Her letters seduce me as she reveals the details of the hijacking and her life in prison. They become an illicit secret. I am embarrassed that I have allowed her to come into my life, and hide them from my family. How can I trust her, I wonder, when she is the reason for derailing my life? But her letters are oddly healing, and a strange bond develops between us, the widow and the hijacker.
I am the cause of your suffering. I deserve to die. Death would spare me the suffering I have inflicted. I have to live. I have to be reminded every day, every waking moment of what I have taken part in.
Her letters appease and help me heal in unexpected ways.
I thought I had dealt with Brian’s death, but the hurt is still there, as fresh as it was the night the police came to my door. Writing to you gives that ache life, turns it into something tangible that I can hand to you, lay in your lap.
The arrival of the postman takes on a new significance as I imagine a letter in his bag from Julie and anticipate the truths she will reveal. She has divorced her husband, she confides, and is no longer in his control.
She is a force I cannot fathom but need to make sense of. Police reports said she slept in the same room with eight sticks of dynamite, helped translate the directions from an English manual about how to assemble a bomb, and played the role of hostess to the hijacked passengers. I am riveted to her words and at the same time disgusted by the very feel of the paper in my hand.
I envied her childhood and would have made so much more of doting parents, gladly traded places and lived in the room I imagined she had all to herself, filled with books and school trivia, with parents who read my homework and prepared for my future. I wondered what it was that dulled the joy, when she decided that what she had wasn’t good enough.
I spent my childhood in a bug-infested basement of a Bronx tenement, one of eight siblings, where we ate leftovers from the automat where my mother worked, and where the door was left open to drug dealers. Brian and the boys were the best thing that ever happened to me. I put my childhood behind me and invested everything in them.
Why did you go along with a scheme that you knew would land you in prison? It was a question I’d thought about for a long time.
I thought I would be out in eight years, and I knew I could do that – spend eight years for what I thought was a noble and worthy cause. We would both be out when we were still in our 30s, and that was doable. We would still have our lives ahead of us. I knew nothing could go wrong if I trusted in him [her husband] and his intentions. So I always did, and I was rarely disappointed. I just gave my life over to him for safekeeping, and, in spite of all the dangers we lived through together, nothing happened to harm me. I always felt he knew best and would protect me from pain and hurt.
I become preoccupied with her time in prison, of her days spent behind barbed wire. She is both frightening and captivating, the woman with whom Patty Hearst confides, and who was attacked with a hammer by prison inmate Squeaky Fromme, the Manson disciple who tried to kill President Ford.
I am surrounded by gangsters, public officials, Russian spies. I have no rights. I cannot make my own decisions about anything, whether it is what to eat or when to go to sleep. I have to take orders from all kinds of morons, and that is the hardest part.
She is my link to Brian, and somehow fills a void, one that seemed so deep and unbridgeable. No one knows better than Julie how I feel. She feeds me bits and pieces of information about her version of why the bomb exploded, something the bomb squad could not determine.
We believe it was sabotage, and that the Yugoslavs heard about the bomb and set it off remotely as the police officers approached it. We were so certain it had been detonated purposely to discredit us, and Croatians. We would never have intentionally hurt anyone.
We were not without fault, I know that. We carry the ultimate guilt, but there has to be a limit to our suffering as well; we cannot go on forever to pay for something that was not entirely our fault.
With my family asleep upstairs, I reread our letters. John Boyle would disagree, but perhaps she’s right. She has paid for her crime and has been in prison five years past her eight-year sentence. I write a letter to the parole board on Julie’s behalf and put it in the mail before I have second thoughts. Julie is paroled.
Her letters seduce me as she reveals the details of the hijacking and her life in prison. They become an illicit secret. I am embarrassed that I have allowed her to come into my life, and hide them from my family. How can I trust her, I wonder, when she is the reason for derailing my life? But her letters are oddly healing, and a strange bond develops between us, the widow and the hijacker.
I am the cause of your suffering. I deserve to die. Death would spare me the suffering I have inflicted. I have to live. I have to be reminded every day, every waking moment of what I have taken part in.
Her letters appease and help me heal in unexpected ways.
I thought I had dealt with Brian’s death, but the hurt is still there, as fresh as it was the night the police came to my door. Writing to you gives that ache life, turns it into something tangible that I can hand to you, lay in your lap.
The arrival of the postman takes on a new significance as I imagine a letter in his bag from Julie and anticipate the truths she will reveal. She has divorced her husband, she confides, and is no longer in his control.
She is a force I cannot fathom but need to make sense of. Police reports said she slept in the same room with eight sticks of dynamite, helped translate the directions from an English manual about how to assemble a bomb, and played the role of hostess to the hijacked passengers. I am riveted to her words and at the same time disgusted by the very feel of the paper in my hand.
I envied her childhood and would have made so much more of doting parents, gladly traded places and lived in the room I imagined she had all to herself, filled with books and school trivia, with parents who read my homework and prepared for my future. I wondered what it was that dulled the joy, when she decided that what she had wasn’t good enough.
I spent my childhood in a bug-infested basement of a Bronx tenement, one of eight siblings, where we ate leftovers from the automat where my mother worked, and where the door was left open to drug dealers. Brian and the boys were the best thing that ever happened to me. I put my childhood behind me and invested everything in them.
Why did you go along with a scheme that you knew would land you in prison? It was a question I’d thought about for a long time.
I thought I would be out in eight years, and I knew I could do that – spend eight years for what I thought was a noble and worthy cause. We would both be out when we were still in our 30s, and that was doable. We would still have our lives ahead of us. I knew nothing could go wrong if I trusted in him [her husband] and his intentions. So I always did, and I was rarely disappointed. I just gave my life over to him for safekeeping, and, in spite of all the dangers we lived through together, nothing happened to harm me. I always felt he knew best and would protect me from pain and hurt.
I become preoccupied with her time in prison, of her days spent behind barbed wire. She is both frightening and captivating, the woman with whom Patty Hearst confides, and who was attacked with a hammer by prison inmate Squeaky Fromme, the Manson disciple who tried to kill President Ford.
I am surrounded by gangsters, public officials, Russian spies. I have no rights. I cannot make my own decisions about anything, whether it is what to eat or when to go to sleep. I have to take orders from all kinds of morons, and that is the hardest part.
She is my link to Brian, and somehow fills a void, one that seemed so deep and unbridgeable. No one knows better than Julie how I feel. She feeds me bits and pieces of information about her version of why the bomb exploded, something the bomb squad could not determine.
We believe it was sabotage, and that the Yugoslavs heard about the bomb and set it off remotely as the police officers approached it. We were so certain it had been detonated purposely to discredit us, and Croatians. We would never have intentionally hurt anyone.
We were not without fault, I know that. We carry the ultimate guilt, but there has to be a limit to our suffering as well; we cannot go on forever to pay for something that was not entirely our fault.
With my family asleep upstairs, I reread our letters. John Boyle would disagree, but perhaps she’s right. She has paid for her crime and has been in prison five years past her eight-year sentence. I write a letter to the parole board on Julie’s behalf and put it in the mail before I have second thoughts. Julie is paroled.
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