When a Loved One Dies
Monday, August 16, 1976: Gerald Ford was still president, and Elvis had exactly one year to live.
I was 22 years old and living in South Austin with Dianne Roberts, my girlfriend
of almost four years. We’d met in the fall of 1972, my first semester
at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos. Dianne was an art student,
a tall beauty with long brown hair. I was an English major who played bass
guitar. The first time we met, we both realized there was a spark between
us, but neither of us did anything about it. The next time we met I didn’t
let her get away, and from then on we were as close as toes in a sock. Even
our friends assumed we’d be together forever.
In the summer of 1974 Dianne and I quit college and moved to Austin. I was
going to be a rock star. To get by in the meantime, I worked as a mail clerk,
and Dianne worked at a credit bureau. In 1976, after numerous bad garage
bands and false starts, I hooked up with a hot guitarist with cool looks
named Eddie Munoz. By August we had a band called Jellyroll and a slew of
gigs lined up. The first one was still two weeks away when a friend of Eddie’s
called with a proposition. A glam-rock singer who went by the name of Queen
Bee needed a guitarist and bassist for a gig in San Antonio the following
Sunday night. Eddie and I were so excited you’d have thought it was
Madison Square Garden, or jamming with the Stones.
Sunday morning came. Dianne slept late. She was still in bed when Eddie’s
horn beeped in the driveway. I knelt down to kiss her good-bye. I remember
her pale skin and sleepy smile. “Bye, sweetie,” I said.
“Bye, sweetie,” she said. And I left.
I could’ve invited her to come along, but it was going to be a long day
and a long night. Rehearsal was at noon and our gig at least twelve hours later.
Eddie wasn’t taking his girlfriend, either, and he was driving, so it
never came up.
We went on just after two in the morning. The band sounded like a cross between
the MC5 and the Shirelles, and the crowd seemed highly entertained. Eddie
and I were psyched. On the way back to Austin the next day, we talked nonstop
about how fabulous Jellyroll was going to be. Eddie dropped me off at home
around two in the afternoon.
I’ve relived the next moments a zillion times. I go up to the front door;
it’s unlocked. The house is silent. Dianne is in the bedroom, naked,
lying on her stomach. I kneel down to kiss her.
“Sweetie,” I say softly, and gently tug on her shoulder. Her body
rolls over like a plank. Her face is bloody; her eyes are open; a pillowcase
is wrapped tightly around her neck.
It was as if I’d crossed a threshold into a hellish twilight zone. Nothing
was real. But in that zombie fog, certain details stood out: an ashtray full
of strange cigarette butts doused in the kitchen sink. A missing window pane
in the extra bedroom.
Part of me realized she was dead but part of me didn’t. When the police
came, I told one cop, “Maybe she’s not really dead, she’s
just sick. Or is she…?” He just looked away.
They took me downtown and fingerprinted me. A bald detective called Curly led
me to a tiny room and told me to write down everything I’d done in
the last two days. When I was finished, Curly took me to the lieutenant’s
office, and they began to interrogate me about the kind of lifestyle Dianne
and I had led. They seemed deeply offended by our eccentricities.
Things were much more conservative in 1976. I had long hair. My eyes were smudgy
from the eyeliner I’d worn at the previous night’s gig. Dianne’s
art was unusual and provocative: huge canvases populated with subjects like
odd, supernatural creatures or an old woman sitting on a nest of oversized
eggs; an old sepia-tone photo of a bearded man hung from a bedroom wall with
a bayonet stuck in his head.
They thought her poetry was weird too, and after taking inventory of all the
books we had on witchcraft and the occult (a benign interest we shared with
many of our friends, they had us pegged as drug-crazed rock ‘n’ roll
weirdos, maybe members of some kind of cult. It gradually dawned on me that
they were trying to get me to confess. Either that or they thought Dianne’s
death was the result of some strange sex-drugs-witchcraft ritual--i.e., that
she’d “brought it on herself.” Enraged, I did my best to
straighten them out. Meanwhile, I could hear detectives in an adjacent office
laughing and joking about details of the case.
I was the one who had to call Dianne’s father in Houston to tell him
that his daughter had been murdered. I had a reputation as a prankster, and
was unable to convince him that this wasn’t some macabre joke. I finally
gave the phone to Curly, who had Mr. Roberts hang up and call the Austin Police
Department. “Ask for homicide,” he said.
Around this time I fell into a black hole of despair. If there is a God, I
thought, where in hell was he?
At some point I suddenly remembered the missing window pane and realized what
it meant. For a few months Dianne and I had rented a room to a friend of
mine from high school. The last month he lived with us he lost his key, and
instead of getting a new one, he would enter the house through his bedroom
window, unlocking it by taking out a loose pane. I never got the window fixed
after he left. A couple of weeks later, while Dianne and I were out, he returned
to pick up some of his things, entering in the usual manner. When we got
home he was still there, and he had a friend with him, a guy named Lyle he’d
met on a construction job. I didn’t like his looks. His eyes were cold.
About a week later the ex-roommate found out that Lyle was out on bail for
rape. Although he was shocked, the two remained drinking buddies. The ex-roommate
had a drinking problem, but I’d never taken it very seriously, even though
we were old friends. I’d never fixed the window, either. Now I realized
that my own negligence and indifference had played a contributing role in Dianne’s
death. Guilt like that lasts a lifetime.
Some time between midnight and dawn, I was informed that the killer had been
arrested and was being held downstairs in the same building. His full name
was Lyle Richard Brummett, of Kerrville. He admitted murdering Dianne. He
also confessed to killing other women.
Lyle Brummett is a serial killer, though that term was not in use in 1976.
Because a federally imposed moratorium was still in effect, there was no
death penalty then, either, a fact that I regret to this day. The district
attorney approved a plea bargain arrangement in exchange for two life sentences.
Brummett was eligible for parole in 2000. He was denied it, but will be eligible
again next year. I remain in touch with the Victim Services Division of the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which keeps me informed of all upcoming
hearing dates, and also makes sure that the members of the Texas Board of
Pardons and Paroles are fully aware of the horrible crimes he has committed
and the pain and loss he has inflicted on others. In the wake of his violent
life, the world continues to be a lesser place.
I have a different life now. I’ve been married to Lois Richwine for more
than seventeen years. We have a brilliant and beautiful eight-year-old son.
It was Lois who rescued me from that black hole of despair, shock, and grief.
Beginning with that gig on August 16, 1976, I had an exciting and fulfilling
music career. In the mid-eighties I started writing between gigs, and soon
I was writing for a living. But it wasn’t until 1999, when I was working
on a memoir, that I wrote about Dianne’s murder for the first time.
When I wrote about Dianne, her death, and its effect on me, the words flowed
like blood from a slashed artery. Not a day had passed that I hadn’t
thought of her--and the thoughts almost always triggered flashbacks, hallucinations,
and terrible pangs of guilt.
I don’t know if I expected a catharsis after I wrote about Dianne, but
if I did I was wrong. Things got worse. The situation came to a head near the
end of summer 2001. So many people I knew died that season I dubbed it my “summer
of death.” I finally started seeing a psychologist. She told me I had
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and recommended a treatment called Eye Movement
Desensitization, Reprocessed, or EMDR (see “The Eyes Have It,” Texas
Monthly, September 1998). The theory is that, during Rapid Eye Movement (REM)
sleep, the brain is sorting and filing information. A traumatic experience,
such as a violent crime, can cause that filing system to go haywire. Memories
of the event pile up and never get properly sorted out. Later on something
will trigger thoughts about the event, resulting in flashbacks and panic attacks.
In my EMDR therapy, the therapist had me concentrate on specific painful memories
while keeping my eyes trained on the repetitive movement of her hand, back
and forth from left to right. It sounds kooky, I know, but I immediately
started to feel a little better.
Over the next few weeks I began to be able to think about Dianne without the
upsetting effects I had experienced for 25 years. This slight relief was
accompanied by a deep depression, but I had a feeling I’d be able to
overcome it. My fourth session with my psychologist was the afternoon of
Tuesday, September 11.
As the terrible drama unfolded over the course of the day, and our friends
in Manhattan were finally accounted for, I began to think deeply about what
we had witnessed that morning on television: murder on a mass scale, with
thousands–no, make that millions--of people experiencing shock and
grief at the same time. The emotions hit me like a shock wave. To be sure,
not all of those people were experiencing the same intensity of emotion,
but the collective impact was awesome. For years I’d been suffering
flashbacks and nightmares about the horror, the terror, the pain of evil,
monstrous violence, and now that was all we were hearing about in the media.
One of the most-often-heard refrains—the world will never be the same
again—seemed to be expressing a sense of violation and loss of innocence.
I could relate to that.
And a strange thing happened. I felt a sense of relief, of letting go. Certainly,
it was partially the accumulation of my therapy sessions, which helped me break
the spell of years of epic grief, but I think a significant part of the phenomenon
was that I felt a rush of solidarity with all those people crying out in a
single scream of anguish. My best attempt at an analogy is that it was like
putting out an oil well fire with a blast of TNT.
I still have occasional nightmares and depression, but since my treatments
I’ve been able to remember Dianne and that time of my life with less
pain, and to think about her without automatically thinking of the monster
who murdered her. It’s something less than peace of mind, but I never
asked for that--and anyway, I think I’ve learned to live without it.