Paul Monson’s house has an open floor plan, living room to dining room, dining room through kitchen. The grandkids run through here, he tells me. Kristy and Kyle, that was the first thing they did when they used to visit. Storm through the house like little lunatics. Kristy and Kyle were Rocky and Michelle’s kids.
Paul is from Minot, North Dakota. Came to Montana for work. His father died long ago. His stepfather, Gil, owned Lunder’s Kiddyland, a traveling carnival, and before that he was a farmer. Paul calls him an “anything-for-a-buck guy.” Michelle loved her grandparents.
“A lot of times people think girls go after guys who are like their dad,” Paul says. “But I can’t see anything like me in Rocky.”
Maybe Rocky’s energy attracted Michelle, Paul says. Or maybe it was that she was an adolescent when they met, while Rocky, who looked much younger than his age, twenty-four, had access to an adult world that was new to her. His own place, booze, no authority demanding obedience from him. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant at fourteen, hadn’t had Kristy at fifteen, if he hadn’t been so much older, their romance may well have gone the way of most teenage romances. High drama, deep infatuation, and then nothing. Move on to someone else. “I think he was old enough that he wanted to get things nailed down,” Paul says. “Get a family going and stuff.”
Paul says he and Michelle ate lunch together nearly every day. He worked nearby and took his midday break at her house, and he doubts Rocky ever knew. “I’d take my lunch over there and she’d have Springer on the TV and we’d sit there and watch it,” he says. “I was closer to her than the other girls. I don’t know why. She was close to me, too.”
Paul reaches over, then, to a pile of homemade DVDs held together with a rubber band. He says they are for me to take, copies he made in advance of my visit. Home movies. Rocky used to film everything, year after year, particularly the camping trips they took as a family, pretty much every weekend. Rather than special occasions, holidays, birthdays, that sort of thing, the DVDs mostly show the everyday life of Michelle and Kristy and Kyle. Paul says he watched them all. More than once. He was searching for clues, anything that might have suggested what was to come, but there was nothing. They looked like any old family. Kristy, three years old, sitting on the couch watching cartoons. Kyle, child’s fishing rod in hand, standing at the edge of a stream trying to catch a fish. Multiple videos of Michelle asleep in bed, woken up by a camera, and her husband calling to her from behind the lens. There were no clues, Paul says. It will be several years before I bring myself to watch them.
Paul’s ex-wife, Sally Sjaastad, didn’t know Rocky much better than Paul did, even in all the years he was around. The couple’s two older daughters, Alyssa and Michelle, had gone to live with Paul when they were fifteen and fourteen, respectively. Sally and Paul had divorced years earlier—when Michelle was eight—and mostly the girls had lived with Sally. But when their teenage years hit, the girls discovered a freedom at their dad’s house that simply didn’t exist with their mom.
Sometimes Sally would call Paul and he’d have no idea where the girls were, or he’d say, “They’re at so-and-so’s house,” and she’d drive by and they wouldn’t be there. Once, Paul gave her an address that turned out to be the halfway house for boys coming out of Pine Hills and transitioning back to the real world. Boys with addiction problems or behavioral issues. Boys too young for jail, but too dangerous—to themselves, to others—to stay at home. Pine Hills was a live-in facility for troubled boys. A place well known to Sally because she did vocational rehabilitation for the state of Montana; she helped people who had disabilities, tried to find them work.
She pulled up that night in front of the transitional house, furious, searching for Michelle, who was just thirteen or fourteen at the time. The man who answered confirmed that Michelle had been there, but had gone off with a boy named Cody. Sally fumed. My daughter, she told the man, is not allowed to come here again. Ever. Michelle turned up three hours later.
Another time Sally pulled up in front of Paul’s house and saw a green hatchback parked out front. A car she didn’t know. She knocked on the door and no one answered. But she could see movement in the house, so she knocked harder. Again, no answer. She left, and came back a little while later. Same thing. She hollered through the crack in the door that if they didn’t answer, she’d call the cops. That worked. Michelle opened the door. There was a young man there, with shaggy, layered hair, in jeans and a T-shirt. He had a strong jaw, like he’d spent his life clenching it. Full lips, and acne scars on his cheeks. It was the first time Sally met Rocky. He seemed shy, wouldn’t make eye contact with her. She told him he needed to go, that he couldn’t be there when Michelle’s dad wasn’t home. He mumbled something to her about how he’d been just about to leave.
Later, Sally told Paul that the boy was too old for Michelle. She didn’t know how old he was, but any boy old enough to have his own car was a boy too old for fourteen-year-old Michelle. She thought they’d solved the problem then, she and Paul. Thought Rocky was out of Michelle’s life. She never imagined Michelle would disobey her; in Sally’s mind, Michelle was still her little girl, the one who did chores without asking and never skipped school. Michelle had never been the rebellious type. When it came time to grow up, which happened far sooner than any of them would have wanted, she did. Grew straight up into an adult. Missed most of her teen years entirely.
Rocky was a wiry guy, five foot five, and high-strung, jittery. Energetic. (His family describes him slightly differently, as quiet and sometimes devious, also on the shy side.) Before he shot himself, he took the videos, packed them in a bag, and put them in the garage. He wanted to be sure they’d be saved. Homage to a happy American family. If it’d all gone as planned, that might have been the story that survived. A Great American Tragedy. He’d written a message on his arms. No one was meant to see it, and no one can exactly remember what it said. Something like I deserve to go to hell.
The dents in Paul’s front door, he says, are from a time Rocky tried to beat it down to get to Michelle. But at the time that didn’t really register to him as violent, not dangerously so. It’s the kind of violence that seems so difficult to evaluate in the moment, but crystal-clear in hindsight—which is to say that this is precisely what domestic violence looks like. Paul is hardly alone in his failure to register the portent of it. But imagine it’s not Rocky at Paul’s front door, beating at it, kicking it, screaming for a woman inside. Imagine it’s a stranger. Who wouldn’t call the police? Who wouldn’t try to intervene to stop the violence? And yet when it comes to people we know, people we see in other contexts—as fathers, brothers, sons, cousins, mothers, whatever—we have trouble registering the violence. Now Paul says he’d intervene, he’d do something. Take the law into his own hands somehow. It’s a Montana thing, the libertarian, individualist culture of the place. He doesn’t trust the system. Doesn’t think the police really did much to save his daughter. Or the prosecutor. “One thing I want to tell you that’ll give you insight into Montana,” Paul says. When he asked for the autopsies of the family, the coroner said he could release only those related to Paul by blood. Michelle, Kristy, Kyle. But not Rocky. But when Rocky’s father, Gordon Mosure, asked, he got them. All four of them. “The point is the view that the man owns it,” he told me. The patriarchy sets the rules. Paul shakes his head. “The more you think about it, the more it’ll piss you off,” he says. He pulls out a brown accordion file and shows me the three autopsy reports he managed to get. Kyle’s report begins, “This young boy is received … with blood … saturating the clothes.” The coroner noted that the decedent had recently eaten gummy candy. Kristy’s report said her gunshot wound followed a “pattern of metallic snow.” Her heart weighed 180 grams.
I point to a plaque in Paul’s living room. It’s slightly off-kilter, hanging by itself on a large white wall. Engraved with Michelle’s high school graduation. Billings Senior High School class of 1997. By then she was already living with Rocky and had two kids under the age of three, and she still graduated on time. She gave birth to Kyle a year after Kristy. She’d transferred to a high school for—as Paul puts it—“the kids who had kids,” about six blocks past her old school. She’d have a stroller, both kids in it, and she’d have to push it uphill in Montana’s harsh winters. “I remember seeing her do that and I think that was pretty remarkable.” This is the moment Paul’s been dreading. Bows his head. He’s holding the plaque now. He’s gotten up, taken it down from his wall, and is cradling it. He takes one hand and gently wipes across the top, cleaning the dust off. Then his hand trails down the front, eyes spilling over. He sucks in his breath, trying to gather himself together. This is why parents like him don’t talk to me, men in particular. They’ll do anything to avoid this moment.
Sally Sjaastad is different. I have spent hours with her, over the course of several years. She preserves her daughter’s life in some measure by talking about her, by recounting and remembering all she can. She keeps everything of Michelle and the children, letters and art the kids made for her on holidays, notes from Michelle when she was young, stories about the murders from the local press. She drives me past the school Kristy and Kyle attended, where a rock and a bench with their names are a permanent marker to their memory. Sally says she aged overnight after the murders, gained seventeen pounds in four months, looked worn down and crumpled. When she shows me a picture of herself from when Michelle was alive, I don’t recognize her even after she points herself out. I’ve found, in the face of overwhelming tragedy, that women often talk and talk, and men fall silent. Sally carries a swirl of memories like a nest around her; Paul holds those memories like stones inside him.
Michelle had always seemed to Sally to have a sense of responsibility beyond her years. She’d mow the lawn, wash the dishes, vacuum the carpet, all without being asked. One year she and her sisters worked the cotton candy machine and some of the games at Lunder’s Kiddyland, and Michelle took the twenty dollars she’d made and stuck it in an envelope with a card that said it was to help her mom with groceries and other expenses. When Sally opened it, she broke down crying.
“It would have been very easy for [Michelle] to quit [school],” Paul tells me. His voice is quiet, a little ragged. He wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand. “I wasn’t proud of her for getting pregnant, but I was pretty proud of that. She didn’t give up.”
Women like Michelle Monson Mosure share this steadfastness. A determination and resoluteness to keep themselves and their children alive by any means possible. They don’t quit. They stay in abusive marriages because they understand something that most of us do not, something from the inside out, something that seems to defy logic: as dangerous as it is in their homes, it is almost always far more dangerous to leave. Many of them plan, like Michelle did. They stay. They bide their time. They keep their children safe. They balance, poised, on the front lines. Hypervigilant, and patient, in a constant scan for when they can slip away intact. They do it for as long as they possibly can.