Читать книгу Bone Crusher - Linda Rosencrance - Страница 14

Typically, serial killers prey on prostitutes and women addicted to drugs because they’re vulnerable and available. No one takes a second look or gives a second thought to a man in a car picking up a woman in an area where all too many women walk the streets plying their trade.

And usually when a prostitute turns up missing, no one files a missing persons report. Think about it. Another prostitute won’t report it, because she probably figures the police won’t even listen to her. And the families of the women often don’t know their relatives are missing, because they don’t hear from them on a regular basis.

Even the women who escape the clutches of their would-be murderers don’t go to the police. For one thing, they don’t think the police will believe them or even care about what happened to them. For another, as in the case of Vickie Bomar, the women often have warrants out for their arrests and are afraid to go to the police because they don’t want to go to jail.

And sometimes serial killers prey on prostitutes because they think they’re doing police a favor by getting rid of women they consider worthless, although that didn’t seem to be the case with Larry.

But the reality is, none of these women deserve to die—no matter how they might live their lives. Despite the perceptions and misconceptions about the women who use drugs and turn to prostitution to feed their habits, the truth is they are daughters, and sisters, and mothers, and aunts, and cousins.

None of the Peoria serial killer’s victims intended to live their lives high on crack and having sex with who-knows-how-many strangers. They had had jobs and families. They went to church and school. Sure, they had a couple drinks now and then and probably smoked some weed, but that was it—in the beginning. But as time progressed, they suffered tragedies; they got mixed up with the wrong people. They turned to harder drugs, such as crack cocaine or heroin, to dull the pain. They sold their bodies, shoplifted, mugged, and even stole from family members to get the drugs they needed to survive. And the years of addiction took their toll.

They were raped, beaten up, and made to feel worthless. They wanted to find peace, but all they found were places to get high and escape from the world. They lived wherever they could—in shelters, on the streets, with friends, with family. They tried to get off the streets, but they got caught up in the never-ending cycle of using, getting clean, taking up old habits, using again, getting locked up, getting clean….

That’s what happened to Brenda Erving.

By all accounts, Brenda Erving was a good person, a beautiful person. She loved her family, and her family loved her. She was a happy little girl who liked to go out and play and have fun. She went to Manual High School in Peoria, where she excelled in her classes. Brenda was funny—the type of person who enjoyed making people laugh.

But she had a hard life.

When Brenda was young, Cynthia, her baby sister, suffered from cancer. Cynthia passed away when she was just seven years old. Her death affected the entire family, but Brenda took it particularly hard.

“When Brenda was a kid, she was a lot of fun. She was very sweet,” said Laverne Young, Brenda’s aunt. Laverne’s brother William Young Jr. married Brenda’s mother when Brenda was just two years old.

“I stayed at their house a lot when Brenda’s baby sister came out of the hospital,” Laverne said. “Sometimes my brother would get a code blue to go to the hospital because they thought Cynthia was going to die. They thought she was going to die six times before she passed. And when they would go to the hospital, I’d go to the house and stay with Brenda and the other kids. And sometimes she’d stay overnight with me.”

Brenda’s life just seemed to be mired in tragedy. Her mom, Lee, who passed away a few years after Brenda died, was a diabetic and an amputee. It had hurt Brenda to watch her mother suffer the way she did.

Then, when Brenda was thirty-five, her sister Antoinette passed away. One minute Antoinette was joking and talking with her husband, and the next minute she asked him to take her to the hospital because something was happening with her chest. She died almost as soon as she got there.

“I talked to her after her sister passed,” her aunt Laverne said. “I asked her if there was anything I could do. She told me I could do anything because she just didn’t know what to do.”

By then, Brenda had already started hanging out with the wrong people and doing drugs, but her sister’s death really pushed her deeper into life on the street.

“Brenda was doing good,” said her stepdad, William Young Jr. “She had three daughters and she was raising them. She was doing good. Then she got in with the wrong crowd.”

When Brenda’s body was found, her family was devastated.

“It shocked me. I felt bad. I didn’t know what to think. My son called me. I was driving. I answered the cell phone. I went home, and the detectives came by the house to tell me what happened,” William said.

Laverne, who said she didn’t even know Brenda had been missing, called her brother one night just to talk. William told Laverne he and his girlfriend, now his wife, were just about to leave to go over to Brenda’s mom’s house.

“I said, ‘Is Lee worse?’” Laverne said. “He said, ‘It’s not her. It’s Brenda. She’s not with us anymore. And that’s the way I heard about it. It was terrible. I was abolutely shocked. It was like everything had been taken away from me. I was devastated for him, her, and her mother. And I started thinking back to when she was a little girl and wishing I had been able to be in her life more, and maybe things might have been different. I still think about her and miss her a lot. But it bothers me now when I think of Brenda. I have to put it out of my mind.”

Laverne said she didn’t even know Brenda was involved with drugs.

“After Brenda died, my brother told me she was into drugs, and he was upset about it,” she said. “I told him to try and understand, because she wouldn’t have chosen that way if she knew another way. She was trying to deal with what she went through in her life. I told him I still loved her.”

Like Brenda, Linda Neal faced a number of tragedies in her life. That doesn’t excuse the life she ultimately lived, it’s just a fact.

Linda grew up in Joliet, Illinois. She had two sisters and two brothers. She was the youngest girl—a tomboy. But when the kids were in grade school, her parents split, and her dad moved to Peoria. Her mom did everything in her power to raise her five young children the best way she could. The kids often spent summers with their dad in Peoria, a city Linda seemed to take to more than the rest of her siblings.

And it seemed to be working for Linda. She went to Joliet Central High School, where she excelled in sports. An athletic teen, she ran track and was on the gymnastics team. She was also a cheerleader. A great cook, Linda went to Joliet Junior College for a time and initially majored in culinary arts, but she later decided to take up stenography, instead. She dreamed of being a court reporter one day.

In 1982, her mom passed away, at forty. Her mother was the same age Linda was when she was murdered. She had suffered for years from a rare skin disease. At the end she lapsed into a coma and died in a Chicago hospital. All the kids were close to their mom, and it tore them all up.

For a while the family lived with their grandmother in Joliet. Linda eventually moved to Peoria with her boyfriend. They got a house, where he still lives. Things seemed to be going well, at first. She worked in a number of area restaurants. Then tragedy struck again when her twenty-three-year-old brother died. He suffered an epileptic seizure and died in his sleep.

Linda started hanging out with the wrong people, drinking and using drugs. She got into cocaine and started smoking crack. She and her boyfriend started fighting—he was clean and couldn’t stand the idea that Linda was using. They split up and Linda hooked up with a number of older men—men on Social Security. It was an easy way to support her habit.

Younger brother Mark, who lives in Missouri, was the first to admit that his big sister was no angel. But she was his hero. He was closer to Linda than he was to any of his siblings.

“We just had so much in common,” said Mark, who was four years younger than Linda. “We were so much alike. Instead of a brother following a brother, I followed her. If it came down to going somewhere, I always wanted to be behind her. I learned a lot from her. She wasn’t an angel, but she was kindhearted. If you knew her, you couldn’t do nothing but love her. She was affectionate toward people, but if you got on her bad side, she was like a rattlesnake. She’d get you.”

Mark learned a lot from Linda—more than he learned from any of his other siblings.

“Once I did something wrong to a friend, and [Linda] made me apologize, and I wasn’t used to apologizing to people,” he said. “And I remember crying, because I had to apologize. She taught me right from wrong in a lot of things. She’d say, ‘You don’t do this, you don’t do that.’ If you hurt someone’s feelings, she made you apologize.”

Linda also taught Mark about life on the street.

“We used to fight together,” he said. “I’ve seen her fight people four foot tall and six foot four. She held her own. She didn’t care how big or how small you were. If you got in her face, she was going to get you. She was going to fight you. I’ve seen her fight two or three girls at one time and whup all of them. That’s another thing she taught me—not to be afraid to stand up for myself. She said, ‘Don’t go running and crying, you fight.’”

Mark admitted things started to go downhill for his sister, once she moved to Peoria for good.

“Every time I’d be around her, there would be a fight with this girl or that girl,” Mark said. “People were jealous of her because she held her own. She didn’t take nothing from nobody. And a lot of people just didn’t like her.”

Then there were the drugs. In the beginning Linda didn’t want anything to do with drugs, but things changed.

“She was running with some of the wrong people,” Mark said. “I had some other cousins who were into drugs. It’s crazy, because she was always against it. I know she smoked marijuana, and drinking alcohol here and there at parties, but that was the extent of it. As far as crack cocaine—no way.”

Mark said he was totally shocked when he found out his sister was doing drugs. It didn’t make any sense, because she always told her family members who were using that it was wrong and they were going to kill themselves.

“She was so against it for so long,” he said. “When I found out the first time she was doing it, I couldn’t believe it. I thought no way, not my sister. She couldn’t stand the sight of people who did drugs. I couldn’t tell you what made her do [it]. I talked to her about why she did it. I wanted to know why she turned to drugs when she used to try and get family members off drugs. But an addict always makes excuses. She’d just say, ‘Oh, I only do it recreationally.’”

Beverly Broadway, Linda’s sister, who lives in the south suburbs of Chicago, remembered her sister as the life of the party, and as someone who looked out for her family.

“She was hilarious,” Beverly said. “We’d sit up and laugh all night, crack jokes with each other, talk about the past. Even when we had picnics or barbeques, she was always the life of the party. She was fun to hang with. But she wouldn’t let anyone mess with her family. When we went to a party, she’d say, ‘If anyone’s messing with you, you let me know.’ She’d have my back. She looked out for me.”

But Beverly knew Linda had her problems with drugs.

“I went through a lot with Linda with that,” she said. “When I was going through my divorce in the summer of 1998, I asked her to come here and stay with me. I knew she had a problem. Her addiction was pretty strong. But I thought if I got her away from there, we could work on some things. But bringing her into my house was kind of a mistake, because some things would come up missing. And it became more of a problem than a help to me. She stayed a month with me—then I had to send her back because she stole my cell phone and she pawned my car.”

Turns out Linda had given her dealer her sister’s car for the day in exchange for drugs.

“Sometimes you can give the drug dealer your vehicle for an entire day, and they can do whatever they want with it, maybe do drug buys or whatever. And I ended up seeing my car on the street, and me and my girlfriend pursued my own car on the street with this guy driving my car,” Beverly said. “So it started becoming more of a hassle for her to be staying with me than a help. So I sent her back to Peoria. We still remained friends, and I understood what she was going through.”

But through it all, Linda still tried to do the best she could for herself and her family.

“She still tried to keep herself up, and I know she tried to take care of my dad while she was down in Peoria,” Beverly said. “She’d always check in on him or go to see him. But everybody knew about her drug habit, and it got to the point [that] when she needed things, they’d rather buy those things for her than give her the money.”

Beverly recalled a scary incident that happened to Linda before she met up with Larry Bright.

“There was this one tavern she would always frequent, and that’s where she’d hang out and run across people with drugs. Sometimes Linda would hook up some of the guys that were there with people who sold drugs, and she would get something out of it, like smoking the drugs with them,” Beverly said. “One time she was in a car with a Caucasian male who choked her and pushed her out of the truck while it was moving, and she was afraid. She talked to the police about it (the description of the guy didn’t match Larry) and they wanted her to stay in a shelter for her safety. So she went. What happened to her kind of upset me, so I talked to her and asked her to come up my way. I told her I knew about a facility that was real nice that I could put her in, to help get her off drugs. I knew she did get into selling her body for drugs. I think she was probably arrested once or twice for prostitution. I didn’t like her living that life, and that’s why I tried to get her to come here.”

Linda agreed, and her plan on the weekend she was murdered was to wash her clothes and have her dad put her on the train to Chicago. Larry Bright, though, had other plans, and that’s when she came up missing.

“She hadn’t called me about coming to Chicago, so I started calling down there asking, ‘Where’s Linda? Hasn’t anybody seen her?’” Beverly said. “They said she left the shelter. So I figured she must have gone out to get that last high before she got on the train to come see me. It made me mad to think that. Then when I heard that they found her body, it was devastating. It just broke my heart.”

Beverly later explained how she first heard her sister had been murdered.

“Initially my stepmother called me and said they found Linda, and I said, ‘What do you mean “they found Linda”?’ That’s when she told me she was dead, and they found her in Tazewell County,” she said. “From there, I heard it on the news, and they had no clue about who did it, and then they tried to connect all these other prostitutes’ deaths. Linda was a fighter. She didn’t take anything from people, male or female. She was known to carry her weight. I was kind of surprised when the police said, according to Larry Bright, she didn’t fight back. I was thinking she had to be really stoned or high and couldn’t fight back.”

Beverly cried for weeks after Linda died.

“It was tough. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it,” she said. “It was like I was so close to getting her out of there. That’s the only thing I kept thinking of—I almost had her, if she had just washed her clothes and come up here. But she just had to go out that night and get that last high in. That’s what killed me—knowing I almost had her. It was devastating. Larry Bright must have felt like these women were expendable. They were nothing on the street. They wouldn’t be missed, that their families didn’t care. Little did Larry Bright know. There was a family who loved Linda and would know if she was missing.”

Mark, too, was devastated when he learned about his sister’s death.

“My stepbrother called me when she first came up missing,” Mark said. “She wasn’t known not to keep in touch with her family, even when she had been on a binge for two or three days. We’d lose contact with her then, but after she came down from that little binge, she would call and let us know she was safe. Then he called and said, ‘They found Linda.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, okay, where’s she at?’ Then he told me she was dead, and I don’t remember any more than that. I fell into my closet doors and I passed out. A few minutes later when I came to, I could hear him yelling in the phone. And my girl came running into the room, asking what was wrong. I picked up the phone and I just asked to talk to my dad, because I knew it had to be killing him to lose a daughter. That’s all I remember about it.”

Mark said he still thought about Linda all the time.

“I still deal with her death every day now,” he said. “I look at her pictures and remember all the good and the bad, and I still love her. I don’t condone what she was doing, but I still loved her—no matter what problems she had. Months before she was killed, me and my girlfriend were trying to get her to come up with us to get her away from all the drugs. I’ll never get over it. I still have dreams about her all the time, and we’re still running around as kids or going to parties, like she was still here. Linda wasn’t the angel of angels, but she had a good heart. She was generous and kind and had a loving heart.”