ONE

Jill and Larry

Jill Lonita Billiot and her only sibling, Marc, weren’t exactly the Smothers Brothers, but at least as far as she was concerned they shared a common experience with television’s famous singing comedy team: sibling rivalry. She was jealous of her baby brother and convinced that her parents loved him more than their only daughter.

Eventually, as an adult with children of her own, she would confide to a reporter for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News: “I was raised that women were to entertain, to get married, and have babies.”

Jill’s father, Henry Albert Billiot, was a New Orleans-area towboat captain who worked the waterways of the world’s largest and busiest port city. He was owner and operator of his own business, Billiot Tug Boat. Her father traces his ancestry to the Houma Indians. Billiot is an especially common name around New Orleans and Houma (population 30,000), seat of local government in Terrebonne Parish, fifty miles southwest of New Orleans in the middle of the Louisiana Bayou country. In fact, seven bayous converge in the town, and there are so many canals and bridges that tourism promoters and many locals call it the “Venice of America.”

Established in 1834, only nineteen years after the Battle of New Orleans, the bustling seafood-packing and shipping center’s name is taken from the Houma tribe, which is now settled in Terrebonne and La-Fourche parishes in southeast Louisiana. The name of the small tribe and the closely-related Chakchiuma homma can be translated as the “Red Crawfish (People).”

Although Jill’s father’s family roots are sunk deeply into Louisiana’s crawfish and alligator country, her mother is a native Midwesterner from a state that proudly touts itself on license plates and tourism brochures as the “Crossroads of America.”

She grew up as Juanita Engelman, and traced her ancestry to hardy Germans who settled in the rich, fertile farm country of northern Indiana. Some family members and other acquaintances who were on a friendly basis with her shortened her first name when addressing her and called her “Nita.” When her children were born Nita Billiot was a full-time New Orleans housewife.

By her own admission, after Jill matured and began her marrying ways, she altered her birth-date, gradually advancing it a year or two at a time into the early 1950s. But she was probably born during one of the most momentous periods of America’s history, while World War II was raging, either on June 11, 1943, or on the same day and month a year later in 1944.

The little dark-haired, dark-eyed girl was as brown and feisty as one of the crawfish that prowled the Louisiana bayous and canals, but she arrived too late to remember the war years and homefront hardships like ration books and shortages of gasoline, tires, and silk stockings. By the time she was old enough to begin elementary school, the American economy was experiencing the immediate post-war boom years and the country was already confronting the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Jill was far too young to worry about such convoluted problems as the economy and the Cold War, however. Her world was smaller, more warm and secure. And until the arrival of her brother, Marc, it appeared she was at the center of her parents’ world as well.

Before and after the squalling interloper made his appearance however, Jill’s world was filled with the odor of spicy Cajun cooking, as well as with fried chicken and dumplings prepared Indiana-style. She learned early how to crack the shell of a blue crab or snap open a crawfish steamed bright red before sucking out the sweet pale meat and juices. As she grew up she was also taught in Sunday school about Jesus and the Ten Commandments; she grappled with the three R’s; played with dolls; and competed for attention with a younger brother she may not have liked at all.

Her home was in one of the most colorfully exotic locations in the country. Despite its catchy nicknames such as the “Queen City of the South” and the “Crescent City,” (because of the way it’s snuggled between the scythe-shaped shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain and lazy loops of the Mississippi River) New Orleans has a bawdy history that few cities can match. Since the 1987 release of Hollywood’s sexy crime thriller, The Big Easy, which was set there, New Orleans has become more firmly attached to its most popular modern nickname. Somehow, in many ways, the “Big Easy” seems more appropriate today than its longtime predecessors.

The city of a half-million people sprawls between the huge lake and the serpentine meanderings of the country’s grandest river as it nears the end of its journey in the Gulf of Mexico. Tourism authorities would prefer that potential visitors associate their community with positive images like the fine seafood and other savory cuisine epitomized by the famous chef, Paul Prudhomme and his colleagues, along with standard local favorites like black iron skillet corn bread, blackened redfish, Cajun seafood jambalaya, turtle soup, and Louisiana pecan pie.

The history of jazz in New Orleans is another source of civic pride and the city sponsors an annual Jazz Fest that attracts enthusiasts from all over the world. One of America’s most captivating and enduring music forms, jazz was born on Basin Street and adjoining arteries in what is now the French Quarter. The Queen City has produced or nurtured the careers of a long line of musical geniuses ranging from pianist Jelly Roll Morton (Ferdinand LeMenthe) to Joseph “King” Oliver with his hot cornet; from the famous trumpeter and scratch-voiced vocalist Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong to fellow trumpet player Al Hirt.

The unique colonial and antebellum architecture, which includes some of the most elegant examples of wrought-iron courtyard gates and iron-lace balconies and balustrades in the world, is yet another aspect of the city that local movers and shakers are especially proud of. Even the otherworldly shadowland of the above-ground cemeteries, with their historical tombs laid out in blunt, flat, simple slabs and their showpiece elaborate sculptured monuments draw tourists with curiosities whetted by the unique blend of the artistic and the macabre.

New Orleans earned a reputation for wet graves centuries ago because of its high water table. Many early settlers buried their dead only after boring holes in the coffin then lowering it into the moist ground where a couple of slaves stood on it until it filled with water and settled into its final resting place.

Wealthier residents of the old city, repulsed at the idea of after-death immersion, began burying their loved ones in wall vaults and stone sepulchres anchored only a few inches into the ground. Sealed in stone, the corpses didn’t share the wet graves of their predecessors. Under the hot southern sun, they baked inside their stone ovens instead.

For decades, the unique burial vaults in century-old graveyards like the Garden District’s Lafayette Cemetery Number One were a huge tourist attraction. Spontaneous tours of some of the more notable graveyards have been stifled in recent years, however, by hoodlums from nearby public housing projects who have taken to mugging and raping unwary tourists wandering around the ancient burial grounds.

The Mardi Gras in New Orleans, of course, is famous throughout the world. The annual celebration attracts thousands of tourists to the city and surrounding communities before its raucous windup on Shrove Tuesday, or Fat Tuesday, the final day before the beginning of Lent.

But mention New Orleans and serious historians as well as many other people are likely to think of Storyville, which was the Queen City’s notorious official red-light district for roughly twenty years before it was closed by the US Department of the Navy in 1917 and absorbed by the rough-and-tumble Vieux Carré, the French Quarter. The exotic old neighborhood is synonymous with New Orleans as the slightly sinister playground of generations of flatboatmen, sailors, and tourists.

Voodoo was a part of the New Orleans mystique even before Storyville. The mysterious and menacing blend of West African animism and shamanism with Roman Catholicism is the stuff of legend as well as religion in New Orleans. And no historical character has been so closely related with the mystical rites, magic, and lore of voodoo than a series of menacing priestesses collectively known as Marie LaVeau.

The original Marie, a beautiful free mulatto who worked as a hairdresser for elegant white ladies and arranged sex orgies for rich white men when she wasn’t concocting magical spells, is believed to be buried at the foot of Basin Street in Cemetery Number One. A few years after she passed the mantle of voodoo queen on to a successor, the occupants of the city’s ubiquitous brothels and crib houses were still doing such big business with the spell peddlers that members of a so-called benevolent association of madams got together and officially agreed not to use the voodoo women against each other.

The Crescent City’s dark side has been well chronicled in literature, film, and song, much more so than its record of positive accomplishments. Director Louis Malle’s blockbuster movie, Pretty Baby, starred young Brooke Shields as a child prostitute in a Storyville brothel and the movie launched her career. A few years earlier, country music crooner Bobby Bare scored big with a hit single that was a comic version of a Marie LaVeau story penned by former Playboy cartoonist, author, and composer Shel Silverstein.

The New Orleans that Jill grew up in had undergone massive changes since the days of Storyville and the birth of jazz, but they weren’t all necessarily improvements. New Orleans was still a rough-and-tumble rivertown populated by people whose appetites were often too big and their tempers too short for their own good. Although the brothels and crib houses of Storyville closed long ago, prostitutes of both sexes were still more easily available than parking spaces on many of the streets. The opium that Storyville whores and their clients smoked in private had been replaced by heroin—later cocaine—that was openly available from street peddlers in the same neighborhoods.

As late as 1993, when Jill was having serious trouble of her own with the law, her hometown was tagged with the unofficial title, “Murder Capital USA.” New Orleans took the title from Washington, DC, which had held the dubious distinction as the nation’s most violent city for four years in a row.

New Orleans eased the nation’s capital out of the top spot for cities of 250,000 population or more by recording 389 homicides. According to the FBI statistics and the most recent census figures, that worked out to 78.2 murders per 100,000 people. Most of the slayings occurred in and around public housing projects, and a large number involved narcotics.

Washington, DC, which is a larger city and actually had more slayings, 467, came in a close second, with 76.6 homicides per 100,000 of population. Detroit ran a distant third. By mid-1994, a concerned bar owner in the French Quarter was keeping a public tally sheet comparing homicides in New Orleans with those in Boston, a city with approximately the same population. The kill rate in New Orleans was running more than five to one ahead of homicides in Boston.

But when Jill was a girl growing up in the New Orleans area, it was not nearly as violent. When she was fifteen years old and her family was living on Yetta Avenue in Metairie, a bedroom community of 172,000 snuggled between the New Orleans International Airport and the western edge of the Crescent City between Lake Pontchartrain and the river, she moved out of her family home. The teenager traveled north to live with her maternal grandparents in northwest Indiana’s tranquil farm country.

The Englemans lived just outside Servia, an unincorporated village at the intersection of Nehr and Klutz roads about a ten-minute drive southeast of North Manchester. Servia is a smattering of a half-dozen or so houses surrounded by farm fields and cow pastures that makes the bucolic North Manchester look like a metropolis by comparison.

North Manchester, which became the new center of Jill’s school and social life, is a quiet little farming community and college town that is about as different from New Orleans as it can be. Once the site of a village of Potawatomi Indians, and roamed even earlier by Miami tribesmen, the area welcomed its first white settlers in 1834. That was barely eighteen years after the state, which English settlers named for the “Land of the Indians,” was admitted to the union.

Many of the families living in North Manchester when Jill arrived still traced their ethnic roots to Great Britain and Germany. The ancestors of most were hardy farmers who made their living by tilling the soil. Dairy cattle, hogs, and poultry are important elements of the local agricultural industry.

During the growing season Wabash County fields are filled with wheat, hay, oats, corn, sorghum, soybeans, and a variety of other crops. Many farmers double-crop, planting and harvesting wheat and other grains early in the season, then sneaking in fast-growing yields of sunflowers that successfully resist early frosts for late-season harvests.

The town of roughly 5,000 people is also a center for the Church of the Brethren and its immediate offshoots, including the United Brethren Church. The United Brethren founded a seminary in 1816, which eventually became Manchester College, and was operated by the Church of the Brethren. Today it hosts about 1,400 students and is one of six Brethren-related co-educational colleges of liberal arts and sciences. The Brethren also sponsor a graduate school, Bethany Theological Seminary, in Illinois.

The Brethren organized in 1708 in Schwarzenau, Germany, after breaking away from the Lutheran Church. Within roughly twenty years almost all of them had emigrated to the United States. Also referred to in their early days as “Dunkers” or “Dunkards,” because of their practice of baptizing members by threefold immersion, they are one of the historic peace churches along with the Quakers and the Mennonites. Even during World War II, many young Brethren men refused military service as conscientious objectors. Some of the more pious still refuse to press lawsuits.

The quiet and unadorned lifestyle followed by some of the more conservative members of the Brethren and German Baptist neighbors is still obvious in North Manchester. German Baptist women lend an Old World charm to the community as they attend church services, do their shopping, and tend to other activities and chores dressed in simple blue or white ankle-length dresses set off with delicate plain white bonnets.

North Manchester’s most famous citizen was Thomas R. Marshall, governor of Indiana from 1909 to 1913, and vice-president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. Marshall served with Woodrow Wilson during the first World War.

Many of Jill’s new schoolmates in the junior class at North Manchester High School were farm kids who did the chores in the mornings before boarding buses and heading for school. In the afternoon and evening after returning home they did more chores. They fed, watered, milked, and cleaned up after cows; slopped hogs; gathered eggs; pitched hay; and helped out with the cooking and cleaning. On weekends and during spring and summer breaks, children drove tractors, hauled combines, or maneuvered shovels and hoes in the fields alongside brothers and sisters and parents.

For fun, they paired off and dated at nearby drive-in theaters, went on hayrides, and skated at area rinks. But the most popular recreation for North Manchester teenagers was provided by the high-school basketball and football teams. There was little that could compare with packing the stands around the football field on a crisp late September or October night to cheer on the Squires while chewing on popcorn or hot dogs and sipping fresh, sweet apple cider.

During the fierce northern Indiana winters the Squires moved indoors and exchanged their bulky football gear for T-shirts and shorts to test their prowess on the basketball court against prep squads from Cherubusco, Columbia City, Rochester, Tippecanoe Valley, Wabash, and other nearby communities. Once or twice a year the Squires squared off against one of the big-town high schools in Fort Wayne. The schoolmates of the players, along with many of the town’s adults, filled the gymnasium with their cheers.

On winter weekends, if Manchester College was playing home games, they could also assemble to watch the Spartans match their football and basketball skills against teams from other small Midwest schools such as the Rose Hulman Institute in Terre Haute, Ball State in Muncie, and Rockford College in Illinois.

North Manchester High was a small school in a small town, and Jill didn’t slip in unnoticed by the other teenagers. She exploded on the high-school dating scene like a rocket. Although she was not necessarily prettier, or more attractive than most of the other girls, there was something about the combination of teenage charm, vivaciousness, her Southern accent, and the exotic locale of her former home that made the local teenage males sit up and pay attention. “All the boys were attracted to her like a magnet, and of course most of the girls hated her for that reason,” Nancy Reed, her best friend from those high-school days, recalled years later.

When Jill posed for her junior picture in the 1961 edition of the school yearbook, The Crest, her dark curly hair was swept back from her forehead and was well above her shoulders. The features in her oval face were even, and her high, full cheekbones gave her a slightly plump appearance that was misleading.

Her photo was the last picture in the second row of the first page showing the junior class. The photos were arranged alphabetically, and her picture and name appeared between those of classmates Nancy Bickel and Allen Bitzell. Judging by the pictures of the neatly-dressed, well-groomed boys and girls, they represented a good cross section of wholesome Midwest American teenagers. There was nothing about any of the photos to indicate any of the juniors were destined to become especially famous—or notorious.

Jill’s photo didn’t appear with her classmates at North Manchester High School during their senior year. By the time the 1962 edition of The Crest was distributed and the graduating class began passing personal copies around to friends for autographs, Jill had interrupted her formal education to get married.

She eloped with Larry Eugene Ihnen, a rural North Manchester boy with a freshly-scrubbed handsomeness who graduated a year ahead of her with the class of ’61. Larry’s last name was pronounced “Ee-nan.” His senior appearance in the 1961 edition of The Crest was unique. Other graduating seniors had lists of extracurricular activities with everything from football, basketball, and track, to the student council, class play, dance band, speech, Spanish and science clubs, or the National Honor Society. After four years of high school, Larry didn’t have a single entry. Jill, apparently, was his primary extracurricular activity, at least during much of his senior year.

Judging solely by the photographs, he might easily have passed for the youngest of all the students in the graduating class. Wearing a light-colored sports jacket with a dark bow tie for his senior photo, the baby-faced schoolboy with the neatly trimmed dark hair could have been mistaken for a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old.

The young couple were joined in holy matrimony by the Reverend William A. Nangle, pastor of the United Methodist Church in the county seat town of Wabash about fifteen miles almost due south of North Manchester. It was July 24, a couple of months after the groom’s high-school graduation.

Jill wore street clothes for the ceremony. She explained to a Denver newspaper reporter years later that she didn’t have a big wedding and wear a white gown because white was for virgins. And she didn’t qualify.

On the couple’s application for a marriage license, Jill listed “student” as her occupation. Larry indicated he was an apprentice bricklayer. The eighteen-year-old groom’s parents were divorced, and his mother, Donas L. Armey, signed her consent for the marriage. In the space on the application for consent of parents or guardian, Jill indicated that her father and mother were also divorced. There was no consent signature for the seventeen-year-old bride.

Like Jill, Larry was born under the sign of the twins, Gemini. His birthday was May 28, 1943, just less than one year and two weeks before hers. According to people who put store in such things, the birthdays of the bride and the groom indicated that they would be ambitious, alert, intelligent—and temperamental.

The teenage wedding may or may not have been fated by the stars to occur, but it was virtually unnoticed back in North Manchester. Page-one stories in the town’s local newspaper, The News-Journal were devoted to a tornado that ripped through the nearby communities of Tippecanoe Lake and Goshen; high-school journalism students attending a workshop at Indiana University; a new budget adopted by the North Manchester Church of the Brethren; and a national story about President John F. Kennedy threatening Russia over the Cuban missile crisis.

There wasn’t a word about the wedding that day in that issue of the paper, or in any subsequent editions.

The teenagers quietly moved into a mobile home at Cleveland’s Trailer Court on the outskirts of Manchester. Larry went to work laying bricks. Jill found herself a job at the Heckman Bindery, one of North Manchester’s most dependable and largest employers.

Whether or not it was moodiness or crabbiness on the part of the young bride, the groom, or both, the ill-fated marriage quickly shattered. The teenagers lived together less than a year before breaking up in March 1962. Larry moved in with his mother on Packerton Road in an area a mile or so out of town known as Damrod Heights. Jill continued to live in the trailer. Represented by a local law firm, Plummer & Plummer, she obtained a restraining order on March 7, preventing her husband from bothering her at her home or elsewhere. Wabash Circuit Court Judge John W. Beauchamp signed the order.

In her petition for divorce filed in the circuit court in Wabash, Jill also asked that her husband be directed to pay her attorney fees and half of the approximately $280 the couple had in a joint savings account with the Indiana Lawrence Bank & Trust company in North Manchester. She noted that she was a housewife and factory worker and said she had no funds to pay for the cost of the divorce.

Jill accused her husband of the catch-all offense of cruel and inhuman treatment and said it was no longer possible for them to live together as husband and wife. She also asked for restoration of her maiden name, Billiot.

Larry filed a cross-complaint claiming it was he who was the victim of cruel and inhuman treatment. He was represented by attorney Sarah Kelton Browne of North Manchester, and he agreed that he and his wife could no longer live together.

On June 12, a couple of weeks after the graduation of Jill’s former classmates at North Manchester High School, her marriage was formally dissolved. Jill dropped her complaint and the divorce was granted to her husband. Her maiden name was restored. The young couple had been married a few weeks short of a year.

Like the hurried wedding, the divorce of the former high-school sweethearts attracted little more than a whisper of attention from their neighbors and acquaintances. For awhile, Jill hung onto her job at the bindery while she put her disappointing marriage behind her. But she wasn’t going to settle for very long for the life-numbing existence of a high-school dropout who lived in a trailer and worked at a dead-end job in a factory.

She was barely eighteen, single again, and just beginning to burst into the full bloom of her beauty and power as a mature woman. She was ready for challenge, romance, and adventure.