Tropic

Back in the day, the Miami Herald was a really good newspaper to subscribe to; the Sunday issue in particular. On Sundays they had a magazine section called "Tropic", which, among other things, would cover a particular story with an in-depth article. Many of the articles were so good, so memorable, local people are still referencing them in conversation to this day.

As the Herald went into decline, one of the things they got rid of was the "Tropic" section. I'm lucky enough to have access to archives that cover most of the years of the magazine. I ran across this article on Christine Falling, Florida's worst babysitter, today while researching something else. I remember sitting on the patio, drinking coffee, and reading this article one Sunday long ago. Since it's not available on the net, I thought I'd include it here so it would be.

The author won a Pulitzer for her work at the Herald. While I don't agree with the conclusion of the article, the writing is terrific. Something you could savor along with your coffee on a Sunday morning.

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THE BABYSITTER
Author: MADELEINE BLAIS Herald Staff Writer

1983 Tropic

"I love young 'uns. I don't know why I done what I done. Young 'uns is real cute. They don't really give you no problem. They sleep most of the time. They is affection and you can cuddle them. Little girls is fun because their clothes is prettier than boys and you can dress them up more fancier. I always give young 'uns candy, or a cookie, get on my hands and knees and chase a truck with them. I've been babysitting since I was 14. I never hit a young 'un. I always left that up to the parents.

"Everybody asks me, why you done it, why you done it. I keep askin' myself. I could a seen it if it was a grown-up, could take up for itself, but a little one ain't gonna hurt a grown- up. If it was a grown-up I could have hollered self-defense. The way I done it, I seen it done on TV shows. Only way I ever thought to do it. The simplest and easiest. No one could hear them scream.

"Sometimes I think I done it 'cause I got bad nerves and all the crying, pitchin' fits, throwing stuff, all the time messin' on you, peein' on you, burpin' up on you. Make my nerves go haywire. Only thing I want to do is shut them up. I go to any extreme. I went too far.

"Maybe it was a seizure. I have them grand mal seizures. They is the worse seizures they are.

"Maybe it's 'cause I cain't have young 'uns. Cain't carry them. Something's wrong with my uterus, deformed, retarded, somethin'. When my sisters have one I'm jealous. Maybe that's why I did Geneva's the way I did. I never did touch Carol's young 'un though. Cain't say why not.

"Maybe it's 'cause I didn't get paid half the time. Geneva never paid me but she was kin. Now some of them parents owed me and owed me and owed me. They was gonna pay me and it kept doubling up and doubling up. Fifteen dollars a day times three months. I don't know how much that is. Cain't add that good.

"Sometimes I want to blame the way I was raised up.

"Sometimes I think I have a streak of mean.

"A streak of mental illness.

"Undoubtfully you don't do somethin' for nothin'.

"Got to have a reason somewhere.

"I keep having these dreams, seein' all the babies in a row, all the same as they was only they can talk and they're sayin' all this junk. 'You killed us; now we're gonna kill you.' I want to get rid of those dreams and go back to a normal life.

"I don't understand.

"I brought it all out in the open.

"Why I still have dreams about it, I'll never know.

"I remember when we was little my stepmother, Aunt Dolly, she would take me to church Sunday nights and while the services was goin' on, me and some other girls used to sneak out back. We was mean when we was little. We used to take cats, much as I love cats, throwed 'em up in the air and wringed their necks just to see if a cat had nine lives.

"That what we done it for.

"A cat does not have nine lives.

"I found that out.

"You kill it one time, it ain't gonna come back eight more times."

For 2 1/2 years she made headlines:

Christine Falling, the babysitter of northern Florida, presumed carrier of a mysterious virus that infected and then killed first one then two, three, four and finally five children left in her care from early 1980 until July of 1982. She was famous, ("I got letters from Hawaii.") a modern-day Typhoid Mary, a one-person epidemic of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. "They put me in all them Enquirers and them Mirrors and them Globes. TV, too." She told reporters that the "awful weird coincidence" of the deaths was not enough to keep her from babysitting. Her comments were bizarre, so offhand:

"I'm not scared to babysit. Nobody knows if a young 'un is going to die. You can babysit for a young 'un who has never been sick a day in her life and they'll just drop dead on you.

"In a way, I'm glad I never had no young 'uns 'cause if I had one die on me like that, why, they might just bury me along with it.

"Sometimes I wonder if I don't have some kind of spell over me when I get around young 'uns."

Christine's case was as wild and peculiar as the countryside of the Panhandle where the sad drama took place, the portable horror traveling from one town to another: Lakeland, Perry, Blountstown. It is a rural area known as South Georgia, something out of Deliverance. It is God-fearing country with billboards to show it: "Heaven or Hell -- You determine it." Logging country, the land is covered with tall pines and great oaks. The close-by rivers have noble names: The Su-wannee, the Steinhatchee, Apalachicola. They move past the small towns as slow as time, and they are just as old.

The people are poor; without education, without prospects. Carol Phillips, Christine's sister, says the best jobs in Perry are at Buckeye, the paper plant, and after that Winn Dixie and K-Mart. Those are the jobs people would kill for. Housing is rundown and often not clean; as Christine would say, "It's hard to keep your personal hygienes up and all." Inside one trailer, one evening, dinnertime: a bowl of greens, huge servings of mashed potatoes with gravy, a single piece of gristle tossed back and forth among three young children, one shouting, "I hate fat meat." The offending morsel lands on the plate of the youngest, powerless to toss it elsewhere. The television is on. No one is talking. Parents and children glumly fill their mouths. The hus-band will be leaving soon on a run; he drives a truck. He likes it: It's hard to think about going to work after the freedom of a truck. The man is in his late 20s, sick with stomach ulcers, doctor says he's dying. The man thinks he got the ulcers from too much Pepsi. He wants an open casket. Outside tethered dogs bark at the moon.

Under such conditions there is not much margin for grace, very little energy for anything other than survival. Mortality is a presence and a reality. A portion of the cemetery in Perry is called Babyland. It is a group grave. Crude metal markers honor the passing of about 30 children. "Another angel before the Heaven," says one of the markers. Carol Phillips, Christine's older sister, has a baby in the cemetery. "They say that at Woodlawn there are two children to every adult. Half my junior high school class is here because of some foolishness they was into: a car wreck, a dare." Carol bends over, pulling up the weeds and uprighting the fallen baskets of flowers, not just at her daughter's grave, but also at Jennifer Daniel's grave and at the graves of strangers.

When the children in Christine Falling's care died, it was assumed they were like everybody else: life's victims. No one thought "smotheration." Everyone figured it was that disease that keeps the young 'uns from breathing; a touch of that.

No one would accept that she was a murderer. Not her family, not the townspeople, not the doctors, not the parents of her victims.

Reporters wrote that her "babysitting business" was suffering because of the bad publicity. The phrase conveys a wildly false reputability. It implies a facility, some kind of licensing, the keeping of books, a cheerful decor of dancing animals. This picture parodies the reality of a gang of kids in the custody of an epileptic teenaged girl, of low intelligence, in trailers and shacks, tended for hours on end. The parents were poor: the parents of Jeffrey and the parents of Joe-Boy were out fishbaiting; driving worms from the earth, vibrating them up through the use of crude tools, collecting them into buckets and selling them. Each bucket, containing about 500, earns between $17 and $28, depending on the time of year; it's a common side income for pregnant women to get up extra money for a nursery.

They accepted their victimization. Jeffrey's death was blamed on the water. It was contaminated: Young 'uns couldn't handle it. Joe-Boy's parents were attending Jeffrey's funeral when Joe-Boy took ill suddenly. The talk again turned to the water.

The mother of the final victim was out all night. She was 17 years old, celebrating the release of her 2-month-old son Travis
from the hospital after a week's bout with what was said to be "yemonia." The child was saved after he developed breathing difficulties in Christine's care. A week later, Travis was returned to Christine's care, and died.

Jennifer's mother had left Christine for a matter of minutes when the death occured. She was inside a Winn Dixie buying some diapers while Christine watched her daughter when she took ill and turned purple and stopped breathing. When she came out Christine waited until they started driving to tell the mother something was wrong. "I knowed I could put on a cover-up story." Her cover-up story: "This baby ain't breathing." The mother: "Babies don't breathe hard, Christine." She looked over. Her child was blue. "There was no spond." They raced to the hospital. Christine dropped the child's glass bottle on the way in. As always Christine was in shock when questioned by the authorities; the tears came easily. At the funeral when Precious
Memories was played, Christine fled.

Despite the deaths, families of the victims and friends continued to offer tributes to Christine's skills as a sitter: She was nice to young 'uns, she brought them presents, she let them take sips of her iced tea. Also, there were dozens and dozens of children who had survived her caretaking, a statistic intended to demonstrate that Christine could hardly have killed those five in light of the dozens she didn't kill.

"I tried," she said, "never to go under a dollar an hour." Sometimes she did, exchanging her services for food and a place to sleep.

Buddy Smith, Calhoun County Sheriff: "It was a sad case on both sides." Baya Harrison, defense attorney: "The full horror of this story has yet to come out." Dr. Robert Wray, psychiatrist: "Mass adolescent female murderers are extremely rare." Jerry Blair, prosecutor: "Falling is the victim of her environment. She couldn't handle stress very well. I probably have more sympathy for Christine Falling than anyone I've ever prosecuted for a criminal offense."

From the Perry News-Herald, July 29, 1982:

Some of Christine Falling's 'family' in Perry say they're glad she has been charged with the murder of two infants in her care because, this way, she'll eventually be brought to trial where she'll be found innocent of all charges.

"Then, maybe then, Falling's life will get back to normal and people will leave her and her family alone. Falling was charged with the murder of two Blountstown children last Thursday. The charges were another chapter in a long nightmare for the 19-year-old former Perry resident whose babysitting jobs was her sole means of support."

Geneva Burnette Daniels, Christine's stepsister, the mother of Joe-Boy and Jennifer, said Christine's epilepsy made her especially sensitive to the young children who eventually died of their illnesses. "She knew what the kids were going through."

Carol: "She must be a very sick person if she did what they said she did. I won't believe it. I can't. If God came down and stood on that sidewalk and said to me, 'Your sister did it,' I'd have to say, 'You're crazy. Not Chris."'

When Christine was arrested, police tried to link her with the death of Carol's daughter. Christine had visited when the baby was a couple of weeks old. "It makes me really mad," says Carol, "that they tried to blame that on her."

Jesse Falling, adoptive father: "Maybe she's got her nerves crossed."

Dolly Falling, adoptive mother:

"...Like our friend, his two nerves was crossed in the back of his head. All he could do was sit and cry all day, yes ma'am, tears coming down all day and then he went to Chattahoochee for a year and had that operation to get his two nerves uncrossed and he's been his old self ever since."

In Christine's world:

It is the 19th Century.

Russia bombed Pearl Harbor.

Columbus rode the Mayflower and discovered Florida.

Wallace and Carter are former presidents.

Elephants gestate for two years and their offspring weigh 20 tons.

It was either George Washington, or maybe it was Abraham Lincoln, who discovered electricity. In any case, it happened before she was born. She doesn't understand why she has to know things from before she was born.

The psychiatrists keep giving her tests. She thinks they are stupid tests, suitable for "a 2- or 3-year-old young 'un."

"They ask you about your sex life, what age was you when you lost your virge . . .virge . . . virginality. Silly questions: If you had a sex life would you want to be spreading your personal sex life around. They ask are you a homosex or a bisex, which at that time I put no.

"On the tests they want you to tell them what kind of picture you see in this paint spattered, most of its just
butterflies and bats. They do that to see if you got any brains. They like to play with what's up here."

A psychological evaluation con-ducted on Oct. 25, 1982 revealed that Christine's IQ was 85, in the low average range of intellectual ability.

Christine listed her hobbies as watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Some of the fevered curiosity that greeted the case of Christine Falling diminished because of how she looked: Christine, Christine, beauty queen, went the chant in her hometown of Perry. Christine was obese, over 200 pounds. The long straight hair fell flat, untended. The wide forehead was a ledge, overhanging sunken eyes. There was a lack of differentiation to her features; the cheeks were chubby. She was a mockery of someone younger; a giant baby.

She certainly did not fit the cliched cheerleader image of the pretty, young babysitter dressed in the latest outlandish style, trusted element of society, absolutely essential to the sanity of the burgher marriage, girls who think everything worthwhile is either cute or really cute. They arrive to babysit with their textbooks in virtuous if ostentatious tow. They are given a nervous little lesson in 911, offered the bounty of the refrigerator and the Cable and all in all rather elaborately courted. For their part the girls are expected to convey an air of reassuring normality. In the newspaper pictures and on television, she never looked normal. Nor reassuring.

Carol Phillips is tall, and thin, with curly hair, freckles, and two chipped front teeth. Like Christine, her sister, she has a country drawl, yet not the same flat monotone.

Carol and her husband Mike live in Jacksonville. He earns six something an hour at a plant that manufactures shingles. The work is difficult, and a man can be standing there laughing one minute and wrapped up in a machine the next. He would like to get on the day shift and hopes to join the credit union so he and Carol can buy a 1980 Plymouth Scamp. Carol spends her time keeping their one bedroom apartment clean and neat, getting groceries, going to the laundromat. The apartment is sparsely furnished. There are some photos from Mike and Carol's wedding on display. The visual centerpiece is Carol's high-school diploma, earned at the vocational school in Perry, four years of study compressed into seven months.

Carol gestures with diffident pride at the framed document, "I always said it was nothing but a piece of paper, but...."

Carol dreams of going to college, studying modeling and merchandising. She likes to make summer tops so maybe she'll go into the summer line of clothes. She remains Christine's only faithful correspondent. She writes her a letter at least once a week, and sometimes tries to send her a card that says "Smile" or "Been Thinking of You." Sometimes Carol will be in the midst of something totally unrelated to her sister, and she'll start thinking of Christine and for no reason start to cry. Carol often says she doesn't want to live through her purpose on earth too quickly: Her purpose is to see that Christine has a home if she ever leaves prison, to keep in touch with her.

Prison life:

"Lots of girls is here on check charges. Some of them murdered people they don't even know. At least half a dozen's in here for the same thing as me."

"Two things they don't like here. If you killed a cop or you killed a young 'un. After a while the nagging stops, but they's them years when they won't let it go."

When Christine Falling first arrived at Broward Correctional Institute she received some notes filled with vituperation and threatening her life. Prison officials reacted quickly: prolonging her orientation, keeping her out of the main compound until it was discovered that these notes were scrawled in Christine's own handwriting. When she tried to burn her cell down, on March 11, the evening before her 20th birthday, other women rescued her, suffering smoke inhalation and burns. Christine wasn't hurt; they were.

"Grossest thing I heard since I been here, they was one girl killed her baby, put it in the oven and cooked it and fed it to her husband. According to what everybody say, her husband asked, where's the baby and she said, you're eating it." Christine places full credence in this ghastly story, even though it never happened.

"They asked me if I want to meet her. No, I don't think me and her would get along. Least it wasn't my young 'un. Least I didn't feed them to nobody. Least I called the ambulance and carried them to the hospital."

Even when she confessed, her confession was not readily believed; from United Press International: "Was the confession a matter of Falling, a poor, overweight, poorly educated teenager, who has spent her life being shuttled from family member to family member and who may have been a victim of child abuse herself, finally submitting to pressures, however subtle, exerted on her at the hospital?"

In the end Christine owned up to the deaths of three of "them innocent children" and she has been linked with the deaths of two more children and one old man. The old man, she says, doesn't count, because the cause of death was never determined: "It's not my fault his family didn't run an autopsy." Although she confessed to Joe-Boy's and Jeffrey's death to a psychiatrist, she was never formally charged, and she prefers to stand by the death certificates: "Myocarditis," Or, as she says, "exploding hearts." When she confessed to the murder of Muffin Johnson, Jennifer Daniels and Travis Coleman, she ended a mystery that probably should never have existed. Joseph Sapala, the medical examiner who broke the case with the Coleman baby, accused his colleagues of traveling the "primrose path of statistics," ascribing to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome what should have been diagnosed as strangulation. SIDS, he said, is a "wastebasket term; if you don't know what the hell you have, it's crib death." What tripped up the examiners was the presence of disease in the children: They found a debility, myocarditis for instance, an inflammation of the muscle of the heart not uncommon and not necessarily fatal; and in a place where the death of babies is commonplace, where such things are often given Biblical interpretations, where God is said to take nursing babies from the mother's breasts to serve his purpose, in such a place the passing of these children was seen to be routine. Not only by townspeople, but also by medical examiners.

Christine:

"It was too perfect. There was no way for them to know I done it unless I said so. They was no homicide evidence, no trauma. Joe-Boy and Jeffrey, their hearts exploded. They said Muffin had brain fever which collapsed her brain. The brain waves froze and all. Jennifer they said had this SIDS, this crib death. Jennifer just upped and died which that's popular with young 'uns. Travis, same thing."

By plea bargaining, Christine avoided a trial and received a 25 year mandatory prison term. In December she was transferred
from Calhoun County Jail to the Broward Correctional Institute in the western corner of the county where Pines Boulevard and State Road 27 intersect, a monotony of canals and roadbed and roadbed and canals inhabited by truckers, alligators and insects. Not visible from the road, the prison arises from the sawgrass about a mile in. It has the air of an industrial complex, a grim mirage, growing out of nothing in the middle of nowhere. It is a place of near absolute isolation, barren under too much sun.

With her confession to crimes as odious as can be imagined, Christine Falling receded from public view: the horrid force, the bad seed, retarded and monstrous, was now contained. Jailed. Never a figure of sympathy, she ceased to be one of curiosity.

Before her arrest her dealings with the press consisted entirely of issuing bizarre remarks. After her arrest, a gag order prohibited her from speaking with the press before the scheduled trial.

In prison, Carol has been her only visitor from home. On Christmas Day she was disappointed to call home at the very minute her adoptive parents were fixing to leave the house.

She decided to tell her story for one reason.

"I got to the point," she said, "where reporters is better than nothing."

Christine Laverne Slaughter Falling was born on March 12, 1963, the second child of Ann Omans Moore Slaughter Adkins, a 16-year-old girl. Ann's first child, Carol, is a year and a half older than Christine. Ann's husband, Tom Slaughter, was an old man even then. Today he is 85, going deaf, and the victim of numerous accidents in the log woods where he used to work. He still stands tall, and spends his time puttering around the front yard outside the shack where he lives. It is one of those yards not uncommon in the deep country, totally covered with cans, car parts, broken furniture. Tom Slaughter takes pieces of debris and puts them together. These are his inventions. He is not much of a historian when it comes to Christine's early days. He knows he's not Christine's father, nor Carol's, nor the next one's -- what was his name, he got adopted out, Michael Wayne. He gave all three his last name because it was only right. "They was caught in my trap. Weren't the daddy of but one of the four, Edward Earl; he might be mine." That one died, though; something was wrong with his muscles when he was born. He wasted away, turned to bone. The four children were born four years apart. Carol remembers her mother leaving and coming back pregnant, not with Christine, she doesn't remember back that far, but with Michael Wayne, and then leaving again for a time, and coming back and having Edward Earl. The extent of Tom Slaughter's baby stories is an account of his daughters first meals: "Carol, she weren't a day old, born Friday night and at noon the next day she ate lima beans and mullet fish for dinner" and Christine ate yolk of egg and butter and grits in equally good time. The menu at baby's first meal is frequently recited in the county, as if there is something quite signal and gratifying about this event.

Some memories:

Carol: "I never did miss Mama. I guess she was never around long enough to get attached."

Carol remembers having to take charge of Christine and the baby: She was about 4. Neighbors dropped in now and then. Once Carol was trying to keep Christine from wetting her pants, and she and a slightly older child hung Christine by her shirt on the clothesline to dry out. Carol says Christine cried, but Christine has no recollection. The two sisters give varying accounts of their childhood. They agree on basic matters, but frequently one will have an elaborate memory of an event, and the other sister will be nearly blank on the matter. The broadest view of course is that no event is ever lost. Something not recalled, at least not openly, goes underground, and is transformed into an outlook, maybe a compulsion or a fear, perhaps a way of behaving that has no obvious roots.

Carol's first memory: "A kitten died."

Christine's: "I was in the hospital, I had a seizure, or when I fell, and they give me IV to keep my nutrition up, and I remember they sticked it in the wrong place, and all the fluid come up my arm and it turned all purple, and they kept trying to restick and I kept jerking it out everytime they restick it."

When Ann was away on one of her frequent trips, which usually took her 100 miles away to her home town of Blountstown, the children often accompanied Tom Slaughter to the woods on his job, staying all day in a big playpen.

Christine: "Daddy had us out in the log woods in a playpen with a net on top against the mosquitos the day he got in his accident. Me and Carol was laying in it, when a log fell, busted his head open, busted his intestines, three fourths of his stomach is plastic intestines. Right or left side of his face, I forget which, ain't nothin but cotton. He has a metal plate in his head. Who come and got us I don't know. The foreman or somebody else, I don't know. All I know is, Daddy was in the hospital, and it weren't long after we went to Dolly and Jesse.

"Ann wouldn't take care of us.

"Tom couldn't."

Carol:

"What happened was, after Daddy's accident, Mama took all us kids, and carried us to a store or a shopping center, it was somewheres in Perry and she put all the young 'uns on a bench outside the store and she told us to just sit there and she walked away. I yelled after her, 'When are you coming back?' and she wouldn't answer me. She never turned around to answer her own daughter. She throwed us away like we was garbage, can you imagine doing that to your young 'uns? She throwed us away. My own mama doesn't want us. Felt like an outcast for sure."

Christine: "I don't remember that. If Carol says so, I'm sure it's true, but I cain't memory it."

Carol: "I love Ann as far as her bearing us. That's the only kind of connection I have."

Christine says that for the nine years with Jesse and Dolly Falling, the two sisters never saw their mother. Carol disagrees. She says they saw her three times at three funerals. Uncle Archie's. Uncle Willie's. And Grandmom's.

Aunt Dolly:

"I had this hunger in my heart to have me a baby. I went to five doctors, but no one could help me. One day I was at church and the preacher brung in Carol and Christine and my husband said, 'Do you want those children?' 'Well, somebody has to take them.' They was relations of Jesse.

"We never abused those young 'uns, no sir. No one has ever actually seen it with their own eyes. He never drank alcohol in front of them, never beat them unmerciful, never took in another woman in front of those two children. I blame myself for spoiling the children when they were young. They had the cutest little dresses you could buy in Perry. I brought them up to fear God, to believe in the Bible. I went too many miles for that girl. She knows the ground I stand on. Things started to turn when the children growed old enough to know we wasn't their real parents. They would say it to our face and how would you feel, children you spent money on and raised?

"I'll tell you what Christine did one time. Me and my husband had a mind of building this house here, and I seen a picture in a magazine jes like the house I wanted and I cut it out. Children, I said, leave this here alone. This piece of paper. And what did Christine do? She took it and tore it right up. I took the pieces and copied a picture from them and locked it away in my footlocker.

"I think Christine's problem is that she absolutely growed
from a child into a woman nearly overnight. That's what happened. She growed too fast. She got daresome.

"I don't trust that girl. She never did want me and Jesse to have anything for ourselves. She saw Jesse and me get on our feet and it looked like it near about killed her. I told them, we're building for them. One day every drape, every car, every well, every refrigerator, every mirror, every dresser, every commode, every fan will be yours. We're building for the children. Them children is grown. They don't belong to me no more. If they don't have a house of their own it's their own fault. We fulfilled our duty to our children.

"Christine called on Christmas Day. She's always ringing my number and expects me to accept the charges.

"I told her she was free to write to me anytime she wishes.

"She wants us to visit. We won't go this year. Not in 1983. This house is not finished, not finished, not finished. There are no baseboards in this house, not a bit. We have to fix that up. We don't have the money to make that trip with."

Carol has a memory of Dolly Falling's footlocker, filled with relics from her childhood, report cards, ribbons the girls won, a certificate saying that Carol has the aptitude to become a telephone operator. "Just junk but Dolly had kept it."

The junk is gone. Now it contains Christine's Bible that Dolly is prepared to return to her "once she's got a little bit of sense and acts like a human being ought to." There are some house papers, Jesse's Army records in case he has to go to the hospital, some old Valentine boxes. Beyond that the only relics are some 45 rpm records that Dolly used to like and the children used to try to take and break. They remain in safekeeping:
Satisfied Mind by Red and Betty Foley. Whirlpool of Love sung by Webb Price, and Mother Prays Loud In Her Sleep by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.

"Them children," says Aunt Dolly, "fulfilled my mother hunger. I done got a square bite of it, don't want no more."

Jesse Falling: "The past is the past. I never hurt those girls, never touched them. If I did, had to be drunk or ignorance. Now I did whup 'em when they rebelled and talked back to my wife; what kind of husband would let his adopted daughter talk to his wife like that.

"Even now if I could get my wife to agree I'd get me one and raise it."

Christine: "One day Uncle Jesse took us down to a housing project he was working on, jes me and Carol. Dolly had a hairdresser's appointment. Jesse told Carol to get out, and I started to get out, and he said, 'No, you stay in the car.' He took Carol in one of them buildings and when she came out, her pants wasn't even on right, her shirt was wrong-

side out, and when we went to pick up Dolly, I started running my big mouth, saying Carol's clothes was all messed up. I ain't seen Dolly give Jesse such a dirtiest look all her life.

"Weren't much later I come into Carol's room and Jesse's standing over her, and her pants was off, and she was crying, which I didn't know what hurt she had, so I tried to call the law to get her help, not to say he done something wrong. I didn't know what he done. The way the phone was I couldn't just pick it up; I was just tall enough I could hit the bottom of the phone and the ear part fell where I could catch it. That was the time Jesse tried to choke me, he put the cord around my neck. Dolly knowed about it. She was right there but she weren't going to do nothin' but preachin' and prayin'."

Carol tries hard not to think about that aspect of the past: "I made myself rise above it. It was nothing Jesse planned. I could be in the kitchen, in the yard, and he would start touching me. I try not to think about it. Dolly and Jesse did a lot for me. They kept me from going to an orphanage and staying there forever. When they adopted us, they weren't anyone else that wanted us, because of our age, and we was so many. And we was unruly. We had been let loose. We was plain and simple 24 hours a day unruly."

But she does remember the day Jesse tried to choke Christine. Jesse told her to go to her room and change her clothes. Which she did. Jesse came in the room. Carol remembers no sexual abuse that time: "He burnt some money, and was hollering about the prices of sex and stuff. I could see Christine in the hallway behind Daddy and I could see her run to the phone. When I come out, Daddy was choking Christine. I was so scared. I started screaming at Mamma to help. She wasn't doing anything. It made me so mad at her. She should have been
helping Christine. I tried to make Jesse stop and he popped me real hard and throwed me up against the breakfast bar, and I ran down to Jesse and Dolly's bedroom and I locked the door and picked up the phone.

"When the cops come around Jesse locked hisself in the bathroom. They broke his arm and three ribs.

"That day daddy was a madman."

Upon the advice of Dolly's minister, Carol and Christine were removed from the Falling home and placed in Great Oaks Village, a county-run children's refuge in Orlando. Carol remembers that Dolly and Jesse wanted to visit, and she did not want to see them, but Christine begged her to let them visit. The two girls had a pact that neither would see either of their adoptive parents without the other.

According to records from Great Oaks village, Christine had trouble adjusting. She was a compulsive liar: She would steal other children's possessions -- once, some playing cards, once some makeup -- and then try to fix the blame on others. "She will try to do anything to get attention," one report reads, "even if she knows it means restriction. If she feels we are paying more attention to someone else, she will come and tell lies on them." One evaluator was asked to indicate any "special interests the child exhibits." Answer: "None." "What would you single out for praise in the child's behavior?" Answer: "Nothing."

In another document, a social worker indicates that Jesse Falling had been arrested at least twice on charges of sexual abuse of Christine. The first time, the records say, there was a hung jury. The second time, Dolly had the charges dropped.

In a letter dated June 21, 1972, a social worker reports that Dolly "blames the children for all her mar-ital problems. Since she views the children as deterrents to her happiness with her husband, she is now relieved that the girls have been removed
from their home."

But after a year the children were returned to the Fallings.

Christine and Carol remember Great Oaks Village with fondness. Christine liked it because it had a swimming pool, and every Friday night a movie was shown and the children were given Dr. Pepper and popcorn.

Christine: "There weren't no one constantly beating on us."

Carol: "A vintage year."

Once home, Carol says, the molestation stopped. But not the beatings. Over the years Christine seemed to attract more beating than her sister: "Christine never understood that expression, 'Children is to be seen and not heard.' Christine didn't exactly understand the expression no matter how many whippings she got. For a long time I didn't talk. I swear, I'd have forgotten how if I hadn't been in school and forced to speak up there."

Christine: "One remark he'd always use: 'This hurts me more than it hurts you.' That's an old saying old folks have."

Carol's version of the final night in the Falling household:

Oct. 30, 1975, Christine comes home from school 10 minutes late.

Jesse accuses her of not coming straight home. He starts spanking her. He begins to spank her "where she is supposed to be spanked." Then he starts in on the legs, the back; the blood is at the point of breaking the skin.

"A man that's angry, a man that's been drinking, he's going to hurt a child. Dolly was just standing at the door. I tried to talk Mamma into stopping him but she wouldn't. What kind of mother, what kind of Christian, what kind of human would just stand there?"

There is a knife on the kitchen counter. "I saw my opportunity; go for the gusto: 'Daddy, stop. I'll see you dead before you hurt Christine again."'

She jumps on him with the knife. He slaps her across the face with the belt. He takes the knife away. He freezes; he just stands there and looks at her, and lets Carol hit him and hit him and hit him. "He started crying and he told me to leave.

"Christine was laying on the floor. She wouldn't move. She would not."

Later, Carol lifts her sister off the floor and carries her to the bedroom. "Chris," she whispers, "it'll all be over soon. We'll soon be gone.

"The next day Jesse made her go to school and he told her to wear shorts. To show off the justice.

"I packed a Winn Dixie bag with all our belongings and I told Chris she wouldn't have to bother to take the bus home from school that day, that she could leave with me."

Christine has no memory of the final beating.

"I can't remember what urged me to leave. All I know is, I left."

The sisters found an older girl willing to share her apartment. Carol entered a school program in which she worked half a day. "For two years," says Carol, "Jesse and Dolly didn't know if we was runaways or we was dead."

About six weeks after the two girls left home, Christine left Perry for Blountstown to find her real mother. She did, and for the next few years, the sisters were out of touch. Christine says her mother tried to turn her into a prostitute. "You shouldn't do your young 'uns like that," Christine says.

On Sept. 19, 1977, Christine got married. She was 14.

For a long time the "most happiest" day of Christine's life had been her trip to Disney World, a "fancy-nating" place. She loved Cinderella's castle, the rides, and the souvenirs, "shirts and hats with pictures of the Disneyland players, Goofy and all them."

But Disney World got replaced as the happiest day by her wedding day, when she married Bobby Adkins, a city worker in Blountstown, a big man of few words, in his early '20s. He was the stepson of Christine's mother.

"The ceremony was set for 5:30 because that's when Bobby got off work. We had a cake stacked three, and on top was a little man and woman with wedding suits on and all. I wore a white velvet dress, size 18. There was lace coming from the stomach all the way up to the neck. Preacher Nichols performed the ceremony between two funerals and he didn't charge nothin' but we gaved him $30 for his troubles. After he left we spiked the punch with either Seagrams Seven or Lord Calvert.

"I got drunk. I woke up the next morning with blood all over me."

The marriage ended six weeks later. "I don't care who a man is, sooner or later he's going to run around on you," says Christine. She threw a stereo at Bobby. When the marriage ended, especially like that, Disney World went back to being her most happiest day.

Carol:

"People who have problems deal with them in different ways. Daddy didn't deal with his real well. I graduated from high school for my mom and dad. They had told us that wanted one of us to make it through, me or Christine, it didn't matter which one. They didn't even show up for the ceremony. I made the class speech and five minutes before it was supposed to begin, I kept looking out there and I couldn't see them so I called home, and Dolly told me the electrician has just come to fix something that was wrong with the wires. And they had to wait. I kept my eye on the door every minute. They never did show up. I can't forgive them for that. I wanted to make them proud."

On the week-end before Christine's 20th birthday, Carol visited her in prison. The sisters spoke softly to each other, in that country way, giving everything the same drawling emphasis. Both were nervous. A little fearful. Christine borrowed a pretty blouse from another inmate.

"Really, Carol, it's just like college only they got a gate around it. You sleep in a dorm, and you got it guaranteed where's your next meal. If you're pregnant they got what they call prenatal planning, teach you how to be a mother. They teach
college skills and culinary skills which that means kitchen."

"Well, Chris, I'm glad to see you're doing OK. Some day you're going to be a real lady. Your hair's always been so pretty. I was wondering: How long has it been since you wore feather bangs? You might not believe this, but sometimes I wish I was where you are. Sometimes the world can be a hard place. It's good to see you, looking good and to catch you up on the news, who's all had babies, how everybody is. Chris, I was wondering, if I talked to the lawyers, to Baya, and there was some way to get you into a place where you could get some help, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your mind, but if I could get it so you could go somewhere else...."

"Fine by me. Half of 'em here's crazy anyway, talking to theirselves, answering theirselves back."

Carol: "They gotta take care of her now, the taxpayers. It's their ballgame. Something should have been done a long time ago. Life's gave me a run for my money. It never gave Chris a run. It just took her over.

"I think it hurt her because of that fact of who she looked like. She was the spitting image of Ann. It must have hurt her to look in the mirror and see herself become an image of a woman you hate. I remember standing in front of the mirror, primping, and Christine would just be standing there, not looking at the mirror, but at the walls or the floor, crying.

"Sometimes I think my grandmother was what gave me the punch to go on. Christine was too young to get her benefits. I told you my real mother sometimes carried us over to Blountstown, and my mother would go off somewhere and we would stay with her mother. My grandmother made me her pick. Seems like even before I was born she growed to love the baby my Mamma was about to have. My grandmother was always telling me how pretty I was, how much she loved me, what kind of person I was going to be.

"Me and her, we'd sit at the kitchen table, always talking about my hair, getting ribbons for it and how we was going to make some new dresses.

"Christine's my baby. I'm sorry but I love her more than I love myself."

Christine: "If they was something dependent on my sister's life, if it meant for me being killed, I would save her. I'd rather be killed than her."

There is no mystery in Christine Falling. The reasons why she did what she did are mundane. Her life threatened as a child, she threatened the lives of children. Treated like a monster, she became one. Her

childhood paid daily witness to violence. The only point in addressing her past is as a reminder that there is no such thing as a full-blown aberration arising from nothing in the middle of nowhere. Every abandonment, every brutality whether remembered openly or not so openly, worked to create the person Christine Falling is today. The mystery, if there is one, is how Carol survived and how after everything that happened, the two sisters are able to hold each other in what others might call crippled regard but which for them passes for love.

"State where and how the accident occurred: Chest pains with pain in left arm.

"Diagnosis: Psychoneurotic.

"Treatment: Placebo. Two cc's.

"Instructions to Patient: See her doctor in five days."

This was the routine at Calhoun General Hospital for Christine. She visited its emergency room more than 50 times between 1978 and 1980 with complaints of ailments and mishaps, some real, some not: seizures, snakebites, red spots, bleeding tonsils, dislocated bones, terrible falls, hot grease on left arm, stepping on wire, sharp pains, hit by crowbar while fishbaiting. Once she went to the hospital complaining of vaginal bleeding. The diagnosis: Normal menses.

A crisis was building. These visits reached a crescendo in January 1980 when she complained that her period would not go away, the blood would not stop. She was admitted to the hospital but analysis of sample tissue scraped from her womb showed that she was all right. To this day she claims that she was pregnant and the doctors performed an abortion. A baby died in her imagination. Not much later, on Feb. 25, 1980, a baby died in reality. Muffin Johnson, age 2, would not stop crying.

Two and a half years later, she confessed, "I would be doing something simple, like pulling a blanket over one, and a voice would say, 'Kill the baby,' over and over and then I would come to and realize what had happened."

Christine is scheduled to be released from prison in the year 2007, at the age of 44. So far she has served eight months of her term at BCI.

In that time, she has had homosex. "That way you have somebody to look out for you."

She has lost almost 50 pounds: "I always heard prison food is better than outside world food. Well, it ain't."

She has plans to go to the prison beauty shop to get a curly perm.

The prison dentist is fixing her teeth.

She was sentenced to 90 days in disciplinary lock-up for igniting the mattress in her cell: "No cigarets, no potato chips, cain't watch TV, not allowed to talk to them compound girls."

She still has a habit of looking sideways when she speaks; the color of her eyes is tepid, watery: "They turn with what I got on. I got weird eyes." These days they tend toward blue, reflecting the prison issue. She wants to grow out her nails, but they are still short and raw, bitten to the quick.

Christine:

"If I hadn't admitted up to it I might not be in jail right now, or if I was in jail, it'd be on a bad check charge.

"I'm here on my own word.

"Sometimes it makes me feel stupid as hell.

"Obviously, if I hadn't said nothing about it, chances other ones would have happened. It got to be hard on me. Ones I could get my hands on, which ones dead. Ones I couldn't, I jes wished it.

"The reason I confessed was mainly people talking to me, telling me I was looking at a death penalty. No way I could get off on all three charges, and it would be stupid to go in front of 12 juries who want to do one thing and that's put you in a chair. If I plea bargain, then I can go to prison, get a college skill that'll help me get a job. The best part about it," and at this she shows a flutter of animation, the dullness of the gray- blue eyes lightening a bit, "is the day you get out they give you $100 and buy you a new suit and give you a bus ticket anywhere."

Posted by floridacracker at October 12, 2004 11:09 AM