It took me a long time to finally watch the home movies that Paul Monson had given me. Sally had told me how she’d watched the tapes over and over in the early days just to hear Michelle’s voice. And Paul had watched them multiple times, too, but there was nothing he could find, no aha moment that could explain why he’d lost his daughter and his grandchildren.
I held on to them for a long time, partly assuming I, too, wouldn’t see anything if Paul hadn’t. But also, if I’m honest, I dreaded seeing them. I wondered if maybe I didn’t want to see Rocky as a family man. Or I feared I would search them, like Paul has searched them, scanning for clues, and find nothing. Or the texture of their lives would remind me that Rocky and Michelle and her children were just like all of us, as frail, as vulnerable, as scared and angry and needy. And that any one of us, or our family members, friends, neighbors, is as capable as the next of being in the same situation Michelle was in. I’ve yet to meet any victim anywhere who doesn’t say some version of this to me: I’m not your typical victim.
But there was another reason, too. A reason writers and journalists like me don’t often admit: after all the time I spent with the surviving Monsons and Mosures, I felt the loss of Michelle and Kristy and Kyle and, yes, even Rocky in a way that was already reshaping my world, distorting my view. There was a period of time when it took a force of will for me to not look at every man I met as a possible abuser and every woman as a possible victim. This is not the way one wants to walk through life. I knew that. I know that. So before I watched the videos, I took an entire year off from anything having to do with violence. I worked out, and I read, and I painted, and I went to therapy, and I avoided abuse and homicide and police reports.
And finally, after that year, I returned to it all on a summer day not long ago. I was staying with friends, and I had the videos on my hard drive, and I began to watch. They were all out of order.
In the first one, I saw Kristy in pink sweats and that camo hoodie carried down those large boulders by her mom and then later on her father’s shoulders.
To his wife, Rocky says, “Smile, smile,” from behind the camera.
In another scene, Michelle is uncharacteristically drunk, wearing tan overall shorts, trying to stand up in their kitchen. Laughing her ass off. Rocky is laughing, too. He tells her to walk a straight line, then walk backward, then say her ABCs backward. She takes a sip of beer, spills some. He says, “We’ll check back in later.” As if he’s a reporter with breaking news. In the next shot she’s on the floor of the bathroom, still wasted, this time in her black underwear, which is pulled down to her hips. The scene is uncomfortably intimate. Invasive. He says, “Who did this to you?” He laughs. She grins, but her eyes are closed. “Leave me alone,” she says, over and over. Then there’s a split second where she’s naked on the toilet, and she’s been sick and he wants to film her throwing up into the toilet. She’s annoyed, but defenseless, her limbs splaying everywhere as she tries to hold herself up. He says, “We’ll come back, folks. We’ll come back to this.”
Every once in a while there is a clip from some Christmas or family event, more or less always at Sarah and Gordon’s house, but the vast majority of the videos are just the four of them, and most often camping. Rocky cajoles Kyle into jumping off a rock with him into the frigid water, but Kristy does not. Nor does he ask her. The gender expectations are already established. Later, Rocky sets up the video on a rock and there’s a rare shot of the four of them. Michelle and Kyle wear life vests. Kristy walks up to the camera, smiles, and says, “I’m eating an apple.” The apple is twice the size of her hand. It’s the most animated I’ve seen her. She was a quiet child. Observant, but not talkative. Kyle was the ham. Kristy walks toward her family. Rocky and Kyle jump off the rock together. Then a second later, Michelle jumps off. In the background, Michelle shrieks from the shock of the icy water, hiding behind the rock. The three of them leave Kristy standing alone on the rock with her apple.
The kids play in the hammock like larvae. Tom Petty bellows in the background, “Good love is hard to find.” Later, Rocky retrieves a towel from the bottom of a river. Saves the towel, and says, “It’s not cold, it’s warm,” over and over, mind over matter. “You just gotta psych yourself out.” He takes Kyle in the yellow inflatable canoe, down a small rapid, perpendicular to it. “Stupid,” Michelle yells to him. He straightens out. Long shots of the distant snow-capped mountains, a waterfall pouring down so far away it’s soundless. Kyle walks through the marsh grass in his life vest with the canoe paddle. There are long stretches where Kyle is the videographer and he zigzags with the camcorder as it blurs dizzily across the pebbled, rocky ground. “There’s bugs in the water,” Kyle says in his little-boy voice.
“Kyle, how much bugs is there in it?” Kristy says. They are beside a road; several cars speed by.
At home, the kids swing on a swing set in the backyard. It’s July 2001. Kyle swings so high the chains hiccup. Later on the couch, Kyle sits beside a baby eating green Popsicles. The TV is on. A commercial comes on, and the announcer says, “… to embrace life and over on her own terms.” The baby is a blond boy named Tyler, a neighbor’s baby.
Then Rocky has a garter snake from the backyard in a yellow bucket. “Where’s Kristy? I got a snake for her,” he says, walking through the house.
She screams from behind the bathroom door. “No, don’t, you’re scaring me.”
He laughs.
He holds up a Popsicle.
“Don’t,” she says. “It’s not funny.”
He laughs at her fear, hands her the Popsicle, and walks away with the bucket.
Then they’re camping again. Kristy throws branches in the fire. It smokes wildly. Michelle is filming. Rocky’s wearing a red T-shirt and jeans, drinking a beer. Kyle’s hollering for his dad’s attention while he swings on the hammock, “Daddy, watch. Watch. Daddy, watch.” AC/DC blares in the background. Sally said she remembers the constant heavy metal when she’d visit them. How it was always on so loud. Rocky frog leaps, one leg up, backward, toward Kyle, but he won’t turn around. Kyle leaps from the hammock, falls on all fours. Rocky glances toward him, but keeps up his frog jumping in a wide circle. Kyle climbs back in the hammock. “Daddy, watch. Watch!” Rocky plays air guitar, bangs his head to the drums. Circles back to Michelle, grimaces and arcs his face toward the lens. He looks momentarily menacing, but then he steps backward, smiling. He holds up the beer, gulps the rest of the bottle at once, Adam’s apple bobbing.
In between the camping videos, there is one DVD from when Alyssa, Michelle, and Melanie were small. Sometimes Melanie is there; other times it’s clear she’s not born yet. All three of them look alike and they look like Sally. Dominant upper lip, large round eyes, long faces. As babies and toddlers, Alyssa and Michelle are always in tandem. They dress up as clowns or cowgirls for Halloween. They feed each other cake on their birthdays. In one, Paul puts them both in a pile of leaves in the back of his pickup truck. Paul and Sally are still married back then, and Sally is in the background, thin and smiling, in curlers with a scarf around her head, or a Dorothy Hamill bob. The three girls take baths together, ride bikes and tricycles and Big Wheels, share a tiny grocery cart and push it around the living room. They play ring-around-the-rosy in the living room. Ashes, ashes, they all fall down.
Rocky had a tendency to film Michelle in her underwear. Her legs are long and lean. He films close-ups of her ass all through the years, the male gaze at its most sophomoric. She offers up an occasional rebuff, asking him to leave her alone, but for the most part she seems to just simply ignore him, knowing the camera will pan elsewhere eventually. As in cinema, this objectification—woman as an erotic form for the filmmaker or viewer—underscored the power dynamic in their relationship. He does what she does not want him to do. He continues to do it despite her objections. Finally, she concedes to his power and he, as he expected all along, wins. I am tempted, of course, to avoid reading too much into these moments, to throw up my hands and say, “Oh, come now. They’re just family movies. He was just teasing.” I also consider how ceding power to another person does not happen in a vacuum. It’s a slow erosion over time. Step by step, moment by moment, whittling away until a person no longer feels like a person. For Michelle, the loss of power was so complete and so obvious to me—from his disallowing her economic opportunity, to filming her body in parts and pieces, and all the way to his eventually taking her life. Why is it not okay that he filmed her over and over and over in her underwear?
Because she asked him to stop.
And he didn’t.
And eventually she gave up asking.
This is loss of power at its most elemental.
There is a rare moment where Michelle is behind the camera. She’s filming Kyle on his bike in the woods, zooming through a small clearing. She catches Rocky making his way down the rocks, shirtless, a towel over his shoulders, cigarette dangling from his mouth. His hair is blond-tipped from a summer of camping in the sun. When he reaches her, he asks her something inaudible, something like what is that? She says, coyly, “My evidence.”
It’s a fraction of a second. Still, I don’t know how Paul missed it. Rocky comes at her, his lip curled in a grimace. He mouths something like motherfucker, and his right arm swings out—toward the camera or toward her, and the tape cuts in that instant. But you see the flash of anger. Instant and raw. There is no lightness in his body, no gesture toward play. His arm, fast as a whip, goes for her and the camera goes black. I watch again, trying to slow the scene. It’s unmistakable. His face, in a nanosecond, turns beastly. His arm snaps toward her. And the Pavlovian response to the moment isn’t just Rocky’s. It’s Michelle’s, too. Turning off the camera in one practiced movement. Exit viewer. I call a friend into my office, and don’t offer him any context. “Watch this,” I say to him, “and tell me what you think happens next.”
It’s only maybe two seconds long in total. A sneeze and you’d miss it. We watch together, my friend Don and I. I’ve seen it now three, four, five times.
“Holy shit,” Don says when he sees it.
The final DVD from Michelle’s dad was labeled Mosure Family 2001 Last Tape. There is more camping and Kristy and Kyle sitting on the couch watching TV. There’s Rocky unhooking a fish from their line, his jaws working as if he’s chewing something. And a small blow-up swimming pool in their backyard in which a tiny duck swims. “Ducky,” Kristy says to the duck, trying to pet it. “I went underwater and you freaked me out!” Later, I see a turtle walking across their front yard. Rocky’s white car is parked diagonally across the lawn, next to a scooter on its side. There’s no hood on the car. Then there are silent videos of the Mustang Rocky was forever working on in their garage.
The tape picks up again, but there’s no telling how much time has passed. Weeks. Months. It’s Kristy in purple, Michelle again behind the camera, watching as her little girl’s head is trained toward the ground, standing at the water’s edge. Kristy takes a few hesitant steps. She walks up so that just her tippy toes are in the water. And she stays there.
Then they’re in a cave. It’s September of 2001.
Michelle’s wearing cut-off jean shorts. “Even in all this darkness,” Rocky says, panning from the cave walls to his wife’s ass, “show your mom what she really looks like.”
The last scene of the video shows a hexagon-shaped cage. And inside the cage a snake is curled up, with its view trained on the camera, its upper body in an S curve. It has dark brown diamonds on its back, a thick middle body in the foreground. Rattlesnake. It’s tight as a ribbon inside its enclosure, far too big for where it’s landed. Rocky is filming, the kids’ voices in the background. Rocky takes one finger from his left hand, taps on the glass five or six times. The snake doesn’t move anything but its eyelids, lazily, slowly, watching that finger tap, tap, tap. Its tongue flickers a few times, but it appears nonplussed by the human trying to catch its attention. Then, all of a sudden … snap! The snake bangs the glass and reels back so quickly you don’t even see the move. All you hear is the thump. “Wooo,” Rocky says, saved by the glass barrier. Daddy always lives. “Crazy.”
It’s the final image on the videos. The snake. The tap, tap, tapping, Rocky showing his power over a thing that in another landscape, could kill him in an instant.
Rocky’s voice.
“Crazy.”
And then nothing.