Healing From Family Violence and a Mother’s Murder

 My guest today is Shelly Edwards Jorgensen. Shelly is the author of a memoir titled, Beautiful Ashes, a true story of murder, betrayal, and one woman's search for peace. In the memoir and in our interview, Shelly talks about multiple traumas she experienced growing up, including living with an alcoholic, abusive father, and both before and after he murdered her mother, testifying against him at his eventual trial, and suffering sexual assault.

On the other hand, she also discusses the uplifting power of her faith during the darkest times, her healing journey, and all the ways in which she has ultimately embraced a new mindset on life, faith, and the purpose of suffering.  Shelley, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Well, thanks for having me, Beth.

There is so much to unpack in your story, and so, so I want to start, the, the book you wrote is called Beautiful Ashes, and it's, the, the sort of big event in the book is a shocking one that your father was convicted of murdering your mother, but there's so much more. In the book than that, that event was really the culmination of sort of years of living with your father's abuse and behavior.

So if you could just talk a little bit about that, about a little bit about what it was like living. in your family's home before your mother's death? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think a lot of people can relate to this because it's domestic violence. That's what it is. It's, it's alcoholism and domestic violence.

Now, not all alcoholics become violent, but many, many do. And my dad was one of them. So, I, I say he was a Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde alcoholic. He had his moments where he would completely lose it and become extremely violent, but he had his moments where he was loving and kind. And so when you, when you grow up in that environment, you don't really think that other people aren't growing up in that environment because, because that's all you really know.

And so you develop over time this skill to assess the nuances of. Your, your parent who's volatile, it's a mood. And so therefore you're always walking on eggshells. And so I have a sister that's two years older than me and she took the primary role of I, I would say protector from, from the beginning of my mother.

Cause this culminating event where my dad murdered my mother and burned our house down. I was 15 and my sister was 17. So I was a sophomore in high school. She was a senior. But this literally was one month before my parents 25th wedding anniversary  and the domestic violence started at the very beginning.

And of course my parents got married in 1960  because this event where my mom was murdered happened in October of 85. And so the culture around divorce and domestic violence was extremely different than it is today. But, it's still there. The same culture exists, it's just talked about more, and the, the kids in the situation still have no voice, because they don't even know that they can have a voice, because you're never taught to have a voice.

I would watch my dad, uh, Basically strangle my mother or try to kill her on a regular basis and you know, I was threatened. My sister was definitely threatened. We, we would go through these roller coasters of emotions and when you're really little, you don't even know what it is that are the warning signs.

So everything, you're on high alert. And everything becomes kinda skewed in your ability to even know what safety really is because you never had it. And so it sets you up for failures in, in so many other ways. You don't recognize what abuse is. You don't have a voice because you're trained how not to speak and how to keep a secret. 

And portray, and I grew up in, I'm going to say upper middle class. So, on the outside, we had the white picket fence. And the last family vacation we went on was a month long to Europe. Most people don't have access to that kind of vacation as a family. And so, since my book came out and I had people that I, I knew from elementary school read it, They said, Shelly, I wanted to be you.

They had no idea. What really was going on behind the scenes and that's the reality for people that grow up in domestic violence and they're keeping this secret or any sort of abusive if they have  an abusive parent or something that is dysfunctional that's going on in the home and you're taught from the beginning that you have no one to speak up to or no voice.

Transcribed Then you lose your voice, or you never even obtained one. And for me it was I never really even obtained one. Let me ask you about that, about the family secret aspect. There's a couple aspects I think that you mention in your book about that. One is family members at times witnessing the abuse and nothing changes and nothing happens.

And then another aspect, which is just maybe just a visceral survival mode, don't tell these secrets, or maybe getting messages from your parents. So in your case, how would you describe the way that you felt so clear that this was a secret and you were not to tell anyone? Where do you think that came from?

That came from well, it's a combination of a lot of things, but I do tell a story in the book that I go back to being 4 and, you know, that's another misnomer that people think. Oh, well, they're little. They don't really know what's going on. Well, that's not true either. So I was, I was 4 years old. And my parents had dropped us off at our grandparents because they had some event to go to and then when, when they came back later in the weekend to pick us up, my mom had sunglasses on at night and it was winter.

And. She had the sunglasses on because she had a black eye, and I figured out, and she lied about how she got the black eye, she said she had fallen down the stairs, and I knew that's not what happened. My gut knew that that's not what happened. I was four years old. And so in that moment, and probably, you know, it was building at that point.

As a four year old putting all these little pieces together and all these instances that I had been either directly involved in or heard or witnessed or even felt, I knew that my mom was lying to me. And so if she's going to lie about how she got a black eye, then I certainly can't speak up about her having a black eye.

So that's one, one story that I talk about in the book and I also talk about another story in the book where we fled the house. I was six years old and again, I'm being told to not say anything and we would have this pattern. That the morning after, because most of these events would happen on the weekends, because that's when drinking happened the most.

And so the morning, the morning after, my dad liked to cook. He would get up, he would cook these big breakfasts, and I call them the morning after breakfast. So now we're sitting down at the family table eating breakfast. Homemade pancakes and hash browns  and you're expected not to say a word about mom having scratches on her neck or not really being able to talk because he was trying to pull her tongue out because he didn't like what she said.

And along the way, you're threatened. So you're like, well, if she's pulling mom's tongue out and she's got scratches all down her throat because he didn't like what she said. I certainly better not say anything. So you, it's, it's just a, it's a compounding effect that you, you learn over time. You don't talk.

And then with the, the thing I mentioned too, the, at times family members did see it and I'm trying to be understanding there, I, I think they can't stop your mom from returning to the marriage. You know, they, they might have felt powerless in the situation, but what do you think that Did because I think you even mentioned like a barbecue or something.

There's events where your grandmother saw or your other family members saw. And so how do you look upon that now? What that would have meant to you at the time? Well, and it's twofold. So like my grandma Edwards. And when you refer to the barbecue event, she witnessed that. Now, my dad learned his domestic violence and alcoholism from his father, because my grandfather was an abusive alcoholic.

And so my grandma Edwards definitely knew what the signs were. She definitely knew what the ramifications were. But again, It's generational trauma that gets continually passed down. And so she was, she was of the mindset to, you know, you, you deal with it. I mean, my grandma was, was born in 1900.  Again, different time period, completely different time period.

And on my mother's side, my grandma Finley, I think that they had over the years, had tried to intervene. And I, I talk about the event that happened six months after my parents were married. I talk about that in the book where my dad literally drug my mom down the stair, a flight of stairs by her hair naked into the street.

And she called her parents because he locked her out and she's naked in the street. This is 1960 in Detroit. So she calls her parents. They certainly know what happened because they picked her up.  And I know over, over time they tried to get my dad help. I do know that they tried. But, my mother was the one that would have to make that decision.

My  sister didn't 1968. I was born in 1970. So, you know, this pattern was firmly established by the time I had any memory of it. So, it wasn't anything new, and it was just an ingrained, I want to say ingrained pattern.  Domestic violence has a way of breaking you down as the victim. My mother was a beautiful woman.

She was educated. She was born in 1935 and she had a bachelor's degree. That was, and it wasn't a nursing or teaching, it was in business. So that was an anomaly as well. And she had parents that were well off and that would have helped her, but there was all these other stigmas. She didn't want to be the first divorce in the family.

There was all these, these other pressures. And also, when you're in it, and I kind of described this before as the frog in the pot of boiling water. It incrementally gets worse, and at first you're believing the I'm sorry's and the this and the that, and somewhere along the way, you lose yourself in it.

Long before there's physical abuse, there's emotional and verbal, which in my mind, Long term effects of that is way worse than anything else, really, I mean, aside from being killed. But the long term effects of the psychological abuse and all the other things that don't cause bruises and broken bones, in my mind, is worse.

Yeah, you mentioned your mom, you know, she was a beautiful, educated woman. It's very evident in your book how much you loved her and that she was a wonderful mother. And so I do want to ask you, give her some attention in this story because, I mean, you even said something like you went to her, your first basketball game after she passed and she'd been to every single basketball game.

And I mean, that's not easy. She was working, you know, it's not easy to make it to every single game. So tell me a little bit about her. Well, not only did she make it to every game, she made it to every band concert, everything. She was the taxi. She was the team mom, basically. Everybody on, on the team, on any team that I was on or my sister was on, knew my mother.

She was there. I started playing organized athletics at six years old, and I was a three sport athlete, and so there was a lot of driving, there was a lot of time on baseball fields, and basketball courts, and volleyball courts, and my mom was always there, I mean, even, I remember when we got into high school, and we were still playing summer league softball, some of the high school boys that went to high school with my sister's grade, Started being umpires at our games.

My mom even knew them. So everyone knew my mom and, she was beloved. I didn't realize at the time  how hurt everybody that I was close to and that knew my mother was hurt by everything that happened. I mean, obviously you think that you know that people are experiencing that too, but you're so caught up in your own grief and your own trauma, the whole thing.

I mean, the whole time period of my life was just a nightmare, but I realized just the profound effect that my mom had on everybody that knew her. For She had friends everywhere we went, she had friends, and at her funeral, literally it was standing room only, and this was a very big Catholic church that we were in.

So, Yeah, my mom was well loved.  That's so, it's really nice to hear. And as you're talking, it makes me think I'm glad you had 15 years with her, you know? The tragedy is such a big, big part of it. But then it is nice to remember the person, too, and how special she was. Because it sounds like she really was.

Yeah, she's amazing and I, I did only technically have 15 years, but she hasn't missed anything. I've missed her. She hasn't missed me because I know that she's not far.  Yeah, that brings up another topic that you discuss in your book, which is that in the aftermath of her murder, she did visit you at times, like a spiritual visitation type of a thing that, of course, at the time you were like thinking you were crazy or having a psychotic episode or something, but yeah, you're 15 years old or 16 at that time.

So talk a little bit about that and I guess how you experienced it then and then how you see it now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so you mentioned that the first basketball game after I went back to school was going to be the first one my mother ever missed. And so that was weighing heavy on my mind and I was a guard and I was pretty adept at stealing the ball.

So it was a pretty common occurrence for me to steal the ball and have a breakaway. We were at a opposing team's gym and I stole the ball and I'm on this breakaway and I hear my mom cheering. And I'm like, so I look into the stands and this sensation comes over me and I see her, I hear her. She's cheering.

And I'm like, what the heck? Yeah, I of course, brick the shot. And then as the ball's kind of like bouncing and I'm in this kind of, is this really happening to me? Again, a really strong sensation of her presence washes over me and I hear my mom's voice saying, Shelly. I love you and everything will be okay.

And then that was it. Then we basically went in the locker room at halftime. I thought I was losing my mind. I don't say anything. I am 15. This is just two weeks after the fire. Then December comes along, the beginning of December. And I'm at the, basically the biggest mall in our area, Christmas shopping.

The place should be packed. And it is packed. The mall is packed. And I walk past Baker Shoes. Well, my mom was like a shoe horse and she loved shoes and purses and fashion. I mean, she was always dressed to the nines. She'll probably have a lot to say to me because I wear boring shoes and she always wore cute ones.

But anyway, so I'm walking past this Baker Shoes and I kind of glance in as I'm walking and there's a bench between me and the entrance to it. And I swore I saw her in there. And I'm like, okay. And so I hurry around this bench and this planter and I go in this baker's shoes. And again, we're full blown Christmas shopping.

This is after Thanksgiving. So I walk around the, this bench and I go in the baker's shoes and I get in there and the place is empty. Even the workers were in the back. I'm like, uh, this is weird. I hope no one saw you running around that planter to get in here. So I'm walking out and again, my mom's presence and this sensation washes over me.

And I hear her voice and she says, Shelly, I love you and everything's gonna be okay. I'm like, did that just happen again? That, that's twice. You know, now you're thinking, well, maybe, maybe it really did happen last time. Maybe I wasn't crazy, but you're still going, how is this happening? So then some more time goes by.

Now at this point, my dad is renting my best friend growing up's house behind our house that burned down. So, and it's placed up on the hill and I could look out my window and see our boarded up house. And to make matters worse, at that point, if you can think of anything getting worse, my dad started sending me to the house to get canned goods.

It was like, I do not need to go to a haunted house. I've been to the worst one possible. And I cannot describe how terrified I was the first time I went there. It was dark. It was cold and windy, and it was November in Michigan, so it was creepy. I'm going into this, and the smell, I'll never forget the smell.

A house fire is not like a bonfire. And so, I'm having nightmares, reoccurring nightmares, where I'm watching myself. Bang on the sliding glass door wall and watching my dad kill my mother in the words of my mother that I heard For many years before this Shelly one of these days you're not gonna be here and he's gonna kill me So those words are going through my head and I'm not sleeping because I'm having these reoccurring nightmares I mean, just everything is terrible.

And so I'm laying on my left side with my back to the door in my bedroom and all of a sudden my room starts getting light and so I assumed, Oh, my sister or my dad was opening my bedroom door and the light from the hallway was coming in. No, I rolled over in there and lighting up my room is my mother standing there.

You can't duplicate the feeling  and it's really hard to express and describe.  So, I, I feel her, I'm seeing her, and the only thing that she says again is, Shelly, I love you, and everything will be okay. And then she's gone, the light's gone, and then I'm laying there going, Okay, so either you're crazy three times in a row, or this is really happening.

And so, I didn't even, I didn't speak of it, still didn't speak of it, and it really happens. It really does happen, and I'm not the only one that that happens to, and I've had many experiences since then that were even more profound, but, you know, at the time, she's giving me this simple message. I love you and everything will be okay.

And it's kind of my mantra for the book. I have bookmarks that I made that I take to book signing events and it's everything will be okay. And I even have pens that say everything will be okay. That was the only message that I could hold on to because I trusted my mother. I believed her. And I had so much still to go through.

I mean, we didn't even talk about me being raped three months before my mom died. Well, I still had to be raped again four months after. In that time period, I was told everything's going to be okay three times, and I had so much more to experience that wasn't okay. But it was a grace that she was allowed to give me that message three times to get through my thick skull that I wasn't crazy and that the spirit world exists.

And that, that the afterlife is, is real. And I know that our loved ones are not far from us. She hasn't missed a thing in my life. She hasn't missed my high school graduation. She didn't miss me getting my driver's license. She didn't miss my wedding. She hasn't missed anything. Has she been here in the form that I wanted her to be?

No. But she hasn't missed anything. And I know that because of subsequent experiences that I've had. Yeah, and when you were talking about those messages, I got that idea in your book too. I mean, you went through so many traumatic things and like you said, it continued on where things were not okay for so long.

And so it's like you're getting these messages, but then you have to go back to a hellscape really and then you get a message and you have to go back to it. But I hear what you're saying is that somehow you're holding on to that. You're still holding on to that. And in the end. She was right in the end.

She was right. It just took time. I mean, that's something I guess to keep in mind because sometimes it's like, Oh, it's it'll be okay. It might not be okay in a year. It might not be okay in two years. You know, in your case, it stretched out. I mean, your dad wasn't arrested right away. You lived with him for quite a while after he murdered your mother.

So yeah, it was way complicated. Yeah. And I was reading about my life in the newspaper as a teenager. Yeah. You know, I had to be the star witness for the prosecution. I mean, the, the list goes on. There's things, there's stories, Beth, that I didn't even put in the book because it's just too much. My dad hosted a surprise party, birthday party, well, not quite surprise.

He hosted my sister's 19th birthday party. at the house. It just had gotten rebuilt. We weren't living there. So there's no furniture in it. So there's really no, it's just weird. Why are you having a birthday party at the house? And so my friends are there, Lisa's friends are there, and this is a month after I find out he's gay, which was another traumatic thing for me to, to digest about my father as a teenager in the 80s.

And He puts a chair in the middle of the living room. He had my sister sit in this chair. This, the music changes, and here it comes a male stripper. And do you know that I didn't, I didn't know at the time that that is exactly where the blood stain was. I didn't know that yet because I didn't know that piece of evidence, but that's where the chair was.

So there's so much more that I didn't even put in the book.  That I had to to deal with in that time period. So, no, it was not okay for probably.  It took me two decades until I started figuring it out and managed to find the right trauma therapy. Also changed my mindset about the purpose of adversity in the first place and learning to trust in God's plan for me.

I mean, I believed in God all along, but I didn't trust him because I'd been betrayed too many times. And so I decided I had to have a complete mind shift. And start believing things that were hard to believe,  and start putting things into practice, and exercising my faith, and putting my trust in God's plan, and really understanding.

What the whole point of adversity is in the first place, which is to teach us. So when I had those paradigm shifts, that's when the healing could start for me. It was understanding that every single thing in our lives. That is hard, is an opportunity for growth. It can be horrible, and in many cases, it's horrendous, but if we understand that the purpose of life is for us to grow, learn and grow, and I'm a Christian, and you don't have to necessarily be a Christian, but I know that really the purpose is for us to develop Christ like attributes, humility, empathy, compassion, patience.

Long suffering, endurance, all the way up to charity, which charity is more than just, you know, writing a check to a non profit. It's about what's in your heart and how you look upon others. Do you look upon others with love and compassion and all of those other characteristics? And you cannot learn any of those things.

to the degree in which we need to learn them without experiencing hard things. The natural question is why? Why is this happening to me? That's the natural question and it's okay to ask it. But if you allow yourself to get stuck on the why, that leads to depression and misery. Because you just circle the bowl feeling sorry for yourself.

And I did that. I did that for a very long time. I was 35 years old. I just graduated summa cum laude with my MBA. I have a bachelor's in engineering. I'm, you know, on my dream career path that I had wanted since I was 10 and own my own home. So on paper, everything should be fine. And, uh, uh, outwardly, Everyone thought it was fine, but inwardly, I'm praying to die every day, still.

So, I went from praying to die every day, to happy and whole, by seeking the right trauma therapy, which one size does not fit all. I did talk therapy on and off for 15 years, and was still at this point. And I had fundamental mind shift about, What adversity is it's a gift and I know it sounds ridiculous to say that but that is and I went through this Transformation in my mid 30s.

I'm gonna be 54 in April So I'm almost 20 years past the beginning of this journey where I made the mind shift. So of course I'm even further down that road than I was then, but I'm here to say happiness is a choice. When people were telling me that when I was in my 20s, it would frustrate me and be like, are you serious?

I'm not supposed to be upset that my father murdered my mother and burned our house and these people stole this and they did this and this and this and this and this and this and this. This laundry list of about 5, 000 things long of egregiances?  You know, I'm not supposed to feel upset? Well, you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about then.

Well, maybe they didn't, but they were right. That's what I was thinking about when you were talking though is that, you know, when someone's in the midst of it and they really are maybe having to grieve and process all of these traumas and maybe it's just not, you can't get to that mindset. You can't just flip a switch and make yourself look at it like, oh, this is good for me.

This is a good learning experience. You've got to go through it, go through that process and hopefully come out the other side and get  Well, and you have to learn. I mean, you can learn it when you're in it. I had to learn it when I'm in it, but it took me a long time. And none of this is a light switch.

And none of it is linear. Because healing is up and down for everyone. And it's a winding road with, with hills and valleys. And so even though this is very, you know, Simple, it's not easy. Even now, I have that mindset that all adversity is an opportunity for growth, and so I try to look, instead of focusing on the why, which you still ask why, so the, instead of allowing myself to dwell on the why, I say, okay, because Shelly, you need to learn something.

So then I start focusing on what and how. What is it I'm supposed to be learning, and how can I use it to help myself and others? When you're hurting. The last thing you think you have energy for is serving somebody else. But when you do that, something happens.  And so it is a mechanism for your own healing is serving.

And so now, even when I'm going through something that's hard for me, I have to take the same lesson. And even though I've learned it over and over and over again, still at the onset, when, when you're in the throes of this why me moment, It takes a lot of discipline and you're never going to be perfect to say, Oh yeah, this is great.

You know, I'm just going to grow from this. But if you don't have the mindset that it's even possible to use it as an opportunity for growth, then you're never going to, you're going to languish for a long time before you figure it out. And then you, you're going to do that. So if you want a shortcut, have the mindset going in that it's an opportunity for growth.

It doesn't mean there's not going to be suffering. And it doesn't mean that it's going to be, Oh, I'm just going to turn the light switch off and I'm not going to feel upset. I'm not going to feel hurt. I'm not going to feel sorrow. I'm not going to feel pain. Of course you are. But it's a mindset that helps you not get stuck in those things.

Like I was stuck for 20 years. Because I didn't have the right mindset, and now I can progress through different adversities faster,  and see more purpose in it, and be able to heal and let go of that. Even my mother's murder, I can look at. As something that, yes, it was catastrophic, but I've learned and grown in ways that I know I never, ever, ever would have.

And I never would have chosen  that growth in day to day life. You're not gonna do that. You don't purposely put your hand on the hot stove.  It's human nature to not push ourselves to grow in these ways. It's just not. We, we're adverse to pain. Whether it's physical, emotional, or whatever, we're adverse to pain.

I saw in your book, at one point you said you had a, you felt like it was a message from God that you had chosen this life before your birth. And when I'm listening to you talk, I feel like, You're saying, we as humans, we would never choose this. We would never choose to put our hand on the hot stove or have our mother murdered or have these abusive things happen to us.

But maybe our higher self chooses, maybe it doesn't know exactly every detail that's going to happen, but our higher self knows, I want to learn these lessons in this lifetime. And so I'm going to do this. And then you have to suffer, suffer through, you know, in your human mindset. That's exactly it is, is I.

I know that we existed before we were born as spirits and part of this experience of this mortal experience is to gain a body and to gain this knowledge and we did sign up. I know that through my own personal experiences, I know that I chose many of these things. So did my mother. I believe we were ignorant because we didn't have the knowledge, and that's why we're here to gain the knowledge.

Maybe the bulletin board went around saying, Oh, yeah, I'll sign up to do this, this, this, this, and this. This sounds good. I can obtain these goals or these talents and this wisdom. I have no idea what any of this means. Okay, sign me up. You know, and so, yeah, we did do that. We did choose, and all of us did, and all of us chose for whatever reasons we chose.

We've progressed to a certain extent before we were born, and we're here to progress too. The next level, I mean, are we still in elementary school? Are we in high school? Are we in college? Where are we in our journey? As mortals, we would not have made these choices, but we made these choices before we were born.

And now we're given the opportunity to learn the lessons we signed up to learn. Well, thinking about it from that perspective, and knowing everything that happened in your life, I think, you know, you signed up for an intensive course, I would say. You made it through. And you described the way you look at life with this mindset now and it's so much more positive and from a growth perspective and you've gotten there through those experiences.

I think that's impressive is what I'm saying. I'm gonna take us a step back here. I'm shifting gears but you had mentioned back when you were younger before and after your mother's murder that you had been sexually assaulted and so just to be clear that that was not your father although your father was a very abusive.

person, obviously. These happened in separate events, and you kept them secret. You kept them very secret, and not only that, but blamed yourself for them. So, you had to also go through that evolution with that, with those experiences. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you think those might have been a part of learning those lessons about speaking up for yourself, having a voice, and the not blaming yourself aspect of that?

Sure. Thank you. Yeah, so that's kind of, I would say, a side effect of growing up in domestic violence and being robbed of your voice. Because in being oblivious to what really abuse is, it sets you up to be victimized in other ways, all sorts of other ways. And there's other sexual abuse that I experienced that I didn't put in the book and some of it I'm still, I'm newly remembering.

The mind is a crazy thing and what it does to protect itself. But I do talk about what happened when I was 11 in Mexico, where I was molested by an acquaintance of my parents. And it wasn't a singular event. It happened repeatedly over the course of this week. And I have an audiobook too. And so there's Amazon and there's Audible.

And you get reviews on both platforms. And you would think, because Amazon owns them both, that you'd see them all. So, I normally would look at my Amazon reviews, and I didn't always keep up on Logging and Audible. So, on Audible, I have not as many reviews, and they're all 5 star, I believe, except for this one.

And in this one review, this lady is basically victim shaming me, saying that I had no backbone and how I didn't stand up for myself and kind of really lambasting me. And at first it was very hurtful, you know, because first of all, this is my story. This is what happened. I was a child. I was 11 years old.

And my whole entire life, I felt shame over what happened to me because I felt, because how did I go back more than once to allow myself to be victimized more than once? How, how did I, and I didn't understand it. I did not understand it. And so I carried that shame for my whole life. And that was an 11 year old getting molested, who then at 15 goes back and gets raped by the same person.

That was the rape that happened four months after my mom died. The sexual assaults that happened with that person, I didn't talk about until I was in my 20s, and I talk about that in the book. Now, also, I talk about another sexual assault that happened 3 months before my mom died in July of, um, 85 when we were in England on that family vacation.

Now, I'm 15 years old. I think I'm really cool because I'm having my first beer in a pub without my parents because we went with my mom's cousin's sons who were old. I was the youngest because they were all older teenagers. So I'm drinking and I'm dancing with a guy that's older. I'm interested in him and I ended up getting, you know, raped outside the bar.

By this guy. I didn't tell, you know, when I, when I first told anybody, and this is after decades of therapy and already talking about being molested at 11 and raped at 15, I was in the middle of writing this book, I'm married, I'm 45 years old. My best friend is sitting at the kitchen table with my husband and I and we're talking about this trip to England.

And Julie looks at me, because I must have had some sort of look on my face, and she says, Shelly, what happened in England? Oh,  no, no, I have to tell. Because I was carrying, same situation, I'm feeling like I had some sort of responsibility in what happened. And so, with the molestation, I never understood how I could just return.

To the scene. And so really I was in my late 40s. I had to go back to therapy to really reprocess everything so I could really articulate my thoughts and feelings. And so I really relived all of this again in order for me to be poignant and give the value in the book is not the data. This happened, this happened, this happened.

It's me. What was I feeling? What was I thinking? And so in that process, I talked with my therapist about that very thing. And she said, well, and I don't know why she didn't tell me this in the beginning or when we went through this when I was in my 30s, was, she said, well, Shelly, there's something in our subconscious that when you have something traumatic happen to you, especially sexual assault, In your mind, when you're robbed of your choice, or you're robbed of something to that effect, your subconscious thinks if it can re  create the situation  where that trauma occurred  and it You, you can change the outcome by making it different the second time.

So subconsciously, victims will put themselves back into the same situation in which they were victimized in the first place in this attempt that they're not even conscious about to change the outcome of the first event, which is impossible to do. And so that's why you'll see a lot of people who've been victimized multiple, multiple times.

And you'll think. What, why, how did, how is that happening? And so I brought up that review with that, with the woman, and at first I was really hurt by what she's saying, and she's victim blaming me and. And then I sat back and I'm like, I'm happy for her. She has no idea what any of this feels like. So she must not have experienced this because victims don't victim shame.

And so I had, again, it was another thing I had to change my mindset. It's not about me, about, about me being hurt, that she's like basically shame, publicly shaming me that's going to be there for eternity. And it's my only one star review, so you know how people work reviews.  They read the five and then they go, Okay, what are the negative reviews saying?

And so, so I had to take a mind shift change on that one and say, I'm happy for her. I'm sorry for me. She doesn't understand. I'm happy for her that she doesn't understand. And then, and then leave it there and don't spend any more of my energy being hurt over that. Yeah, yeah, because you're right. It's like, she definitely is not understanding where your mind would have been at during that time and the experiences you had.

And then, Of course, to the very first event that you're 11 years old and this man is a predator. So it's like, again, you did blame yourself for all of these things as you talk about in your book, which is, it's just, it's painful to hear that. Right. But I, I think the natural thing is that you, you do think you, especially as a child, you think you have culpability.

I mean, name a child that doesn't think that they're smarter than an adult. Right. I mean, especially teenagers, right? They know everything. And so, you think that you know more than you do know. Probably at every stage of your life.  But,  but especially as a child, right? Yeah, yeah, and you're just trying to make sense of it.

You're trying to make sense of it. And I think there is that, you know, there can become that maybe mentality that I'm being punished. This is happening to me because I'm bad or I did something or and you're already in a very abusive environment in your home life. that could feel that way. So, yeah, it is, I think if people read your book, I think they'll, that woman didn't, but I think people who have not had that sort of abuse will understand better how that was for you and how that could have occurred multiple times.

So, I wanna, I do wanna make sure, I know I'm keeping you a long time, so I'm gonna add, I wanna jump to one more thing, make sure that I'm talking about it. So, your mom dying and your house being on fire, and then your dad was ultimately convicted of murdering her. In a trial that you testified at  as that process went out, you were still living with your father during all this time.

I don't was it like 2 years or how long was it before before the trial? So the fire happened in October of my sophomore year of high school. And then my sister and I live with my dad. And here's the, here's the kicker. I watched my house on fire on the 11 o'clock news. So all the major news networks were filming, literally my house was still on fire because there was a freelance photographer right in the subdivision that was there before the fire trucks were.

And so on the 11 o'clock news, they are announcing that there's a dead 50 year old woman and they already knew the house that, that the fire was.  Suspect that it was arson. They already knew that. The news knew enough to say that it was suspicious, let alone what the police knew. But my sister and I had to live with my dad.

He did not even get arrested until February of 86, which is still my sophomore year. We had to pick him up from the police department, or from the jail, and post his bond, and you know, I talk about that whole story. Then his trial wasn't until February of my senior year, so almost two and a half years later.

Now, I was living out my life reading about it in the newspaper, eavesdropping on conversations.  I was trying to prevent my dad from killing my sister at the time. It was getting to be too much. And my good friend at the time, my best friend at the time's family moved back to California. They invited me to come.

So my senior year of high school, I literally moved myself, which was an excruciating decision for me to make as a senior. Who's been captain of multiple sports teams and fully integrated. I went to school with the same kids since kindergarten to leave my senior year to, to be 2000 miles away, actually further than that.

And so I was living in California my senior year of high school. I had no idea I was going to have to testify zero idea that I was going to have to testify until. Less than a week in advance. My dad calls me and says, Shelly, you need to testify in court on Monday. I got you a plane ticket. You're flying out on Friday from San Francisco to Detroit.

So I do. My dad picks me up, and that's the other really, really, really weird thing to try to even explain is I had a normal relation, my normal relationship with my father. I lived with him after, as if, you know, everything was still the same. I wanted to believe his story so badly, and actually I allowed myself to believe his story, even knew I knew it was a lie from before I even was told my mother was dead. 

But  I wanted to believe his story because that's what I needed to be true. And so I was living in this sort of denial all this time, even though I escaped to California because I didn't want to, I knew my dad's trial was, you know, it had to come my senior year. I didn't want to be around and I had an escape plan and my sister was basically trying not to come home at that point.

And my dad was drinking continuously after the fire. And until I went to California, when I was in California in the fall of that year, he did go to rehab and stop drinking, but I think his lawyer convinced him that that was the best thing for him. And so anyway, back to the trial, I flew home on a Friday thinking for two and a half years I wasn't going to have to testify.

I only talked to the police once. CPS never talked to me ever. And they didn't help me at all. The system failed us completely. Even after the police knew that domestic violence was part of the program, they didn't come back and ask me anything. They didn't come back and ask my sister anything. I was at home right before it happened.

I was the last one to leave.  So,  if I had any sense about me, but again, I'm a teenager, what do teenagers know? Nothing about the world, really. So, I should have assumed that they were going to put me on the stand, but I didn't assume that. Especially since no one told me. So, I fly home on a Friday, my dad gives me this address, I show up at this lawyer's office, Start it.

Answering her questions. First, I'm like dumbfounded that she's asking me these questions about stories of abuse that I thought nobody on the planet besides me, my sister, and my dad knew. So my head's exploding over that and she's showing me evidence of the bloodstain. That's when I learned about the bloodstain.

Literally, there was a three foot diameter stain in the middle of our living room floor. That the night of the fire, they took a picture of the stain. And so the prosecutor, that was how she started, by the way. And I didn't even know I was at the prosecutor's office. I thought I was getting prepped for the defense.

I had no idea. So she pulls out this picture of this, of the carpet. And there's this huge stain. It's obviously blood because of the color. She's like, was this stain in the rug, or the carpet, not a rug, the carpet before you left? I said no. She said, well, would you have seen it? And so then I described how I would have seen it.

Because I had walked right through there like three times in the time period I was home. And that's the last room that I had to walk past to get out the front door. And we had a circular staircase, so if you came down the stairs, which I did, you overlooked the whole living room. They took a picture of that stain, and then when they went back to get a sample to send to the crime lab to find out, is this blood, or what is this, not only was the carpet stained, Gone.

The padding was gone. Now how does somebody get that out of an active crime scene? So now my wheels are spinning and she's showing me these other things about how they know it's arson and this and this and this. I look down, I'm like, holy crap, I'm at the prosecutor's office. Then she's asking me these questions about when was the first time your dad threatened to kill you and burn the house down?

And I'm like, I was six years old. How do you know that story? It was mind blowing. And then, then they put me on the stand for like, literally, almost 8 hours, on and off, because they took a couple breaks. They're using me to be the star witness for the prosecution to prove first degree premeditated murder.

And then I had to go home with my father. Did anyone care? No, no one. And that's really, that's what it was. It was, it was a disaster. Yeah, I mean, I kept thinking about that because you mentioned it in this interview where your dad would send you back to that basically a crime scene to get these canned goods that your mother had stored.

And so you would go back there, in and out, in and out, in and out, at times then eventually examining it on your own. And so it seems like maybe there was an assumption early on that it was an accident and they didn't protect the crime scene. Who knows? But then there's that and then there's the no CPS visits.

I mean, they had to have suspected your father for all that time and then they did arrest him and he was released on bail. But then there's all this time where he still has these minor children. In his home. It's all kind of hard. That, that is just kind of crazy. And then you're supposed to return home with him after you tell the truth about these things that your dad has never heard you tell the truth or would never think that you would tell the truth about his abuse.

So, I mean, it's all. Wow, it's, it's something, something else, isn't it? So the other question I had for you is when you were at the trial, I guess you were testifying so you probably couldn't sit in for the whole trial, but did you feel, did you have a way to kind of see all the evidence after or just laid out where you were like, okay, I am absolutely convinced that my father did this?

No. Well, I didn't need to be convinced. You read the book. I mean, the moment that we were told that my mom was still at work. So, let me back up so the people that haven't read the book know. I left the house. My mom had come home. There was an ensuing event. I knew that there was a risk of an argument. But I made an assessment.

I left for basketball practice. I assumed my sister was going to be home. I was, because I was late leaving. She should have come home or could have come home. I got to the gym. She was still at the gym. About a half hour later, the neighbors came to pick us up to say that there was a fire at our house. And in the process, they're telling us, Oh, well, your dad's okay.

The fire is, you know, the firemen have got the fire out, blah, blah. And so I'm asking the question, where's my mom? And Mrs. Eidel is looking in the rear view mirror, answering the question to me, looking in the rear view mirror saying, Oh, well, your mom wasn't, isn't home from work yet.  Bing!  Wrong. And I mentioned it in the book, that stupid song from the 80s, The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire.

I don't know if you know the song. It says, I don't need no water, and I'm like, Beep, beep, beep, let the, beep, beep, beep, burn. And so, Lisa's literally singing along to this song, and I hit her in the leg, and I look at her, I say, Mom was home.  Her and I, in that moment, both of us knew, in that moment, mom was dead and dad did it.

We didn't need any more evidence. We had a lifetime of evidence. That was his threat. We had stopped it from happening hundreds, probably thousands of times. My mother told us hundreds of times, probably, that one of these days, you're not going to be here and he's going to kill me. And the threat to kill my mother and us wasn't, didn't end that he was going to kill us.

He uttered he was going to kill us and burn the house down. That wasn't a one time utterance either. That happened many, many, many times. I don't know. I don't know how many times I was told that. So I didn't need a shred of physical evidence. Beyond what knowledge I already had, but like I said, I needed to believe my dad's lie.

So I allowed myself until I sat in that prosecutor's office and she's showing me this evidence and this evidence, I couldn't hold my denial together anymore. So it wasn't the evidence that proved to me that my dad did it, it was the evidence that prevented me from believing his lie, which I knew was a lie from the beginning.

I know it's like semantics there, and so, I literally flew in on Friday. Met with the prosecutor on Saturday, testified on Monday, and I left Tuesday morning. So, I didn't sit in on any of the trial. My Aunt Kathy, my mom's sister, sat on it every day. And there's 4, 000 pages of manuscript. When I was writing the book, I went up to get Manuscript, it's all been converted to microfiche.

They want a dollar a page to print it, I, and so, I wasn't printing a dollar per page, I, I printed like 300 pages. I sat there for, I don't know, 12 hours a couple times, reading through lots of stuff, but.  It didn't change my perspective, because what I already knew, I already had enough. Just the picture of the bloodstain.

I knew that wasn't the bullshit coffee stain that my dad's lawyer is claiming it was. I knew all of his stuff, I knew was just contrived, so I didn't need evidence. I had a lifetime of it. But as you're mentioning, yes, yes, and that's a good way to describe it all. And then it is also that moment with the prosecutor laying stuff in front of you, though, too, because, I mean, in a way, maybe that's a relief because you can be like, okay, here, somebody's holding him to account.

Somebody's got this evidence. It's coming to the light, not that that's something that you want as his child, that, you know, I'm the daughter of a murderer who murdered my mother, not that, but like maybe a little piece of it that's like, okay, this is real. I can stop being in denial. And he did this. Well, I mean, certainly, yes, I'm grateful for the evidence to be, yeah, yeah, that is true because it gives me something I didn't need more convincing and my sister didn't need more convincing, but then we don't have to face the doubt of others because my dad, you know, we talked about how great my mother was and my parents were the ones that they would go to weddings and graduations and parties.

And they'd clear the dance floor for them. Everyone was  befuddled that my dad was even accused of this.  Because this is not what they saw. So, there's two sides to that. The evidence, even though I didn't need it to prove it to myself, I am so grateful for it because I don't have to feel like people don't believe me because the evidence speaks for itself and he was convicted and I didn't want him to be convicted.

But I knew he needed to be convicted. So again, the, the whole dichotomy there. I loved my dad. I still love my dad. I hate everything that he did in this regard. I don't hate everything he did in the scope of my entire life though. There's things about me, like my, I'm a woodworker. I could build a house from the ground up by myself if I needed to.

Thanks to my dad. I have those skills. Thanks to my dad. Nobody is 100 percent evil or 100 percent good. You know, I've talked about forgiveness a lot and with my dad, yeah, I forgave him. And how did I forgive him? Well, I don't know where the accountability begins because his dad was an abusive alcoholic.

He got the short end of the stick from my grandfather. My dad was a Korean War vet, so he had PTSD from that. He was a closeted homosexual in a time period that that wasn't acceptable. So, he had his own skeletons and his own trauma. So, okay, can I blame my grandfather? Well, let me look at his history. Okay.

He was a World War I vet, a police officer, a retired Detroit police officer, and he was orphaned at five years old because his mom died in childbirth and his dad then died. His mom died in childbirth, I think he was two or three, and then his dad died of alcoholism when he was five. Oh, well, what happened there?

I don't know because I can't go back. I don't have enough live relatives that I know to talk about where that history begins. So, I don't know where the accountability begins in the generational trauma. I know that we're all born with different strengths and weaknesses, and I'm going to have different coping mechanisms with the way that I handle the situations that I'm faced with in life, and everybody else is.

You're not going to find two people to respond to that. My sister and I are completely different and in completely different places, and it's not because we had a completely different experience from the standpoint of the experience. We had a completely different experience because of the standpoint of our strengths and weaknesses and how that impacted our lives moving forward.

And so I cannot, it is not my job to judge what my father did. It's God's job to judge that and take into account his strengths and weaknesses, which I, I don't have enough knowledge to do that. Forgiveness isn't about him. It's about me. When you forgive, that other person has no idea. It doesn't mean that you have to re invite them into your life to hurt you again, but you have to let go of the power that you're giving them by holding on to the hurt, and the pain, and everything else.

And turn that over to God, and let Him be the judge, and let Him worry about it, and you forgive, because forgiveness is a gift to yourself. Not to the person who harmed you. That's my approach on that subject. Again, not something that you learn overnight. Well, you know, I appreciate you talking through all this stuff with me and I, I felt your book was very powerful and I want to be clear to listeners that your book, although there are a lot of these traumatic events, the book is about a lot more than that and I think it's, it can resonate with a lot of people because other people could have pieces of these experiences or understand, and not only that, but some of the ways in which you learned and you grew through it, I think can be powerful.

Nice things for other people to connect with and read. So there's an uplifting component and a growth component. Just how you are presenting yourself today with the way that you see things is in the book as well. And so I think it is definitely, definitely a good book and it's very well written and it's powerful and can resonate with a lot of people and hopefully help a lot of people.

And I've kept you too long, but I'm guessing you've gotten some good responses to people who've been through abusive situations as well. Oh, Beth, it's been a tremendous experience because my whole goal, first of all, my mother asked me to write the book. I don't know if I'm explicitly clear in that in the book, as I don't think I am, but I might be.

There's so many revisions, and I lived it all, so it's hard for me to even remember, you know, what the editors are like, oh, you need to, you know, trim this down or whatever. But, uh, the, the, The whole purpose, my entire purpose and mission in life at this point is to help people. I do not want anyone to feel like they're alone in their journey, to feel like it's not possible to heal from things that seem insurmountable.

And so my whole point in writing the book, doing these podcasts, being on social media and trying to engage with people is to help. Help foster hope. That there is a path through anything and everything. And so, that is why I'm, I'm sharing. And the value, I mean, the story is in here, but it's not all the lessons that I've learned.

And so, that's another thing that I'm trying to do, is like, I'm doing book clubs. Or book clubs. People will schedule time and I'll do a Zoom meeting and be the guest author at their book club so that they can ask me the questions after they've read the book and read the story. And I can either clarify things, answer questions, talk about what's relevant to them and what they're thinking.

Well, how did you get through this situation or that situation? Because my purpose is to try to help people. I love people. I don't want people to suffer. I don't want people to feel like they're on a path. All by themselves, because I know what that feels like, and it's horrible. So that's what I'm all about.

And so, there's a lot more. I've learned so much. I had to learn so much. I would not have survived without adapting. And learning and growing, I wouldn't have survived it. There's so much more, but it's not just about the trauma. It's about the learning. And the only reason why I have to talk about the traumatic events is so that I'm not talking to somebody, I'm not talking to the 20 year old me sitting in the therapist's office thinking as she's telling me things like happiness is a choice.

And I'm sitting there thinking. She has no effing idea what she's saying. Telling my story, in my opinion, is showing somebody that I do understand. That I do have a perspective that isn't ignorant. And I'm not just blowing sunshine to say these things. That seemed ludicrous that I actually had to learn those things and they're valid. 

So that's, that's the value in me telling the story, but the real value is what I learned. Yes. Yes. And I think that comes out in the book and I think you talking today, that really shines. And so I really do hope people read the book and I really appreciate you being here today. talking to me very, very much.

Thank you so much for being here. Oh, thanks for having me. And seriously, if anybody out there is on a book club and wants me to join in, just email me through my website, beautifulashesmemoir. com. You can connect with me and I'll be happy to because I really genuinely care. And I just want to be a resource.

So thanks again, Beth, for having me. Thanks for reading the book. Yes. Yes. And thank you. Thank you for all of your good work and for being here. Thanks so much.