Shadow of a Killer: the Dark Side of Paradise Read online

  In the time between phone calls the Perdues decided to go to Sacramento to meet as many of Frank’s newfound family members as they could. It would be eight hundred miles one way, and there were some time constraints due to other commitments, but they could do it. Thank God for credit cards. Thanks too for this woman he had married nearly thirty years ago, who was willing to pack up at a moment’s notice because it would make her husband happy. It was her life that was being disrupted along with his, and her interest was only in him, and his welfare.

  Later, Frank would have trouble remembering his emotional conversation with his mother. It was tearful, and the word love came up often. Beulah wanted him to know that she always loved him, and never forgot him. She also felt it was important to discuss his birth father. She had loved him and wanted to marry him, but it didn’t work out.

  “You have his voice.” She told Frank. “It thrills me even now. Frank told her of their plans to come to Sacramento, and she became even more excited. “Oh, I can’t believe I’m going to see you! I have a picture of you when you were a little baby that I’ve kept all these years.”

  There was no doubt Beulah loved Frank. Somehow over the phone he felt that love, and told her he loved her too. When the call was completed, Frank was shaken. Nonie saw how it affected him, and came to him and held him close.

  They realized there were other people who would be deeply affected. There were four grown boys, and Frank had a boy and girl from a previous marriage. Three of the boys were in and around Seattle, and it was decided to tell them personally. The other three would have to be notified by phone. Upon hearing the news, each reacted differently, but all were supportive, and worried about their father. He was proud of them, that they were able to think of him first, even though their lives would also change.

  The trip by car to Sacramento was uneventful. Sheila had given good directions when she talked to Nonie by phone the day after the call to Frank’s mother. It had been a chance to clarify some of the things Frank had forgotten in the excitement of the first exchange. Things such as his sister’s names.

  When they arrived at the house, they could tell they were at the right place, because every tree in the front yard had a large yellow ribbon tied around it. Everyone came out to meet them. Sally was operating the video camera.

  Only six days had passed since Nonie and Frank had decided to go to Sacramento. It was just three weeks before that they read Sheila’s first letter, never dreaming of the adventure awaiting them.

  There was no doubt this was Frank’s long lost family, for when all the family members who could attend, were crowded into Sheila’s front room for this first reunion, they exchanged pictures. When Nonie saw the one Beulah had carried with her for all the years they were apart, she cried. It was the same picture Esther had placed in Frank’s baby book. On the back, in Esther’s handwriting, was a notation for Mrs. Allen, the woman who ran the home for unwed mothers in Reno long ago.

  When Beulah gave up her only male child, she had no place to go. The sympathetic Mrs. Allen let her stay on for a time, working to earn her keep. Esther, not realizing the young desperate mother was still there, sent the first picture she and her husband had taken to the home on Virginia Street, since she and Myrta Allen were good friends. Myrta, in turn, realizing Beulah had lost so much, gave her young ward the picture of baby Frank, who had been born John, thinking it was the last she would see of him.

  Sally couldn’t help but think back to that day her mother told her about Jean and Joan and John-how she had run away from the family home in Vermont at the age of fifteen. She went to New York City with a young man in his twenties, not realizing she would be held there as a white slave to do his bidding. When she became pregnant the man left her. She contacted her aunt in Reno. The older woman in turn made arrangements with the Salvation Army to rescue her. They placed her on a train headed west to Nevada. Beulah remembered the kindness of many of the passengers on that long trip.

  Verna Jean was born in Reno in nineteen thirty. The aunt helped care for young Jean while Beulah worked in her rooming house, doing the only work she had ever done, housekeeping.

  The young attractive girl was still looking for love, and a way out of poverty, when she met Robert Thomas, a railroad fireman boarding at her aunt’s home. They entered into a relationship. Soon she was again with child. She wanted to keep this baby. When the Salvation Army was once again contacted, it was learned there was no longer a facility for single women in Reno, so she would have to go to Oakland, California to have her child. On the paperwork she wrote that her husband was deceased, hoping she would be allowed to keep the baby when it was born.

  Once again Beulah boarded a train, this time for a trip into California. Robert Thomas had left for parts unknown, but she was happy. She was carrying a new life, one she would love, boy or girl.

  When the Salvation Army did a standard background check, they learned Beulah was not widowed, as she had stated, or even married. The officers of the group decided to place the baby up for adoption when it was born, for the good of the child. Beulah cried when she was told of the decision, but she thought there was no recourse but to give the baby up for adoption.

  Joan Darlene Jackson, the Jackson being Beulah’s given surname, was born June first, nineteen thirty-two at the Salvation Army home for unwed mothers in Oakland, California. The Children’s Home Society of that city placed the child with a Scandinavian family nearby almost immediately. However, she was removed from the adoptive family at their request when she was eleven months old, because her skin was too dark, and it was felt everyone would suspect she was adopted, and therefore given an abusive label. Beulah’s grandfather had been a slave, before escaping on the underground railway to Vermont, where he made a good life for himself and his growing family.

  Not long afterward Joan was adopted by forty year old parents who already had eighteen and nine year old daughters. They may have run a farm. Neither parent drank or smoked. The mother played piano, and the family was very religious.

  Joan, whose name was possibly changed, was lost forever to her natural mother. Beulah eventually married, and had four more daughters.

  John Allen Harrington is the name on Frank’s original birth certificate. Beulah Mae Jackson did not want her aunt to have the boy, so she used her mother’s maiden name on the birth certificate.

  The end of a true story

  By Frank A. Perdue

  P.S. This account was originally written in the hopes of finding the family’s long lost daughter Joan. It was never published, and nothing ever turned up.