Sex. Murder. Mystery(30)

“If you want to call me Mom, I’d consider it a great honor,” she had said. “Of course, I understand you have a mother already.”

Lorri tried it out in her head a few times, but was never able to call Sharon mother. Instead, she chose the nickname Sharon preferred above all others: Sher.

Before the disclosure made by the girls’ dean had stunned her into a silent disbelief, Lorri had believed a terrible lie. She had been oblivious to the nature of the woman who had infected their lives like some kind of insidious disease. She had not heard the sarcasm in Sharon’s voice when she talked about her sisters or her mother. She had not seen how really snotty

Sharon was when things irritated her or when she didn’t get her way.

“I thought she was so wonderful. I thought she gave me so much freedom. I thought she really liked me. But she didn’t, did she? I guess she didn’t like anyone but Sharon.”

Lorri had wondered to herself what it was that kept drawing her toward trouble. Sometimes she chalked it up to the scabbed over hurt of her parents’ divorce. Occasionally she blamed her religion. Other times she was more pragmatic, and knew she made her own choices—and frequently they were poor ones.

In the late summer of 1980, only four weeks into her senior year, she was in a patch of trouble once more. As she had done before, she was drinking and being defiant and irresponsible. The dean at Campion wanted her to shape up, pull her act together, get with the program. Or else. She could concede she was a problem, but no more so than many other teens. She wasn’t running away. She was going to school and partying.

Perry had been notified and he and Sharon, along with toddler Danny, made the trip up to Loveland to straighten out the girl. Lorri had never seen her father so angry as he lashed out at her for making a mess of her life, making a mess of his life. Sharon held Danny and smiled smugly.

Though Lorri was nearly grown at seventeen, a frenzied Perry threw her across the bed, pulled off his belt and whipped her. Lorri had been spanked before, though it had been awhile. But she had never been spanked so hard in her entire life. Sharon egged her husband on. Lorri needed to be taught a lesson.

“This has been going on too long. She can’t keep doing this to us!”

As Lorri thrashed on the bed, she broke some blood vessels in her nose and started to bleed. Blood stained the bed sheets and pillow.

After the whipping, Perry told Lorri to clean herself up. Sharon had wanted to go to the movies and that’s where they’d go—as a family. The film was Caddyshack.

Lorri sat stonily, glancing at her father and his wife. Sharon was no longer the best friend, the older girlfriend. She was no longer the woman to whom she’d confide. The woman laughing out loud at the antics of the gopher on the golf course was no one she wanted to know.

While the Nelsons were watching Caddy shack, Lorri’s roommate discovered blood on the bed and notified the dean. The school administrator flew into action, nearly ready to report a terrible crime, until Lorri returned and explained what happened.

Two weeks later, Academy officials expelled Lorri Nelson. No one wanted a repeat of what had happened. No one wanted to see the violence escalate. Without her father’s knowledge, Lorri was sent to her mother’s. By then, Julie Nelson was living in Walla Walla, in the very southeast corner of Washington State.

“At the moment I saw her smug face while I was being spanked, I knew that she didn’t really care about me,” Lorri later explained. “She had convinced my father that I was no good and that I deserved everything I got. I’ll never forget the look on her face. Even through my tears, I saw her smile.”

Long after the sharpest of the memories associated with the beating at Loveland had faded, Lorri Nelson talked with Barbara Ruscetti about what happened in that dorm room. The doctor’s daughter was still mystified.

“Mrs. Ruscetti,” she said, “why do you think he did that?”

Barb didn’t mince words. “Because Sharon told him to do that to you. I heard her.”

Lorri pressed for details and Barb recounted something she heard Sharon tell Perry.

“Perry, I think you ought to take your belt off and just beat the holy hell out of Lorri. Teach her a lesson!”

As Barb saw it, Lorri’s father was under Sharon’s spell.

”I bet if Sharon said, Terry, we’re going down and rob the Trinidad National Bank tonight,’ he would have gone. He wouldn’t have asked any questions.”

Not everyone was blind to Sharon’s modus operandi when it came to Lorri. Blanche Wheeler would hear of things Sharon had done to Lorri through her daughter, Kerry.

“She was almost conniving,” Blanche said later. “She almost seemed to make trouble for Lorri.”