Mothers of murder victims speak out against death penalty
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PABLO — Marietta Jaeger Lane’s life changed forever in 1973 when her daughter Susie was kidnapped and killed, as was Carolyn Madplume’s when her daughter Catherine was murdered in 2005.
Lane and Madplume shared their stories at an event called Beyond Repair — True Stories of the Death Penalty.
The women spoke at the late Louis Caye Building on Salish Kootenai College campus Oct. 4 at a meeting sponsored by the Flathead Reservation Human Rights Task Force. Even though both women have lost children violently, they are opposed to the death penalty.
Telling her daughter’s story, Lane said the family camping trip to Montana in 1973 was a dream vacation — a vacation they would talk about for the rest of their lives. After a week driving from Michigan, the Jaegers met her parents at the Missouri Headwaters State Park campground about four miles northeast of Three Forks. They spent three days at the campground. The last day the family visited Lewis and Clark caves and turned in early to get a good start the next morning.
Lane said she went into the tent to kiss her children good night. Susie, 7, was over in the corner barricaded by camping gear so she leaned over her older daughter’s sleeping bag to just barely brush her lips over Susie’s cheek. Susie got out of her sleeping bag to come give her mom a real good night kiss.
“I praise God for that lovely memory,” Lane said.
That night Susie was kidnapped. There was a slit in the tent near where her head had been, and the two stuffed animals Susie slept with were found outside the tent.
After a week, the kidnapper made a ransom call to the wife of one of the deputies. He identified Susie by her “humpy fingernails,” index fingernails that were thickened and rounded. The kidnapper demanded $50,000 and wanted the money left in a bus station in Denver, Colo. However, the man did not specify which locker or bus station and didn’t say when.
The Jaegers gathered the money “as best they could,” Lane said. After another week they held a press conference to say they were ready and to ask the kidnapper to contact them.
The Jaeger family stayed in the campground. Lane said it was hard to sit at the picnic table and “watch, wait, wonder, pray and hope.” She credits Montana folks with coming to sit with the family, bringing food and games for the kids, and taking the other children to their ranches and farms, even on a raft trip to get them out of the campground. “Strings of people fingertip to fingertip” searched the campground and nearby areas, area pilots flew and the sheriff’s office was dragging the river.
Lane said she had been brought up in a home where she was told God would get mad at her if she got angry, but finally one day she got in touch with her rage, intense and stressful, and it came roiling up. She allowed herself to think about what she would do to the kidnapper.
“I knew I would kill this man with my bare hands and a smile on my face,” Lane remembered.
However, Lane said she was called by her faith to give up the hatred.
“I gave God permission to change my heart from fury to forgiveness,” Lane said although she wasn’t even sure it was humanly possible.
After three months, when the Jaeger family had finally gone back to Michigan, the kidnapper called again and spoke with Jaeger’s oldest son. He said he still wanted to exchange Susie for the money but didn’t know how to do that without being captured. Lane struggled through the holiday season, trying to make Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas wonderful for her other children and continued to try to forgive the kidnapper.
“Forgiveness takes daily diligent discipline; it’s hard work,” Lane explained. “I had a whole year to make that journey. I made it by constantly reminding myself that in God’s eyes, the kidnapper was just as precious as my little girl.”
A day before the one-year anniversary of Susie’s kidnapping a Montana newspaper did an interview with Lane in which she said she would give anything for a chance to talk to the kidnapper.
In the middle of the night at the exact time he’d kidnapped Susie the year before, the kidnapper phoned Lane. Lane believed the kidnapper had called to taunt her, but he wasn’t counting on Lane’s “feelings of genuine compassion and concern for him.” She told him she had been praying for him every day.
During the conversation, the kidnapper revealed enough information about the crime for the FBI to figure out who he was even though it took another three months to gather evidence. The FBI had put a tape recorder on the phone which Lane activated before she talked to the kidnapper for over an hour.
The kidnapper called again three months later and “totally incriminated himself,” Lane said. Again, the phone call was taped.
Although the kidnapper had been a suspect originally, he had passed both a polygraph test and a truth serum test.
Now the FBI had sufficient concrete evidence and issued a warrant for his arrest. They found physical evidence that Susie’s life had been taken two weeks after she’d been kidnapped.
The next morning the kidnapper, “a very sick young man, a serial child killer” was arrested, Lane said.
Since Michigan did not have the death penalty, Lane had not considered what might happen to the kidnapper.
She did not want him put to death because she believes all life is sacred.
“The death penalty certainly wouldn’t change what happened to Susie. There would be just another death and another family grieving,” she said.
The kidnapper confessed to Susie’s death and several other deaths and then took his own life four hours after his confession.
“I just feel called to honor Susie’s memory by working against the death penalty,” Lane explained. “It demeans our own dignity and worth when we take on the same mindset of someone who kills.”
Madplume agreed and said, “If you are trying to get over the hurt of your loved one, if you take them and put them (murderers) to death, you’ve got another life on your head. … Your loved one wouldn’t want it.”
Madplume’s daughter Catherine and her boyfriend Gerald Sirucek were murdered on Feb. 3, 2005, near Allentown. Catherine, 20, was to have graduated from Two Eagle River School on May 22, 2005. Instead, her mother received her diploma posthumously. Police believe the murders stemmed from an attempt to steal $200 in student loan money from Sirucek.
Rachel Carroll and Denver Henderson, staff members from the Montana Abolition Coalition, were present with literature on the organization as well as postcards for audience members to send to Governor Schweitzer if they chose. Stamped envelopes were handed out for those who pledged to send a hand-written letter to a legislator.
Lane and Diana Cote spoke at another meeting held at the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church on Oct. 6. Cote’s daughter Tasheena was murdered in her home on May 29, 2007, in her home in Arlee.
