Redemption

Reflections by Ronald Nye

In the months leading up to his retirement in 1975, my dad drove back and forth between Kansas and Oklahoma on weekends, testing for and passing his real estate licensing exam. As soon as his retirement party was over, he left for Oklahoma City to find and buy a house for his family, away from Kansas, no longer wanting to live in the state he had faithfully served over a forty-year career; one that turned its back on him in the shadow of political vengeance.

My dad was never the same afterwards. He was never able to share one word about what had happened to him, or what else he might have known, but the whole family felt his pain. He never again carried himself quite the same way, with the proud bearing of a KBI agent who served not just his state, but his country. He lived out the balance of his life a broken man and passed away in 2003.

When you work around people every day and see the things that happen to them, as I have—situations that would make most people sick to their stomach or be stricken with grief—you learn to suppress your instinctive response and just do what needs to be done.

For me, twenty years of working in a hospital filled up all the spaces inside me where I stored those feelings. My dad did the same thing for almost forty years. That should tell you what kind of amazing man he was.

As he grew older, though, his life experiences had finally filled all the space he had, and he found it nearly impossible to repress his emotions. He would cry when hearing anything despondent on the news, or even while watching a “sad” movie on TV. He simply had no place left inside where he could push his feelings to. My dad was a brave man who did the hard things that life threw at him in the face of danger and violence, but he never once turned his back when it came to serving the people he had taken an oath to protect.

Figure 55. Joyce Nye

My mother, ever the faithful and supportive wife, loved Kansas with all her heart. She was born in the small town of Oakley, and never really adapted to life in Oklahoma. Kansas was her home.

Sometime after Dad died my mother suffered a heart attack. She was so frail when she finally left the hospital that I couldn’t let her live alone, all on her own, so I set her up in an assisted-living center near my home where we could visit often.

When the State of Kansas sued us over my father’s personal journals, we were shocked to find that my mother and sister were also named as defendants, two people who had nothing at all to do with it. But Kansas, in a final stroke of injustice to my father’s career, chose to round up whoever they could in the first of countless intimidation tactics.

Because my mother was named as a defendant, I had to read her the essence of the complaint. Reciting the State’s terrible accusations against me and my father, I watched my mom’s eyes glisten with tears, seeing in them confirmation of the suspicions she’d always harbored about the KBI. Sobbing with grief, she said, “But I don’t understand. I had all those boxes shredded years ago. Why are they doing this?”

When I told her of the State’s specious accusations that Dad’s journals had been “stolen” and that both he and I were “liars,” her spirit simply folded. Once a strong and proud woman, she no longer had the will to defend herself or her family. She could not get the fact of being sued out of her mind, and had great difficulty resting at night. Unable to sleep, she would pace the halls of the center all night long, wearing out two pairs of shoes a month. As time passed and things did not get resolved, she slept fewer and fewer hours each day.

Early one morning the nurse went in to give Mom her medication and found that she had died in her sleep. Her heart had just given out.

My mother literally died a heartbroken woman, without ever knowing that her husband had done nothing wrong. The State of Kansas, whose judicial system ultimately ruled convincingly in our favor, had cleared Harold Nye’s good name.

It was just too late.