczynski emerged from his house for the first time. The media was
finally gone.
But the problem of guilt? Of what to think of yourself? Of what to do? It was only beginning.
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/01/157737038/when-your-family-member-does-the-unthinkable?ft=3&f=1001&sc=nl&cc=nh-20120802
