Crime
When a Loved One Is Murdered
In 1976 a serial killer broke into my house and strangled my girlfriend. I eventually found happiness again—but not peace of mind.
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At some point I suddenly remembered the missing windowpane and realized what it meant. For a few months Dianne and I had rented a room to a friend of mine from high school. The last month he lived with us he lost his key, and instead of getting a new one, he would enter the house through his bedroom window, unlocking it by taking out a loose pane. I never got the window fixed after he left. One day while Dianne and I were out, he returned to pick up some of his things, entering in the usual manner. When we got home he was still there, and he had a friend with him, a guy named Lyle he'd met on a construction job. I didn't like his looks. His eyes were cold.
About a week later the ex-roommate found out that Lyle was out on bail for rape. Although he was shocked, the two remained drinking buddies. My old friend had a drinking problem, but I'd never taken it seriously. I'd never fixed the window either. Now I realized that my own negligence had played a role in Dianne's death. Guilt like that lasts a lifetime.
Sometime between midnight and dawn, I was informed that the killer had been arrested. His full name was Lyle Richard Brummett, of Kerrville. He admitted murdering Dianne. He also confessed to killing other women.
Lyle Brummett is a serial killer, though that term was not widely used in 1976. Because a federally imposed moratorium was still in effect then, there was no death penalty, a fact that I regret to this day. The district attorney approved a plea bargain in exchange for two life sentences.
Brummett was eligible for parole in 2000. He was denied it but will be eligible again next year. I remain in touch with the Victim Services Division of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which keeps me informed of all upcoming hearing dates and also makes sure that the members of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles are fully aware of the horrible crimes he has committed and the pain and loss he has inflicted on others. In the wake of his violent life, the world continues to be a lesser place.
I have a different life now. I've been married to Lois Richwine for more than seventeen years. We have a brilliant and beautiful eight-year-old son. It was Lois who rescued me from that black hole of despair, shock, and grief.
Beginning with that gig on August 16, 1976, I had an exciting and fulfilling music career. In the mid-eighties I started writing fiction and magazine features between gigs, and before long I was writing for a living and playing on the side. But it wasn't until 1999, when I was working on a memoir, that I wrote about Dianne's murder for the first time.
When I wrote about Dianne, her death and its effect on me, the words flowed like blood from a slashed artery. Not a day had passed that I hadn't thought of her—and the thoughts almost always triggered flashbacks, hallucinations, and terrible pangs of guilt.
If I expected a catharsis after I wrote about Dianne, it didn't work out that way. Things got worse. The situation came to a head near the end of summer 2001. So many people I knew died that season that I dubbed it my "summer of death." I finally started seeing a psychologist. She told me I had post-traumatic stress disorder and recommended a treatment called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR (see "The Eyes Have It," Texas Monthly, September 1998). The theory is that, during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the brain is sorting and filing information. A traumatic experience, such as a violent crime, can cause that filing system to go haywire. Memories of the event pile up and never get properly sorted out. Later on, something will trigger thoughts about the event, resulting in flashbacks and panic attacks.
In my EMDR therapy, the psychologist had me concentrate on specific painful memories while keeping my eyes trained on the repetitive movement of her hand, back and forth from left to right. It sounds kooky, I know, but I immediately started to feel a little better.
My mental state continued to improve over the next few weeks. Although the usual clichés about putting it behind you and time healing all wounds still seemed like empty lies to me, at least I could think of Dianne without automatically seeing the same horrible mental images I'd lived with for the past 25 years.
My fourth session with my therapist was the afternoon of Tuesday, September 11. As the terrible drama unfolded over the course of the day, and our friends in Manhattan were finally accounted for, it began to dawn on me that I was reacting to the event in a profoundly personal way. Thousands of innocent people had just been horribly murdered before the eyes of millions. Never in history had so many people witnessed an act of evil, monstrous violence at the same time. As the media attempted to define and describe the horror of what had just occurred, there seemed to be a collective sense of violation and loss of innocence. People said, "The world will never be the same again." And all I could think was Now you know how it feels. I've felt that way since August 1976.
Then a strange thing happened. I felt a sense of relief, of letting go. Certainly, it was partially the accumulation of my therapy sessions, which helped me break the spell of years of epic grief, but I think a significant part of the phenomenon was that I felt a rush of solidarity with all those people crying out in a single scream of anguish. My best attempt at an analogy is that it was like putting out an oil well fire with a blast of TNT.
I still have occasional nightmares and depression, but since my treatments, I've been able to remember Dianne and that time of my life with less pain and to think about her without automatically thinking of the monster who murdered her. It's something less than peace of mind, but I never asked for that—and anyway, I think I've learned to live without it.
Austin writer Jesse Sublett recently completed his memoir, Supercool.
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