In June 1995, one month after Feather Rahier moved in, Gelo received a call from a caseworker asking her to take a ten-day-old baby who had been a full-term breech delivery on the streets of Seattle, but the infant only weighed a little over five pounds. He almost suffocated at birth, and tested positive for syphilis. Fetal alcohol syndrome was strongly suspected.
When the child was three months old, a neurologist said that the boy would always be severely retarded. “He may never roll over or even respond to people,” reported the specialist. Other doctors speculated that he would not live a full year. “He did not sit up alone until eleven months,” recalled Gelo. “He crawled at thirteen months, walked with an orthopedic walker at twenty-two months, and on his second birthday took his first independent steps. He survived and thrived, although his mother didn’t.”
Shortly after requesting that her parental rights be terminated so the child could be adopted by “the only mom and dad he has ever known,” her drinking and drugging took their toll. She had cirrhosis, meningitis, hepatitis, renal failure, sepsis, and had been assaulted and beaten at a party. After two weeks in a coma and on a respirator, she woke up, looked at Julie Gelo and the pictures of her children, and passed on. “She was twenty-eight years old at her death, and both her parents died in their early thirties from alcohol,” recalled Gelo. The adoption was completed in October 1995.
Illumed by the above history, Feather Rahier’s request for adoption by Gelo would appear both logical and prudent. Seeking outward stability as an anchor for inward instability, Feather sought a situation of inclusive permanence.
Sadly, there was nothing permanent in Feather’s immediate future, least of all her own moods. Troubled and volatile, Feather was often found crying in her closet. “The next minute, she could be exploding in anger,” said Gelo. “It was very hard on her and on the rest of our family.”
The youngster’s pediatrician wrote to the prosecutor’s office asking, if possible, that Feather be excused from having to testify. “He felt that all of this was having a real negative impact on her mental health,” said Gelo. “He was afraid that we would end up losing her totally.”
Gelo repeatedly assured Feather that everyone was doing everything in his or her power to keep everything as easy, nontraumatic, and safe for her as possible. These assurances failed to calm Feather’s fears.
“I would go in to check on her at night, and sometimes she would be thrashing around in her sleep. If I went to lay my hand on her shoulder, and went to talk with her and say, ‘Feather, it’s okay,’ she would kind of thrash at me with her hands and say, ‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, leave me alone.’”
Feather’s behavior became more troublesome as the date of Clark’s trial grew closer. “She was attempting to draw attention to herself or cry out for help in some ways,” said Gelo. “She would come and tell me what she was doing and they were behaviors that she knew would get consequences, or knew would get attention, you know, from me and from the other people in her life. And it was things like accepting a bottle of cider from a winery down the hill from us that had alcohol in it and drinking part of that bottle, but bringing the rest of it home and giving it to me.”
Feather also wore very provocative clothing to school—outfits that were not provocative when first purchased. “She was taking all of the new clothing that we had bought her and cutting it up and making it very sexualized—cutting, you know, the pants to be very short, or the T-shirt, so that they would expose her midriff,” Gelo said. “That isn’t what she would leave the house in the morning with, but she would carry these clothes in her backpack and change. And I would get calls from the school asking that I bring her more appropriate clothing.”
One day, Feather vanished from school after first period. Students and teachers overheard her say that she was leaving with two boys. “The story was that they were going to a boy’s house,” Gelo recalled, “because the boys wanted to do drugs. Feather wanted to go along to do her ‘wild thing’ that day. She was back in school by the beginning of fourth hour, and didn’t appear intoxicated or under the influence of drugs. Feather knew that when she got home, she would be getting consequences at home, and yet she came home straight off the bus.”
Advised by Gelo that skipping class was not a prudent decision, and one that entailed consequences, Feather had no objections. “She was not the least defiant,” said Gelo. “She was pleasant and cooperative.”
Spring break started that day, and Feather was put on restriction. “Again, there was no arguing, not even the sullen look that I would have seen from any of my other teenagers. Saturday morning, she got up very compliant, asked me, ‘What can I do to help you today?’”
Feather helped with the children while Gelo went grocery shopping. “She asked if she could go outside and rollerblade, and my husband said it was okay as long as she was on the corner of our house, and not across the street. That was fine with Feather, it seemed. She soon returned, and my husband suggested that they go downstairs and watch a movie together. He went on down and waited for her, but she didn’t come down.”
He looked upstairs, and out on the deck, but Feather wasn’t there. “He looked out the living-room window just in time to see her rollerblading by our house with a backpack on her back and a little bag in her hand. And a few minutes later,” said Gelo, “my nineteen-year-old daughter, Faith, came to our house and she had seen Feather down at the 7-Eleven with what looked like a cigarette in her hand. By that time, I had come home, and we went down looking for her and she was gone; we couldn’t find her. And,” said Julie Gelo, in 1997, “that’s the last time anyone has seen or heard from her.”
Rather than again relive her childhood trauma, Feather packed basic belongings into a backpack, then rollerbladed down the block, around the corner, and out of sight.
She would never be a witness for the prosecution against the man charged in the brutal, sexually motivated slaying of seven-year-old Roxanne Doll—the big man from the dark garage whose fractured family, abusive upbringing, and interpersonal malaise were tragically similar to her own—a young man who manifested each stereotypical trait of the fetal alcohol spectrum disorders: Richard Mathew Clark.
Chapter 2
Richard Mathew Clark entered the world as the fruit of an adulterous womb, on August 18, 1968, and was the youngest of three children. His mother, Kathleen Ann-Marie Feller, had married George Walter-Burton Clark Jr. when she was fifteen years old and already pregnant. The age at which Kathleen began drinking is unknown, but her adult years were spent ceaselessly under the influence.
“When my mom got pregnant with me,” said George Clark II, “her folks didn’t approve of my father or my mother’s actions, getting pregnant out of wedlock and such. I believe they held it against us, maybe me, but they didn’t have much to do with us.”
There was an inarguable difference between Richard, his sister, Leslie, and four year older George Clark II. Richard Clark’s father was Gordon Nickel-son. This parental faux pas contributed to the Clarks’ separation when Richard was sixteen months old, and their subsequent divorce. Carol Clark, the children’s aunt, good-hearted and protective, often looked after the youngsters.
“She came and stayed with us when Richard was first born,” recalled George Clark II. “She was a good cook, and I always had lunch for school.”
The home was not long without a father figure or Kathleen without a man. Neither did her reproductive system remain idle. Commuting to the eastern Washington town of Moses Lake to drive a potato truck, Kathleen met Norman Hastings.
“When she came back from Moses Lake, he would come over and visit, stay the weekend,” recalled George Clark II, “and that’s how my younger sister Jennet Hastings came about.”
After the relationship