Sin “bringeth forth death” James 1:15

Near the end of 1994, my family saw this verse personified in our family. I had been in Florida about four months and in August my parents drove out Pensacola, FL. My sister was about to start another year at PCC and I was working and hoping to go to school in the future. From what I was told later by my mom’s friends, my dad spent the trip home telling my mom about his filthy life and all the things he’d been doing behind her back. The goal I’m told was to get her to leave. My mom married “for better or for worse.” For 20 plus years, my mom got mostly “for worse” but each year seemed to get worse and by the end my dad wasn’t even trying to hide it any more.

When I wrote Prayer and Fasting (Story 2) I told this part of the story but I’ll summarize it here. My dad’s life of sin led him to murder his wife, my mom. I’ve had people ask my why he did it. I’ve told them that he’d been straddling a fence for so long living in the world but trying to make other people think he was a good Christian that he finally made a choice and fell on the side of sin and caused heartache and suffering for his family. My son has asked me several times why grandpa did that and all I can tell him is that dad was a very selfish person and chose to do wrong. There are many reasons why he did it but it boils down to sin, & sin brought forth a physical death in the way of my mom.

Halloween Night, 1994, my dad called his children to tell us that mom had been found and that she was dead. Tri-City Baptist (TCBC) paid (“Thank you, Pastor Singleton, who loved my mom as if she was his daughter.”) for my sisters and me to fly to MI where my dad had made arrangements to have mom’s body flown so that we could have the funeral there and bury her next to her parents. During the funeral, the “funniest” thing I heard was when the person giving the eulogy said that “I just met Bob, I know that him and Sue had a great marriage.”

We stayed at the home of one of mom’s childhood friends. I remember my sister’s and I talking about, “what if it was dad?” That was not easy to think about but we decided that we had been taught that a person should pay for his crimes and so we determined that we would not hire someone to defend him if he was guilty. A couple days later, all four of us (my dad, my two sisters, and I) flew to Arizona on Sunday to have a memorial service for my mom on Monday night at TCBC. What we didn’t know is that police detectives had flown on the same planes with my dad to and from MI.

As we got off the plane, two detectives arrested my dad but didn’t handcuff him. We were not sure what was going on but a man from our church picked us up at the airport and took us home. My grandparents had driven in from CA for the memorial service and had rented a hotel room because they saw that my parent’s house had been searched by the police and they wouldn’t stay there. I wouldn’t have been able to do that either.

On Sunday night, everyone except me went to TCBC for the evening service. I decided to go to First Baptist because my friends were there that I had not seen in six months. During the service, someone from TCBC came to tell me what happened.

At Tri-City, the church service had started and while everyone was singing, Pastor Singleton was requested backstage. The detectives told the pastor that my dad had confessed to murdering Sue (my mom). Pastor Singleton came to the front, told the congregation, prayed, and dismissed the service. Then someone was sent to tell me. After being told, I went back into the service and told my friends and went to go see my grandparents at the hotel. It was quite an emotional time.

Who would have thought that at the age of 50 years of age, my dad would become a murderer?