Woody and Me: Keep Us from Evil

By Jo R. Hall PhD

If your best friends deepest secret was a deep, internal struggle between good and evil, could you keep that secret from everyone for decades? Elizabeth has done just that for her friend Woody. She knows of his pastabout his drunk and abusive mother. She knows Woody was raised to subdue all emotion into numbness. He wants to be normal, but he fears he may become a serial killeror that someone else will discover his secret.

Woody finds a place to express his bloodlust in the US Navy, during the early years of the Vietnam conflict. Once back to civilian life, though, he has trouble adjusting to the idea that murder is no longer his duty; outside the military, murder is a crime. He still longs for revenge on his childhood torturers, but he knows that by hunting them, by killing them, he will be just like them.

Through these internal battles, Elizabeth is always there, keeping the truth of Woodys past and present fantasies a secret. Together, they share details of their own personal defects and romantic relationships. Their friendship keeps Woody from becoming a monster, but how long will Elizabeth be able to calm Woodys demons without awakening some of her own?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475980516

Jo R. Hall PhD

Jo R. Hall, PhD, earned adult education degrees from Marshall and Ohio State Universities. She lived in Germany, where she worked as an educator; she then spent twenty-five years creating positive work environments. She currently lives near Lake Michigan in the northern Lower Peninsula.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1

Elizabeth’s Childhood

Chapter 2

Elizabeth’s Lost Years

Chapter 3

The Cannonballs

Chapter 4

Woody And Elizabeth Meet

Chapter 5

A Normal Life

Chapter 6

Woody’s Early Memories

Chapter 7

Destroyed Beliefs

Chapter 8

I Am Woody

Chapter 9

Secrets Revealed

Chapter 10

Friends

Chapter 11

Woody’s Navy Career

Chapter 12

Woody And Old Friends

Chapter 13

An Enduring Friendship

Chapter 14

Becker Industries

Chapter 15

Business As Usual

Chapter 16

Thinking Back

Chapter 17

The Ending

Chapter 18

The Aftermath

For Woody and Sharyn

Preface

The decision for Elizabeth to share their story so this book could be written was painful. I did my best to capture the story as Elizabeth told me, so it has been written from her perspective. Woody was Elizabeth’s best friend, and his internal struggle was inspirational. He had no platform to tell the world what he had been through during his childhood. He had no one to tell what had happened and how it impacted him for the rest of his life. It also impacted me in every aspect of my life. I am so grateful they trusted me enough to share their story, and I hope by sharing what is now our story, others will have the courage to change, to speak out, and to be themselves. I am who I am because of Woody and Elizabeth.

I also must apologize. I was asked to change the book because it might be offensive, but what was done to Woody was offensive. I can describe the torture and abuse, but I cannot share what was done to him sexually. He was a true victim, like many other children who never have a voice. His life was horrific. My intentions are to share his story, his will to survive, and his struggle to be a better person than the adults in his childhood. Please use your imagination to fill in the terror and horror experienced daily by a little boy—Woody.

This book is based on truth but changed to protect the innocent. The changes are not intended to help those who know what it means to hear the horse you rode in on, as Woody would say when nothing else could convey his anger. These are the people who do harm to others. They are evil.

Thanks go to Les E., who stood by me throughout this process and was instrumental in helping me find the right words.

CHAPTER 1

Elizabeth’s Childhood

Was my background—my childhood—much different from Woody’s young life? We were going to experience evil and make a decision to either become evil or to do good things. I knew Woody, my friend, wanted only the best for me. Our histories were different, as I didn’t experience the terrific physical abuse he had gone through, but what he helped me realize was that life’s terrible experiences exist on many levels. We were both the product of unhealthy environments, just different.

Woody and I were friends for more than twenty-five years, and it is this journey that is so important to share. We were two parts of a whole; we complemented each other. Before we had the miracle of meeting as adults, our childhoods mimicked one another. This is, as Paul Harvey would say, the start of the rest of the story.

Woody would remind me, One thing people tend to do is compare their problem with another person’s problem and confirm how bad their situation is by saying, ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ or ‘Look how much I’m suffering.’ His wisdom was based on his experiences.

What I learned from Woody was that no matter how different a person’s life appeared to be on the outside, our experiences can have a horrific impact on us. Would I learn not to compare my life with Woody’s life? He did not want to be a victim.

Woody continuously said, Your problems are unique. He always had the empathy for me that I needed. He said, Remember, Elizabeth, your problems are just as important as any other person’s problems, and they are significant to you. All people have their own unique concerns, frustrations, and problems. Please believe me when I tell you that your problems do matter to me.

All I could say was thanks, but I still did not feel important to anyone on the inside.

It wasn’t surprising to me, Elizabeth Becker, daughter of John and Sarah, that I was truly screwed up. My mother had tried to help me by moving me away from my boyfriend. It was the kind of love every teenager wants. You hold hands, talk about everything, want to be around the person all of the time, plan to go to the high school football game together, and hold each other tightly at the school dance. Many years later, my mother finally admitted her part in the plot to end the relationship by moving me into the home of her best friends, Allen and Iris, for the school year. I missed my freshman year in my home high school, which, according to my mother, was for my own good.

Unfortunately for me, when I returned to my hometown in the spring, I found out my reputation had been completely ruined. There was a lot of small-town gossip. I heard one of my so-called friends whisper, I wonder if she gave the baby up for adoption.

Another chimed in, I heard her boyfriend dumped her because she got rid of the baby. I think her parents paid for an abortion.

A third teenager said, She doesn’t look like she had a baby.

The rumor persisted that I had been taken away for nine months because I was pregnant, and at that time in history, everyone would have been ashamed of a girl my age getting pregnant. I wasn’t pregnant, but it didn’t stop the rumors from flying, and while I had been living at the friends’ house thousands of miles away, the boyfriend my mother hated had broken up with me in a Dear John letter. My mother’s plan had worked.

He later said, I couldn’t stand to hear the comments about you being pregnant. I wasn’t old enough to fight the rumors and your mother.

I didn’t get much sympathy from my parents. After crying for days, I made a commitment never to allow anyone to get close to me again. I was alone; I was thinking like a jilted teenager. The nonrational thinking solidified and prevented me from finding a partner later in life. The worst part of the whole thing was my mother’s flimsy attempt at being a parent. During the breakup, she tried to be understanding, but for her it was an impossible task. Her fake feelings later were easy to see through.

She took the friendship ring my boyfriend had given me, packaged it up, and sent it back to him. I thought, How wonderful—she is trying to console me, trying to understand what it is like to break up long distance. I thought she understood how devastated I felt and was trying, for the first time, to be a mother. I was fooled. I eventually found out the real truth, that she was extremely pleased she had accomplished her goal. My mother had a list of problems of her own, and she would instill those in me. It caused me to make less-than-healthy decisions.

My mother let me attend my hometown high school in my sophomore year but chose to move me back to Allen and Iris’s house for my junior year. Moving back to their house for the school year didn’t bother me as much as one would think. Sophomore year had been difficult in my hometown. My boyfriend was gone, and the whole town continued the rumor that I had been pregnant. Moving back to an anonymous life in a different school was pretty cool. I dated a few boys, had a good school year, and at the end of the year was elected as class historian for the next year. That wouldn’t happen, however, just like a lot of other things in my life. I wasn’t going to be historian because I was never going back to that school or town again.

At first, Allen and Iris were nice to me, but they were so cheap that they limited what I could eat and where I could go. They let me stay in a small room at the back of the house with enough space for a twin bed and a small dresser. I spent most of my time in that bedroom and found out I could make myself pass out by pulling a belt tightly around my neck and holding it until I fainted. This practice was all the rage at the time—it was a way to get high, and everyone was doing it—strangling one another and watching what happened. Only the rich kids had access to their parents’ liquor cabinet or prescription drugs, and I wasn’t one of the rich kids. So the cheap high, I thought, was the next best thing.

Years later, during one of our late-night conversations, I told Woody, I think the strangling game was my first real attempt at suicide and the beginning of always feeling alone. I remember, even when I was younger, wishing I could wake up in another home, a place where I was wanted.

I was fortunate that I didn’t die—I usually strangled myself when I was alone in the bedroom, so no one would have known I was in trouble. It was one of those things I became bored with after a couple of times; I didn’t see what everyone else was getting out of it, so I stopped. Other kids were not so lucky; they died accidentally.

During the winter, I dated a few guys and finally found one I liked. His name was Shawn. He was a nice guy from a nice family—his father was a superintendent in a copper mine. We did typical teenage stuff, like going to movies, riding around in his cute little car, going with friends to get something to eat, and making dates for school events. In February of my junior year, however, everything turned to shit.

The only bathroom at Allen and Iris’s house was next to my bedroom at the back of the house. It was a long, narrow bathroom, with the typical porcelain tile of the era on the floor and halfway up the walls. The sink and stool were on one side of the room and the bathtub/shower was on the opposite wall. One large window was between the stool and the tub; it looked out over the backyard. The backyard was fenced with a six-foot stone wall for privacy and was the perfect place to hide from neighbors. Around the privacy wall and the back of the house were shrubs and flowers that made it into a parklike setting.

With each passing day, whenever I was in the bathroom, I felt like someone was either in the hallway or out in the backyard next to the bathroom window, like someone was watching me through the blinds on the window or looking through the keyhole on the door. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched when I was in the bathroom. I decided I was becoming paranoid and was imagining all of it. After a while, I started putting a towel over the doorknob and over the window blinds, trying to fill up all of the cracks through which the Peeping Tom could look. Feeling my most private moments were being violated was like a sexual predator was taking advantage of me.

I didn’t even think of telling my parents. I had raised myself since I could remember and was left, for the most part, to solve my own problems. The other thing was that my mother wasn’t trustworthy, based on her creativity in handling the destruction of my first boyfriend. She wanted to do me harm, not protect me. A person might ask, Where was your father in all of this? He and I had a wonderful relationship, and he was a loving father. Any girl would wish for a father like mine, but this knight in shining armor fell apart in my mind after I realized he wouldn’t stand up to my mother for my protection. He was a good man, but he was in love with someone who would stop at nothing to harm me.

A few weeks after the bathroom voyeurism had diminished because of my tedious attention to detail in covering up all of the portals to my bathroom activities, Allen invited me into the living room for a chat. He said he wanted to talk to me about my boyfriend, Shawn, and the rumors he had heard in the neighborhood. After I nervously sat down, Allen suddenly stood up and walked into the kitchen.

Allen said, Hey, come into the kitchen. I want to show you something. I thought this was a little strange, but I followed. Look what I have for us in the refrigerator, he said. Look in the back of the lower shelf. He’d hidden at least twelve bottles of beer at the back of the refrigerator. He pulled out a beer and leaned against the kitchen counter. No one in the entire family drank—not my mother, father, aunts, uncles, grandparents, or any of their friends—so I was a little shocked at Allen. I had never seen him drink. Would you like a drink? he asked. I know you’ve been drinking when you’re out.

Shocked and embarrassed, all I could do was mumble, I’ve never tasted beer, and I don’t want it now.

He walked back into the living room, ordering me to follow, and told me to sit beside him on the sofa. He started questioning me—or perhaps more accurately, interrogating me—about alleged rumors, all the while moving ever so slowly closer to me. When he was right next to me, he tried to put his arm around me and fondle my breasts. I was a teenager, and he was in his fifties. He continued; I held my breath. My survival instinct took over, or perhaps I panicked. This isn’t right, I thought to myself. He has no right to do what he is doing. I screamed, I’m leaving! I jumped up from the sofa, ran through the kitchen, grabbed the keys to the car, and ran out the back door, where I took off in the car. Fight-or-flight was in operation.

I drove around aimlessly for about an hour, and then went to the only place I could think of to go—my boyfriend’s house. I told Shawn the story, and he said we needed to talk to his mother. Shawn had a wonderful, healthy family, unlike mine. His mother was gracious and knew immediately something was very wrong with me. At first, I was afraid, but somehow I found the courage to tell her about Allen and what he had been doing. Thank goodness for Shawn and his family. It was my first experience with understanding, compassionate parental figures.

I said through my sobs, Allen is the one who was looking at me through the bathroom keyhole and the window. He’s been doing it for months. At first, I just felt a presence, but then I put it together. If I was in the bathroom when everyone was out of the house, I would hear a faint noise. Something would get my attention if I carefully listened to the quiet house, or I would feel someone watching me from the other side of the door. Now, he openly tried to trap me. He was touching me, and I know he would have raped me if I had not panicked and run away.

Shawn’s mother said, Breathe, and then she encouraged me to call Allen and Iris to say I would be back in a day or two to pick up my things. That phone call took courage, and I don’t remember much of what was said. I was shaking uncontrollably.

Shawn’s mother also insisted I call my parents and tell them the story. In tears, I made the call, but I was terrified to discuss this or anything that included sex or drinking with them. Only a year ago, it was rumored I was pregnant, and now I was accusing Allen, their best friend, of being a voyeur. Both of my parents were older than my friends’ parents, and there was never any sex education in our house or mention of how babies are conceived—this topic was taboo. My mother reacted by asking if I was sure about what happened. Allen had been watching me for weeks, but she wanted to know if I was sure. It was as if she was telling me I must be mistaken and I must be guilty. She didn’t care one damn thing about what I was going through, and she wasn’t going to believe what I said. My father wanted to jump on a plane to be by my side in a few hours, but my controlling mother talked him out of that course of action. So I was left to deal with the problem myself.

Shawn’s mother made sure I was safe, at least for the night. I didn’t sleep much, but I did feel safer. I, of course, questioned myself and wondered if I had blown the whole thing out of proportion. I’m always seen as guilty, so I must be guilty, I thought. Shawn’s mother and father assured me the events I had described were not normal, and I was not to blame.

I had about two weeks before school would be out for the summer and desperately needed someplace to stay. Shawn’s mother said I could stay the night, but I would need to find a more appropriate place to stay the next day. It was up to me to find a place to stay, or I would have to go in a foster home or on the streets. Thank goodness my girlfriend’s family let me stay with them, no questions asked.

Allen and Iris got off scot-free, and no one ever really knew what happened except my parents, Allen (the pedophile), Shawn, and his parents. My mother again left me alone to fight the wolves, my father failed to stand up to her, and I had to deal with the pieces. It was never discussed in the family again. The elephant in the living room just sat there.

After that, I felt it was up to me to make all of my own decisions. I would be independent, alone, and untrusting, all of which my mother reinforced. Obviously, I didn’t live with Allen and Iris my senior year in high school, and my guilt was confirmed by the lack of discussion in the family. Even though Iris suspected something had happened and begged my mother to tell her, no one spoke the truth. To my knowledge, the event died with my mother. I’m not sure what Iris thought the truth was, because I spoke to her only once in the next ten years. She probably died never knowing the truth, or she believed Allen’s version of the truth, which was that I was a drunk and had been drinking for years. The incident of being molested, however, helped me acquire a taste for alcohol because of my feeling of aloneness and susceptibility to harm from others, and his prediction became the truth.

During my senior year in high school, I fell in love again, just like a normal teenager. The new love of my life was a good person with strong religious beliefs and a strong moral compass. I thought we were meant to be together, and when I announced during my freshman year in college that he had asked me to marry him, and we were planning to be married my senior year, my mother saw another opportunity to destroy my happiness.

She, with my father’s permission, told me, You’re too young to think about getting married. You have no idea of what you are doing. This boy will never amount to anything, and I’m telling you to break up with him now.

I was stupid and clearly still could be manipulated, as I broke off the engagement. I wasn’t strong enough to fight the devil, so I caved in. That will be the last time she will control me and the last time I will listen to her, I vowed silently to myself. My contempt for her was profound. It would be more accurate to say that my contempt was directed at myself, because I was unable to believe in myself or my decisions.

My life took a downward spiral, and no matter how much I tried to turn my life around, I was in a very dark place, destructive to me and to those around me. I made a list of those positive mind-sets that are supposed to help a person get to a better place. My personal favorites were:

I’m happy.

I’m content.

I use my time wisely.

I use my quiet time to rejuvenate.

I attract friends.

I feel surrounded by love.

All of these were bullshit and didn’t happen just because I had taken the time to write them down. The parts of myself I hadn’t dealt with continued to prevent those little sayings from being possible. It wouldn’t be until years later that I could even think about these characteristics. It was Woody who gently pushed me in the right direction and supported the push with kind words.

The countermeasure to my mother was my father’s sisters. Both of my paternal grandparents died before I was born, but my dad had three sisters who were magical in my mind and were stand-ins for the grandparents I never knew. My father supported them financially, and none of them worked much more than part-time jobs here and there. One had been married but lost her husband at an early age, and she moved back into the house with her two sisters.

Each was delightful in her own way and provided me with encouragement, support, and skills where my mother failed. One of the sisters was the foundation for the rest of the household and was the workhorse, so to speak, for the residence. She was the one who did most of the cleaning, washed the clothing, cooked most of the food, and planted a garden in the backyard. By today’s standards, the house was rather small, with a living room or parlor in the front. The lived-in living room off to the left was now one of the sister’s bedrooms.

The second of the three sisters saw it as her responsibility to teach me the finer points of etiquette by making sure I understood which fork, spoon, or knife to use and in which order. She taught me about sending thank-you notes, responding to invitations, and taking gifts when invited to special events. Her grace and poise was delicate and feminine. She had made it her passion to study how to behave in any social situation. While I wasn’t sure why these skills were important, they proved to be very helpful later in life at Becker Industries. Her world was made up of lace, porcelain hand-painted teacups, and the handkerchief every woman should carry, even on an afternoon picnic. The times have changed, but some of her lessons have stayed with me all of my life, and I’m eternally grateful for the time she spent with me.

The third sister was the most interesting of all. She was artistic and could get lost in her own world, but she was a genius when it came to writing children’s stories, making clothes for my dolls, showing me how to make change, and playing store and games to keep me entertained. I didn’t realize all the games had a purpose—to help me identify colors, remember my ABCs, do math problems, and understand the world at large. She had more patience than any person I’ve ever known. Her patience came from her love for me and having my interests at heart. None of the sisters made me feel I was worthless or something to be thrown away. So it was hard for me, as a young child, to understand how my mother could reject me on a regular basis, when my father’s sisters poured more love into me than I thought possible. Talk about messing up my mind. I felt like a push-me, pull-me toy, but I adored my father’s sisters and was grateful they were in my life. I was lucky to know them, but unfortunately, they