Lost Night A Daughter's Search For The Truth Of Her Father's Murder

PrologueI saw my father clutching his throat, trying to speak. That image taunted me as I walked into the Merced County Sheriffis Department one sweltering August day. Iid come to meet with the detectives assigned to my fatheris murder, though discussing his death with anyone, let alone the authorities, still made my throat constrict and my right eye twitch. Whenever anyone asked about my father, I replied, in a flat, neutral voice, iMy father was murdered.i I hoped to stop the conversation cold, and usually I succeeded. But sometimes the questions persisted. How old were you?I was ten. God, Iim sorry, can I ask what happened? If I felt strong, if I felt I was dealing with a straight shooter who wouldnit coo with pity, I might push myself to continue. Iid tell of waking up that summer night, and seeing pools of blood on the hallway carpet. Iid describe my father standing inside the darkened bedroom doorway, one hand clenching his throat. I might say heid been trying to say something to me, his mouth moving soundlessly as he bled, even though I could not swear upon it. This was the trouble with talking about the murder, the reason I usually blunted the topic. The moment I saw my father clutching his throat was just one among so many details I couldnit verify. Some details remained in doubt because Iid never worked up the nerve to check them out; others, things Iid seen with my own eyes, lay obscured because for sixteen years Iid let them fade like an intense and illogical dream you try to shake upon waking. The only facts I held with certainty were these: At about three thirty a.m. on June 22, 1986, someone entered, through an unlocked sliding-glass door, my fatheris house on the outskirts of the central California farming town where he had grown up. The intruder took a knife from the kitchen and stabbed my father as he lay sleeping next to his third wife. He was pronounced dead at the hospital an hour later. He was thirty-two years old, a handsome, laid-back guy who had loved weight lifting and the Three Stooges and Rod Stewart songs, and who seemed to have no enemies. No one was ever charged with the crime. Beyond this, fact dissolved to suspicion. My father was married to his third wife, Sherrie, for just over a year. I never met her brother Steve, but I heard my grandparents refer to him in mysterious, bitter outbursts. Iid been left to wonder whether Sherrie had conspired in my fatheris death, and Iid done soofleetinglyoin the privacy of my own mind, never daring to talk to my family about what had happened. Finally, in my mid-twenties, Iid begun writing about my father, reclaiming moments from our summers together, trying to bring the years before his death into focus. But when I thought of describing the night of his murder or the way Iid felt afterward, my mind stopped short like a horse at a tall fence, unwilling to cross into territory I wasnit sure I could return from. The story of my fatheris death was half complete, because Iid been too afraid of what I might remember, and because I hadnit lived the end of it. Now I was ready, and I had a guess as to why. Three days before my appointment with the detectives, Iid joined my boyfriend, Bill, on a visit to his family. We sat around the dining table with his siblings and parents, playing Scrabble and trading jokes as the night grew darker. Finally Bill glanced at me, tapped my foot under the table, and said, iRachel and I are engaged.i You would have thought weid announced we were joining the circus, the way the air hung with incredulity before the excited gasps. And though heid proposed months earlier, Bill and I could hardly believe the news ourselves. I wrote in an ecstatic scrawl in my journal the next day, iIive entered a new era. One in which the murder is pastoor almost.i Was I ready to face my fatheris murder because I waHoward, Rachel is the author of 'Lost Night A Daughter's Search For The Truth Of Her Father's Murder', published 2005 under ISBN 9780525948629 and ISBN 0525948627.