Getting to Know Donald
My mother and Donald dated for six months before he proposed. They had romance, companionship, and great fun. He brought her flowers, and she gave him books. When I came to visit, he’d always have a little gift for me too: a little figurine from the Hallmark store or a box of chocolates—and newspaper clippings. My mother and Donald loved to clip articles from the newspapers for family and friends.
But there were things about Donald that did give me pause. I had moved from Washington, DC, to Baltimore by then, and, when I talked to my brothers, they would tell me about some things they noticed about Donald. Sometimes we worried, but mostly we laughed.
One of the things they told me about Donald was that he had a television show he had to watch every evening at five o’clock. He was, we joked, like the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man who always had to be home to watch Jeopardy!.
One weekend Donald had made a big fuss when he and my mother were having dinner at Larry’s house. Donald was insisting that he had to get home by five o’clock to watch his television show.
“He was going crazy, yelling at Mum that they had to leave ‘now, now, now,’” Larry told me.
I thought that was amusing. For years my mother had religiously watched what she called “her stories,” and now she was dating a man who had “his stories,” too. I thought it was odd—kind of old-guy odd.
But they were dating, and my mother was happy and laughed often. When I’d visit them, Donald was always very polite, and I could see how dear he was with my mother, getting her coffee or holding doors—an old-fashioned kind of man. So I wasn’t unhappy or surprised when she told me they were getting married.
Before he proposed to her, Donald had told my mother about his first marriage and where he had lived for so long. But my mother, fearing her children’s reaction, waited until after their honeymoon to tell us.
What I learned from my mother was that Donald had been a Marine in China in 1937. He’d gone there with a battalion of United States Marines to protect American interests when Japan was pushing into China. In his first month, the Japanese had begun bombing Shanghai. Donald was part of the Marine battalion protecting the International Settlement and Chinese civilians. He’d had a difficult time in China, but after his release, Donald had come home to his small Pennsylvania hometown, gone back to work, taken more college classes, and married his high school sweetheart.
But one day, my mother said, Donald came home from work in a state of despair, and he shot his mother-in-law and then his wife. My mother was very clear that he’d done an awful thing, but that it was a long time ago, and he was a different man now. Donald was the man she loved, and she asked us only to accept him.
I saw sweetness between my mother and Donald that I’d never seen between my parents. They touched a lot. She’d rub his shoulder or stroke his arm when they watched television, and they always kissed hello and goodbye.
Part of me thought my mother was crazy to marry a man who had killed two people. But another part of me admired my mother for being able to accept him. When she said, “The past is the past,” she meant it. She had seen her children through business failures, bad relationships, and divorces. Now we were going to judge her?
But over time Donald’s story changed. From him, and from my mother, I would learn more pieces of his story. But it was years later—only after his death—that I began to find Donald’s true story. After Donald died, I wanted to know what had contributed to the tragedies in his life and how he survived them. I have spent twenty-five years researching, traveling, and digging into the past so I could understand what happened to Donald Watkins, and I have sifted through all of that to decipher what his story means to all of us.
I feel as if I am sitting on a pivot point when I talk about Donald. I look in one direction and see a totally crazy person—a man who killed two women. But I can also look in the other direction and see Donald as the mental health community did: a person with an illness, a refugee of deinstitutionalization, a man worthy of rejoining society, and ultimately a person who suffered. I worked in human services for many years and know the devastation experienced by people who have been institutionalized in the past.
But then, I look at what is nearby, and I see something else that is troubling. While I see Donald struggling to fit in, suffering with stigma and his own history, I also see my mother marrying him.
As I have lived through and after Donald, this is what I come back to: Yes, he was both gentle and odd, mentally ill, damaged by trauma, and a murderer. But the bottom line is that my mother married him. So I keep asking, “Just who was crazy?”
Once, when Donald was still my mother’s boyfriend, I got to see the behavior my brothers talked about. We were out to dinner and halfway through the meal Donald began asking what time it was. Each time one of us tried to answer, my mother would shush us and tell Donald the wrong time. I knew my mother was lying, but I assumed it was because she wanted to stay out later and have more time with her kids.
But when the waitress came to the table with coffee, Donald abruptly demanded to know the time. She said it was almost five o’clock, and I saw panic cross Donald’s and my mother’s faces at the same time. I knew immediately this was not about how much time to spend at dinner.
Donald nearly toppled my brothers as he pushed his way out of the booth. He stood, looked around, and headed toward the bar at the far end of the restaurant.
My mother turned to Larry and said, “Let him go; he can watch his show in there.”
“What’s going on?” I asked my mother.
Her reply was noncommittal. “Donald doesn’t like to miss his television show.”
This, as I came to understand, was an understatement. When we finished eating, we found Donald sitting quietly at one end of the bar, drinking coffee. The bartender, busying himself at the other end of the bar, seemed relieved that we had come to collect this strange customer.
Donald’s show was the 1970s syndicated wartime drama Black Sheep Squadron. On one level it made sense that Donald liked a television show about bombers in the Pacific, but until Donald met my mother, he didn’t have a television. So how did this show get locked and loaded in his psyche?
Another peek into Donald’s strange interior came when I heard from my brother Larry about an incident he’d had with Donald at a local mall. Donald and Larry were sitting outside a store while my mother shopped; they were talking and sharing a newspaper. But then, Larry told me, they saw a young Asian family, with their toddler in a stroller, coming down the mall toward them.
Suddenly Donald jumped up and began to scream, “Baby killers, goddamn Jap baby killers.”
The young couple were stunned, Larry said. They spun around and sped in the other direction with their child. Larry was mortified.
Later, when he told me about that incident, Larry said, “Di, I don’t even think they were Japanese.”
Then, one day, my own life was in Donald’s hands.
On a fall weekend, I had gone to Pittsburgh to visit my mother and Donald, and we decided to take a drive to Ambridge, Pennsylvania, for shopping and lunch. On this trip, I was showing off my new car and wanted to drive. I knew Donald hated highways, and he refused to drive on them. When he and my mother took trips to Lake Erie or to
