Crash Into Me_ A Survivor's Search for Justice - Liz Seccuro [77]
I buried myself in my work once again. There was a profound happiness in my renewed productivity, and in doing good work for my clients. I resumed therapy. It was a different “normal,” but it was my normal nonetheless. Mike was considering asking for his old job back. Ava was joyous and had begun kindergarten around Labor Day. Life was good.
One day in mid-September 2007, I was sitting in my office when the phone rang. I answered in my usual lilt, “Hello, Dolce Parties!” I heard a click and a hollow sound. I almost hung up—yet another telemarketer. But I paused. And a tinny, canned, prerecorded voice informed me that my “offender would be released from the Charlottesville-Albemarle jail on September 14.” I slammed the phone down in a panic. Certainly, this couldn’t be true. Some error in the automated victim notification system. He had just gone to prison! I began dialing furiously: my husband, Chief Longo, Claude Worrell, Jeffrey Lenert in probation. Lenert was the one who picked up. Yes, it was true. I asked how that could possibly be, but he said he did not know. It was simply “computed” that way.
Worrell called me back. He hadn’t heard the news, but promised to get more information. Chief Longo called next—he hadn’t heard anything, either. No one at corrections could confirm why or when. Finally, Worrell called again. There had been a “computer error.” William Beebe’s data had not been entered into the system properly. He had not been classified as a violent offender, and thus was still sitting in the regional jail, not one of the maximum security facilities we had expected. Due to this lack of classification, his lack of a prior criminal record, his good behavior, and the fact that the regional jail was at 150 percent capacity, Beebe was being released. Just like that, a two-year recommendation for a felony sentence had boiled down to five months and change.
But there was nothing we could do now. Beebe had served his sentence, regardless of the administrative issues surrounding his release. He was released on September 14, just as the automated call had warned. News crews showed photographs of a long-haired, goateed man who looked nothing like the defendant in the courtroom over five months ago. As Beebe regained his freedom, I again lost a sense of mine. This didn’t feel like justice, but this was the result of our system—a good system, if flawed. I saw no reason to continue to fight this. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life mired in thoughts of William Beebe. At this point, only I could make this feel right, and I wanted something good to come of it. I focused on how I could make a difference for other survivors.
And with that resolve, my life began anew.
EPILOGUE
Hope, Joy, and the Continuing Fight
What does it sound like when your planet crashes wide open? For me, it was the skittery, papery pffft of an envelope sliding across my lap as I sat in the passenger seat of my car in my driveway. It was a letter. It was Thursday, September 5, 2005, when my past came skidding into my present, and at that precise moment, I realized that my day-to-day existence would change. I knew instinctively, with certainty, what that envelope contained, and yet I opened it. I was curious. Curious to know why, who, what, when? And although my life did change, at the end of the day I still don’t think I have the answers. What happened to me that night in 1984 is ultimately unknowable, no matter how many people raise their right hands and swear to tell the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth. But I have come to believe that living with that—the unknowable— is the brave part.
What I am able to know, I am able to forgive. To a