A Son Even a Mother Couldn’t--or Wouldn’t--Love

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Every morning, as Beverly Chapman penciled in her eyebrows, arching them high above the rim of her glasses, she felt uneasy. The box of her son’s ashes, perched on the top shelf of her closet, seemed to judge her somehow, to glare down at her.

Bobby Stone had been killed in his sleep--first hacked to death with a claw hammer, then slashed in the throat with a knife.

Beverly had expected something like that one day. But she always figured her grown son would be the one doing the killing.

She had tried her best with him, rearing him alongside his older brother and sister, but Bobby was different. He was meaner than mean. When he was little, he even tried to drown the family dog.

“You can’t continue to treat people the way Bobby treated people and not expect something to happen,” Beverly says.

So why did she feel chills every time she looked at his ashes? Was it guilt? Shame? Regret?

She didn’t want to think about that. She only knew she couldn’t stand those ashes sitting there one more minute.

Lifting the box from the shelf, she took it to her neighbor’s house and left it there.

*

Beverly begins her story with the simple truth that she never wanted Bobby to begin with.

It was 1959, and she was married to a tyrant in Golden, Colo., who knocked her teeth out, fractured her ribs and broke her nose three times. She had two small children already--3-year-old Mike, whose father had been killed outside a bar, and newborn daughter Jamie.

Another child by this man would mean bondage. In testament to her resolve to be independent, she gathered up all her maternity clothes, threw them in the driveway and doused them with gasoline. The heap flared up like a funeral pyre.

“I’ll never have another kid,” she pledged to herself as she watched it all burn.

A week later, she learned she was pregnant with Bobby. His conception had felt like rape, and the next nine months were torture. How could she get away from this man now? How could she support three children on her own?

When Bobby was born in 1960, he had a blood disorder that kept him in the hospital for two months. When Beverly visited, nurses wouldn’t let her hold him. Could she touch him? No.

When she finally brought him home, her beatings continued.

One night, bruised and bleeding, she grabbed her children and checked into a motel. Mike, just 5, put ice packs on his mother’s swollen face and held the side of her bloody, broken nose while Beverly popped the bone back into place. It crunched as she secured it with a Band-aid.

She resented Bobby for tying her to this man, but she didn’t let him see it. Nope, he never knew. She was a pretty good actress and treated all three kids the same. Yes, indeed she did.

Beverly began making plans to escape. At the grocery store, she would write a check for $20 over the food total and give it to a trusted neighbor for safekeeping. Taking in laundry and ironing and collecting pop bottles, she managed in a year to save the $500 for an old white Valiant--her getaway car.

After she fled to a Denver apartment, she worked three jobs to support the kids and put herself through beauty school--office work during the day, bartending at night and operating the apartment switchboard on weekends.

She went through baby-sitters like diapers--one stole her car, hooked up a trailer to it and hauled everything out of the apartment. When Beverly came home, the children were sitting alone in pajamas.

It was too much for a single mother with no child support, so she put them in the Colorado Christian Home. Surely, they would be better off there, she told herself. For the next 4 1/2 years, she kept up her work schedule and collected the children on weekends.

Young Troublemaker

Already, Bobby was a troublemaker. One day, she looked out the window and saw him trying to drown the dog in a bucket of water. Another time, he set the field out back on fire.

Diagnosed as hyperactive when he was 7, Bobby was kept under control with Ritalin. Docile now, he would draw for hours on end--the same picture again and again. A perfect little house with a mom, a dad and three kids. Beverly looked over his shoulder and sighed.

“Bobby, I wish things were that way,” she told him, “but they’re not that way.”

She was on her third or fourth husband by now. A bottle-blond knockout, she invariably was attracted to the wrong kind of men--good-looking, womanizing boozers. The marriages never lasted long, and Bobby didn’t help. If he could drive a wedge between Beverly and whatever man happened to be around, he did it.

Jamie, on the other hand, begged each new man to adopt her. And Mike was simply devoted to his mother.

Finally, Beverly saved enough money to buy a little brick house in a Denver suburb. Everything would be perfect now. They would be a real family. She was sure of it.

Beverly embraced motherhood. On Bobby’s birthday, she made him a birthday cake in the shape of a train. It was the best, best thing he ever had, “except you, Mom,” said the boy with the big blue eyes and crooked smile.

The rare moment of warmth caught Beverly by surprise; happiness was fleeting in their picture-perfect house.

Bobby picked on boys twice his age and beat up children in the schoolyard. When he was sent to his room, he’d sneak into Jamie’s and Mike’s instead to break their toys and carve up their bedroom furniture.

He ran away dozens of times. He was just like his father--wild, Beverly thought. He was a hard child to love.

It must be in the genes, she figured. The other children were doing so well.

Take Mike, for instance, who, when he mowed lawns for extra money, would deposit $10 or $15 a week into her bank account--and not even tell her. Beverly found out when she asked the teller why her balance was always a little high.

Bobby, meanwhile, at age 15, was stealing his stepfather’s $5,000 coin collection and dropping the coins into cigarette machines. He broke into a neighbor’s house and stole a half-pound of marijuana, a film projector and a screen.

Bobby was a taker, not a giver like his brother. And Beverly had had enough. She didn’t like the boy. In fact, she finally admitted to herself, she didn’t even love him. It sounded cold, she knew, but she couldn’t help it.

“There is no law that says I have to love him because I had him,” she rationalized.

She took him to juvenile hall to try to scare him straight, but Bobby seemed unaffected. So when the folks there called and asked her to take him home, she refused.

“I don’t want you around me anymore,” she told her son. “You lie, you cheat. . . . “

“All I want to do is be with you, Mom,” the teenager said, but Beverly didn’t believe him. She sent him to a foster home. He ran away when he was 17.

Over the next dozen years, Bobby fathered four children with two women. He worked in construction, apartment maintenance and even dressed like a clown and rode a unicycle on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street. He shaved his head and tattooed his skull with a lion’s claw. He joined an anti-government group, refused to pay taxes and burned his Social Security card and driver’s license. Cocaine became his food and beer his drink. He beat his girlfriends.

Whenever he came home, which was rare, he ran up his mother’s phone bill, once for $800, then denied the calls were his.

When Bobby was 30, he met Nikki, who was half his age. He was jailed once for beating her. But they stayed together and, over the next five years, had three children.

Bobby had abandoned all his previous children but his firstborn daughter, who moved with them from Colorado to Slidell, La. There, the family of six lived in a tiny travel-trailer. One child slept in a bean bag, the baby in a swing. Blankets doubled as curtains.

Bobby’s anti-government protests became more hassle than they were worth, he decided, so he gave them up. He found the Lord instead, during a three-week revival last spring. The drums roared, the giant gong reverberated and the preacher shouted for redemption. Bobby was captivated. He sang, swayed and shouted with the congregation.

He swore right then and there to change his life, he told his friend, Leon Moore. He promised to be a better father, to marry Nikki. He joined a support group for people with addictive and compulsive behavior.

He also called his mother.

“I don’t know why we can’t be a family,” he told her.

“Bobby, you can’t steal and lie and cheat people and expect them to come back for more,” she said.

“Mom, this time you’ll see,” he said.

“OK, Bobby,” she replied. “That’s all I can hope for.”

What he longed for in his mother he found in his father, who came back into his life after 26 years. When he suggested Bobby move to McKinney, Texas, to be close to him, Bobby lunged at the chance. He found a job doing maintenance at an apartment complex and rented a small house.

Making good on his pledge, he married Nikki and joined a local church. He was elated when Jamie, who was fleeing her own abusive husband, decided to move to Texas to be close to him.

Everything finally was coming together for the little boy who had been meaner than mean. He was 36 now. He had a wife, he had children and he had a little white house with pink trim.

But, like the drawings of his childhood, the picture was an illusion.

After less than two weeks in Texas, Nikki, now 20, took a lover. When Bobby found out, he unraveled.

“You’re my property! I own you!” he screamed in front of their neighbor, Melissa Smith. He pushed Nikki to the floor, knocking over the high chair. She fell with her baby in her arms. “Give me those wedding rings or I’ll chop your fingers off!”

That night, Dec. 18, Nikki made plans to escape with her lover and some of his friends. With Nikki and Bobby sleeping, they entered the unlocked front door at 2 a.m. Nikki told police she woke up and began to gather her children and clothes. She said she had no idea that, at the same time, Bobby, still sleeping, was being hacked with a hammer and slashed with a knife.

Nikki took off in the friends’ van in the middle of the night, leaving Bobby’s oldest daughter behind. The 12-year-old found him the next morning.

When word reached Beverly, she cried all day.

“It’s not the man I’m missing,” she said. “It’s the kid I’m missing, the one I thought I could help.”

Surprises in a Bible

After Jamie went through the little white house with the pink trim, she brought some mementos back to her mother.

One was a Bible. In it were tucked some family photos and a receipt for Nikki’s wedding garter. And in the Book of Revelations, Beverly found an application to volunteer for a prison ministry.

She was shocked. Could her boy have changed for the better? Could her youngest child’s mean nature somehow have been tempered? She will never know. The application was blank, and Bobby’s friend who ran the prison ministry knew nothing of his interest.

But Beverly wants to believe--just as she wants to believe the grandchildren she has never met are happy.

“You can pretend the kids are doing OK,” she says. “Inside myself, that’s the only way I could survive.”

At 58, Beverly isn’t proud of all the decisions she made rearing her children, but she is very proud of her 20-year marriage to Tom Chapman--the same man whose coin collection Bobby stole. She went through five husbands before she found Tom, who, finally, makes her feel loved and worthwhile.

A grand jury, meanwhile, has indicted Nikki’s lover and two of his friends, but authorities haven’t yet decided whether to seek charges against Nikki.

And Bobby’s ashes are still across the street.

Come summer, when the snow melts off Pike’s Peak, Beverly will take the box to the top.

“I’ll set him free,” she says, “and set me free too.”

She will never be free, however, of a question no mother should have to answer: Did she not love her son because he was mean--or was he mean because she did not love him?