If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.
—Frank A. Clark
On the morning of the first day of Dad’s trial, we all arrived together at the courthouse—my grandparents, my cousins, me, and my siblings. There was a mob of media, but I found a quiet spot, away from the crowd of cameras and bright lights on the courthouse steps. Aunt Susan came over and put her arm around me and gave me a hug. I looked at her and said, in the most happy and confident tone I could strike, “Where’s Mom?” She should be here, I thought. We shouldn’t go in without her.
God, the look on Susan’s face. Now that I’m an adult, I think I understand that the worst feeling in the world is when you can’t help a kid who is in pain. Aunt Susan just gave me another big hug, and nothing was really said. And then it dawned on me that I’d asked a stupid question. But a part of me really expected that asking that question would lead to Mom walking around the corner and showing up.
Today, being in the public eye is a piece of cake. A few years back, after one of my snaps was a little off and another led to a blocked punt against the Miami Dolphins, the Eagles were bringing in long snappers for tryouts. The media crowded around my locker, asking how it felt for my job to be in jeopardy. Man, I wanted to say, this is nothing. Try being tailed by cameras to and from a courthouse at twelve to testify against your dad in his murder trial.
You’re insecure to begin with at twelve; add to that the knowledge that the world really did seem to be watching. The media scrutiny made me feel vulnerable, embarrassed, and ashamed. One morning, I missed the bus and set out to walk to school. Remember that scene in Home Alone, when Macaulay Culkin is walking back home carrying groceries and Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern—Harry and Marv—are slowly following him in their van, stopping whenever he stops, inching forward as he walks? The same exact thing happened to me that morning. A news van would slowly follow me and stop when I stopped. I can still hear the tires rolling over gravel, and I remember hearing the van idling when I’d stop. I was, like, Is this really happening right now? I’m Kevin from Home Alone. Only my mom wasn’t ever coming home.
The trial began on October 22. Once, when there was a break in jury selection, I was sitting by myself on a bench in a hallway outside the courtroom. One of the prosecutors, Becky Roe, knelt down, so we were eye-to-eye. She asked if I’d be willing to testify. She was very kind, and made me feel like whatever I said would be okay. “You were the only one home that night,” she said. “I’ll just ask you questions and you just answer honestly.”
“If it helps end this, I’ll do whatever it takes,” I said.
Inside the courtroom, I was in a perpetual fog. Remember the wah-wah-wah of the teacher’s voice in the Peanuts cartoon? Everyone was speaking like that around me. I didn’t fall asleep, but someone would say it’s lunchtime, and I’d realize I’d been zoning out all morning.
Still, there were things that stood out. A guard brought my dad into the courtroom. He was wearing a suit. The guard removed his handcuffs before he sat down. Dad looked stone-faced and didn’t make eye contact with us. When Hank Corscadden, the other prosecutor, rose to make the state’s opening argument, it was the first time I heard a lot of the details from that night. As he went on, I shrank further and further, frozen into myself.
“Your Honor, counsel, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “August second, 1992. Some of you folks might have been out on boats on Lake Washington. Some people might have been watching hydros, some people might have been along the shores of Lake Washington watching the Blue Angels. It was also unfortunately the last day of the life of Kathy Dorenbos.”
He went on to set the scene: Randy had gone to basketball camp. Krissy was in California. I was playing in the yard of a neighbor. Mom and Dad spent the day working in our yard.
“About eight o’clock there was a phone call from a woman,” he said. “You will hear the testimony. Her name is Jody Lentz. The defendant spoke with that woman about eight o’clock in the evening. He was apparently under the belief that he was the only one at home. The defendant told Jody Lentz he was alone. But he also heard someone pick up the phone. The conversation ended. Shortly thereafter there was an argument in the garage at the Dorenboses’ house. We don’t know exactly what was said. We do know that only one person walked out of that garage.”
Then came the first time I heard the grisly details: Mom had been hit on the head some nine to eleven times with a bench grinder. After I went to bed, the prosecutor explained, Mom was wrapped in a pink blanket and Dad spent the night packing her in the trunk of our Maxima and cleaning the garage. He scrubbed the floor and painted over blood spots. But there were traces of blood left on the floor, the wall, and the Maxima’s tires. Dad put the sledgehammer and bench grinder—I remember the phrase “implements of death”—in the trunk, with Mom’s body. Next, the prosecutor revealed there would be a witness called.
“You will also hear from a gentleman who is a neighbor friend, Jim Brown,” he told the jury. “He will tell you that he came over to the Dorenboses’ house that night and the garage doors were closed. Jon was playing on the computer and he was told Kathy was out for a walk. He will tell you that the defendant was acting very strangely. The van was out front; the family car, the Maxima, was not. The garage doors were closed. The defendant escorted Mr. Brown to the door. In fact, the defendant escorted Mr. Brown back to his car, which he had driven to the Dorenboses’ residence… The next morning the defendant called Jody Lentz again. He then drove over to the King County Police Department with his wife in the trunk.”
I guess I heard most of that, but you know what? At twelve years old, while I was living this nightmare, a lot of it didn’t register. It sounds kind of crazy to say now, but I remember having the feeling—even then—that this was all going to work out and Dad would be coming home.
When Dad’s lawyer, Anthony Savage, rose to give the defense’s version of the case, I had an inkling of what was to come. One night, I overheard my grandparents and Aunt Susan talking downstairs. Dad’s defense was going to be “self-defense”—I remember the phrase—because it could knock down the length of his sentence. After all, the trial wasn’t to determine if he’d killed Mom. He’d turned himself in. It was to figure out how much time he’d do.
So there were two theories. The prosecution made it sound like Dad was having an affair with Jody Lentz—her kids were in Little League with me—and when Mom picked up the phone and heard them talking, all hell broke loose. Now the defense was about to maintain that Mom and Dad fought because Mom didn’t want Randy taking the family van to camp, and when Dad disagreed, she went ballistic on him—part of a story that, literally, no one else could testify to, not us kids, or any of Mom and Dad’s friends and relatives.
Savage told the jury we were looked on as a stable, loving, tight-knit family. But, he said, looks could be deceiving. All was not well—which was news to Randy, Krissy, and me. “The marriage was undergoing some stress at this time,” he told the jury. “There was talk between Mr. Dorenbos and his wife that come fall she would go get an apartment and leave him and the children in the family home. Whether or not that ever was going to come about or how long, all of that was brought to a sudden end on August second, but at least there was conversation between the husband and wife to that effect. There is no history of abuse, physical abuse, between the parties.”
Wait, what? Mom and Dad were going to separate? “Mr. Dorenbos will testify as probably the last witness in the case; he will tell you that it was family practice when the mother and father got into any disputes, they would go and have them outside the presence of the children and that these were shouting matches only,” Savage continued. “But other than shouting and disagreements, they lived as contentedly as a husband and wife can. It will be Mr. Dorenbos’s testimony that at least in his opinion his wife suffered from lack of self-esteem. One of the problems between the two of them over a period of years was her feeling, whether deserved or not, that he was on occasion, you know, cutting her, particularly with the children in terms of allowing them to do things, countermanding her requests or her orders, things of this nature. This was a source of some discontent between the two of them.”
That’s what happened on August 2, Savage said. Mom—who we’d never heard lose it—had gone ballistic on Dad. Seriously?
“On the day in question, she took one of the boys up to go off to athletic camp,” Savage said. “There was a mix-up about which cars or which of the vans were going to be used to transport the kids. After Mr. and Mrs. Dorenbos got back from their particular episode, which really didn’t mean much at all to him, they worked around the yard. They got a light supper of some kind. He was in the garage. Along toward dusk his wife came out and confronted him with an accusation that in dealing with the boy earlier in the afternoon he had, you know, cut her authority, made her look less in the eyes of the boy, accusations of some kind. And Mr. Dorenbos was, again—I don’t want to suggest that was a daily thing, but he was more or less used to this and waited for the storm to pass, and it did not.”
I remember putting my head in my hands and looking at my shoes. “For the first time in his married life with Mrs. Dorenbos, it began to escalate to the point where she grabbed a hammer and began advancing on him, striking and yelling as loud as she could,” Savage said. “She couldn’t stand it any longer. The actions of Mr. Dorenbos will be detailed by him but in reaction to his wife coming at him in a violent mood with a weapon in her hand, from the steps that he took to prevent him from being harmed to stop his wife from utilizing the weapon. And he will in painful detail relate those to you. But as Mr. Corscadden says, at the end of all this Mrs. Dorenbos was dead.”
What followed, Savage said, were acts of “confused thinking” on Dad’s part—and not evidence of consciousness of guilt. “The first thought he had was of his son that was going to come home,” he said. “He did not want the boy to see his mother and he didn’t want any of the children to see the situation in the garage, which had in the escalation of the fight resulted in bloodstains, articles dislodged, and things of this nature. He did indeed close the garage, waiting for his son to return home… The next morning, having attended to his son, he took the body of his wife, put it in the trunk of the automobile, took everything that he thought might be of evidentiary value, and put it in the car and drove to the police station, where he, in a demeanor of emotional hysteria, crying, sobbing, insisted on telling the police what happened the previous night.”
Soon it was my turn. When I was being sworn in to testify, I was asked to raise my right hand. I’m left-handed; when my left shot up, the judge stage-whispered, “Your other right.” My stomach sank. My hands were slippery with sweat as I stared down and mumbled answers to Becky Roe’s questions; more than once, the judge reminded me to “please raise your voice when you talk so the jurors in the back of the courtroom can hear.”
Q: Jonathan, can you describe the relationship between your folks as you observed it?
A: I think from what I observed they were living a very happy life.
Q: It seemed real happy to you?
A: Yes.
Q: Were there sometimes arguments?
A: Yeah, not really serious. Just kind of—
Q: What kind of stuff do you remember, anything in particular?
A: No.
Q: Based on your going back and forth to your friends’ houses, did the kind of arguments that happened at your house seem any worse or any more often than anyplace else?
A: No.
Q: Did you ever observe your parents get into any sort of physically violent argument with one another?
A: No.
Q: And did you ever observe them get in yelling or screaming matches?
A: No.
Q: Pretty typical arguments as far as you ever saw?
A: Yes.
Q: During any periods of time on Sunday that you were home, what do you remember your parents doing that day?
A: Normal things, just work and kitchen stuff, like that.
Q: Do you remember any particular sorts of arguments or did anything sort of seem unusual or angry between them?
A: No.
My testimony, in effect, was the same as Randy’s, Mr. Brown’s, and all of Mom’s friends. The idea that Mom could be abusive to Dad, that she would come at him because they disagreed about the use of the van? That’s freakin’ crazy, the desperate story of a desperate guy. I was still in a fog every day in that courtroom, but I knew that everything was building to Dad’s testimony.
First, though, there was a different hurdle to get over. John, our therapist, sat Krissy and me down in a courthouse conference room. I could tell by his frown that this was going to be some serious shit.
“They’re gonna show the autopsy photos of your mom in court tomorrow,” he said. “And what that means is, after your dad killed her, he brought her to the police station in a sleeping bag in the trunk of the car, and they took her out of the sleeping bag and they laid her on a table, and they cleaned her up and they took pictures of whatever injuries she had, to try and find exactly how she died.”
He explained that we would be excused from the courtroom when the photos are shown. “But I want you guys to have the choice whether you want to see those pictures or not,” he said.
Over the objection of the prosecutor, he arranged for us to have a private viewing of the autopsy photos that afternoon. We’d be the first minors in the state of Washington given such a showing.
We were driven to the prosecutor’s office in downtown Seattle, and we sat in this big, cold, empty conference room. Everything was dark around me except where I was sitting. And a woman walked in, and she put a folder on the table. And she looked at our therapist and she said, “I just don’t understand this, but here you go.”
John sat in a chair, picked up the folder, and said, “I’m gonna walk outside. I don’t even care if you look at this. Don’t do it for me. Do it for you. If you don’t want to look, don’t. All I want is for you guys to have the choice. You might be a thirty-year-old man and a thirty-three-year-old woman who may want to have a relationship with your dad. And right now that’s a really unpopular thing to think about. I get that. But I also know how forgiveness works, and how the world works. So if you guys want to look at this, you’ll never, ever ask yourself what happened. Ever. And if you decide to sit in a coffee shop with your dad and have the conversation and it gets brought up why, or what happened, even if he’s on his deathbed, then you’ll have seen it, and you’ll never need to ask the question. And so it is totally up to you guys.”
He stood up and left. My sister and I just sat there. And I reached for the folder. And I opened the folder. And I saw my mom’s autopsy photos. She was missing a big part of her head. But of all the major injuries Mom had, I’ll never forget the pictures of her hands. To this day, it’s not the gashes on her face or the missing part of her brain that brings me to tears. It’s that she had little, tiny bruises on her knuckles and her hands. Those were the hits that she took while she was trying to protect herself. I remember paying close attention to the pictures of her hands.
Now here I am, in my late thirties. And I’m so glad I saw those photos. Because I know what happened, and, like John said, God bless him, when I do come face-to-face with my dad, I’ll have no questions about what he did.
After we looked at the photos, our therapist knew we needed a release. He drove us to a cliff off Puget Sound, and he said, “Just scream. As loud as you can. Just scream for as long as you want and as loud as you can.” And that’s what my sister and I did. We held each other’s hand, we stood on a cliff, and we just screamed. We could hear our pain echoing all around us. I can’t tell you if it was five minutes or seven hours. It felt so good to just scream. To let it all out.
I don’t know if John planned it this way, but seeing those photos—if only briefly—and screaming into the universe from that cliff was good preparation for sitting through Dad’s testimony. I don’t know, maybe I was starting to wake up. Things weren’t going to be okay. Dad wasn’t going to come home. Mom was gone. Forever.
When he took the stand, Dad didn’t look at us. He testified that Mom hadn’t been happy, and they were talking about separating in the fall. That she’d get an apartment, leaving us with him in the house. His lawyer asked if he or Mom ever lost their temper. He said he didn’t. But when it came to Mom?
“I don’t know if I’d be describing it correctly,” he said. “She did something. I don’t know if you’d call it losing a temper. There were a number of incidents where she would become what I thought was fairly hysterical. She would make fists and lock her arms straight and she would be swinging them all over the place and screaming, ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ feet were stomping.” That’s what happened, he said, on the last day of her life. She got agitated when he said it would be okay for Randy to take the family van to basketball camp: “She clenched her fists and her face, and said, ‘You’re never doing what I’m telling you to.’ And then she started saying something that wasn’t coherent.”
Later, he testified, around 7:30, while I was out playing, Mom had another such episode. As I sat there, listening, guilt washed over me. If only I’d have come home earlier, I thought. Maybe she’d still be alive.
“She started screaming, ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ ” Dad said. “She’d stomp her feet. Her arms were swinging. I noticed there was a little claw hammer that we used for hanging pictures in her hand.”
Dad said he got the hammer from her, but as they wrestled, she was reaching toward the shelf above her head for a sledgehammer. They struggled over the sledgehammer. “I was trying to hold it away from both of us,” he said. “Her head was moving up and down real rapidly and it caught her twice.”
He said he saw blood coming from her head. They continued to struggle when he saw the bench grinder on the shelf. “I panicked,” he said. “I thought someone was going to get seriously hurt. I grabbed the grinder and I struck her, trying to knock her out.” Dad’s voice was catching, but he wasn’t in tears. Then there was this:
Q: After your wife had fallen to the floor and you had fallen with her, what happened?
A: I swore at her.
Q: For what reason?
A: Because I was furious. And then I looked at her and I could see she wasn’t moving. And you could see part of her brain was exposed right where the grinder hit her.
Q: What did you do?
A: I put my hand on her and put my face up against hers, and she wasn’t breathing, she wasn’t moving. I couldn’t feel her heart in the back. And I just said, “Don’t leave us.”
Dad really only got emotional when Becky Roe cross-examined him, maybe because his story was being exposed. She pointed out to him that no one had ever witnessed Mom throwing a fit like he claimed—and even he, in his statements to police the day after he killed her, never mentioned anything about Mom having a fit or coming at him aggressively, with or without a claw hammer. Then there was this exchange, which stayed with me:
Q: You talked about Kathy separating and moving out because she felt that she was not capable of handling the kids because they were older, and she didn’t feel she could control them anymore. What sort of issues were prompting that? The jury has seen two of your three children here. What kind of out-of-control behavior are you purporting Kathy believed she couldn’t deal with?
A: It had to do with a sense of being needed.
Q: That’s a little different, isn’t it, than kids being out of control and her believing she couldn’t control their behavior?
A: It had more to do with a sense of the fact that she felt that the children didn’t need her anymore.
Q: So since she felt the kids were getting older and didn’t need her anymore, it’s your testimony now that that’s part of the reason she was willing to leave the house, leave you and the kids in the house and move out?
A: That is correct.
Before she was done with him, Roe referenced the testimony from a neighbor who spoke about how Mom and Dad were excitedly talking about Mom going with Dad on an upcoming business trip, and she made sure to get my dad to admit that Jody Lentz was the only corroborating witness he had, the only person he had spoken to about this idea of Mom having these tantrums and moving out. Oh, and when Dad, saying that he took responsibility for what happened to Mom, claimed that, in their struggle, a chain saw must have fallen on her, Roe had had enough: “Chain saws falling on her. How much responsibility is that really taking?”
I don’t remember hearing the judge sentence my father to thirteen years. But I wrote in my journal that I thought it was fair. Now that the trial was over, I wrote two letters in my journal, one to Mom and one to Dad. The one to Dad reads:
Dear Dad,
Someday I would like to know the real truth about my mothers death, wether it is now or 19 years from now. I want to know. I also would like to know what was going on between you and Jody Lentz.
I was elected on an 8th grade basketball team. I’m on Aaron Harper’s team. Larry Harper is the coach. The team name is the Clippers.
Dad I feel angry and embarrassed to be on the news and front page of the newspaper for what happened. But I also love you very much and am proud to have been Kathy Dorenbos’s son.
Love you, your son,
Jonathan Dorenbos
The other one, dated November 2, 1992, breaks my heart to this day:
Dear Mom,
Dad was found guilty, if your wondering. If what Dad said was true, that you thought Randy, Krissy and I didn’t need you, you were wrong.
If things were bothering you why didn’t you talk to us. Not trying to be rude or anything, the worst thing for you is to keep strong feelings inside of you, because you will get stressed out and yell at people for no reason. Or maybe you have a reason, I don’t no. You might get hurt or you will hurt someone else.
Someday, Mom, I will be in heaven and I will ask you what happened.
Thank you for the best 12 years of my life. Thank you for helping in my school (Cottage Lake), being a great helpful citizen to Woodinville and many more things you did to help other people. I wished you could have done things for yourself like finishing college and start your own business. You were the best mother any person could want. I love you a whole bunch Mom!!
Love, your loving son,
Jonathan
The trial over, I remember thinking: Now what? For the last three months, everything had been leading to the trial. Now I’d seen Dad taken away. Mom was gone. And both were facts I had to keep being reminded of. Krissy and I were seeing John three days a week for therapy. We had a lot of work to do.