Natalie Goldberg in her book on memoir “The Long Road Home” said that the difference between passion and obsession was that obsession was painful. I sorted through the materials I’d collected into my Scrivener binder. I glanced at the picture of Stephen Gilmore I pulled off Facebook. Stephen was Patty Vance’s first boyfriend; he was my second. Stealing him from her — if such a thing were possible — was my first betrayal of the friendship. He was striking when we met in 1976, and in his Facebook photograph, he still cut an arresting figure. In the photograph, he is surrounded by men of various ages and a woman who is perhaps his mother. The men looked as though they were in their twenties and I wondered if they might be his sons. Part of me wanted to “friend” him. Yet, my first impulse to search for him was because I had this fleeting suspicion he might be the perpetrator, the man who murdered Patty.
It felt deceitful to “friend” him as if my motives were a corruption of the word somehow. We hadn’t made contact in forty years though he made one half-hearted attempt many years after we’d broken up. The end came after he chased me through the streets of San Francisco after an argument, and I was truly frightened. I resorted to pulling the shoes off my feet so I could run faster. I darted six blocks before I felt safe enough to hide in the alcove of a flat. I squeezed myself into a corner out of eyeshot from the street. I sat with my knees to my chest, shivering from the cold marble tile. Only then did I realize one of my feet was bleeding.
Stephen was spotted by my mother twenty years later staring up into the window of her apartment. When she confronted him — now much heavier and greying at the temples, she’d noted — he said he was wondering how I was doing.
I told some of my law enforcement connections about this boyfriend from my distant past, how he’d behaved erratically. I used the word “stalk” to describe his behavior rather than rehash the story of my running through the streets and his staking out of my childhood apartment years later. I used the shorthand version: the guy might be unstable. I couldn’t help but think perhaps the law enforcement crew thought the same of me. Yet I knew it was common for family or friends of a murder victim to point the finger at whom they supposed was the perpetrator. A few months back I half suspected Harold, Patty’s brother, but realized I had absolutely no reason. I’d heard strangulation was a personal crime, and he was the only man aside from her father and Stephen that was close to her that I knew of. Sure, Harold had behaved dismissively towards her growing up, but that was normal big brother behavior. Harold didn’t do it. I was starting to think crazy thoughts. Just because I’d heard such sleuthing behavior was common among family and friends didn’t mean I didn’t feel a bit insane thinking along those lines. I was getting an over-inflated sense of my own abilities. I mean, what qualified me to sort out who the guilty party was? Did I think I was going to outsmart law enforcement — people trained to do this? What hubris? I thought. My homework now should be to rein that sort of thinking in. My energy was better spent on being the squeaky wheel. Definitely not playing amateur sleuth. I could get on board with pestering SFPD more often, to remind them there was someone who cared. Sadly, I was worse at pestering than I was at sleuthing.
Then the WH questions flitted through my mind: What if getting the case solved got the bad guy off the street? What if he was a danger to other women? What if it was only a matter of an hour’s work for the detective to send a sample of DNA to the lab? And maybe another hour running it through CODIS? What if my concerns could be addressed with two hours’ worth of work? Was the guy entered in CODIS or not? It sounded so simple when I set it down like this.
Someone once told me I missed the mark when I said wanting to write about this cold case was becoming an obsession. Maybe he was right. But if Natalie Goldberg is to be believed, I’d argue it must be an obsession; it is too painful to be a passion.
The Cold Case Diary 