LITTLE LISA MARIE
By
Julie Showalter
What everybody seems to
forget is that she was already dead.
People act like I was a horrible mother, but my little girl was dead and
that’s what I had to deal with. Face
facts and move on.
NBC-5 NEWS AT 10:00 - NOVEMBER 28, 1995
BRENT MARSHALL: Good
evening,
Lisa Marie is approximately 40” tall. She has shoulder-length brown hair and brown
eyes. When last seen she was wearing
jeans, a red and white tee shirt and a pink parka.
There are no pictures of the girl available. Roberta?
ROBERTA
BRENT: Yes,
ironic. And on one of the busiest
shopping days of the year, too.
~~~
And another thing – it’s
not like I killed her. I mean, people
are acting like I was the one that did it.
The papers didn’t make it out much better. They said I watched. Well, to me “watched” means you set out to
see something, like you watch television.
Yeah, I was in the room, and yeah, I saw what happened, but I didn’t
“watch.” I just saw it.
After the accident, it
took Dan and me a couple of days to figure what to do. The plan we settled on was, I’d go to the
mall when it was real busy, tell the security guy she was missing, and go home.
We had no idea it’d be such a big deal.
I mean, it wasn’t like she was a kid anybody noticed when she was
around. But they kept me at the shopping center for two hours. Then they made me go to the police station
and tell them everything I could remember about other shoppers in the
store. I made up some stuff about a
suspicious looking guy being in ladieswear just to give them something else to
think about. Then I had to work on one
of those composition drawings of someone I made up.
It was almost ten o’clock
before I got home. Dan was worried to
death and, on top of everything else, upset that he had to order Domino’s for
supper. When I told him everything that
happened, he went kind of pale. He said, “That kid of yours can’t stop being
trouble.”
I kept my mouth
shut. Dan’s a good man. He married me even though he didn’t want a
kid. You’ve got to respect him for that. Most men, we’d have a date or two, they’d
meet Lisa, and it was goodbye Charlie.
Which is kind of funny
considering I planned her so I could get a man.
I was never real popular
in high school, kind of like two levels down from cheerleaders and such. It
seemed to me I was prettier than any of them, and my hair flipped just like
theirs and I wore the right clothes. But
there was no getting into that group.
All I could figure was they decided in kindergarten who was going to be
in the in-crowd and it wasn’t me.
Anyway, Lisa’s father,
Ronnie Bennett, was the most popular guy I ever dated. He got to start two
games as quarterback when Lemmie Johnson got mono. I looked around and figured he was the best I
was going to do – like I say, I face facts.
His mother was real active in the right-to-lifers which meant he
wouldn’t make me go to the clinic – not with her picketing with a dead baby in
a jar. So I quit taking my pills.
Ronnie wasn’t happy about
having to get married, but he liked being able to have sex all the time. He
decided he’d like having a son, and started calling it Elvis. I figured things were going to be great once
I got my figure back and he had his little football player.
So, first disappointment
– no Elvis, it’s Lisa Marie.
Second disappointment –
they bring her in and – I know you’re not supposed to say this. But they bring her in and she’s ugly. She’s bald and red and her head comes to a
point. Ronnie took one look at her and
said, “Damn, it’s a pinhead.” The nickname kind of stuck, even after her head
rounded out. Even after Ronnie left.
Third disappointment – we
get her home and she screams a blue streak.
People said it was colic, but it seemed willful to me. On TV all the
babies smile and goo when you pick them up, but she’d just arch back and scream
louder. Like she didn’t even want me
touching her. She screamed till Ronnie
couldn’t stand it any more. One night he
said just those words, “Raeanne, I can’t stand it any more.” He packed his stuff and moved back with his folks.
You-know-who was left with the screamer.
None of my other dates
ever took to her. She stopped the
screaming, but she still acted tacky.
You try making up to a kid who acts cowed every time you come in the
room. Hiding in the corner whimpering like
some sick puppy. Behavior like that makes a man uncomfortable, and that makes
him mad. I, for one, understand that
point of view. Sometimes I’d shake her
and say, “Stand up straight, smile, act like a happy kid.” But it was a waste of breath talking to
her. She wouldn’t learn how to please a
man.
That night after I got
home from talking to the cops, I was standing in the kitchen eating the cold
pizza and all of a sudden Dan starts yelling for me to come in the living room.
There I was on TV coming out of the police station. Those actresses always
claim the camera puts twenty pounds on you, and I’m here to tell you it’s
true. I looked fat as an old hog. And my hair!
I knew I never should’ve let Olivia give me that perm.
NBC TODAY SHOW, 7:45 A.M., NOVEMBER 29, 1995
KATHY RICHARDSON: A little girl has disappeared in
DAN: Good morning
RAEANNE: Good
morning, Kathy.
KATHY: Mrs.
Martin, I know this is a dreadful time for you, but could you tell us about
your daughter’s disappearance.
RAEANNE:
Well, we were shopping for a dress for her to wear to her Christmas
program. I was picking out dresses and
holding them up for her. I found one she
liked – it was pink velvet, pink’s her best color – and I went to see if they
had it in her size. When I came back she
was gone.
KATHY: And
how did you feel at that moment, experiencing every parent’s worst nightmare?
RAEANNE:
Well. Like you said. It was my worst nightmare.
KATHY: I see you are holding a teddy bear. Is that a special toy?
RAEANNE:
Yes. It was Lisa’s. It was little Lisa Marie’s favorite toy. She slept with it every night. (BREAKS DOWN
IN TEARS)
KATHY: I
know this is hard. Mr. Martin, we have a
report this morning that the police have a lead. A shopper arriving at the mall at about 6:30
yesterday evening has reported seeing a black man forcing a crying child into a
pickup. The witness didn’t see the
child’s face because she was wearing a hood, but she was approximately Lisa
Marie’s size and she was wearing a pink parka. Does this news give you hope?
DAN: Some black guy’s had her for
twelve hours? (SNORTS AND SHAKES HIS
HEAD) Yeah, right.
KATHY: I
see. (COUGHS, SHUFFLES PAPERS) Mrs. Martin, I understand that the reason you
agreed to appear this morning was so that you could send a message to your
daughter’s abductor.
RAEANNE:
Yes. Please, whoever you
are. Take good care of my little
girl. She’s her mamma’s angel. She’s a good girl and never gave anyone a
minute’s trouble. And bring her back. I don’t know if I can go on without her.
KATHY:
Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Martin. Our prayers are with you and little Lisa
Marie.
~~~
I think the Today Show
interview went well, no matter what happened after. The teddy bear was a real good touch, and the
talk about the pink velvet dress. I
looked better than I had the night before.
I’d put some mousse in my hair and done it up on top that way that makes
me look like Heather Locklear, and I wore black – it’s slimming. Yeah, I’d say I looked real good. We watched the interview when it was on – it
plays an hour later in
I’ll always be glad we
did that interview, even if it did get us into trouble. First there was the part about the
dress. I guess I’d said the day before
that I was in Penney’s womenswear when she disappeared, and on the interview I
said girlswear. It didn’t make any
difference that those departments are real close together. The police just worried that and worried it
and wouldn’t let it go.
Then there was the thing
about me saying the bear was her favorite toy.
They said I wouldn’t use past tense unless I knew she was dead. Like I know anything about grammar. First time they mentioned that past tense
thing to me, I said, “All I know about tense is you’re making me tense.” Dan thought that was pretty funny.
The other thing that
started things against us was Dan’s talk about the black man. It didn’t seem to me that what he said was so
awful. But all of a sudden after the
interview we were racists. Those people are so sensitive, you can’t say
anything these days. First thing you
know, you’ve got that Jesse Jackson making some rhyme about you and two hundred
of those people carrying signs. They
found the guy from the parking lot, and it was like he was some Black
Superman. He’s a high school teacher
working on his master’s degree at night, volunteers for a youth center. I told Dan he probably teaches AIDS babies to
patty-cake in his spare time. The little
girl was his three-year old daughter.
How anyone could mistake a three-year old black girl for little Lisa
Marie is beyond me, pink parka or no pink parka. The little girl was crying because she was
tired and she fell, he says. I don’t
know about that. My guess is he gave her
a smack because she wasn’t walking fast enough.
You know, a funny thing
happened during that interview and then later when I watched it all those
times. I started to believe in that
little girl – that Little Lisa Marie. We
never called her Lisa Marie, just Lisa or Pinhead. But when I watched that interview, I started
to believe in that little girl who was her mother’s perfect angel, and looked
good in pink, and needed a teddy bear to sleep with. I mean, that little girl was a little girl I
could have dressed up and played with.
Dan would have loved her. She
would have sat on his knee and laughed and we’d all be a family.
But my Lisa wasn’t
anything like that. She always had a snotty nose. And pink eye – I’ll bet she got it three
times a year. There’s nothing uglier
than pink eye, unless it’s those scabs she got from picking at her lip. I used to tell Olivia, “Lisa’s got a face
only a mother could love,” but to tell you the truth, I really couldn’t love
her either.
FROM STATEMENT TO POLICE BY RAEANNE MILDRED
MARTIN, 10 P.M., NOVEMBER 29, 1995.
PRESENT: MARTIN, INVESTIGATING
OFFICERS BELSON AND RANDALL.
RAEANNE MARTIN: I know my rights. I don’t have to talk to you.
DET. RANDALL:
That’s right, Raeanne, you could even get a lawyer in here to do your
talking for you. Some people do that,
people who aren’t good at talking for themselves.
OFFICER BELSON: The
thing is, Dan’s in a whole lot of trouble right now. He told us what happened, but it seems like
the more he talks the worse trouble he gets himself into.
RAEANNE MARTIN: Dan
didn’t do anything wrong. He must not
have explained it right.
DET. RANDALL: Why
don’t you explain it to us. Begin last
Sunday night.
RAEANNE MARTIN:
Well, Dan had kind of a bad day.
His team lost and I guess he had some money on them. Anyway, by supper
time, he’s been sitting around all day watching football, and he’s probably a
little hungover, or maybe a little drunk, even.
Like maybe he’s not responsible for what he’s doing?
So, Lisa – she was sitting in the floor by the
radiator. She had this cold, and she
kept coughing. I could tell it was
driving Dan crazy. This real phlegmy
cough, kind that makes you gag to hear it.
Well, I say, “Soup’s on,” and Lisa starts coughing up goobers, and Dan
says, “How’s a man supposed to eat with that going on?” And just then, he looks at Lisa and she looks
up at him, and this big green bubble of snot comes out of her nose.
He slapped her.
It didn’t look that hard to me.
He slapped her and her head snapped back into the radiator. You can’t blame him for how her head snapped
back. I mean, that was an accident, a
freak accident. It could happen to
anybody.
~~~
Now, I’ll admit that it
sounded loud when her head hit the radiator.
Louder than it should. But we didn’t think anything of it. She just lay there like she does sometimes
when she’s sulking. She didn’t come into supper, but we didn’t think anything
about that either. Anytime I fixed
chili, Miss Finicky didn’t eat.
So, we had a few beers
with the chili, and after a while Dan got romantic and we went to bed. I guess I kind of forgot about her. But she liked to sleep by the radiator, and
if she didn’t, she knew where her bed was.
The first I know there’s
trouble is the next morning. I get up
and go in the living room and she’s still lying there and Dan’s sitting across
from her in his underwear crying like a baby.
It takes a minute for it all to sink in, but when it does, I go over to
Dan and put my arms around him. A lot of
women are turned off when they see a man cry, but I say there’s nothing
stronger that a man who’ll let you see the little boy inside. I say, “Just leave it to Mama. It’ll be OK.”
Dan says, “What are we going to do?” and I say, “We don’t have to decide
anything right now.”
We put her in one of
those suit bags, the kind you get at nice stores? The people who lived in the apartment before
us left it. Some people don’t know the
value of anything, just throw away something good like that suit bag. Well, Dan put her in the bag – I couldn’t
stand to touch her – and we put her in the closet and we both went to work and
figured we’d work it out when we got home.
OFFICER RANDALL: Does
that seem a normal way for a mother to act?
MARTIN: What? She was dead.
Crying and carrying on wouldn’t help her. Nothing would help her. But she could get Dan in big trouble. That’s what I had to worry about now. And the
way I look at it, technically I wasn’t a mother anymore. But I was a wife. I had a legal and a moral duty to love and
cherish and protect Dan.
OFFICER RANDALL: So you
watched your husband kill her and then you were actively complicit in the coverup?
MARTIN: Are you
inferring I did something wrong? You get me a lawyer and get some of those TV
cameras in here. Let’s just show them
how you treat a grieving mother.
~~~
So, after two days Dan
took her out to the forest preserve and buried her, and the next night I went
to the mall.
You know what’s
funny? We talked a lot those two days
while she was in the closet about whether anybody would notice she was
gone. Maybe we could just get rid of her
and never say a thing. Dan was kind of
leaning toward that idea, but I didn’t want to always be worrying that somebody
was going to come up and ask where’s your daughter. I wanted to get it all out in the open and
over with.
I’d go to the mall and
say “Oh, oh, my darlin’ little girl’s gone,” and everybody would feel sorry for
me and that would be that. She’d never
be found and I’d be one of those people with a tragic past, and maybe be on
“Oprah” sometime with other tragic mothers.
It didn’t quite work out
like that.
All things considered, I
don’t think I was such a bad mother. For
instance, when she was four I bought her a baton and a sequin leotard, and took
her down to have her picture taken for the Little Miss Princess contest.
Everybody thinks it’s so awful that in her whole life she never had her picture
taken – well, she could have had it taken then.
The prize was $500. I explained to her how we needed the money
and she said she’d do it. I showed her
how to pose with a baton – I studied twirling in eighth grade – and she wasn’t
half bad. I worked and worked on her
hair – probably used a can of spray to get her curls up high. Brought out her cheekbones with a little
blush and highlighted her brows and lashes with mascara. After I put on my lipstick, I put just a
touch on her. I looked at us both in the
mirror, and for the first time I could kind of see some of myself in her. “You and me, Lisa,” I said, “we’re gonna make
it.” I went to that picture session real
hopeful.
So we get there, and
there’s 40 Little Miss Princesses in line ahead of us. Lisa starts to whine that she’s hungry. Then someone opens the door and she’s cold.
Then her nose starts running. By the
time we’re at the front of the line, she’s cried off all the make-up and her
hair’s a stringy, sticky mess. I stand there smiling like a fool even though
anyone can tell there’s not a chance in hell that we’ll win. But the worst was
when we got up to the little platform where she was supposed to get her picture
taken. She starts screaming and holding onto my leg and wouldn’t even go up
there.
A half day off work, I
don’t know how much spent on the costume and cosmetics, and I didn’t even get a
damned picture out of it.
I’ve been thinking about
that Little Lisa Marie and how things would’ve been with her. You know, I’ll only be 35 when I get out of
here – 32 if I show proper rehabilitation.
There’ll still be time to have a baby.
Maybe when I get out I could go see Dan on one of those conjugal visits
or they could ship me some of his sperm or something.
I can just see that
little baby. She’ll be a girl and she’ll
coo and laugh at her mama like the baby in the Pampers commercial. She’ll smell good and she’ll never cry, just
like Little Lisa Marie. I won’t call her
that, though. People would think it’s
weird. But I’d think it -- my own
precious Lisa Marie.