Sex. Murder. Mystery(15)

That would have been fine, except for Judy. Morris and Josephine’s oldest presented a rebellious streak that reverberated with earth-shattering regularity throughout her adolescent years. She was kicked out of school when she smoked when no others dared. She was chastised when she was caught talking with boys outside of the church.

Judy was a rebel in knee-highs.

Sharon would never forget coming home from school to see a row of police cars lined up outside their rural Maryland home. Her mother told her to be quiet when she wanted to know what was going on.

No one talks about this! No one in this house!

A day later, the police brought Judy Douglas back home. She reportedly had met a boy at a picnic and gone off with him, though that night she had spent with a girlfriend. Judy was not a bad girl, just one in search of her own place. She was sullen and beaten. Instead of talking with her, instead of clueing Sharon in to what had happened, they sent Judy packing for Montrose School for Girls. The gates of the reform school were but a half mile from the Douglas home. No one told Sharon.

“We never had family discussions,” Sharon lamented three decades later. “They never talked about why they put her in there. I thought she was pregnant… I know later on she had a lot of trouble getting pregnant Maybe it was a maternity home? I don’t know. I still don’t know.”

As she would wrestle with her own mixed-up life, Sharon Lynn would wonder where it had all gone wrong. In doing so, she often revisited her older sister’s troubles.

“Those experiences combined with other things that happened in my childhood… I couldn’t have told you then, but I felt like white trash. That I lived on the wrong side of the tracks… that was the beginning of a stigma for me.”

Like many of their day, Josephine and Morris Douglas believed in the value of corporal punishment. A good spanking or whipping, coupled with some old-time religion, could straighten out even the most ill-behaved, defiant of children. Whenever the oldest Douglas girls misbehaved, they were told to go outside and cut a switch off a bush.

“That one won’t do,” Josephine sometimes told curly-haired Sharon, as she stood over her, inspecting her selection. “This one doesn’t make the right sound,” she said as she tore the switch through the air. “Get another.”

Punishment in the household was neither swift nor merciful. Though Sharon never felt the full wrath of her father’s hand, Judy did many times. But it was more than the beatings, more than the hairbrush, the switches, even the metal grid of an ice cube tray that had been used as a weapon of punishment against her small body.

Worse than that, strangely enough, was the incessant praying.

“We were sent to our rooms where Mother would pray us to death,” Judy recalled many years later. “We’d sit for an hour and a half and were told to think how evil we were and how we had displeased God and shamed the family… then Mother would come in and talk about it for an hour. Then we’d pray.”

One little incident—speaking out of turn, for instance— could command as much as three hours of penance and punishment.

Years later, Sharon would tell a friend that she vowed she’d “never bring God and a belt into the room at the same time.”

Judy’s punishment was the most severe. She would later say she had vague memories of being whipped with the buckle end of a belt. Welts and broken skin were common marks on her body. She was desperate to leave, but had nowhere to go.

One time a tearful Judy reportedly went to the police in Reisterstown for help after a particularly severe beating. She begged an officer to take her away from her father and mother, but all the cop did was send her home. By the time she was returned to her parents, the blood on her back had dried. The fabric of her blouse had to be moistened so she could peel it away from her skin. Judy Douglas vowed she’d save every penny she could get her hands on and she’d get the hell out of there.

She was sixteen when she left home.

“If I had stayed, maybe I would have got the education I deserved. Maybe I would not have married an abusive man. But leaving was my sanity. It was the right thing to do. It was not rebellion. It was survival. Sharon and I learned different ways to survive.”

Even though she would never say the two of them had forged a close father-daughter relationship, Sharon was her daddy’s shadow. She followed him around whenever she could. Mostly she tagged along on errands and when he worked around the house. Morris Douglas was a capable carpenter who put a great deal of emphasis on getting the job done right. He didn’t have a whole lot of interests outside of his work and, of course, the church. And while he was not as humorless as Josephine, Morris was not exactly a barrel of fun. Sharon was close to her father, she would later insist, only by default. Her mother was simply too distant.