April is Amy, Sixteen Years Later

I lived next door to a serial killer.

Many summer evenings, I sat on his front porch in a white rocking chair, sipping lemonade or iced tea with his wife and our widowed neighbor from across the street.

He killed them both.

Every April 5, I think of Amy and feel compelled to share with the world a memory of two beautiful women who should be here right now. Here’s to you, Amy Vick and Kathy Beadle.

April Is Amy

April doesn’t come and go any more without my thinking of Amy. Amy was my next-door neighbor in the Maplewood subdivision in Franklin. One night as I slept, she died. April, in 1993, was when it happened, a week before Easter, when the rest of us were thinking about new white shoes, chocolate bunnies, and marshmallow eggs.

It was an accident, her husband said.

“This 31-year-old white female was found in the family hot tub . . . Foul play has not been ruled out,” the police report said.

He was the prime suspect.

Neighbors gossiped, said it was murder, that he did it. Not me. I believed him. After all, he was a church-going man, an editor of religious books, he told me. And his house stood fifteen feet from the lilac bush at the corner of my house. My son played on the trampoline in his backyard, and I caught lightning bugs with his son. How could I be so close to a murderer? How could I let my child play in a murderer’s yard?

At the visitation, I stood with him at the coffin. “Everybody says she looks natural,” he said. “She don’t look natural, she looks dead.”

Amy wore her wedding dress of white satin and lace. Her hands were crossed on her chest, her shiny red fingernails stark against so much white. Her dark chestnut hair looked out of place against a pillow of white satin.

Two detectives sat at the back of the room, watching.

At the funeral, I stood on a grassy hillside under a maple tree. The heels of my pumps kept sinking in the damp ground. Everyone there was young — twenties, thirties, maybe early forties. Our hair whipped around in the spring wind. The widower walked out the back door of the funeral parlor and up the long path to the grave, his little son beside him. His navy blazer kept blowing open, and he kept pushing his hair back in place. I felt sorry for him. I turned toward the preacher, who read Scripture from a leather Bible, and bright white sunshine blazed in my face. I closed my eyes, shielded them with my hand, and I could see the outline of the people gathered there on the backs of my eyelids. The words of Skeeter Davis came at me. Why does my heart go on beating? Why do these eyes of mine cry? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?

Amy was put under in the moist dark earth, a world where bugs and worms crawled and tunneled and carried on their daily lives. A different world under our world of sunlight and laughter and thunder and madness. She was too young to go there.

Her death was ruled accidental.

___

The years rolled by, and I quit thinking about it. I never went back to the cemetery. I even moved away from the blue house where Amy drowned.

But as the calendar flipped over into April, 2003, it all came back. Like the Maplewood lake that yearly went through a cleaning process by turning itself inside out, the bottom coming up to the top and big nasty brown chunks floating on the surface for everyone to see and smell and live with, it all came back up from the bottom of my mind. Thoughts of Amy kept coming at me, and I couldn’t make them stop.

Do you believe people come back from the dead? I do. She did. Amy prodded me from the other side. The pull was so strong I didn’t have a choice. I had to go to the graveyard.

___

“I’ve got to visit Amy’s grave,” I told my husband. “Go with me.”

On a cold April Saturday, we drove down Columbia Pike to the memorial gardens. I remembered the grassy hillside, the maple tree, the approximate location of her grave. We walked up and down every row, checked every marker for her name, but couldn’t find it. I went to the office for help.

“It’s #148,” the young funeral home man said. “In the Garden of Prayer.”

“I looked all over that section and didn’t see her name.”

“Meet me up there. We’ll find it.”

I watched him climb up the hill, stop, look around, scratch his head, hold out his hands in a shrug. “There ain’t no marker. She’s right here, though.” He pointed to the spot. “And she’s buried north to south.”

A chill went over me. No marker. Nothing to show that someone lay beneath the cold spring grass. Nothing to show that a life was lived, a person was gone. You couldn’t even tell a grave was there. It was seamless.

Amy was lost to the world.

No one deserves to be buried, then forgotten.

“Can you look up when she died?” I asked the funeral home man. I’d forgotten and was hoping to see it on her marker. “I know it was in April because my son was home from college on spring break.”

“Yeah, stop in before you leave.”

When I later entered the office, a man with a mustache and a woman with red lipstick stood shoulder-to-shoulder to the young man. They stared hard at me, didn’t even blink. I wanted to run out the door and keep on running up the pike. Why were they looking at me like that?

The young man shifted nervously, cleared his throat. “Ma’am, she died April 5, 1993. Ten years ago today.”

“Oh God.” My lips formed the words, but the sound didn’t come out.

Ten years. Ten years to the day.

Amy came back on the tenth anniversary of her death because she wanted me to know her plight. Her husband got away with murder and left her in an unmarked grave.

___

I thought of Amy’s car wrecks two months before she died. Two of them, eight days apart. The first one, she skidded in gravel and hit a piece of machinery on the side of the road. She had glass embedded in her face and arms and was all scratched up.

The second accident, her car rolled down an embankment and caught fire. She managed to free herself while patting out flames. “Smell my hair,” she told me, as I stood by her bed. “I’ve already cut my bangs, but you can still smell fire in my hair.” It got singed, along with her eyebrows and eyelashes. Her knee was injured, too.

“Amy, what are you trying to do—kill yourself?” I asked her.

When she went to the hospital after the second accident, the glass was still embedded in her face from the first wreck.

Fifty-one days later, she fell out of a boat on Lake Barkley and had to swim to shore. That same night, she got in a hot tub and met her fate.

I can’t understand. No, I can’t understand, how life goes on the way it does.

Had her husband made three attempts to kill her before he succeeded?

___

Amy’s widower went on with his life. He took up with the young widow across the street. President Clinton spoke of them in a State of the Union address — how Tony had placed an ad in worldwide newspapers when he was seventeen, beginning a search for a life-long mate, and now he’d miraculously found the woman of his dreams.* They moved to Knoxville together. Two years later, she went missing. I saw the story on the five o’clock news, her picture plastered across the screen of my kitchen TV. I was cooking spaghetti, and I held up my wooden spoon and proclaimed, “He did it. He really did it. He killed them both.” His new bride’s body was found eleven months later, buried in their backyard, entombed in concrete under landscaping stones and timbers. She had been strangled.

He disappeared, then was nabbed up north, attempting to shoplift a suit from a bargain store.

He was tried for murder, given a life sentence.

Amy’s case was re-opened.

He made a surprise appearance in Circuit Court and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He pleaded “guilty in best interest,” not an admission of guilt. The plea kept him from getting the death penalty.

He never said he did it. Amy never got her day in court. Justice was not served in her behalf.

___

April, in 2004, I went to the Franklin courthouse, pulled the records, spent a week reading through them, learned Amy’s father died suspiciously and so did her aunt.

Seven months later, Tony called a reporter from Channel 4 News and confessed to Amy’s murder.

April, in 2005, I visited Amy’s grave and saw that someone had placed a marker there.

Amy got her due.

And Skeeter Davis was now buried a few rows up.

(NOTE: Every statement herein is a matter of public record or personal experience, thus true.

*President Clinton spoke of them in a State of the Union address … *This particular statement is in public records, written as a 1994 press release of the Tennessean, the lengthy personal ad written out in full. “Wanted–single, white, female–beautiful with a sexy figure, must have eyes blue as . . . ” There was no speculation as to whether this was true or false. Likely, this claim was manufactured by the murderer.)