How bottling up the horror of my sister’s murder has made me ill for 43 years
APPeARANCeS, as we all know, can be deceptive. On the face of it, you would be forgiven for assuming I lead a charmed life with my lovely husband of more than 20 years. We have two adult sons and a comfortable London home; I have a fulfilling career as a journalist and artist, plenty of friends and a much-loved dog.
And yet, I have lived my entire adult life in the shadow of the most awful family tragedy, harbouring scars so deep that my body has suffered, as well as my spirit, though it has taken me all these years to realise it.
I was 12 when my older sister, Natasha, then 14, was murdered on her way home from school.
even as I write this, I’m aware of how dramatic it sounds. I have to mouth the words in order to believe them, all too aware that it could be the opening sentence to a thriller rather than something that actually happened to me.
Yet those are the stark, inescapable facts which have underpinned my life. tasha’s death wasn’t something that was ever talked about while I was a child, but, the truth is, no one gets over something like that. You simply learn to shut out the pain.
In the end, though, as I’m now discovering, it is your body which ultimately pays the price.
earlier this week, a shocking piece of research from scientists at the University of California revealed that trauma in childhood damages our DNA and can shorten life expectancy.
It certainly chimed with the view of the late neuropharmacologist and intellect Candace Pert, who concluded long ago: ‘the body is your subconscious mind. Our physical body can be changed by the emotions we experience.’
the saying goes that you can die from a broken heart. Well, I have always suspected that my mother would still be here if tasha hadn’t died in such brutal, shocking circumstances. Mum developed a series of stomach ulcers soon after the murder and died of stomach cancer in 2001.
The emotional pain seems to have lodged itself firmly in my stomach, too. In my late teens, I struggled to eat anything and fell into the grip of anorexia. Since my 20s, I have been blighted by irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) which causes the most crippling stomach pains as my gut goes into spasm. At times, this has been so bad, I have been taken into hospital.
Apparently, 90 per cent of serotonin (the ‘feelgood’ hormone) is produced in the digestive tract. So could my tummy be trying to tell me something I refuse to hear; that I have continually evaded ‘ processing’ my sister’s death, and until I do I will never feel ‘right’?
When I tell people how tasha met her death, I see them recoil in horror, just as every time I hear of another brutal killing, I am dragged back to the raw agony of those days.
In the immediate aftermath, my older sister, younger brother and I were subjected to a total information blackout. I was told my sister was dead, but until the funeral, I believed there must have been some sort of mistake. I was an optimist in those days.
Now, of course, I know the true extent of the horror.
On October 29, 1973, my smiley, gentle, generous sister Natasha Parker Semler was abducted and sexually assaulted.
her killer was John Gilreath, who was a giant of a man — almost 7ft and 14 st to her 5ft 1in. he was a known paedophile and had previously sexually assaulted at least two other girls.
tasha was struck with a sharp instrument, probably a Philips– head screwdriver, gagged and left to die, tied to a tree. She was half- naked. It was -1c. We think she was taken in the late afternoon, before the school bus left. the school’s attempt to call home to tell us she was missing got a busy signal.
It wasn’t until 5am the following day — after police had called off several search attempts because of heavy rain — that my father took her beloved golden retriever, tilly, to the school to try to retrace her steps. the police dogs had not picked up any scent but tilly found tasha within minutes in a wood not far from the school.
My father has never spoken about what he saw (he is now 86 and, perhaps mercifully, has memory loss). It was only at her funeral a week later when he broke down that I felt any kind of pain myself. At the funeral, my mother insisted on an open casket for religious reasons. I remember the horror of being asked to kiss tasha. Some people think seeing the body brings closure, but I think this is when my physical problems started.
Afterwards, my parents hid us at our grandparents’ house half an hour away while the world’s media descended upon our doorstep. We were living in Madeira near Washington DC at the time: my mother was an interpreter at the White house and my father an American diplomat. Nothing like this had ever happened to middleclass America. And it caused a terrible sensation.
then we moved to Berlin, where I started afresh in total denial. I told my friends that the third girl in the family photos standing next to my other sister and me was a cousin. But this was when the physical effects began.
Outwardly, it was as though nothing had happened, but I became anorexic, punishing my body to cope with the emotional turmoil I felt but couldn’t express.
By the time I reached university, I had been in hospital several times for IBS and could often be found in the foetal position, in agony.
At the age of 26, less than a year after I’d moved to London to follow my British fiancé, I was struck down with Myalgic encephalomyelitis (Me). I could hardly move my limbs and spent two months at London’s Charter Nightingale hospital being treated by doctors who scratched their heads, while I slept through most of their visits.
When I married, we had to cut our honeymoon in Kenya short because I was convinced I was going to die — in a plane crash, eaten by wild animals or stricken with malaria.
Now, I realise I had survivor’s guilt. But how was I supposed to be happy? My sister had died a terrible, agonising, slow, cold death, alone and abandoned. I knew nothing would bring her back, but when I even felt good for a few minutes, I became convinced something terrible would happen.
When I went on to have our sons, Constantin, now 22, and Ivan, 20, my sister’s loss really hit me. New life was coming and all I could think about was disease and death: my doctor said I knew more about foetal illnesses than he did.
It became unfathomable to me that anyone could survive what my parents had been through. I have since learned that experts believe anxiety is passed on in the womb: it upsets my children hugely to talk about that, but there is no doubt they are worriers like me.
So, as the mother of two young children, I soon discovered the drug called ‘busy’.
It works a treat for those in denial — you work from 5am until 7pm, not stopping for lunch, and you feel as high as a kite.
everyone else seems dopey and sleepy compared to you, manically working and feeling smug. If someone says you look ratty and tired, you put it down to jealousy.
It was no wonder the Me returned in 1999. Before my mother died in 2001, I spent as much time as possible with her, flying to the U.S. every two months. She was quite religious and unbelievably brave. She is buried next to tasha.
the physical impact worsened when, with the advent of Facebook some years later, the gruesome truth of tasha’s death really
started to filter through to me. Her classmates found me online and drip-fed horrifying revelations.
One of her peers told me the school had ordered a blackout on communication afterwards. Students were not allowed to discuss Tasha in public or in private. They were even forbidden to erect a memorial in her name.
The killer, John Gilreath, was known to the school and to police; he had been charged with eight counts of sexual assault previously, including on two girls from the school. He had been given a 20-year sentence in a psychiatric hospital, but was released less than a year later without either the judge or the school being notified.
He was sent home to live with his parents and receive outpatient psychiatric treatment.
The anger at such injustice cannot be put into words. Tasha should be alive. Had the police arrived earlier; had Tilly come on Dad’s first search for her; had there not been rain to kill the scent for the police dogs; had Tasha not been late and rushing as usual and taken a shortcut near the woods where Gilreath hid. Every ‘had’ has had to be digested. They say that anger is like a locomotive: that it will hit anything in its way. The more I learn, the angrier I get. The angrier I get, the worse I feel.
Over the years, I have dabbled with therapy. Therapists tend to be nice people who nod their heads a lot, but they can’t handle me.
Drugs, doled out freely by psychiatrists, are fine, but they merely dope you up.
Others told me I hadn’t processed Tasha’s death properly, but is it any wonder? We never spoke about it as a family.
I was doing just about OK with my busy-ness- coffee-and-alcohol diet until my younger son went to boarding school in 2009.
A friend spotted me weeping on a bench in a London street. I couldn’t stop heaving. I worried I would choke to death. Nothing could have prepared me for this level of grief.
My terrified husband booked me into the Hoffman, a week’s intensive psychological boot camp in Surrey. On the last day, I partook in the exercise where you batter with a plastic baseball bat someone who has hurt you (psychologically). They suggested Gilreath.
Four hours of thumping later, I was shaking madly (I could see the therapists asking themselves if they should call a real doctor). The next morning I came home and answered the phone: John Gilreath had died at about the time I was busy ‘killing’ him.
Since then, I have been getting progressively worse. I am more anxious, more tired, more achey, less hopeful, and more sure that terrible things are coming my way.
My IBS is severe. I endure it. I drink too much. I often don’t eat. I hardly exercise.
I avoid routine health checks such as mammograms because I think it’s going to be bad news (it takes days to get the courage to call for an appointment).
Every day, I am either stressed or depressed. I’m terribly anxious. If my now adult boys don’t return my texts within seconds, I panic. I presume everyone is dead until told otherwise.
I did sit them down and explain that those minutes I never waste might have saved Tasha. Had we panicked immediately and not given her the two or three hours or so of reasonable ‘gone to a friend’s house, forgot to call’, teenage leeway, she might be alive. Such is the legacy of a sibling’s murder.
I am in my mid 50s — that point in life when things really can start to go wrong, the age where doing mean things to your body catches up with you.
Neglect is part of the post-traumatic stress diagnosis. Self-care to me is like filing tax returns: I do it only so I don’t get arrested.
My IBS was never much discussed until this summer, when my husband read the Giuila Enders book, Gut. She writes: ‘Our gut is capable of making us feel the negative effects long after the period of stress is over.’
Suddenly, he realised there might be hope on the horizon. He researched the Original FX Mayr Clinic in Austria and decided to send me there for two weeks.
‘you have to fix your stomach,’ he said. I suspect he also meant ‘and the rest of you’.
The Original FX Mayr clinic has been around for 40 years and has always been ahead of its time. The philosophy of its founder Franz Xavier Mayr was that the intestines are the key to happiness.
‘Look after your gut and it will look after you,’ was his motto. The Mayr’s approach is the opposite to the one taken by most nutritionists for treating digestive issues. Fasting is part of the treatment, as is an alkaline-based diet which reduces inflammation ( which they say prevents many diseases).
They also insist on chewing (I am a gulper) and eating only raw food after a certain hour. Mental coaches are part of the programme.
Since I agreed to attend, my stomach has been in gridlock. I now realise that it has long been the clearing office for all of my mental problems.
Part of me is worried I might unleash something really sinister. I had a nightmare last night — my worst — about being attacked by a strange man. Without coffee, alcohol, busy-ness, and my art to distract me, what will happen?
Maybe grief lodges itself in dark corners like coral and needs to be flushed out once and for all. Perhaps I will leave feeling lighter and brighter.
It is hardly the most appealing of ‘holidays’ but I am here: it is time to grasp the nettle, however painful. I am finally ready to heal, even if it really hurts.
I want to feel good without feeling guilty. Above all, I want to lift the black cloud that cloaks all the happy memories of my beloved sister and the childhood we shared which was so brutally ripped from us both.