Happy Endings

Christine Paluf and Dr. William Petit Jr.

The news today that Dr. William Petit found new love gave me a shot of warmth and optimism.  If anyone deserves a second chance at happiness in life, it is he.

I have a difficult time acknowledging there is evil in the world, so when the proof is right in front of me, I seek every detail in a macabre sort of challenge of nature.  I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly, probably just some clue about why there sometimes exists a hell on earth.

That’s what happened in Connecticut in 2007.   Two parolees, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes stalked a mother and her 11 year old daughter at the supermarket, followed them to their suburban home, and planned an evening of robbery and torture.    In the middle of the night, they broke into the home and found Dr. Petit asleep on the sofa in the family room.  They slammed his head with a baseball bat and tied him up, out of the way in the basement.

The sisters were tied to their beds and the younger one was raped, as was the mother, Jennifer Hawke-Petit.  Early the next morning Hayes drove Jennifer to the bank and instructed her to withdraw cash, which she did at the same time she passed a note to the teller that the family was being held hostage nearby.  It was the last time anyone saw her alive.  She returned to the car and was  brought home and strangled.  The robbers set fire to the house and left the girls to die in the flames.

At about the same time, Dr. Petit, bloodied and injured, managed to free himself and escaped out a basement window to seek help.  Between the neighbor’s call to 911 and the call from the bank, the small town police force arrived quite long after, and were criticized for not taking the house sooner to save the women.

In the subsequent separate trials of Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes , Petit said he thought often about suicide after the loss of his family and all the memorabilia a family creates and collects, but he pursued justice for all of them, and in the process, found new love.  He is now engaged to photographer Christine Paluf,  a woman who volunteered with the charitable organization which was begun to honor the memories of the lost women.

For those of us in Central New York, it brought back terrible memories of the Harris family murders in Dryden, NY, in 1989.  In similar fashion, Michael Kinge broke into the home of a typical family preparing for the Christmas holiday.  He tied up the father, mother and teenage son, escorted 15 year old Shelby to the master bedroom, forced her to put on her prom dress and sexually assaulted her over several hours.  She died on that bed.  The rest of the family was tied up, seated back to back on the floor and shot in the head one at a time.   The Harris home was also doused with gasoline and set afire to destroy evidence.

It is easy to cope with these vicious acts by reminding ourselves we are far away.  Different towns, different states.  If we turned the news off at the first details we can protect ourselves from the grim certainty that evil really does exist.  But by opening our eyes and our minds, we learn how close we come to the long fingers of trouble.

Not long after the Harris family was killed, I was walking in Saint Mary’s cemetery in Dewitt.  I consider cemeteries to be beautiful places; the underground inhabitants mostly taken by natural causes in their 70s as nature suggests we go.  Cemeteries are peaceful and park-like.  But one routine, sunny day I saw a large headstone right beside the little road I was walking with the words “Harris Family” etched deep.  I felt a thunderbolt strike me in the head.  There they all were, a few feet from me, together in eternity much too soon.  It was too close.

The Petit family came too close too.  In a family photo released during the first trial, the background looked terribly familiar to me.  The family was from Connecticut with plenty of Atlantic coastline, but the background of this particular picture looked like Wychmere Harbor near my vacation house on Cape Cod.

Wychmere Harbor, Cape Cod, June 2007

I read the caption and my blood froze: “Cape Cod, June 2007″.   My family was on Cape Cod in June of 2007 too.  Could our paths have crossed at the beach, the grocery store, or the ice cream shop in Harwich?  Or did the Petits pass through quickly on their way to other Cape towns?  It really doesn’t matter now.  They lined up along the split-rail fence as everyone does for a photo there, as I’ve done with my own children many times.   We went on to live our lives.  The Petits went back to Connecticut and were dead in a month.

Happy endings seem so necessary, especially for those who deserve them more than just about anybody. That is Dr. Petit. His fiancee looks remarkably similar to his wife.  Is he holding onto a piece of his first love by finding love in someone who looks eerily the same?   His in-laws say they are ecstatic at the news.  The backdrop of unfathomable hate makes this gesture all the more loving and kind.

Perhaps we need to see evil from time to time to see love’s power and grace.  Everything is relative after all.  Anyone familiar with what happened in that home in Connecticut must have wished to hold the doctor in humanity’s embrace.  I’m so happy we won’t be needed anymore.  Dr. Petit deserves new love,  and I am thrilled he seems to have found it.

Wychmere Harbor, Cape Cod, Autumn 2011