Well, I had three children. The oldest was Charlotte. I have a middle child Andrea and
my son Bill.
We were always a really close-knit family. Charlotte, she was so sweet, but she was a
really quiet, kind of timid type of girl.
She wasn't real headstrong, and I think part of that is that she felt she always wanted
to please. She just was a really, really good kid.
I guess maybe in the back of my head I kind of had an idea that something really bad had
happened.
They told me that she had been stabbed 27 times and that she, by all indications, had
been raped.
That morning she had been woken up by a thunderstorm that went through, and I heard it, too.
It was a pretty violent thunderstorm. She actually got up around 4:30, 5:00 and decided
to go out and get her papers delivered.
I got a phone call from The Morning Call. So I got up and answered the phone and it
was her district sales manager.
He said, "Well, we have a little bit of a problem. Her cart that she pushes was found,
but she was not found."
We had the police involved now because we found a newspaper and her Walkman in the side
yard, and she always did have her Walkman on when she was out on her route.
And so at that point in time I knew that there was something drastically wrong.
I kind of pretty much shut down. I wasn't eating. I wasn't drinking. I just kind of
sat in the rocking chair, and as people would come and people would leave, people would
tell me things that they'd heard on the radio or—I just kind of like sat there and rocked,
like unbelieving what was going on. It just doesn't happen, not in Allentown, not to us.
I was made aware that she was missing around 7:00 in the morning, and they came to do the
notification around 3:00 in the afternoon. There were so many family members there in
my living room at that point in time. We went out into our kitchen which had a French door
that we closed, and they sat us all down at the table, my brother and I on one side and
the officer and the coroner on the other side, and told me that it was definitely Charlotte.
And, of course, I didn't really know how to react at that point in time because I was—I
think I had had enough information that I kind of knew that that's what they were going
to tell me. It had to be done. I had to know it. I had to get the answers that they were
able to provide.
I know that they have to remain a little bit separated from what's going on. In the death
notification, there's no easy way to handle that information, to either deliver it or
receive it. It is an important piece. It has to happen.
And it seems like when the sun sets on the day that they die, it's like a finality for
me. It's the last day that they were living and it's done. I try and live with her happy
memories. We talk about her often. We don't put her in the back burner. She's not in a
closet somewhere. She's Charlotte. I had three kids. I still have three kids. Whenever anyone
asks me, I have three kids. Some people will say, "I have two kids," because they don't
want anybody to ask them about that third child. I'll tell anybody, "She was my Charlotte."