90 Miles

Karen vanishes with her children to escape a violent marriage, erasing a life in order to save it. But eventually, when it’s safe—if it’s safe—she must come out of hiding.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Once upon a Time I disappeared. I was one person
one day and the next someone else, both the same
woman I'd always been, and also utterly eerily unfamiliar. There
was a story in this, I felt, one built around
a universal question, how do you know who you are?
Answers would be grounded in the body and bound to memory.

(00:29):
But for many years I could not write it. I
couldn't figure out where to begin, and I had no ending. Moreover,
trauma had scrambled my understanding, the need to make meanings.
Stymied by an inability to see, I was unable to
sink beneath the surface of events down to the truth
of who had done, what and why.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
That's Karen Palmer, author of several novels and the memoir
She's Under Here. Karen's a harrowing story of a vulnerable
young woman who finds herself in the wrong place, at
the wrong time, in the wrong circumstances, without the tools
or experience to recognize the danger she's in until finally

(01:14):
she does. It's also a story of extraordinary resilience and
the power of love to transcend seemingly impossible odds. I'm

(01:37):
Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that
are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
I am an adopted only child, and my parents were
transplanted New Yorkers. They were both children of Irish immigrants
who moved to New York City, probably around the turn
of the century. And both my parents grew up during
the Depression, and my father went off to World War Two,

(02:15):
and my mother, who was I guess about five years
younger than him at the time he left the neighborhood
in New York. She was still in high school and
he kind of knew her from seeing her around, but
he didn't know her know her.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
By the time he got.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Back after the war, she was all grown up and
she had a job as a secretary down on Wall Street,
and she caught his eye as a returning serviceman. He
was still wearing his uniform and going out drinking, you know,
with his friends. And my mother used to tell this

(02:50):
story that when she first saw him, she was very disdainful,
you know, she called him, oh, those flyboys, you know
that they were showing off in their uniform, and she
was at the time engaged to marry a navy guy,
and within two weeks of having met my father, she
broke off her engagement and was wildly in love with

(03:13):
this man that she thought was not for her on
first sight. My mom was the youngest of seven children,
and my grandmother raised all the kids on her own
because her husband had run off with another woman in
the middle of the depression. So, you know, these kids
lived in Hell's Kitchen in you know, in a small apartment,

(03:37):
all seven of them.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
The boy that was just above.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Her in age died when he was seven years old.
He fell down an elevator shaft in the building, and
so there was, you know, there was a certain amount
of that kind of Irish tragic aura to her family,
whereas my father's family was more what they used to
call lace curtain Irish, so they, you know, my mother

(04:03):
would have put it that his family put on airs.
There were only three children in his family, which was
quite unusual for that era to only have three. So
they had they had different kinds of upbringings. And after
the war, my dad was very ill. Towards the end,
he came down with something that they thought was Hodgkins lymphoma,

(04:26):
and Walter Reed gave him these massive doses of radiation
to treat it. When it turned out that wasn't what
he had, but it had the side effect of making
him sterile, which they didn't know for many years. You know,
in those days, they didn't put the lead apron over you.
They just you know, blasted you. So they tried for

(04:47):
ten years to have a baby and couldn't, and then
they adopted me. So I was brought into this this
situation where my dad, who was a fairly serious alcoholic,
cleaned up his act for a couple of years while
they were adopting me, you know, because they had social
workers come around and interview them and all that. My

(05:09):
mom was very hopeful that the marriage, which had gotten
rocky over those ten years, would get back on track,
and he cleaned up for the adoption, but as soon
as it was all over, he was a heavy drinker again.
He was a binge drinker, so you never knew when
he was going to go off. He would be fine,
and then all of a sudden he'd be holed up

(05:31):
in the bedroom, you know, with bottles of whiskey and
wouldn't come out for two weeks, and the situation in
the house was tense and there was a lot of fighting.
And my mother was extremely religious and wouldn't have gotten
a divorce because she believed, you know, you get married,
you make the value in it for life. But she

(05:53):
was extremely unhappy in the marriage, so she put a
lot of her attention on me as her child and
the only one in the house that she could talk to,
because she and my father had really a very bad marriage.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
And you were in la by that time, right, Your
parents had moved west.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, my parents moved west right after the war, and
then ten years later they adopted me. They were the
only ones in their families to move. Everybody else stayed
back east. Everyone and my dad wanted to be a
newspaper man. He had a brother in law who worked
for the Washington Post, and he admired this brother in

(06:35):
law so much that he thought that what he wanted
to do after he got out of the service was
worked for a newspaper. So he faked his graduation from
high school for his mother's sake, so that he could walk,
you know, in the auditorium up on the stage and
pretend to get his diploma. When he did not in
fact graduate, because he had ditched so much school as

(06:57):
a youngster. But when he got out of the army,
he went on the GI bill to Columbia for a
year and study journalism, and rather than go all the
way through a degree program, he was very impatient, and
he thought the best way to get a job on
a newspaper would be to first work for a small
town paper, which after my parents got married, they lived

(07:21):
for a year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and he got
a job working on their newspaper, and then from there
they moved to Los Angeles, and he went through this
series of maneuvers, you know, with phony clips and you know,
all this stuff in order to get a job at
what was then called the Herald Express, which was kind

(07:42):
of a slightly yellow newspaper, very sensationalist, and that was
his first newspaper job.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
Karen grows up on a steep hill in Silver Lake,
Los Angeles, as an only child in a neighborhood without
many other kids. She learns early how to keep herself company,
building elaborate inner worlds to fill the quiet. Her mother's
attention is intense consuming, her father's is almost non existent.

(08:15):
Karen lives in the space between too much and not enough,
and then at fifteen, everything shifts. She becomes pregnant. In
her Catholic family. During that era, there is no debate
about what will happen. She'll carry the baby, and the
baby will be placed for adoption, and so forms a

(08:36):
certain symmetry.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
She was very volatile during that time. On the one hand,
she was supportive in her way, given that there was
only one outcome for this, but she was you know.
She early on took me to the doctor and she
was kind, which was very unexpected. I expected her to

(09:00):
be furious. But as the pregnancy progressed, she became obsessed
with what she termed my lack of remorse.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
You know.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
It's like she was looking for something from me that
she wasn't seeing. And part of the form that that
took was that because I was adopted myself, and because
the implication of that was that my birth mother had
also had sex.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
Outside of marriage, you know, So.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
I always felt that she at that point it was
when she first started to think of me as less
her child and maybe more related to the woman who
gave me up. It's like she didn't understand me once
I became a teenager. We were very close to when
I was a child, but once, you know, the hormones

(09:54):
hit and the rebellion and all that normal teenage stuff.
She was beside herself and wanted desperately to control me
and I wasn't having it, and so she didn't know
what to do.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And then you're sent
to this institution called Saint Anne's where you're going to
have the baby. Do you know at that time that
you were also adopted from Saint Anne's. Did you know
that that's where you started out your life?

Speaker 3 (10:28):
Yes, yes, I did know.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
One thing my parents did about my adoption is I
don't ever remember not knowing, so they must have told
me really early on. And I was raised to feel
that I had been chosen and that it wasn't that
somebody didn't want me. It's that my adoptive parents wanted

(10:54):
a child so badly that they, you know, they went
and picked me out of all the so their children,
and that was kind of the fairy tale that they
constructed for me. I knew I had been born in
Saint Anne's because it was not far from our house,
and I think my mother must have talked about it
so that when I got pregnant, it was, you know,

(11:17):
rather than look for some home for unwed mothers that
was at a distance, which I got. I have never
thought about this before. That might have made more sense.
She just picked this place where I had myself been born.
They had a hospital ward in this facility, so it
wasn't just dorm rooms in a place to live while

(11:38):
you were waiting out your pregnancy. You also gave birth
on the premises.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
Karen gives birth to a son when she's just sixteen.
She holds him for only an hour, an hour that
feels both infinite and unbearably brief. The decision to relinquish
him has already been made. Verurse reassures her that it'll
be fine. She'll have other children. The nurse tells her.

(12:05):
Karen receives one polaroid snapshot of her child, the only
trace of him once the door closes. In the meantime,
unbeknownst to her, another loss is looming. Her father has cancer,
information that's been kept from her until after she returns home.
When he dies soon after his illness is revealed to her,

(12:28):
she is suddenly a teenager carrying two profound absences at
once and all. Before finishing high school, Karen takes a
part time job at an office supply company. She's seventeen,
her boss, Gil is thirty six. Here with Gil, her
vulnerability becomes a kind of magnet. She is raw from

(12:51):
all she's endured, grief, secrecy, shame, and Gil steps into
that space. There is an intoxicating world of attention and attraction,
a heady combination that distracts Karen from a sense that
something might be a miss, And in those early days,
what happens between them begins to shape the rest of

(13:13):
her life.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
I was drawn to him initially because after the experience
I had with the pregnancy and giving up my son,
I could no longer deal with teenage boys. It's like
they were a completely different species to me now. And
he was older, and he had a business, and he

(13:39):
was so interested in me, you know. It's like he
wanted to know what I had to say, and I
was so grieving. Something that I have thought since is
that I mistook grief for maturity.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
You know.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
I thought I was a way more mature person than
I was because I had had this hard experience, and
so I didn't see the age difference. Clearly, when I
look back on what he was doing now, it seems
very clear that it was grooming. I would not have
had the language for that at the time at all.

(14:20):
And then also, it was the seventies and you had
Roman Polanski and you had Jack Nicholson, and you had
all these semi famous men running around with teenagers and
nobody thought anything of it. So there was also this
atmosphere of anything goes and a level of promiscuity that

(14:44):
disappeared once the AIDS crisis hit.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
So this was just ahead of that.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
And again I had been through this experience and I
thought I was perfectly prepared to step into a life
with someone this month than me.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
So how long before you marry him?

Speaker 2 (15:05):
Well, we lived together for I think six years, so
it's like we were married, but we didn't actually do
this ceremony until I was twenty two.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
And how did your parents feel about it? Your mom,
because your dad had passed away.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, I think my mom. See this is sort of
a terrible thing to say about her, but I think
my mom, who never really liked him that much, she
you know, she recognized him. He was also a New Yorker,
he had moved from New York to California after being
in the service, and I think she felt like she

(15:44):
had his number, but he was older. She thought he
would take care of me, and she also thought that
he would understand this experience I had gone through and
not think of me as spoiled goods, you know, because
I think that's the way her mind ran is she

(16:04):
you know, some part of her was like, well, no
man is ever going to want her like what she did,
and so she swallowed it, even though she was wary.

Speaker 1 (16:17):
But Karen doesn't feel like spoiled goods, not at all
for starters. She feels very mature and also does not
believe her teenage pregnancy to be a disqualifying thing. Besides,
Gill is intoxicating sexy. He also tells her that he'll
take care of her always, that he'll be there for
her no matter what, that as long as she's with him,

(16:40):
she'll be safe. There are red flags waving all over
the place, but she's a teenager and she doesn't see them.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
There's a word I ran across when I was working
on the project that it's like the frog the boiling
frog metaphor, But to me, it's more specific it's called mithradatism,
which is the process of ingesting self administering small amounts

(17:10):
of poison so that when you get the full dose
it won't affect you. I feel like I participated in
some of the things that I saw in him that
should have been huge red flags, like you know this
this sort of petty criminality, and you know, selling stolen

(17:31):
goods and having multiple identification and I thought, oh, this
just makes him interesting. He's kind of an outlaw. And
I went from seeing him that way to as I
got older and I had children and I grew up,

(17:51):
then it became clearer and clearer to me that he
was actually a very dangerous person. And I spent fourteen
years learning that lesson. So it is a long time.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
Karen and Gil are seven years into their relationship when
their daughter, Erin is born. Erin is followed four and
a half years later by another daughter, Amy. Gil already
has kids from his first marriage, and Karen sees him
as a loving and involved father, a huge draw given
her own father's emotional absence, so she ignores a lot

(18:28):
of things. There's the fact that he denies owning a gun,
a lie. There is physical violence. Gil is regularly unfaithful,
and Karen is diagnosed with numerous venereal diseases. Even as
Gil gaslights her, telling her she must have picked them
up on toilet seats, but then he goes too far.

(18:52):
He locks her in a broom closet.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
There was a breaking point because that particular incident actually
happened during a phase in which things were pretty good
between us. You know, he had gotten a new job,
and he was doing well in the job, and the
kids were at a really fun age, and you know,

(19:16):
it was cyclical. Things would be good and then they'd
be bad, and good and then bad, but they were good.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
We were living in Marin.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
County and we were due to go into San Francisco
that day with the girls, just to spend the day
in the city, and they were out in the car.
I was getting some stuff ready in the house to
bring in the car, and he came back in and
shoved me in the broom closet and locked it and left.
I cannot remember that it was precipitated by something. Perhaps

(19:47):
it was, but I really think it was just casual cruelty.
You know, he was annoyed for some reason that I
wasn't aware of. You know, he was always telling me
things like, get your head out of your ass. You know,
you're being dumb, you're stupid, you know, all those kinds
of criticisms. And so he, for whatever reason, did this

(20:09):
and then left me in there for several hours. And
I had a lot of time to think. When I
was in there. You know, I was a young mom.
I had these two young kids, I had a job,
I went to school. I never had any time to myself,
and I had some time to myself in this closet.
And by the end of my time there, what occurred

(20:31):
to me, because I couldn't think of a precipitating event,
was that he didn't love me. You know, I thought, oh,
this is a revelation, he doesn't love me. But the
more important thing that I came to after that event
was that I realized I didn't love him anymore. And

(20:53):
that's what changed everything, was my falling out of love
with him.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
An other important revelation is soon forthcoming when Karen and
her family take a trip to la and stay with
their friends, Vinnie and his wife.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
We had been friends for such a long time, and
because we knew each other while we were involved with others,
we never thought of each other as for us. I
thought he was wonderful, I thought he was interesting. I
thought he was very sexy guy, very smart. I never
thought of him as someone for me, and I don't

(21:31):
think he necessarily thought of me as.

Speaker 3 (21:33):
Someone for him.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
Like I used to joke around with him that of
all my husband's friends, he's the only one that never
made a pass at me. So we didn't see each
other that way. And then on this trip, I don't
remember for sure what was going on with him and
his wife. Things weren't good between them. He was really
unhappy and I was really unhappy. And we took this

(21:56):
walk in the middle of the night because we were
making too much noise talking and we were told, you know,
or get out and go talk somewhere else, so we did,
and at some point over the course of this walk,
we just kind of looked at each other and it
was like, oh, you you know, we had no idea,

(22:18):
and it was really just like it was the thunderbolt.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
And after that thunderbolt, fairly quickly you're both resolved that
you have to be together, and you both end your marriages.
And this is when Gil, who already was such a
dangerous human. This is when he sort of kicks into

(22:45):
high gear. Yeah, and it seems like he's willing to
let you go, but he is definitely not willing to
let you go with Vinnie.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
Right.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
Although I sometimes if I think about this, it was
worse because it was Vinny, but I think it wouldn't
have mattered as soon as there was somebody else in
the picture.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
He would not have tolerated it.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
It was a thousand times worse because it was a
friend of his, So that had the effect of accelerating
every awful thing he did in his effort to get
me to do what he wanted me to do.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
So there's this night that you're on the phone with
Vinnie and you're making plans and you think that you're
in a safe space to be talking to him, and
that it comes clear that Gil has been lurking right there,
and you know, it's very sort of chilling moment. There

(23:48):
are so many places where it feels like this could
just be it right here, and you know he's kind
of like you hang up and he's muttering like what
to do? What to do? What should I do? And
you ask him what are you thinking? And he says
snakes and filths, baby snakes and silts. What did that
mean to you?

Speaker 2 (24:10):
I think what it meant to me is that what
went on in his head was so much worse than
anything I could have imagined. It wasn't just him him
lying there. He was lying on the floor with his
head partly into the room, and the room was dark,
so I didn't see him. So he had been lying

(24:32):
there listening, and I thought it was okay to talk
because he had gotten very drunk and passed out, so
I assumed he was asleep. And it's not like he
could have said to me, you know, you did this
terrible thing to me, or you're betraying me, or it wasn't.
I'm hurt, you know. I we're married and you're my

(24:56):
wife and we have children, and I'm hurt to discover
that you're doing this.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
It was you're going to pay.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
The stuff that's running through my head is all about
how you're going to pay.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Karen does what she has to do. She gets her
daughters and goes drives hours and hours away to Carlsbad,

(25:39):
where her mother is now living in a mobile home. Park.
It's a kind of practice run, a rehearsal for leaving
Gil for good. When they arrive, her mother's reaction is blunt,
almost dismissive. Why are you leaving him? Is it the drinking?
Karen tells her the truth that she's in love with

(25:59):
someone else. Her mother scuffs love, She says, grow up.
A woman disappointed by love too many times has little
patience for her daughter's hope. While Karen is hiding out,
Gil tracks her down. She hopes their conversations will be reasonable,
but reasonable they are not. He wants her to come home,

(26:22):
and in truth, Karen wants to come home to her
older daughter, Erin has school routines a life Aarin doesn't
want to disrupt. Gil promises he won't be there, that
he'll clear out so that she and the girls can
return safely. So she drives back, bracing herself, and what
she finds when she walks through the door will mark

(26:44):
yet another inflection point.

Speaker 2 (26:47):
We left in the late afternoon and got home probably
around midnight, so the kids were very sleepy, and we
came into the apartment. Apartment was dark, and it had
you know that feeling even when you can't see the
feeling of an empty house or in an empty apartment.

(27:09):
It's like I could feel that he wasn't there. But
there was this very faint smell of fire, and I thought, well,
you know, I don't know we had a fireplace, so
he had a fire, but he's not here. So I
put the kids to bed, and I was putting toys away,

(27:32):
but my gaze falls upon this row of pictures that
we had on the wall over the kid's toy box,
and like, there's something wrong with the way the pictures
look to me. So I got up and went over
to them and looked at them, and they seem normal,
until I realized that in one of the frames, you know,

(27:55):
the matting is there, but the photograph is gone. And
I couldn't, for the life of me, remember what the
photograph was. And then the next one, which was a
picture from our wedding, his head has been cut out
of the picture. So it was on the steps of
the church and the wedding party standing there, and I'm

(28:16):
standing beside him, and all the you know, the grooms
are on one side and the bride'smaids are on the other,
and he's taken this big chunk out of the photograph.
What it made me think then, is, oh my god,
what has he done to the photographs? So I ran
into the kitchen. We had this cabinet where we kept
all our you know, photo albums and paperwork, you know,

(28:41):
all the stuff that we that we owned, the lease
and the birth certificates and all that kind of stuff.
And I pulled out the box where we kept the
recent snapshots of the girls, and they seemed to be fine,
like the pictures. I was worried that he had done
something to the pictures of the girls and that I
would have lost them, and they seemed to be fine.
But as I was shuffling through them, I saw that

(29:03):
there were more of these photos of him.

Speaker 3 (29:05):
With his head cut out.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
And it took some looking at them to finally realize
that he'd only done that in the photos where he
was with me, you know. There were other photos of
him with the kids or with friends or his family
or whatever, and there he is in the photograph is intact.
But in these photographs where we're in it together, he's

(29:28):
cut his head out. And I got scared. So I
pulled out my mother's photo albums. When she retired to
this mobile home park, she gave me all the family
photo albums because I think she was trying to.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
Ease the emotional clutter.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
You know, she was starting a new phase of her
life and she was not a big one for dwelling
on the past, and she knew I loved all that stuff,
like I loved the family photo albums. So I open
up like my baby book, you know, where my mom
had all my pictures, and they were all gone, everything,
and it was gone, all of it. And then I

(30:11):
pulled out other albums you know that my mom had
from her family in New York. Everybody gone, everybody whatever
pictures we had in my dad all gone.

Speaker 3 (30:22):
So he had gone through.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
And again, because of the smell of fire, I assumed
that he had burned all this stuff, and that is
in fact what he did.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
You know, it's striking me that the psychological warfare of
that is particularly I mean, it would be awful for anyone,
but it's particularly awful for an adoptee. It's like, yes,
you've had your adoptive family, all proof of it ripped
out from underneath you, having also, as an adoptee, never

(30:55):
known anything about your birth.

Speaker 2 (30:57):
Family, right right, It wasn't erasure yeah, you know, it's
like he was trying to erase me.

Speaker 1 (31:05):
But Gil takes the erasure further. When Karen opens her
lock box for which Gil knows the combination, she opens
the envelope where she's kept the single existing polaroid of
her newborn son, and it's gone. The envelope is empty.
Gil has burned it.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
After finding all these this discovery that he'd burned everything,
I did finally go to bed and slept for a
couple of hours, and then I got up and started
making breakfast for the girls. And I was carrying the
pot of water over to the stove to boil it
for oatmeal, and in between the burners there was a

(31:49):
single bullet sitting there between the burners. So that was
this message that he had left for me to find.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
So you proceed to hide further, you and Vinnie. You
go away from there with the girls.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
Ninety miles south.

Speaker 2 (32:09):
Ninety miles is how far you can go without having
to petition the court night.

Speaker 1 (32:14):
So you go right to the edge. Yeah, and you
sinal lisun an apartment there. Gil doesn't know where you are.
And then again there's one of these moments where it
seems like maybe a reasonable conversation can be had. I mean,
tell me about that.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
Well, Vinnie was just there initially to help me move in.
He still had his business down in Los Angeles and
was living there, and we were trying to figure out
how we could live together without making the situation worse.
So we were willing to wait on moving in with

(32:51):
each other until, you know, until it's settled down a
little bit. So I do finally talk to Gil and
he says he wants to meet me at a restaurant
halfway between Santa Cruz in our apartment in Brinn, and
he has some stuff he wants to give me, and
he just wants to talk. And it felt to me like, Okay,

(33:15):
he gets it. Now, he gets it. Now I've left.
I've left, I've moved, you know this ninety miles and
I would have never gone so far if he hadn't
been so threatening, you know, because the idea was that
he wouldn't be able to just get in the car
and come down, you know, that he'd have to make

(33:35):
arrangements to come down because it's too long a drive otherwise.
So I thought, well, okay, I'll go talk to him,
and I do remember Vinnie didn't want me to do it.
He's like, don't do it, and I'm like, no, if
you'd think after all these years, i'd know better. But
as you say, it looks like a moment where maybe
it can break the other way. So I got there first,

(33:57):
and I was waiting for him, and he finds drives
in in some strange car that I don't know, and
he gets out of the car and he's all banged up.
He's clearly been in some kind of accident or gotten
in a terrible fight or something. And over the course
of this conversation, which seems like okay, he's got stuff

(34:17):
in the car, some kitchen goods that he's going to
give me, and he's trying very hard to get me
to tell him where we are. It wouldn't give him
the exact address I wanted to settle in.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
I wanted to have.

Speaker 2 (34:28):
A couple of weeks free of being hounded before I
let him know where we were. And he made me
feel so bad about keeping that secret and seemed so
contrite that, against all my better instincts, I told him,
and the instant I told him then he told me

(34:51):
that he would throw me in the back of his
car and drive me out to the desert and bury
me where no one would ever find me.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
So I learned nothing.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
So Gil now knows where Karen, Vinnie, Aaron, and Amy are.
Shortly after the encounter in the parking lot, Gill leaves
a bunch of dynamite twined together in Vinnie's truck, with
a lit cigar in the center, presumably so that when
the cigar burned down far enough, the truck would explode.
The cigar burned out before it could detonate the bundle

(35:31):
of dynamite, but if it had, the truck was parked
right underneath the bedroom window where her girls were sleeping.
It was a lot of dynamite. When the police came,
they told Karen that it was enough to blow the
building sky high. But the police did nothing. There was
seemingly nothing they could do. There was no proof it

(35:54):
was Gil, and they didn't like to get involved in
domestic conflicts.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
It was very frustrating because we couldn't really get any
help out of them, and I didn't have any proof
because even though I was in this abusive marriage, I
had never gone to a shelter.

Speaker 3 (36:14):
I had never talked to a psychologist.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
I never knew anyone that had been abused, which is
probably incorrect, but no one ever told me, so I
never knew anyone that was abused, So I didn't know
what I was dealing with early on, and then when
I finally did know what I was dealing with, they
either didn't take it seriously or couldn't do anything.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
And something else is on the horizon too, something incredibly dangerous,
frightening and malevolent, something that perhaps, had Karen's mom been
able to grasp just how bad it was between the
two of them, how high the stakes could have been avoided.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
I had sent our older girl, Aaron, down to see
my mom for a week after out. We had lived
in Santa Cruz for about a year then, and she
went down there for a vacation and I stayed up
in Santa Cruz with Amy and Vinnie had work to
do and he couldn't come up, so I was there alone.
So she was down there. She had a great time

(37:14):
with mom, you know, they did all the beach things
and went shopping and they had a lovely time. And
then my mom calls me to tell me that Gilla's
there and that he wants to go back on the
airplane with Aaron and what should she do? And I
was sort of flabbergasted, like what is he doing there?

(37:34):
How does he even know she's there? And what does
he mean he wants to come back? And she says, well,
he says he has to get back to San Francisco.
He's got some business stuff he's got to do, and
he wants to spend time with Aaron on the plane.
So I thought, well, okay, will you be sure to

(37:56):
put them on the plane, like see them on because
he had been making noises that he was going to
take the girls, and I just didn't think he would
do it because I didn't know what on earth he
would do with them. He wasn't working at that point,
and he was doing a lot of drugs and drinking,
and he was such a mess, and I thought it

(38:17):
was a threat and not something that he would actually do.
So they got on the plane, and it turned out
my mom did not see them onto the plane, and
I found out later that he had tried to take
Aarin on another flight that went to New York and
the only reason he didn't get on that flight was

(38:39):
because she could read and she made a stink, And
so they went This is when you could buy a
ticket at the gate. There was no security, there was
no nothing. You just walked up to the gate and
purchased your fare. So they went to San Francisco and
I met them with Amy at the airport. It was
very late, and she was, you know, half asleep and

(39:02):
very heavy in my arms. And they came off the
plane and I needed to hug Aaron, and Amy was squirming.
She wanted down, and he was holding his arms out,
and so I gave her to him to hole and
it was just so instinctual. I mean, I spent fourteen

(39:23):
years with this man, and he was their father. And
I passed her over, and then we started walking to
baggage claim, and again at some point Aaron was behaving strangely,
and I bent down to talk to her, and when
I stood back up, Gil and Amy were gone. And
what they had actually done is walked straight through the

(39:45):
airport and out and got on a bus. But I
didn't know that. I spent hours and hours trying to
find them in the airport.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
And at this time Amy's three and Erin's seven.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
Amy was two and a half and Aaron was seven.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
This then proceeds to unfold over a period of ten
days where you don't know where Amy is and Gil
has her.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Yes, I mean we looked everywhere for her. We did flyers,
We went to police stations, we checked with bus stations,
and did what we could do, and nobody could really help.
I mean, the airport wouldn't even let us put the
flyers up. They said they would distribute them to their
security people and they would keep an eye out, but

(40:33):
it was not very helpful.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
There's this eerie moment right where I mean, it's all eerie,
but there's this moment where you do get the least
get a tip that there is a man living in
a building with a child and something doesn't seem right.
But then the tip doesn't pan out because the child
is a boy. Right, Except that's not what happened.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
No, And if I had no, I still don't think
it was them, because I think by that time he
had already left the city. He couldn't afford to stay
in the city anymore. He went north and stayed. It
was up in Santa Rosa, which is a town maybe
an hour and a half north of San Francisco. Yeah,
but this idea that oh, it's a boy it couldn't be.
Her turned out to be sort of a red herring

(41:21):
because he had changed her appearance to make her look
like a boy.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
He dyed her hair and cut it short. Yeah, so
after ten days he does get in touch, right, But
what he wants in exchange for returning amy to you
is that you promise to give up Vinnie. That's the
only way that you're getting your daughter back is if

(41:47):
you promise. You swear that you are going to give
up Vinnie.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yes, which of course I did instantly. I swore that
I was not telling the truth, but I swore it instantly.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
This is the moment when everything breaks open. After the
terror of not knowing where her youngest daughter is or
what Gil might have done, Karen returns home and turns
to Vinnie with a single, urgent sentence, We've got to run.
They had talked about the possibility before, in the abstract,

(42:25):
what they would do if things didn't get better, But
this is different. This is now. The situation has been escalating,
despite everyone around them continuing to insist that no one
can sustain this level of rage forever, that it'll peter out.
But it won't. It hasn't. It's only grown, and then

(42:45):
comes a threat that makes the decision for her. Gil
takes Amy and warns Karen that if he ever breaks
her promise to him, he'll take her again, or take
both girls, or kills them all. That's the moment she
understands they can't wait, can't plan, can't hope for a
safe window. They have to disappear immediately. What follows is

(43:08):
essentially a DIY witness protection effort. With no guidance, no support,
and absolute secrecy. Karen and Vinnie gather what they can,
decide to change their names and start driving east.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
We went that direction because I was told Gil that,
you know, I would never live anywhere except on a coast.
I was used to being near an ocean, and so
the middle of the country was not ever a place
that I contemplated moving to. So I figured, somewhere in
the interior it makes sense to go there, because he'll

(43:44):
look for me first in places like Washington and Oregon,
and you know, maybe Florida and North Carolina, places that
he could see me living.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
And so we drove east, and.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Vinnie, whose sister and or husband had lived in Colorado
for a while, had once spent a day in Boulder,
and he thought it was a cute town and it
had a university, and it was, you know, forty minutes
from a big city, so we could probably find jobs.
And just on a whim, that's where we wound up

(44:20):
deciding while we were driving.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
Yeah. Well, and also there's such a flurry of things
that you're deciding things that no one ever thinks about
unless they were suddenly in a position of having to
think about, which is, well, what does that mean? We
don't have any id at what do you do about that?
How can you rent a place to live, much less
buy a place to live if you don't have documentation?

(44:43):
And so you do end up for a little while
in a condo that was empty, that hadn't sold yet,
and the landlord, you know, there were these angels along
the way. No, yes, definitely you didn't ask too many questions,
but also who at a certain point if you did
let them into your i mean, letting anybody into your
circumstances felt like the most dangerous thing imaginable.

Speaker 3 (45:05):
It did.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Yes, So tell me about I mean, just a little
bit about buying the house, because this is again like
you're relying on the kindness of strangers. Or the reliability
or the trustworthiness of strangers, because at a certain point
you have no choice but to do that.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
Well, something we had when we ran is we cashed
out our bank accounts and you know, took what cash
we had and put it in a paper sack that
we had under the front seat. So we had this
small stake of money and we weren't sure what we
would do with it. It would it be enough to
buy something in you know, leaving California, it's like the

(45:44):
prices are completely different when you go into the interior,
and Colorado was just coming out of a pretty bad recession,
and so prices were very depressed. And this realtor that
had exchanged painting this condo for rent. I think he
looked at us and he thought, well, Okay, this nice

(46:04):
young family and they, I don't know, they might like
a house. I'm going to show them houses. And we
would go because it was kind of a fun fantasy
to go look at this stuff. And he would drive
us around Boulder and we'd walk around houses. And there
was this one house that Vinnie kind of fell in
love with, and in a way that it wasn't with

(46:25):
the other ones. I could tell he wanted it, and
he thought it was doable, and I'm like, no, we can't.
We'll never get alone. We don't have any paperwork, We
have nothing. So he said, let's talk to the realtor
and tell him enough of our story so that he'll
understand why we can't give him a credit report, why

(46:48):
we don't have any work history. And the realtor was like, well,
this house has been on the market for a really
long time, and I think maybe the owner can be
talked into carrying the note on it rather than having
to go through a bank. And he thought it was
probably a decent deal for her because if it turned
out that we defaulted, then she would just keep our

(47:10):
down payment and put it up for sale again. It
was not the worst thing in the world, although you know,
she wanted to sell it, and I'm sure she wanted
a regular sale, so she agreed to that, and then
she demanded a credit report, and we couldn't do it.
So we wouldn't tell anybody our real names. We never

(47:30):
did all the years we lived in hiding. We never
set our real names to anybody.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
Including to each other.

Speaker 2 (47:38):
Oh well, to each other, yes, I mean. And we
fiddled with our identification stuff, so that the name I
was born with is Carrie the first name, and I'm
Karen now because I wanted to change it to something
that was close and that if I could, you know,
was signing something.

Speaker 3 (47:54):
If I screwed up, I could kind of cover it up.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
So I picked the name that way, and then we
told people that Carrie was a nickname, so you know,
so Vinnie would call me Carrie.

Speaker 3 (48:06):
Other people called me Karen, but.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
It was not you know, that way, we could still
be who we were anyway, This lady, the realtor, said,
let's call her up and put her on speakerphone and
you can give her a shortened version of what you
told me and maybe she'll take mercy on you. And
so we did that and Vinnie did all the talking
because I was a wreck. And at the end of

(48:29):
it he said to her, well, this is the situation.
We cannot give you our real names, and we can't.

Speaker 3 (48:35):
Show you this stuff. This is what it is, and.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
We understand if you want to pass and don't want
to do it, and it's a small world. You can't
even tell anybody the story we've told you. And she
was very quiet for this long moment, and then she
told us a story about a safari she had been
on in Africa. She was an academic and she had
been on a safari with a bunch of academics from.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
All over the country.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
And in the evenings they would sit around this campfire
and get drunk and tell stories. And there was a
young woman who one night was telling a story about
having had an affair with a married man, and she
was very upset and she was crying. And the woman
whose house we wound up buying said she realized as
the woman was talking that she was talking about her

(49:23):
next door neighbor. But she recognized the man in the story,
and so she said to us, it is a small world,
I understand, And she agreed to carry the note.

Speaker 3 (49:37):
As you say, another angel.

Speaker 1 (49:43):
Will be back in a moment with more family secrets. Karen,
Vinnie and the girls live that house in Boulder for
a good long time. They've tried to build new lives

(50:04):
for themselves, and for four years there's no sign of Gil.
But then Karen hears from her mother her mother's house
has been broken into and there's only one thing missing,
her address book. This is nerve wracking, of course, but
still Gill stays away. Then Karen's mom gets a call
from one of Gil's older daughters. Gil has been arrested

(50:26):
for murder and is in prison.

Speaker 3 (50:30):
It was a.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
Garbled story which didn't get straightened out for a while
on my end, because I just thought, oh my god,
he finally did it. He finally killed somebody. And I
don't know if the garbling was my stepdaughter or.

Speaker 3 (50:47):
If it was my mom.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
I kind of think it was probably my mom that
she got the story wrong. What I eventually found out
that he did was he was charged with a temp
did murder where he had one night he was back
living in New York in the apartment he grew up in,
and there was a bar across the street that was

(51:09):
very noisy, and apparently at two o'clock in the morning,
he went down there with a gun and started firing
into the bar because he was mad at them because
they were making noise. I mean, it's the whole thing
is just outrageous in my mind. But that's what actually happened,
and that was plea bargained down to illegal possession of

(51:31):
a weapon, and then he went off to prison for
a number of years for.

Speaker 1 (51:37):
Karin how and where did it? I mean, because now
there's a lot of years go by, you begin to
publish novels, your daughters grow up, they go to college,
they start lives of their own. And yet what is
so palpable is always this sense of han like is

(52:01):
it ever over? And what would over even mean? You know,
you learn that he's back out of prison, does it
continue to feel for you like your one ring of
a doorbell or one knock on the door away from
there he is he's finally caught up with you.

Speaker 3 (52:19):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (52:20):
I always felt like that, and I felt like that
long past when he was probably capable of doing that, because.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
It was a black hole.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
And also I had such unresolved guilt about having taken
the girls away. You know, I did the thing that
he did to me, and I did it permanently, and
so like, what does it mean to take a man's
children away? Even a man as disturbed and dangerous as this,

(52:53):
The children are still part of what makes him human.
And so I struggled for years with feeling like should
I try to reach out and see if there's a
way to have some kind of rapperschement here? Is there
a way to resolve this? And of course, I never
did it because I was fairly certain, I would say

(53:16):
ninety nine point nine percent certain that it was just
me fantasizing again about the way it could be and
not the way it was.

Speaker 1 (53:30):
Karen has begun to have success as a writer. Her
first novel is published in nineteen ninety six, followed by
a second novel, but her story, this story continues to
hunt her. She decides to fictionalize it to write it
as a novel. The girls are now grown and out
of the house, so Karen decides to take herself on

(53:50):
a solo writing retreat. While there, the edges blur. Revisiting
this time is just too much for her, and she
breaks down.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
Was unexpected. We decided at a certain point that we
were going to sell the house in Bolder and move
closer to the ocean and go live in a place
that was kind of smaller and quieter even than Bolder,
and get more for our money.

Speaker 3 (54:18):
The house in Boulder had appreciated quite a bit, and.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
We thought we could sort of semi retire, which was
really totally unrealistic, it turns out, but that's what we thought.
And I was in charge of reconnaissance and went out
there and looked around and looked for a house to
get and all this stuff. And I was by myself
in this place that was very mysterious to me, and

(54:45):
trying to write this novel which fictionalized the absolute worst
time in my life, and I was trying to disguise
elements of it and also be true to it. And
I start did disappearing. You know, all the stuff that
I had been through, I had never had a breakdown.
I certainly had very rough times, but I was always

(55:09):
pretty sound mentally. And this was the first time in
my life where I felt completely unsound, and it was it.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
Was not good.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Trying to write about this in that way was definitely
a part of it.

Speaker 1 (55:27):
Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. The haunting continues, right,
and you don't write that book, which is great because
then you write this book, which is the book that
you needed to write, Right.

Speaker 3 (55:40):
Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1 (55:41):
But you know, you kind of everyonce in a while
you look up to see if there's any news of Gil,
Is there anything that you can find? Is there any
and there's you know, usually the same couple of things
that aren't useful, you know, just he's been a person
of interest in various places or whatever. But then there
is this moment what year is it when this happens

(56:03):
where you're searching for Gil and you learn that Gil
is dead.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
This was Christmas two thousand and eight where the girls.
Amy was in the Navy and Aaron was back east
in her first job as a lawyer, and they both
came home for Christmas. We were living again in Los
Angeles by that point, and we had this, you know,
this very nice Christmas dinner and everybody went out for

(56:34):
a walk. And one of the gifts that my older daughter,
the new lawyer, had given Vinnie was this book that
was a guide to adoption in California, and like Vinnie's
opening it and looking at it and sort of puzzled,
the girls wanted to make it official after all these years.

(56:55):
They wanted him to adopt them as adults. So we
had this tremendously emotional Christmas, you know, where we were
all crying and everybody goes out for a walk except me,
and I was thinking, well, I don't know what happens
with Gil here. It's like, is there some kind of
legal thing that he's the father? Do we have to

(57:17):
track him down and get him to sign something? And
so he was on my mind, and after everybody went
to bed, I decided to google him, which I did
periodically without any particular information, but this on this particular night,
I googled him and I added a search term, which

(57:37):
was Santa Maria, California, because I had had a private
detective at one point track him as far as Santa Maria,
and I didn't know if he was still there or what,
but I added that term and up popped this item
that was in their little local newspaper there about a
body having been found in a park and that they

(58:01):
initially thought it was foul play. They thought that perhaps
the person had been murdered, and then determined that they
died of natural causes. And in the course of looking
at this article and another article and kind of triangulating
between them, it was clear to me that it was Gil. So, yeah,

(58:24):
so that's how I found out he died.

Speaker 1 (58:27):
What did that? I mean, this is such a huge question,
but like, what did that feel like? There's probably some
complicated German word for all of the different feelings, you know.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
Yes, yeah, yeah, I was heartbroken because you know, again,
I think I still had this thing in my head
that there would be some sort of deathbed reconciliation somewhere
along here, and the idea that he was gone forever.

Speaker 3 (58:58):
Was overwhelming to me.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
There was that, but then there was also, you know,
tremendous relief because right up until that moment, I still
thought he was capable of finding me and doing great harm.

Speaker 1 (59:15):
So you and Vinny have three grandchildren. Aaron has three boys. Yes,
you know, you have these daughters who have thrived, and
you have this marriage that has endured. Where are you
now in like just inside yourself in terms of your
own sense of your life and peace?

Speaker 2 (59:36):
You know, I think actually committing to finishing the book
and writing down what happened in as truthful a way
as I could. I mean, it's a cliche, but it
kind of set me free, you know, where It released
my final feelings of not the kuilt, but that I

(59:59):
have come come to some sort of peace with this story.
You know, I did what I had to do, and
I think, I write this somewhere also, I would do
it again. I did what I termed the only thing
I could do, and I would do it again. And

(01:00:20):
putting that in black and white settled the issue for me.
It's very weird reliving all this stuff. You know now
that it finally is out in the world. But it
settled for me, so I actually feel at peace. And
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
Good is not the right word, but good about it? Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
Here's Karen reading one last passage from her memoir She's
Under Here.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
Vinnie was in the kitchen making sauce, a pot bubbled
with tomato and garlic, a frying pan sizzled with browning sausages.
What happened, he asked? I told him, was it enough?

Speaker 3 (01:01:09):
Carrie? It was? And it wasn't.

Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
I didn't know when will it be enough? I don't know, never, probably,
And Vinnie kissed me. What can I say about love?
How can I ever convey a depth of feeling? All
I can show you is the warmth of our kitchen,
filled with fragrant steam. All I can give you is

(01:01:34):
the sound of Vinny breathing, the rise and fall of
his chest against mine, the warmth of his arms, the
feeling of utter safety and desire, desire in the moment
and desire in memory, desire that rushes or meanders or
runs underground, only to surface when least expected, with force

(01:01:55):
and full joy.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre is
the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd

(01:02:30):
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

(01:02:55):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.