Rocky was quiet in many of the same ways that Michelle was quiet. In crowds or around new people. He was troubled, rebellious, but he loved the outdoors. Fishing, camping. It’s something he had in common with his dad. All of it, in fact: the outdoor stuff, the quiet, even his real name, Gordon, he shared with his father. The nickname had come from his dad when Rocky was a baby, a tribute to the boxer Rocky Marciano.
Gordon and his first wife, Linda, had three kids, of whom Rocky was the eldest. They lived, then, in Columbus, Ohio. Rocky had a younger brother named Mike and a younger sister named Kelly. The kids were close, but not overly. They fought, they hung out, they ignored one another, they protected one another. Mike and Kelly looked up to Rocky, their big brother.
If it’d been another time, another age, Gordon says he probably would have never married Linda. He’d spent four years in the Air Force and returned to find the sexual revolution in full swing in America. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” he told me. He says this with a stony face, devoid of pleasure or nostalgia. He found a girl, she got pregnant, and he forgot all about the sexual revolution. Went right back to his sense of being duty- and honor-bound, and figured the right thing to do was to marry the girl you got pregnant. “Her mother and father are saying, well, ‘The baby’s got to have a father.’ Which, now you’d say, ‘The baby’s got a father, big deal.’ [But] I went ahead and married her.” Not that he didn’t want the kids. He loved the kids, all three of them. Loved Rocky even after he became a handful.
When they divorced, Linda gave him full custody of all three kids. He had met someone at work pretty quickly after he and Linda separated. Sarah. (Linda did not want to go on the record with me, but she did claim Gordon and Sarah began dating while she and Gordon were still together.) His three kids would become Sarah’s. She’d raise them. She’d love them. She’d discipline them, too. Once, she remembers, back when they were still in Columbus, Rocky and Mike got into a fight in the living room. She says Rocky was picking at his brother relentlessly, until Mike finally blew up. “Mike got in trouble, and I said Gordon, it’s not Mike, it’s Rocky,” Sarah tells me. Mike was boisterous. Mike would yell, but Rocky was the real agitator. “He was always setting up the others to get in trouble,” she says.
Gordon and Sarah married in Ohio and two days later they moved with the three kids to Montana, where Gordon had a new job waiting for him. They didn’t give the kids any warning. Or Linda. They think now they should have talked to the kids about it, should have eased the way. Given them some time to get used to the idea, maybe even visit once. “It was probably not the smartest thing to do,” Sarah says. Linda said she had to hire a private investigator to find them. Gordon says she found them pretty much right away—his new boss was friends with his old coworkers. Yet still, her letters and cards were sporadic and it was five years before the kids saw Linda again.
“All the thinking, all the stuff that comes into your mind because you know—partly the Men Are From Mars thing—but I’ve always felt like there was something I could do to fix it and save the grandchildren,” Gordon says. “I keep coming back to the divorce. How can it not affect kids? But how many millions of kids are involved in divorces every year?”
Although the kids had always had some trouble with school, after the move Gordon and Sarah discovered the kids were further behind than they’d realized, and though they hired tutors, the kids remained behind. None of them wound up graduating. Gordon claims that Linda planted the kids in front of the television or dragged them around with her wherever she went during the day, shopping or whatever. “Instead of teaching them ABCs and all this, they hadn’t gotten any of that,” Gordon says. When I spoke with Linda she remembered things differently, of course. Gordon admits he was the kind of father who tended to avoid conflicts, rather than confront them. Even Sarah says Gordon never shows any emotion at all, until “something political comes on TV. And oh, man, the roof blows off the house. Anything that doesn’t directly impact our home, he’ll react to. But if it’s our home, our kids, whatever. No reaction,” she says. “Part of it is the era in which he grew up.”
“I have a master’s in avoidance,” Gordon says.
Rocky was in trouble after the move almost immediately. At twelve years old he was drinking excessively, engaging in petty thievery. He stole cassette tapes of bands he liked—Aerosmith, Black Sabbath. Once, he stole a bike. Sarah would find Mad Dog 20/20 bottles thrown over the fence into the weeds behind their backyard, and she’d know they’d come from Rocky. He was passive where Mike was aggressive. By seventh grade, Sarah and Gordon knew Rocky needed help.
They sent him to Pine Hills, the home for troubled boys.
They sent him to counseling.
Everyone zeroed in on the divorce, Gordon says. The therapists, the teachers at his school. Like it was the answer to everything: what went wrong, where Rocky went off the rails, why he started to drink so much that Sarah said his eyes would roll back in his head, tongue hanging out. But Gordon would think, How could this be? Once we were divorced the fighting was over. Wasn’t that something? In a family counseling session once, the therapist asked Rocky if he was sad his mother had left, and he said, “No. It was better.” Sarah turned to him and asked if he really believed that, and he said, “Yeah, it was better after she was gone because then we got to hang out with [Dad] more, but not have the big fighting between them.”
Even if it was the divorce and the sudden move, even if these were the places you could point to where things went wrong with Rocky, what about fixing whatever was broken inside him? The therapy. The live-in treatment. Wasn’t that Pine Hills’s entire mission? To fix their son? What did it matter where his pain and anger originated? What was it that made him drink at thirteen, fourteen years old until he was incoherent? Made him shoplift whatever he could get his hands on? Made him agree to rules they’d set out about curfews and alcohol, and then just flout them again and again, like he answered to no one? Sometimes Sarah thought Rocky’d been born without a conscience. He could be charming or manipulative, devious or adorable, funny or quiet. Gordon remembers one of the counselors for alcohol treatment saying to him, once, of Rocky, “Whatever he’s holding inside, he’s not giving up.”
Sarah tells me Rocky didn’t have a lot of trust for women. Didn’t really like them much. “I think when Linda did leave, they didn’t all really talk about it. Gordon and the kids. Linda and the kids. I think that had to have affected him, because he was the firstborn and he was the favorite,” Sarah says. Then she mentions their move, their sudden departure from Ohio to Montana. “When we all left, why didn’t [we] all talk about it?” It seems so ridiculous to her now. What were they afraid of? “Ridiculous” is not the right word. There is no word for it. Why did they not discuss it? All of it? As a family? In the blinding glare of hindsight, the horror they now live with, how could they have once believed that an open, honest conversation about something as common in this world as divorce or remarriage or moving to a new state was so bad it could not be addressed aloud? Would it have explained something to Rocky that he needed an explanation for? Would it have reset his pain somehow?
Both Sarah and Gordon say that Rocky never quite matured. When Michelle came into his life, she was so young, but then she became a mother, and she outgrew him. “That was never going to be understandable to him,” Gordon says. “She had grown so much and he hadn’t. And basically, the more you learn …” He stops. He wonders if the early drug and alcohol use impaired Rocky’s emotional development.
This is how they exist in the world today, Sarah and Gordon. Locked in a constant search for what they could have done. It’s the legacy of domestic violence homicide, a trauma embedded into entire swaths of families. What did we miss? They can’t even quite mourn Michelle and Kristy and Kyle, because their minds flip instantly to the fact that they should still be here. Kristy graduating from college; Kyle maybe declaring his major. Or out fishing with his aging dad. Michelle in nurse’s scrubs, leaning over some tiny newborn. They can’t escape the fact of what Rocky did. That final act eclipsing entirely who he was, whatever good he had in him.
Sarah told me once that on a camping trip about a year before the end, she had a moment where she just felt this unbelievable relief and gratitude that they’d survived as a family. All those terrible, chaotic teenage years, with Rocky in Pine Hills, and then later in jail in Texas, and Mike rebelling and all the fighting. Finally, finally, she thought, they were a normal family. But the memory now no longer holds. She can’t think back to that time without the magnetic pull of regret. What they might have missed, what might have been right under their noses.
They’re not responsible.
They know this intellectually
But they do not feel it emotionally.
“You just don’t want to go on,” Gordon tells me. “But you don’t have a choice.”
They live in this suspended state of grief. A kind of emotional purgatory. They know they are not alone in their sadness, in their rage, but they believe they are alone in their guilt. Michelle’s family carries all this, too. The rage, the sadness, but most of all the unbelievable, massive burden of guilt. What did we miss?
But you can’t miss what you don’t know to look for.
When Rocky brought Michelle home that first time, she was as quiet as he was, Sarah remembers. “She turned out to be really different,” she says. Different from Rocky’s quiet. “She talked a lot about how she knew people always thought quiet people were dumb. She knew that was what people thought of her, but unless she felt it was worth discussing something, she was quiet and took it all in.”
Michelle didn’t come around too much in those early days because Rocky had that trailer out in Lockwood. But right away Sarah and Gordon could see he was serious about this girl. When she got pregnant, they found out her real age and they were livid. If Michelle’s parents pressed charges, Sarah remembers telling him, “We won’t turn you in, but we won’t save you either.”
Michelle learned she was pregnant on her fifteenth birthday, in September 1993. The baby, Kristy, was due in April. Sally was outraged. She wanted to blame Paul for not watching closely enough. She wanted to blame Rocky for being with a fourteen-year-old. She wanted to blame Rocky’s parents. She wanted to blame herself. But none of that would solve this problem. Michelle said Rocky was a great guy. A great guy. They just had to give him a chance. They just had to know him like she knew him.
In December of 1993, Sally took her three girls to Minot, North Dakota, for the holidays. Michelle had a backache that they all believed came from the eight-hour car ride. But then Michelle couldn’t eat, she felt nauseated, and seemed to develop a fever. Sally got scared. Michelle was only six months along.
When they returned from Minot, Sally took Michelle to the hospital and told the nurses in the ward that her daughter was in labor. “I’d had three children. I knew what it meant, Michelle being in labor this early,” she tells me. But it was hours and hours before anyone came in to look at Michelle. Sally felt like the doctors didn’t take Michelle seriously because they saw her as just another throwaway teenage mother. It infuriated her. Michelle was in and out of the emergency room for the next two weeks.
When the hospital staff finally realized Michelle truly was in labor it was too late to stop it. The baby was coming. No one knew if it would be born alive or not. Sally was terrified. For her daughter, for her grandchild. When the baby eventually came, it was a girl with lungs so tiny and undeveloped she was put into the NICU and no one knew if she’d make it through the night, let alone the week, the month, her life. They named her Kristy Lynn. She had Rocky’s last name, Mosure. She was a genetic mirror of her young mother, sharply defined upper lip, pale, searching eyes.
Kristy was practically the size of a teacup. And Michelle watched hour after hour, day after day, as the nurses tended to her tiny daughter, pumping air into her lungs, monitoring her, talking to her. To Michelle, it wasn’t the machines keeping her daughter alive or the doctors or even her, really. It was the nurses. They were miracle workers. Kristy stayed in the hospital for months. Stayed, in fact, until Michelle’s actual due date, when she was released still on oxygen and still being monitored by a machine to the care of Michelle and Sally. Michelle and her new daughter moved into Michelle’s childhood bedroom upstairs in Sally’s house. Every day, Rocky would be over there with them. Sally had to give him this. He came around; he called. She wouldn’t let him live there, but she let him come every day, all day. Devoted, worried, trying to help in whatever way he could. Sally didn’t like him much still, but she respected his dedication. And Michelle and Rocky did seem to be in love—with each other and with their new child.