Finding Amy (30 page)

I rest in the water, so tired I'm half dozing in the silence. Then wind whispers through the trees and my buoy bell chimes. I have not heard that sound in a while. My tears pour down, hot in the cold air. Suddenly, I feel peace as the wind shifts and the chimes sound again.

I know it's Amy, telling me, telling us, that it's okay.

I reflect on Amy's diary entry on September 10th. “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Forever. FOREVER.

And can it be that in a world so full and busy the loss of one weak creature makes a void in any heart, so wide and deep nothing but the width and depth of vast eternity can fill it up!”

—Charles Dickens,
Dombey and Son

A
my St. Laurent's family had to wait a long time for the closure that would finally let them begin their grieving process without repeatedly having to sit in courtrooms rehearing the details of her death. It would not be until six months after the verdict, at the sentencing phase of Gorman's trial, that the family would finally have a chance to tell the court what Gorman's violent act had done to them, and what the world had lost when Amy St. Laurent was killed.

Amy's younger sister, Julie, spoke of the pain of spending seven weeks with the missing person posters everywhere she went, downtown, in her favorite stores, and all over the USM campus. How she'd be out putting up posters and expecting that Amy would come around the corner and start laughing at her. But it went on and on. There was no place she could go where she could get away from them.

She told of driving down the road past the spot where Amy had been buried, a place she passed several times daily on her way to school and work, and how, since Amy was found, the knowledge that Amy had been there the whole time made her physically ill. She had never been able to travel that route again.

She told the court that when she lost her big sister, she also lost her best friend and her sense that the world was a safe place: “When that day happened, everything in my life came to a stop. My family was walking around like zombies … the look in their eyes of not celebrating her birthdays. You should see the hurt on their faces. Even now, after it's been two years, I don't see things the same. The world isn't the same to me … everywhere I go, I am constantly … watching myself.”

Amy's father, Dennis St. Laurent, said that he had been in a living hell for twenty months and doubted that he'd ever come out of it. He told the court that his daughters were all he had in this world, all he lived for, and Gorman had hurt both of them. He said that Amy had been a loving and caring person who did not deserve what Gorman had done to her. He reminded the court that, not only had Gorman never shown any remorse for his crime, he was so cold blooded he had tried to hide Amy from her family so that they could never find her and at least have the closure of a funeral.

Last to speak on Amy's behalf was her mother, Diane Jenkins. After thanking the court for the opportunity to finally be heard, she said:

I wanted to start out by saying that there are two kinds of people in this world. One who makes the world a better place for having been a part of it and those who leave it with destruction in their path.

I want everyone to know who Amy was because up until now, she has only been the victim's face on the posters. I also want everyone to really understand the impact that this has had on my family, friends, and me. Amy was a pretty remarkable young woman for only being twenty-five. She loved her family and friends and was extremely caring and loyal to them. She understood what it meant to care and give from the heart.

You see, people genuinely loved Amy because she knew how to love and care about them. Amy was also a very hard worker, a contributing member to society. She had the opportunity to go to college and she didn't take it, so she worked very hard to finally get where she was. She had a very good job with a lot of responsibility.

The words her boss wrote in a note to me were “Amy was the best” and she was.

So this is what her friends and colleagues have left—photographs and memories of a young woman who touched their hearts.

My personal loss is beyond words. A piece of me died that day also. Pain does not end, it only changes and pain really doesn't care when it rears its ugly head and what it is that triggers it to come back at you one more time.

I want people to understand what this has done to us and me. Imagine getting the call that is a parent's worst nightmare, being told that your child can't be found. After the initial shock, can you imagine how traumatic that is? Then having to pull yourself together because you have another child and you need to be there for them.

Imagine having to tell your parents and trying to explain that their grandchild is missing and then just two days later, having to go back into the same nightclub you know your daughter was in last and asking everyone if they have seen this young woman and having to explain to them that this is your daughter and she is missing. Then going back out two days later for the next two nights and doing it all over again in hopes that someone will remember something.

Imagine days turning into weeks, imagine walking railroad tracks, construction sites, woods, marshes, truck yards, fields, and vacant buildings. Nothing. Nothing. By that time, you're not looking for your daughter, what it is you're looking for is a body. Not the vibrant, beautiful daughter.

Imagine doing this until you emotionally and physically can't anymore. That is pain and trauma. Imagine for seven weeks seeing your daughter looking back at you from the reward posters, those beautiful blue eyes piercing your heart, but you know how important those posters are.

Imagine having to maintain a career during all of this. Imagine having to send your other child back to school. Imagine having to deal with the missing child's finances, try explaining to someone why you're canceling someone else's phone service, cable, or why the bills now have to be put in your name. Imagine seven weeks of this.

Imagine finally getting the call that you are hoping for and dreading, the call that they found her and they are waiting for positive ID and then waiting to learn how she died. Then imagine being told that she was found partially clothed and died of a gunshot wound to the head. Then imagine telling her sister how she died and imagine what you would say when you were asked the question by this child who has lost her only sibling, “Why her? Why did she have to die?”

Imagine having a funeral service just a little over a week before Christmas and what would you do with the gifts you already bought her?

Now imagine having to pack up your child's apartment, boxing up a young life. Imagine going through her clothes and holding them next to you because they smell like her and you know you will never hold that person again. So you keep going back and holding the sweater and inhaling the remains of the person you loved very much, but eventually the scent goes away.

So what are we left with? Memories, possessions, pain, the ring she wore when she was murdered.

I'll never see her children, my grandchildren. A funeral for a friend's young sister brings all of the painful memories back to the surface like it was yesterday. Even simple everyday things like listening to the rain bring pain.

For the duration Amy was missing, each time it rained, my heart ached thinking she was out there somewhere cold, wet, afraid and wondered why someone hasn't come to save her yet. I can't stand listening to the rain now.

When I allow myself to go there, I can imagine what the last moments of her life must have been like. The fear, pain, and horror and I am also almost ashamed to tell you that I don't allow this to happen often, it hurts too much. This I want you to know is real. I live with this every day and it invades my thoughts, breaks my sleep, and breaks my heart over and over again and I'll never forget it as long as I live.

Our family and friends were not the only ones who lost when we lost Amy. Society did as well. If she had this much caring, understanding, and compassion for the human spirit at twenty-five, just imagine what she could have done if she lived.

Jeffrey Russell Gorman was sentenced to sixty years in the Department of Corrections custody for the murder of Amy St. Laurent.

Subsequently, Gorman appealed his conviction to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court (the Law Court), arguing that allowing his mother's grand jury testimony violated both the Maine rules of evidence and the Confrontation Clause of the United States Constitution. Legal matters move slowly. The case was argued before the Law Court in February of 2004. In March of 2004, the United States Supreme Court decided a landmark Confrontation Clause case,
Crawford v. Washington
. Because the Gorman case involved potential
Crawford
issues, both sides had to re-brief and reargue the case. A final decision, denying the appeal and affirming Gorman's conviction, was issued by the Law Court on July 22, 2004, two years and nine months after the night Amy St. Laurent disappeared.
¹

While the sentencing phase of the trial was the family's first opportunity to speak for their daughter in a legal forum, and while their anxiety that the conviction might not be affirmed and they might have to face Gorman again through the ordeal of a second trial was not laid to rest for another year, Amy's mother, Diane Jenkins, did not wait for finality to begin taking steps to ensure that other young women would have a better chance to be protected than her daughter had.

When a loved one dies, survivors often have a powerful desire to perform some memorial act to ensure that the value of that person's life does not simply fade away. When you've loved someone, you want the world to understand something of who they were. You want to create a legacy that will confirm that the person who is gone lived a meaningful life. Most important, you want to carry on the meaning of that life into the future.

Within months of her daughter's death, as the facts concerning the circumstances of Amy's death came to light, Diane Jenkins, from the depths of her own personal pain, was already looking for ways to prevent the same thing from happening to someone else's child. In Amy's memory, she created the Amy St. Laurent Foundation to encourage the avoidance of violence, to provide help for victims, and to help arrest and convict violent offenders.

The first project undertaken by the foundation was to bring RAD
²
(Rape Aggression Defense systems) courses to the area by underwriting the training of a group of Portland police officers as instructors,
³
and providing the equipment necessary to teach RAD classes. The RAD system is a basic self-defense program for women, taught in a series of three or four sessions, that involves awareness, risk reduction and avoidance, and basic physical defense systems. It is designed first of all to make women safer by enhancing their awareness of their surroundings, teaching them strategies to make their environments safer, and teaching them to recognize and avoid risks. Second, the course teaches assertiveness and verbal confrontation skills to help women avoid the appearance that they are victims and to stop aggressors. Finally, the course teaches realistically employable tactics to women who are serious about defending themselves in situations where their life is in jeopardy, allowing them a chance to escape.

Diane Jenkins also began speaking to high school students, beginning at a “Give Back the Night” safety forum at Falmouth High School, sponsored by the Junior League. She joined Chief Chitwood and community policing officers to deliver the message that violence and danger are real and can happen in the lives of ordinary people. No speaker, however well prepared or sincere, could possibly have matched the eloquence of someone who had been through it. Seeing Jenkins's small, upright figure holding her daughter's picture, and hearing the deep vibrations of sorrow in her voice as she told about who her daughter Amy was and the impact of her disappearance on the family, was the most vivid reminder possible of the real-world effects of violence on a family.

The audience was absolutely silent as Jenkins, who never imagined herself as a public speaker, described the last conversation they ever had, ending with Amy's last words: “I love you, too, Mom.” Jenkins's willingness to share her personal story had a powerful impact on adolescents who imagined that bad things happened in other places and to other people, and that their lives couldn't be touched.

In an interview after that first event, Jenkins said, “It could have been either of my kids sitting in that audience, any one of our children … It's important that they don't think they're invincible and that nothing bad is ever going to happen to them.”
⁴

While Diane Jenkins honors her daughter's memory and carries out Amy's caring and compassion for others by working to make other people's children safer, Amy St. Laurent's memory lives on in another arena as well, and the bonds forged by her spirit linger. Ask public safety officers involved in the Amy St. Laurent case what was special about the case and they will come back, again and again, to the unusual working relationship forged among their different agencies.

On January 22, 2003, Deputy Attorney General William Stokes wrote the following in a letter to Captain Loughlin:

In my 25 years of service to the State of Maine, I have seldom seen a case involving such a wonderful collaboration and level of cooperation between law enforcement agencies as in this case. The Portland Police Department and the Maine State Police, together with the Maine Warden Service, did themselves proud by their cooperation and their single-minded focus in first, finding Amy's body and second, bringing her killer to justice. I want to thank you for your wonderful support and for assigning such terrific people, such as Danny Young, to work on this case.

His relationship with the Maine State Police, and in particular with Scott Harakles, is an example to all of the law enforcement agencies to follow.

As Bill Stokes recognized, it had been an unusual case for everyone. Without the collaboration, and an extraordinary willingness to put personal differences aside, combined with the passionate desire they all shared to secure justice for Amy, the case might never have been resolved and Gorman might not have been convicted.

Cooperation happened at every level and at every phase of the investigation. Despite radically different personal styles and command structures, Sergeant Tommy Joyce and Sergeant Matt Stewart, both used to deference to their status as CID sergeants and both used to calling the shots, were able to work out or put aside their differences in order to ensure that their primary detectives were able to work, unimpeded, on Amy's case. Both recognized the importance of smoothing the path and providing staff support and moral support throughout a long and difficult investigation. Matt Stewart said that even if there were differences of opinion regarding the case higher up, on the ground, the detectives just kept things rolling and worked it out.