Judith walked to a Bartell’s Pharmacy and sat at the soda fountain, sipping on delicious tasting ice cream sodas in tall, frosty glasses while the prescription was filled. A bus ride home finished the day.
The seizures diminished in frequency for a while. The medication was apparently working.
In 1955, at age eleven, Judith’s wish came true. A Justice of the Peace married George and her mother, and then George moved in with his new wife and stepdaughter. The newlyweds took Judith along on their honeymoon to Kennewick where they visited with George’s family again.
Judith could see how happy her mother was, and this knowledge, in turn, made her feel very happy. Finally, Judith had a real, complete family. She began calling George “Daddy.”
A new trio was formed.
George took his responsibilities of stepfather to heart. He immediately implemented new, strict rules in the household, including asking Judith to finish eating the food on her plate and not to interrupt adults while they were talking. It was no longer acceptable for Judith to jump on the furniture like a rambunctious puppy. A sense of structure and order came into place with regular bed times. More rules. And— punishment for Judith when she broke the rules? George spanked Judith in the hallway of the house when she disobeyed the rules, and he sternly, with an authoritative voice, delivered lengthy lectures to Judith on why she must not break the rules. This change of rules planted some seeds of conflict in Judith. On one hand, she had wished for a father with all her being—and got one. On the other hand, this new father unleashed awful rules upon her—something she instantly loathed and rebelled against. Why couldn’t she just have a daddy and keep living the way she was before with her mother? Why did everything have to change? None of it made sense. It was a great relief to Helen to be able to share the responsibilities of raising a child with another able adult. With her new husband in the home, she possessed more hope for the future and felt optimistic that things would somehow work out for the best.
In 1956, twelve-year-old Judith began menses. With the onset of her periods, the Dilantin, unfortunately, no longer controlled the seizures. Seizures fired up again, with, curiously, an increase in seizure activity around Judith’s periods. Sometimes her periods would last for three whole weeks with heavy flow the entire duration. With seizures manifesting while Judith was in school, her classmates witnessed behavior they had never seen before—dizziness, Judith falling down to the floor, wetting herself, making strange noises, acting goofy and disoriented afterward. The children did the only thing they knew to do—they teased Judith mercilessly. She was deemed a freak. In addition to the health difficulties in school, Judith was only reading at a fourth grade level when she was in the seventh grade, inviting further mocking from her peers when she was asked to read aloud in the classroom. Judith began lashing out in anger at her classmates when they teased her. Teachers took note and made reports to the school counselor and principal.
The next year, at age thirteen, Judith watched her world and the new trio explode painfully, like a firecracker in her soft hand. Judith became a big sister. Her mother and George had their first child together—a baby girl named “Georgette.” While it was, at first, wonderfully exciting having a cute little baby to study with fascination, Judith quickly began to realize that this baby was ruining her life. She was losing her mother to the small, needy, bawling, creature. Her mother was completely wrapped up in the baby’s needs. Helen had quit her job at Boeing to focus on caring for her new daughter. George earned a decent living for the family at Bethlehem Steel in Seattle. It had been thirteen long years since Helen had given birth to Judith, and she needed to re-orient herself to caring for a newborn. Naturally, George and Helen were on top of the world with joy in producing a child together. But Judith felt as though she were pushed to the outside, looking in on this newly-formed trio.
A trio that no longer included herself.
George and Helen sold the small home in Renton and moved. Judith had to leave behind her neighborhood with all its familiar happenings; had to leave behind the lovely garden with the tall sunflower; had to leave Clyde the mailman. The family moved into a single-wide trailer home, situated in a mobile home park in Federal Way, directly across from the Lewis and Clark Theater, very near Highway 99—the strip of highway that would later be famous for being the highway that Gary Ridgway cruised in search of sex acts with prostitutes and candidates to murder.
Then Uncle Si died. He passed peacefully in his rest home in 1957.
As Judith and her mother adjusted to Uncle Si being gone forever, Judith realized the big sister thing really wasn’t working out for her. Not only did her mother love the baby more than her, Judith wasn’t permitted to babysit or even hold the baby because she could go into a seizure at any moment and drop the baby. Everyone knew it was dangerous for Judith to be around the baby. The damn seizures were ruining her life. Sometimes, in fits of sheer frustration, Judith poked baby Georgette or pinched her to make her cry. One time she roughly shook the baby. Judith was in big trouble with her parents.
Judith’s childhood entered a long tunnel of darkness. She was kicked out of school in the eighth grade as, in addition to her seizure disorder, her anger and aggression had increased to an unacceptable level. Teachers complained that “Judy” would do almost anything or create any kind of a disturbance to gain attention, especially where boys were concerned. She destroyed property, broke rules, and slammed her desk to the floor when challenged. She often acted ridiculously silly. Ultimately she was suspended from school for exhibiting indecent behavior in school.
The young, blonde, teenager with a body that was beginning to blossom into the full flower of womanhood, posed in front of a much nicer trailer home, probably the fanciest one in the park, while the man took pictures of her. She wore a bathing suit for him and posed for the camera. He told her that she was very pretty. He wanted to take some photographs of her so that he could have them to look at.
His yard was lovely with neatly landscaped flowerbeds, colorful flowers, a big tree stump. She felt beautiful, posing for the nice man in the pretty flowers.
But then mother found out and got so angry with her! She shouldn’t have gone down to the man’s trailer. Mother told her to never, never go there again. Why did she have to ruin something so nice?
Helen made an appointment for Judith to see a hypnotherapist in downtown Seattle. George and Helen walked Judith into the large, brick building. They waited in the waiting room while Judith was with the hypnotherapist. Judith sat face to face with the therapist, defiant, arms crossed in front of her chest. Nobody was going to hypnotize her! The doctor went back to the waiting room and shook his head. It hadn’t worked. George and Helen asked themselves what they could try next.
A subsequent visit to the hypnotherapist was more successful. While in a moderately deep hypnotic state, the therapist asked Judith to describe a perfect life. Judith, relaxed, compliant, verbally outlined her vision. She fancied herself out parked in a car with a boyfriend, in lover’s lane, and his arms would be around her, and he’d be kissing her gently, placing a ring on her finger and asking her to marry him.
One night Judith woke her sleeping parents and said she had something to tell them. Could it wait until morning? No, she had told them. She went on to describe to her parents’ stunned faces that George’s nephew had repeatedly molested her. She offered matter of fact details of how he had done it. Many times, Judith asserted, when the families got together, the nephew had insisted that she put her hand inside his open trousers and manipulate his penis with her hand. At other times, he had demanded that she take her pants down. Then he lay on top of her, rubbing his erect penis against her pubic area. She said all of this bothered her, and she knew it was wrong. She wanted to tell them about it. George, highly skeptical, asked Judith, “If you really saw a penis, what did it look like?” Judith replied that she couldn’t really explain it but she could draw a picture. After being given pencil and paper, Judith sketched a remarkably life-like
