In 1975 I graduated from high school.  A gallon of gas cost 44 cents and Bic launched the first disposable razor.  The Alaska pipeline was begun.  Gerald Ford was President.  And my oldest, most important friend was murdered.

Lisa Nodelman was perfect, at least through the eyes of a five year old on that first day of kindergarten at May Street School.  She remained that way until her violent end as a senior in high school at 17.  She was the most popular girl in class.

Maureen, middle row left. Lisa middle right

The classmates we had in kindergarten were the same kids we had all the way to 6th grade.  We played together after school, celebrated every birthday looking just like the class roster only more dressed up,  knew whose birthday came early in the year and was therefore among the oldest which seemed important back then.  Lisa was one of those early ones.  We knew who was smart and who was dumb,  lined up automatically according to height anytime we went in and out for recess or set up for the class photo.  Lisa and I were always within one head of each other.  We started and ended May Street tall for our age.

By Junior High at Chandler Street, our little class got diluted with kids from other grammar schools, and high school blended the group even more, but by then I enrolled in tiny Notre Dame Academy and I lost touch with Lisa, lost touch in the hallways and classes each day but I did keep informed through friends and my sister Karen who attended Doherty High and ran track with Lisa.  I heard Lisa joined a fast crowd off the track too.  It was probably God’s grace that I was in a different school not able to keep up.  My parents would not have allowed it and I would have resented them for that.

Maureen and Lisa, at center

Lisa was beautiful.  She got the grades.  Except for the time as a little girl she was afraid to climb down from the tree house in our yard and I was surprised to have to summon my mother, Lisa was fearless too.    Lisa broke school track records.  She was as we say today, the total package, destined for great things, and I had no doubt those things would come to her when I saw her for the last time.  She walked into a little shop where I worked at Tatnuck Square and was her usual confident self.  High school had matured her, matured us all, and she treated me favorably, which was a relief.  I always wished Lisa would like me best.

Just a couple of months later on a cold day in January, a small item appeared in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.   A city girl was missing.  It was Lisa.   Karen said everyone at Doherty was talking about it.  No one had any idea where Lisa could have gone.

By the second day, the article on Lisa got longer.  Authorities expanded their search to Cape Cod for the suspected teenaged runaway.  The stories I heard about Lisa made a run to the Cape seem plausible even in winter with everything shut down.  But at the same time, in the same newspaper, there was another story about a woman’s body found in a snow bank outside the campus of Anna Maria, a small college in a Worcester suburb.  She was nude and had no ID.  Thank goodness it’s a woman I thought.  Lisa was no woman, she was just a girl.

Maureen at left, Elise at right

The next day all the dots got connected when Karen came home from school out of breath from running up the driveway with the afternoon paper in her hand and fighting tears to announce Elise is dead; the news not only confirmed but hammered on the front page in bold black lettering I still can see. “Paxton Body Identified As Missing City Girl”.  The most famous headline of my life.

I was too stunned to do the right thing, so I did the young thing.  I carried on with my busy little senior year.  I didn’t take time for the funeral, didn’t feel the need to expose myself to all that sadness.   In fact I heard Lisa’s mother turned hysterical at the burial and starting kicking dirt all over the place, so grateful to have missed that messy scene was I.  There were college applications to fill out.  Life was waiting for me.

They arrested a man some time later, I don’t recall if it was weeks or months after the murder, but he stood trial and was sentenced to death until the Governor overturned the death penalty and I felt the guy got off easy.  I don’t remember the murderer’s name anymore, so I don’t know his fate, but I suspect he probably did his twenty years in prison and got out around 1997.  I recall he was young to be a murderer, only about 23 years at the time.

Side by side in 6th grade

On the night Lisa was murdered she got into a fender bender while setting off for a party across town.   She exchanged license and insurance information with the man she bumped into, and went on to enjoy the last night of her life.   With Lisa’s address in hand, the man drove around the corner and waited outside her home on Havelock Road.  In the cold, all night long, he patiently anticipated the return of the pretty girl to whom fate had introduced him.  When Lisa pulled into the driveway around 4 am, he grabbed her before she could even turn off the engine.

The next morning, Lisa’s Mom got up to go to work and found the car in the driveway, engine still running, radio blaring and warmth floating from the dashboard vents through the open driver’s door.  A few blocks away, police found one of Elise’s shoes.  Further down the street, they found her purse.  By the time they found her days later, she’d been raped, stripped, strangled and dumped in the snow by the side of a rural road.   No more Lisa.

I should have gone to the funeral because I’ve been saying goodbye in my dreams ever since.  Lisa makes periodic appearances in nocturnal story lines that make no sense, but I’m always living my life and she’s not living hers.  She looks exactly as she did when I last saw her, age 17, younger than three of my own children now, just a baby to a 51 year old.  And I always wake up so sad for Lisa, for the college she never attended, the career she never started, the husband she never met and the children she never had.  I’m sad for the class reunions she didn’t make and for the chance meeting at the grocery store with an old acquaintance who is the only one who gets to be old.  She never got that far, getting herself killed so young.

There are all kinds of lessons to be learned and I focused on them early.  Friends used to say, “that could have been us”, but I didn’t say that.  My parents never would have let me go to a party on the other side of Worcester.   They gave me the curfew of an eight year old.  So I didn’t learn how close I was to being a victim of rape and murder like Lisa.  My life wasn’t set up like hers.

Mostly, I’ve learned how life takes fairness off the table again and again.

How do you go on when your mother tried to kill you?  The Stacey Castor story is so bizarre, so incredible, I don’t think Lifetime Television would consider it’s story line.  Surely there are no self-help books on this one.  How many people would need to buy it?

When David Castor of Syracuse died of suicide by antifreeze poisoning in 2005, authorities never stopped thinking about Castor’s wife.  The drinking glass on the night stand held the fingerprints of only one person; Stacey Castor.

For two years prosecutors worked to build a case of murder and in 2007 their efforts led them to another crime.  They exhumed the body of Stacey Castor’s first husband David Wallace who died of a suspected heart attack in 2000.  A subsequent autopsy revealed he died of antifreeze poisoning too.

With the truth bearing down on Stacey, the mother of two warned her daughters, 20-year old Ashley and 15- year old Bree, that the police were opening old wounds and causing trouble for all of them.  The girls believed their mother was a victim and did not deserve this stress after all the tragedy in her life.

On the eve of Ashley’s 21st birthday, Stacey offered to give her daughter a first celebratory cocktail.   She mixed two vodka drinks and the pair sat down to enjoy the evening.   Ashley recalls her mom encouraging her to finish every last drop of the drink.

That night, Bree inquired about her sister and her mom said Ashley was resting in her room and would sleep until morning.  Ashley’s boyfriend telephoned her, but Stacey said the girl was sleeping and should not be disturbed.  He asked Stacey to look for an item left behind in Ashley’s bedroom and Stacey returned to the phone to say she looked and couldn’t find it.  The boyfriend was calling from just outside the house and never saw the light go on in Ashley’s room.

The following morning, Bree entered her sister’s room and found Ashley dazed and incoherent at the foot of the bed.  Bree went to get her mother and when she returned a few minutes later, she saw a typewritten suicide note on the bed that was not there a moment earlier.  In it, Ashley confessed to killing both her father and her stepfather, however the note bore no fingerprint from Ashley.  Only Stacey and Bree, who had picked it up to read it left fingerprints on the paper.  Ashley was  rushed to the hospital and recovered from her poisonous cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs and her mother was arrested.

Stacey Castor was convicted last week of murdering her second husband and attempting to murder her daughter.  Prosecutors in an adjacent county are now building a case of murder against Castor for her first husband’s death.  Castor is 4o and will likely never live outside prison again, and yet it is the life sentence of the daughter that I can’t shake.

What will it take for Ashley to repair her wounds?   She told prosecutors she considered her relationship with her mother to be close, which makes it even worse.  Had they been competitive or estranged from one another, Ashley would have had a little distance to protect her.  This attack came from deep inside the heart.

I think of all the life events where Ashley will want a mother.   New jobs, a bridal shower,  a wedding, pregnancies and parenting advice.    Holidays, birthdays, Mother’s Day.  All the moments through all the years where we place a phone call home or we come together and toast to the happy occasion.

Will Ashley ever have a drink when she doesn’t remember her mother’s special recipe?  Will she ever have a cocktail again at all?

The courtoom photograph of a sobbing Ashley shows the finality of what her mother tried to do.  Did  Ashley harbor any doubt about the truth until that moment when a body of informed adults confirmed it?  We cannot know.  Hopefully Ashley will receive counseling and friends to carry her to the other side of this nightmare, where the woman who brought her into this world also attempted to take her out.