Happy 55th, Marrianne

Loving the Case girls was gift to all of us

August 14, 2015

Today is your 55^th birthday, Marrianne, and, on this day I want to publicly share my own testimony of respect and love for you.

I know I don’t need to say I love you. You know that.

Our friends and family know who you are, too, know that they can rely on you to be present when they need you. They know they can count on you to listen, to support, to comfort, to counsel, to give fully and not to demand more than they can give back. None of that requires repeating, either.

Your colleagues, past and present, know you will fully invest in the work that needs to be done, pursue just outcomes, and follow or lead with respect for the abilities that each person brings to the work you do together. These qualities are evident to almost everyone who has had the opportunity to work with you for any appreciable length of time.

As for the few who have decided to move in a different direction, somehow concluded that you are actually in the way of whatever it is they may be trying to accomplish—well, we know from experience that the work that is important to you requires progress, not unanimity. Or, as your plainspoken mother put it when you were seven years old and struggling with a mean teacher, “Honey, some people are just a**holes.”

But, even though so many people understand and appreciate these virtues, I still want to take this opportunity to testify in some detail about one continuing aspect of your life that captures something singularly important about you and about our almost 30 years together as partners and parents and comrades. I do this now because I’m 13 years older than you are and who knows how many chances I’ll get to celebrate you before I wear away and lose my mind in the process? And I do this also because I’ve been thinking about it since earlier this summer when we headed to Fort Wayne for Joyce Case’s wedding to Larry Hout. Though a good number of our friends know something about your history with Joyce and her sisters, the details about your relationship with Nancy, Allie, Leslie, Mary Ann, Kathy and Joyce says something unique about your ability to overcome obstacles to loving and being loved. For these reasons, today seems a good day to testify.

Some 30 years ago, as a member of the West Elkton, O. Friends Meeting you had made an effort to get the meeting more involved in the surrounding community. At the time, the Friends meeting was approached to help a family of girls who weren’t going to school because they didn’t have shoes. As with so many other things in your life, you decided to get personally involved and ended up making a deep commitment to the Case girls.

They were Irish twins, to be sure—six of them between the ages of five and twelve years old. Their father, inclined only to petty theft and other criminal schemes, got himself busted shortly after you met the girls. His parents, sometimes employed at primarily low-wage jobs, had somehow managed to buy themselves a home. It was barely adequate housing, but it was a place where their son could live with his family, while they lived in a trailer out back.

But having put the home up as bail, they lost it and inherited the care of the girls when their son and his wife skipped town. As it happened, though the grandparents were able to keep the girls together, they were poorly equipped to do anything else to help them thrive. And though, from time to time, a social worker took an occasional interest in helping the girls in their growing up, the truth is that from the first, and for decades after, you would prove to be the one adult in their lives who made a constant commitment to them, and who would do her best to give them the love and attention that we all require as we make our way through the world.

While they were still preteens you would pick them up at their house and bring them to yours to spend the weekend with you. You’d take them places they’d never been before, to libraries, museums, music festivals, performances, to Sunday Friends meeting where they could participate in the youth group and learn to interact with a much wider world. And before every school year began, you would take them shopping for a new pair of shoes, for new blouses and jackets. Those weekends continued, sometimes two or even three weekends a month, even after you moved to Dayton, further away from their grandparents’ home.

Not so long after you first met the girls, you and I, both working for the American Friends Service Committee, had also met. By 1988, though I was living in Ann Arbor and you in Dayton, we were deeply involved and I, too, would occasionally visit you, in the process meeting the girls, also.

When the oldest, Nancy and Allie hit adolescence they ran away with young men much older than they were, bouncing from one rural trailer park to the next. The weekend they ran away, I was visiting and tagged along while we searched the backwaters of southwest Ohio, looking for two girls the world had long ago decided were expendable. I remember being astounded that we spent our weekend in a hunt for two runaways I would not otherwise have met, and even more surprised when we found them.

Though the girls were not done rebelling, they came back to Dayton with us quietly enough. After all, you were the one adult in their lives who had ever put aside the priorities of her own life to focus on theirs. You even went and got yourself certified as a foster parent so that you could legally take them into your home and keep them outside the juvenile system.

This would prove not to be enough. Dayton public schools would also prove incapable of reaching them and the streets of Dayton, rougher and infinitely more exciting than the roads of rural Ohio, overwhelmed and seduced Nancy and Allie, and the juvenile system ended up getting them anyhow.

Now is not the time to tell the whole story of the Case girls, nor am I the one to do it. You might be that person, or one of the girls, Allie, perhaps, or Mary Ann. Who can say for sure?

But what I do know is that if not for the commitment you made, I would never have crossed paths with the girls. And I wasn’t equipped to love them without hesitation, either; not the way you did. Nor, for that matter, were they equipped to easily survive what the world does to poor, mostly abandoned children, with only a single adult around to treat them with respect. For Nancy and Allie, the oldest, who suffered longer and more relentlessly from neglect and abandonment, your love, coming as late in their childhoods as it did, had less of an impact than it did on their younger sisters. Still, the girls were each distinctly different personalities and, each with a different set of skills, made their separate ways in the world.

Mary Ann, the most reserved of the sisters, likely learned how to avoid self-destructing from watching how challenging adolescence was for her older sisters. The only one who went to college, she has proved to be a capable, careful and thoroughly committed mother, able to put herself second and insure that her daughter, Kiya, would have a secure childhood so very different from her own.

Joyce, the baby, always seemed to be the most comfortable with the thought that someone could absolutely like her and love her. The stable home and family life she has built for herself, with her daughter, Alisha, husband, Larry, and her stepdaughters and their children, makes it clear that one can start off on a hard road and still make it to a very good place.

Allie, too, bright and always quick to fight, has somehow survived multiple tribulations and gotten to a place as an adult that seems to suit her. Along the way, she has acquired a delightful and capable companion with whom she shares life, work and travel.

Of course, these are not happily ever after stories. Life does not stop throwing mud pies and bricks at us. Thirty years ago one might have guessed that the girls faced a future filled with nothing but sadness, want and tragedy. It has not happened that way for Alice and Leslie and Mary Ann and Joyce, mostly because they found within themselves the strength and endurance to overcome.

But they also found you. They are your daughters, not because of some miracle of birth, but because you volunteered to love them a long time ago and never stopped. In the process, they are mine, too, and let me say now that I love them because you showed me the way to do that.

Have a happy 55^th b-day, Marrianne. You flat out deserve it.

T.J. Spytma is out of prison

and we should all be happy about that.

Brendan and I drove 500+ miles northwest last Wednesday (and back on Friday). It was a great trip--lots of music along the way, things to talk about, fuel-stop food, wool to gather--but the point of the journey was Thursday, when we got to spend a few hours with friends T.J. Spytma and Penny Ryder.

T.J. will be 55 years old in November and when that birthday comes, it will be the occasion for his first party outside of prison since he was 15. Penny picked T.J. up at the Cotton Correctional Facility on Tuesday and, after a joyful moment of being together without supervision for the first time ever, they loaded a couple of boxes of personal items into Penny's car, the sum total of T.J.'s material accumulations these last 40 years. They headed first to the parole office an hour away, where T.J. would be expected to show up probably twice a month for the next four years to be urine-tested and to look his parole officer in the eye.

In his pocket, T.J. had a check for $176, his savings from decades of paid work at a Braille production facility inside the prison. But T.J. had no complaints about the job, which he considered a good one compared to the other options. T.J. and Penny had plenty to talk about on the way to the parole office, but there were lots of distractions, too, like how green the world is, how tall the trees were, how fast the cars go, and how a free and quiet moment felt.

Of course, there was lots of strategizing to do; the two of them have few illusions about how difficult the adjustment would be for T.J. individually, and for both of them together. Before T.J. had even gotten out, they had already decided they would begin couple's counseling right away. They knew they would need plenty of structure. There was so much to learn, including, as it happened, that he would be billed $2,000 by the state for the four years worth of drug-testing and parole officer eyeballing that lay ahead.

In a week, T.J. would begin a part-time job with the American Friends Service Committee's Criminal Justice program, the same program that had brought the two of them together in the first place, and that Penny had run for more than 25 years before she retired. T.J.'s job would be to staff the program's Parole Workshop project, which helps lifers and other long-term inmates prepare themselves for parole and, in particular, for the routine, but grueling, hearing before their parole board.

The parole hearing is usually so stressful for long-time inmates that many end up dreading it more than the prospect of doing additional time. For years, lifers in Michigan prisons had difficulty even getting to the hearing stage. But one attorney in Michigan, Paul Reingold, spent a good deal of his own time lobbying for regulatory changes that would at least allow long-time inmates to get a hearing. To his dismay, he discovered that most of them, frightened and unprepared, would mess up the hearing, unable to cope with aggressive questioning from staffers whose job amounted to making sure that if the inmate harbored any doubts about himself, could not manage his own anger, or had an untreated mental illness, the breakdown would happen at the hearing, and not after parole was granted.

Already familiar with AFSC's Criminal Justice program in Michigan, Reingold went to Penny to express his concern about the alarming rate at which lifers blew their parole hearings. After considerable strategizing with allies, Penny and AFSC developed the Parole Workshop, which included readings, reflections and discussions aimed at getting participants to think more deeply about the factors that drove them to commit their crimes, the consequences for their victims and the communities they came from, and how they had changed in their understanding of their own life, how their capacity for empathy had grown, and how they would use freedom, if it came to them.

For T.J., who has spent the last 30 years in prison thinking about his own crime and the crimes of others with whom he has served time, working in therapeutic groups and individuals sessions to understand who he was developmentally at the time he committed his crime, the changes he had to make, and how to cope with his own victimization as a child, the job is a perfect fit. He won't be able to go into the prisons to lead the workshops himself (at least not right away), but he will be able to coach the coaches, and communicate with inmates taking the workshops, encouraging and guiding them by mail and telephone.

A horrifying crime
[Note: Even though the names of the victim and her family members are part of the public record, T.J. has asked me, as a sign of respect, to not to use their names, and I have honored his request.]

In 1974, T.J. (then 15) and another boy broke into a neighbor's home with larceny on their minds. The two teenagers, already regular abusers of barbiturates, were high. Before they were done ransacking the house, the neighbor, a local school employee, wife and mother, returned home.

During the crime, T.J.'s accomplice raped the victim and perhaps struck the blow that killed her. But T.J., himself, struck the first blow, and also slit the victim's wrists before he left, with the intention of sparing the dying victim from further suffering.

In the many years that I have known T.J., and the even longer initial period in which I knew of him, he has never denied any of the details of the crime and has acknowledged the gravity of what he did, not only to the victim, but to her family and to the social fabric of his community.

Though some of his statements have been qualified by observations about his drug use and juvenile status, T.J. has been clear:

"I, along with my co-defendant, did the unthinkable... It was my idea to do the breaking and entering. My judgement was not that of a mature adult and my decision making was further influenced by my use of barbiturates prior to [the victim's] death. When my co-defendant and I were discovered by [the victim], in the home, I was the first to strike her from behind."

--from T.J.'s letter to me, October 23, 2010

It doesn't take much imagination to guess at the degree of community outrage and grief that accompanied the news of the killing in Muskegon County, Michigan. Even 40 years later an on-line Michigan news service headlined the story of T.J.'s parole this way: "Notorious murderer Timothy Spytma paroled from life sentence." The article itself is a reasonably measured description of what T.J. did, how the murder/rape affected the community, how the case proceeded through to sentence, and, using a judge's letter regarding a possible parole, how both Spytma and the laws regarding juvenile prosecutions and sentences have changed. But the headline very likely speaks louder than the story.


"In one way or another, we articulate what has happened to us through the person we have become."

On the way back to DC, while Brendan, using his ear buds, communed with his music, I listened to Azar Nafisi, on audio disc, reading her own book, Things I Have Been Silent About. It was the second time around for me with Nafisi reciting her own words. I love the book. Nafisi (also the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) is a luminous writer inspecting her own life, so modern and so old-school, so gothic and so exotically Persian. But I stopped the disc and roused Brendan to quickly take down a quote from Nafisi that put me in mind of T.J.:

"In one way or another, we articulate what has happened to us through the person we have become."

Maybe, I thought, but looking at the person T.J. has become, how could anyone begin to grasp what has happened to him, what he did, who he was, who he has become? How could anyone meet T.J., feel his warmth, watch him with Penny, watch his absolute focus on Brendan when they were in conversation, and also guess what a terrible thing he did when he was 15 years old?

Certainly, there are people, including [the victim's] children, who were (and remain) entirely opposed to setting T.J. free. At 17, the victim's son, discovered her maimed and tortured body on his return home that day. He opposed T.J.'s release on the very reasonable grounds that he doesn't believe that T.J. could possibly be rehabilitated because the U.S. prison system does not effectively rehabilitate and that T.J. would be a danger to the community upon his release.

It's difficult to argue that prisons do little to rehabilitate, do little to address mental illness, do little to treat drug addiction, do little to teach literacy, and do inflict, nearly every day, an unusual level of indignity and deprivation that goes far beyond the fact of imprisonment. But there is now quite a lot of evidence that T.J. is not only rehabilitated, but that he has achieved that rehabilitation largely through his own efforts, through his personal will, through the diligent application of his considerable intelligence, and through the remarkable expansion of his capacity for compassion and empathy.


Doing time, lots of it

There's no question that T.J.'s rehabilitation in prison was a lengthy process. He didn't even begin any kind of psychotherapy until 1986, eleven years after he was first sentenced to prison. Michigan prison practice at the time was actually to deny therapy for inmates with life sentences until they had served at least ten years of their sentence. For T.J., this only compounded the difficulties he faced--a 16-year old felon with a history of substance abuse and emotional trauma--in adjusting to a life sentence in an adult prison. That he survived long enough to make it out is a tribute to human resilience. The prison system, itself, deserves little credit for T.J.'s personal triumph, powered as it was by T.J., assisted as it was by Penny Ryder and a handful of other believers who worked hard on his behalf.

In early 1986, as part of a court hearing on an appeal of his sentence, he had a psychiatric evaluation conducted by the same psychiatrist who conducted his evaluation before his 1975 sentence. At the conclusion to his 1986 report to the court, Dr. Denis Walsh wrote this:

"He wishes to see his crime over and done with and yet, I do not see it that way. I feel his crime is significant and indicates weakness in ego functioning which enables primitive aggressive impulses to erupt into overt behavior. I think Mr. Spytma is unaware of what conflicts are defended against by these hostile acts. I must, therefore, take the position that he needs psychiatric treatment before he can be considered for release... He has worked very hard, using whatever tools he has been given to do his best to ready himself for release, but no psychiatric treatment has been given... Up to this point, what has happened is that a mentally ill individual has been warehoused and struggles against despair."

This report, when it got back to T.J., could have compounded his despair. But by that point, already well along the path toward eventual rehabilitation, he was motivated to do more. Finally eligible for psychotherapy, T.J. kept moving. In a report filed with the Department of Corrections in 1987, clinical psychologist Stephen Purcell praised him:

"...from his very inception into the group, Mr. Spytma showed high interest and motivation in wanting to explore the underlying psychological precipitants to his crimes... The subject has been very cooperative in terms of group participation and support of other members of the group... this clinician views Mr. Spytma as being a very intelligent and affable individual who is willing to work on the problems that have precipitated his [original] offense. It appears that the subject will make impressive movement in therapy providing he continues to attend on a regular basis."

But it was years after that before T.J. actually told anyone about having been sexually molested at 10 by an older step-sister and, subsequently, at 12 years old, abused multiple times by an adult sister-in-law. Up to that point only T.J., himself, and the two women who victimized him knew what had happened.

For a 2004 psychiatric examination, T.J. wrote a 20-page account of his relationship with his mother and his feelings about his father's death when he was nine. In writing the report, he described his feelings about what he had done to [the victim] and to her family:

"I came to realize much, much more how my actions affected the [husband and children of the victim]. My God, I caused them all such needless pain and suffering. [Prison psychologist] Dr. Purcell helped bring the feelings home. He would ask, 'What if that were your mother? What if you came home to find your mother in the same condition as [the victim's son] found his mother?' Contemplating those personalized questions was emotionally draining for me. I felt I had come to know the sadness, the loss, the suffering they each experienced. What if [the victim's children] had children of their own? They would never have their grandmother. My actions that sad day were so far reaching. Birthdays, holidays, they must be particularly difficult for each of them.

"When my own mother passed away on April 16, 1992, I knew, with a much greater degree of certainty, what all of them must have felt that day in 1974. [But] while I have a fairly good understanding of the moments leading up to my mother's last breath, they didn't have [even] that. I can't imagine them having total resolution with unanswered questions about their mother's death. I feel for them. I carry the guilt of having deprived them of so much potential happiness."

Through it all, or most of it, from the mid-'80s on, Penny was there for T.J. In another 2004 report to the psychiatrist conducting a pre-parole exam, T.J. wrote about Penny:

"Aside from my immediate family, my most significant and cherished relationship is with Penny. I was especially fortunate to have Penny in my life when I was going through group therapy and at the time of my mother's death. Admittedly, because all of my relationships prior to Penny were short ones, I was hesitant to be entirely trusting, but the longer our relationship continued, the more trusting I seemingly became. Like my group experience, I can be vulnerable with Penny. I can admit when I experience fear. I can cry. I need not ever worry about her thinking less of me... She saw and helped me understand that it wasn't until my mother passed away that I could finally mourn the deaths of both my parents."

Penny also wrote the psychiatrist. He quotes from her letter in his report:

"I have helped him to own his emotions and to realize that emotions were appropriate for people and prisoners to have. Yes, in prison there are times when exposing your emotions is dangerous, but that he needed to express them to people he could trust... The friends that he has picked to share with over the years have for the most part been ones that actually helped him to grow. The ones that he has been hurt by he understands that it is very much a normal part of life."

Few people are ever more deeply and systematically exposed than a prisoner who wants to heal, to move on, to seek parole. But to get where he is today, T.J., had to learn to let his defenses down more than the rest of us routinely do.


Growing up in prison

And could learning to do so be any more difficult than it must have been for a 15 year old with a history of drug abuse entering an adult prison, an inmate who kept secret the facts about two separate experiences of continuing sexual abuse for some 30 years while serving a 40 year sentence in prison? But he did it, and in the process became a paralegal and a member of the Mass Incarceration Committee of the National Lawyers' Guild, and is only a few credits short of a bachelor's degree.

Even prison guards who know T.J. laud him. Psychologist Alison Jones summarizes the remarks of one prison official for a pre-parole report on T.J. in 2008: "She knew him both at Coldwater and at J.C.F. She asserts that he is definitely a model prisoner, is very respectful towards prisoners and staff, and never has to be checked about anything. He was a geriatric aide for elderly prisoners when she knew him at Coldwater. He went way above and beyond his job duties and went out of his way to be helpful to others. She sees him as a very caring and compassionate person. Given the age when the crime occurred and the growth that has occurred over time, she feels that he could function well within society and that there is little more that the prison system has to offer him in terms of rehabilitation. She notes her perception that he has rehabilitated himself and grown up in prison. He has succeeded where many prisoners have failed. She notes that he did hard time and was able to overcome his circumstances and turn a negative into something positive."

But even after this report, it would be another six years before T.J. got out of prison. And the first day out he discovered that he wasn't done paying the state. The next day, T.J. and Penny were off getting a state ID for him, and getting him registered for Medicaid. Of course, the bureaucrats he encountered needed to know why he didn't already have ID, why he wasn't already registered for health care. Because this is my first full day out of prison in forty years, he told them.

People were cordial, he said. "Some of them just smiled and said 'welcome.'" But either way, both T.J. and Penny are going to take everything in stride. They know that he will keep paying in small ways for the crime he committed in 1974. But they also know that a new life is beginning for T.J., and that he has work to do; helping others understand what they have done and preparing themselves for freedom.