Ray was beginning to feel frightened. His father was obviously very upset with what
he’d caught Sissy doing in the garage with her friend and punishing her severely.
The look of pain and terror on her face scared him. Ray became afraid of what his
father might do to him if he learned about his spying; maybe his father would punish
him in the same way?
The thought of his father’s thing, coming after him like it was going after Sissy,
made Ray wish he’d never gotten out of bed. Now it was too late. If he tried to climb
down now, his father would surely hear him. His only hope was to wait until his dad
was done punishing Sissy, and sneak back into his room when his father left the garage.
His father was on top of Sissy and shoving his stomach over hers with tremendous force.
Ray could hear her muffled screams through the sweater over her mouth. Ray decided
the punishment must be very painful indeed.
Finally, his father stopped pushing and stood up. He was sweaty and breathing hard.
To Ray’s horror, he saw his father’s thing covered in blood. Sissy lay sobbing on
the garage floor. His father threw her sweater and underpants at her in disgust.
“Fucking slut,” he heard his father say. “You ever tell anybody about this, and I’ll
say I caught you in here with one of your boyfriends. Who do you think people will
believe?”
His father left the garage, pulling up his trousers.
Sissy got up, still crying hysterically. Ray noticed that she also had blood between
her legs and on her stomach.
Ray panicked. If his father went into his bedroom to check on him and found him gone,
Ray would experience his father’s punishment firsthand. Forgetting the need for silence,
Ray leaped from the garbage cans, ran straight for the back door, and was in his bed
with the covers over his head when he heard his father enter through the front door.
Sissy never babysat again. After that night, his father stopped staying out late and
came home right after work each day, eliminating the need for a babysitter. In a surprisingly
short time, Ray’s eight year-old attention span pushed the horrific punishment his
father inflicted on Sissy into the recesses of his mind. At least for a while. He
did remember the words his father used, and vowed to someday learn the meaning of
“fuck” and “whore” and “slut”.
Once, Ray saw Sissy. Though her family lived only a block away, it seemed that since
her punishment, she avoided the part of Pacific Avenue where Ray’s family resided.
It was a month after she last babysat him when Ray saw Sissy at McKinley Park. He
waved to her, but when she saw him, she got up and walked away. Her eyes seemed sad.
Ray felt sorry for her, remembering the incident with his father in the garage.
But one Saturday, not long after summer ended and school began, Sissy came to the
house. Ray was outside bouncing a tennis ball against the garage with Skipper when
she arrived. Ignoring him, Sissy walked up to the front door and knocked. His father
answered the door in his undershirt.
All Ray heard Sissy say before his father motioned her inside was that she knew his
mother was at work. His father wouldn’t look at her directly. They went inside and
Ray’s dad closed the door.
Ray continued to bounce the tennis ball for the better part of an hour before Sissy
emerged. He heard his father say he’d pick her up later and that everything would
be all right. Sissy only nodded, a sullen look on her face. It looked to Ray like
she’d been crying.
Ray never saw her again.
That night, Ray’s father drank more than usual. He left after dinner in the car, which
was rare, since he normally walked to one of the bars on Park Street only a few blocks
away. He came home early, too. Early enough that Ray was still up and watching TV.
When he entered the house, he had a peculiar look on his face, the same expression
Ray had seen him wear the night he punished Sissy.
The next day, exciting things happened in the neighborhood. Alameda policemen, resplendent
in their tan uniforms and caps, went door to door. It wasn’t until they came to his
house he found out why.
Listening from behind a chair, Ray heard a tall policeman ask his parents if they’d
seen Sissy. Actually, he called her Cecelia Levine, but Ray knew Sissy was only her
nickname. She’d been missing since the night before, and her parents were frantic.
Ray’s mom told the policeman they hadn’t seen Sissy in weeks, and Ray’s dad bobbed
his head in agreement with his wife’s statement.
Ray would never forget the next time he saw the tan uniforms of the Alameda police.
It was after supper, only a couple of days after the first policeman came to their
house to ask about Sissy. His dad was in the garage, drinking alone instead of with
his co-workers. Ray was on the porch with Skipper.
A big black and white police car skidded to a halt in front of their house. As Skipper
began to bark, two cops piled out with their revolvers drawn. Another police car pulled
up abruptly behind the first and two more Alameda cops got out, also with their guns
in hand.
To his amazement, one of the cops ran right past him to his front door. Two others
ran to the rear of the house, and the fourth to the garage.
“Police,” the cop shouted, pounding on his parents’ front door. “Open up! We have
a warrant!”
Ray couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. It was just like on Dragnet.
Just as his mother opened the door, a loud voice called out from the garage.
“He’s in here! I got him!” The other cops raced to the garage.
When the policemen came out, Ray couldn’t believe his eyes. His father was in handcuffs
and being roughly dragged to one of the police cars. His head was down.
Ray’s hysterical mom ran to the cops, declaring her outrage and demanding to know
why her husband was being abused in such a fashion.
Ray would never forget what the policeman told his mother that fateful evening. He
told her that Ray’s father was being arrested for the murder of Cecelia Levine.
Ray’s world would never be the same.
Over the next few days, cops and reporters came and went. People would come to stare
at them, many not from the neighborhood. Soon, his mother started going to meet with
men at the courthouse on Central Avenue. She took Ray with her, dressed in his Sunday
best, but left him outside in the hallway when she went in to talk. Sometimes, she
came out crying.
At school, Ray was bullied and beaten. Gradually, he learned things. Some things he
overheard, other things he learned from the court documents and newspaper clippings
his mother left on the kitchen table. But the final, awful truth would only be revealed
weeks later when Ray went to the courthouse each day for the trial.
Ray told his mom he didn’t like to go to the courthouse because he didn’t like to
see his father handcuffed. But his mother insisted on taking him, telling him it was
very important. The lawyers told her it was good for the jury to see Ray and his mother
so they knew he was a family man; it might bring sympathy. Sympathy might mean mercy.
It was in that awful courthouse that eight year-old Raymond Pascoe learned the truth
about his father and came of age. It was just before Christmas, 1964.
Ray learned the strangled body of Cecelia Levine had been discovered two days after
her disappearance by a sanitation worker at the Alameda dump, or Mount Trashmore,
as it was nicknamed by the locals.
During the homicide investigation, Alameda police detectives discovered that Cecelia
Levine, like countless teenaged girls, kept a diary. In that journal, along with accounts
of her first kiss and her rendezvous with her boyfriend while babysitting at the Pascoe
household, was a heartrending account of her rape at the hands of Ray’s father, Arnold
Pascoe. Also of her discovery six weeks later that she was pregnant.
The prosecuting attorney read the journal to the jury, page by tragic page. Desperate
to keep the news from her parents, and with nowhere else to turn, Cecelia had approached
her rapist for the necessary funds to finance an abortion. Cecelia’s diary entries
chronicled her despair and, in one particularly tortured entry, her contemplation
of suicide. The journal’s final entry, dated the day of her disappearance, contained
a jubilant announcement that her assailant was not only going to pay for the abortion
but drive her to a clinic in Oakland to undergo the procedure.
Ray watched a parade of witnesses corroborate Cecelia’s journal. He even heard Teddy,
the boy who visited Sissy in the garage, testify to the truth of her journal entries.
Ray learned things. He learned that Cecelia was in fact going to have a baby at the
time of her death, and the blood type of the unborn fetus, whatever that was, matched
his father. He learned tire tracks at the landfill matched the family car. He learned
that fibers from Cecelia’s sweater were found in the garage.
But the most damning evidence came from the accused himself. In a drunken stupor on
the night of his arrest, Ray’s father made incriminating statements that mortified
the jury and sealed his fate.
“Fucking whore,” he called Sissy. “Slut.” Those were his father’s words, repeated
for the jury by the cops who’d heard his father utter them the night of his arrest.
Ray told no one of what he’d witnessed between his father and Sissy. He kept what
he knew locked inside him. He felt sorry for Sissy because she was dead. But he felt
sorry for his father, too, and couldn’t understand why everyone seemed to hate him.
Of course his father had to punish Sissy. Didn’t they understand? She was a whore
and a slut; that’s what his father had said. But in the end, it didn’t matter. Ray’s
idyllic life was over.
Ray could no longer play outside. His mother kept him indoors to prevent him from
hearing what people yelled as they drove by. But Ray heard anyway.
The only good thing Ray remembered from those terrible days at the courthouse was
the pretty blonde girl. She was about kindergarten age, and each day at lunchtime,
while the courtroom was empty, the little girl would come with her mother. The massive
bailiff would lift her up to the huge desk where the judge sat.
Ray and his mother always remained inside the courtroom, while everyone else, even
his father’s lawyers, went out to dine during the noontime break. He would watch as
the girl handed the judge, a tall man with blond hair who walked with a limp, a brown
paper bag containing deviled eggs or sandwiches or fruit. It reminded him of the times
when he and his dad were building airplane models in the basement, and his mother
would bring them down sandwiches and cookies. The little girl had freckles. She was
very pretty.
She was obviously the judge’s daughter, and the way he doted on her made Ray think
of the times his father threw the baseball with him and rubbed his head, or wrestled
with him in the backyard.
Ray learned the little blonde girl’s name. He heard her father say it almost every
day of the trial during lunchtime.
Her name was Paige.
Soon, the trial was over. On the last day, Ray’s mother dressed him extra carefully
and told him that today, of all days, it was important he look his best. As Ray stood
in his now-familiar spot in the courtroom, his mother squeezed his hand so tightly
it hurt.
The judge told his father to stand up. When he did, the judge spoke. Ray would never
forget the words he said.
“Arnold Roy Pascoe, you have been fairly tried and duly convicted by a jury of your
peers for the crime of rape and two counts of murder in the first degree. Do you have
anything to say before I pass sentence?”
Ray would see his father’s defeated expression in his nightmares for years to come.
“I got nothing to say.”
“Very well. You are hereby sentenced to the maximum penalty the law allows me to levy
for the heinous crimes you have committed. You will be remanded forthwith to the correctional
facility at San Quentin, and at a time yet to be determined, you will be put to death.
I will not ask God to have mercy on your soul, praying instead He direct that sentiment
to the family of the child, and unborn child, you mercilessly destroyed.” The sound
of the gavel echoed like a gunshot.
The last image Ray Pascoe saw of his dad was when the bailiff led him away in chains.
His father wouldn’t look him in the eye.
As the crowd bleated and flashbulbs popped, Ray must have fainted. The next thing
he remembered was being in his mother’s arms outside the courthouse as she pushed
her way through the throngs to the car.
After that, Ray’s life became a waking nightmare. Without the financial resources
to move away, his mother changed their names back to her maiden name, Cowell. It was
the end of Ray’s childhood.
Arnold Pascoe sent almost daily letters to his family from his new home on San Quentin’s
infamous death row, but Ray’s mother never opened them. She tore them up and threw
them away. In time, the letters stopped coming.
But death by lethal inhalation was not to be for Arnold Roy Pascoe. Fortunately for
him, the last person to die in the gas chamber in the State of California, Aaron Mitchell,
was put to death in April of 1967. San Quentin’s “Green Room” went vacant as the Supreme
Court examined the constitutionality of the death sentence. Arnold Pascoe and one
hundred and ninety-two other death row inmates were subsequently integrated into the
general prison population in 1972.
Ray, by then in his teens, worked long hours delivering newspapers, repairing electronics,
and enduring the daily hell that had become his existence. Within a few years, the
beatings and taunting stopped, replaced by sidelong glances and hushed whispers.