Like funeral pyre smoke on the wind as a prayer...

One month from tonight will be the 24th anniversary of the murder of my Aunt Michele. It would be reeling from this event, and the subsequent news two months later that my dad was dying of lung cancer, that I would find myself coming to Johnstown and The Breeze in the spring of 1991.

For years the approaching anniversary would set me brooding. About her and about him and all that lay ahead. Over the past two-plus decades some years have been worse than others, though tonight I'm not sure whether the years when it crossed my mind and weighed upon my heart less were "the better ones" as I have said before. Tonight, I find myself feeling a little ashamed about that.

I became a writer in part from and by the encouragement of my Aunt Michele. I will pick up a book on journalism, or writing, or just good writing period, and as I open it startle as I again see her handwriting in the inscription on the inside of the cover. Always the same message: It's not such a dumb-ass dream to think you can and could be a writer. Go for it. For that I owe her part of the credit that I am writing this tonight, and that I am writing this book.

So, nearly a quarter-of-a-century after everything seemed to be falling apart, only to rebuild to the man and place where I find myself tonight, here's a little bit from the book, from a chapter about covering murders and how her's helped shape that for me as a journalist: Sent up on the cyber-ether like funeral pyre smoke on the wind as a prayer that she might read it.

....Just out of college I got a job with a small weekly in Fort Lupton, a roughneck oil town in northern Colorado. The first Monday I showed up at work I ended up covering a story about a Hispanic teenager who had been shot over the weekend.

The kid had allegedly been up to no good late on a Saturday night and someone had taken a shot at him, maybe to just scare his ass, but they hit and killed him.

“We found him lying in the alley, tiny little hole in his down coat about the size of my pinky,” the police chief said, sitting in his office and holding his hand up in the air like he was Emily Post showing me how to drink a cup of tea. Without saying it I got the definite sense from him that in his opinion what you had here was basically a gang-banger who got a bitter taste of street (or alley) justice, and a lot of taxpayer resources weren’t going to get wasted hunting down whoever did it.

The wages of sin.

If I recall, I didn’t even call the kid’s family to get a comment about his death. Just sucked up and regurgitated the chief’s on-the-record “cop speak” about how they were investigating, but finding few leads, blah … blah … blah.

I think I learned some of my most important lessons about covering these types of stories when I found myself on the other side of the police tape … as a member of the family of someone who was murdered.

My Aunt Michele lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia. My mom’s little sister, she was big and blond and larger than life. An actress and dancer as a young girl she had put all that away when she found herself a single parent after her husband left her with a young child, and she was just beginning to get back into musical theater in her 40s after her son had been raised and was on his own.

She made her living as a legal secretary. She worked for a group of lawyers late at night in the empty office complex after everyone had gone home. This gave her a chance to go to auditions and rehearsals and dance classes during the day and evening.

At the time of her murder I was living with Lesli in New Mexico, newly married, not even in journalism. Unable to get on with a paper when we had moved down there I had taken a job as the assistant director of public relations at a rich-kid liberal arts college. One afternoon I came back to my office and there was a message to call my dad in Colorado. Middle of the day. Unusual. I called and he had “that voice.”

This is the guy who talked to me once for 15 minutes before he said, “Well, I guess I took your mom to the hospital today…”

I was convinced it was my mom. Heart attack. Would have never imagined he’d say, “Your Aunt Michele was murdered.”

Strangled, stuck in the trunk of her car that was found still sitting in the parking lot of the office complex where she worked the morning after she was last seen about 10:30 the night before leaving a restaurant and saying she was heading back to work.

That evening was the beginning of a night of a thousand sorrows. The first stumbling steps of a march of pain, confusion and grief that would eventually lead to my dad diagnosed with terminal cancer and dead himself in less than six months. Even though I wasn’t in the business at the time, when I heard the news I immediately went into reporter-mode. Maybe out of self-preservation. That ability to look at anything as long as it’s just a story.

Lesli and I went home, numb and in shock. I called Virginia and talked to my grandmother, who between sobs told me that the police wouldn’t tell her anything. Not even whether or not her daughter had been raped.

I realized that I knew a reporter at the Virginia Beach paper. He had worked at the daily in Greeley covering education and our paths had crossed on a number of stories when I was working for the college paper. I called. He wasn’t there, but after what I assume was a quick call to him to attest to my bona fides, the reporter who was covering the story called me back.

He started telling me the details: what the cops were saying, what he had in the story for the morning’s edition that was getting printed literally as we spoke. Just a matter of the facts. All the sudden he paused, realizing he was talking to a relative.

“Uh, sorry dude…” he said. I told him I understood. And I did. This was just a story to him.

I was able that night to find out that she hadn't been raped. Cold comfort to my grandmother, whose daughter lay in a morgue in Norfolk, and who they still hadn’t let her see, but some comfort nonetheless.

The next day was a blur of phone calls and planning. I remember Lesli looking at me at one point and saying, “this is like a cop show on TV. This doesn’t happen to regular people.” What we had found out was that yes it does. That evening, we made the 7-hour drive to Colorado to my parent’s house.

I remember driving through the darkness toward God knew what. I’ll never listen to the first Indigo Girls album without thinking of those hours spent in the cab of that pickup with just Lesli, that tape playing over and over, and I’ll never be able to re-pay her for being with me as I made that drive.

Secure yourself to heaven….

Hold on tight, the night has come.

Fasten up your earthly burdens,

You have just begun….

When I got to Pueblo and saw my mom is when I broke down. This became real. This was not a story. This was my mother and her heart was broken and that broke mine.

In the morning I was on a plane to Virginia with my mom and dad. The next week is so burned into my memory that it doesn’t seem like 24 years ago sometimes, but more like 24 minutes.

Michele was murdered right at the time when the Iraq War, the first one, was going on. I used to go back to the Holiday Inn hotel room and watch the war live on TV as a respite from the reality I was living in.

When one thinks of the beach they think of sun and sand and summer. During the winter it can be angry place, and it was the perfect locale for such a painful and confusing time. The ocean which I usually only saw in June or July or August on family vacations was grey and churning in February, with waves crashing on the beach and cold, biting sleet that stung your face as it blew in from off-shore as I would sit at night on the balcony of my ocean-front hotel room and sob and scream into the wind.....

....what I learned through all of this was that these stories are about people. Everyone is someone’s aunt, someone’s sister. Someone’s brother. Someone’s child. That realization hit me as I sat in a car at a stoplight on the way to the funeral in Virginia Beach and glanced over at the newspaper vending rack on the corner, only to see the photograph of my aunt that I had just seen as I walked down the stairs of her house staring back at me from the front page of the paper.

I think about that kid in Ft. Lupton, now lain moldering in his grave for nearly three decades. Would he have gotten his life together and gone on to have kids like I did? A wife? A business of his own? Or would he have ended up in prison? Would he have killed someone himself?

I haven’t been above using this hard and heartbroken won knowledge to get an interview. I tell people about my aunt, in part to let them know that I understand, that I’ve been there, but also in part to break that barrier between them and me ... the grieved and the messenger. Most of the time, honestly, I’m not sure if it’s to comfort them, or get the story.

Most times, I think, it’s a bit of both....