According to George Clark II, the three kids—Leslie, he, and Richard—would wait in line for their beatings. “We had to watch each other get beat,” he recalled. “What made me scream the most was the fireplace poker that he used on us.”
Unlike his older brother, Richard Clark didn’t scream. “Richard would grit his teeth,” said George, “he wouldn’t cry until after Bob was gone. Me and Leslie would scream like crazy, but Richard very rarely cried until after it was over.”
According to Aunt Carol, shortly after Kathleen married Bob Smith, she picked up Richard Clark for a visit. “I took him home with me for the weekend,” said Carol. “He had bruises up and down his back and his legs from being beat with a belt. He cried and couldn’t sleep for two days. I wrote his mother a letter. I told Kathleen that if I ever [saw] anything like that again, I would report Bob to the authorities.”
Because of that admonition, Carol Clark was not permitted to visit again for three years. “I next saw Richard when he was eight years old,” recalled Carol Clark. “My mom and I had gone to the doctor’s office for her appointment, and I saw Richard come out of the doctor’s room with his mother. And I didn’t know if it was Richard or not because he had lost so much weight and his teeth were protruding out of his mouth. Well, at that time I asked Kathleen if I could bring Richard home with me and keep him because he looked so bad. And she thought it over and she did let me bring him home eventually and keep him because of what was going on. He must have been about eight years old at the time,” said Carol Clark. “Richard lived with me for two years straight.”
Times were always tough in the Bob Smith household. Kathleen broke her neck when Richard was very young and never worked again. Smith did seasonal berry picking, sold marijuana, and poached deer to obtain meat.
“The Clark side of the family was always good to us,” recalled George. His aunt Carol verified the accuracy of his assessment. “Members of our family bought food and clothing for the children,” she said, “and one time I even went to Richard’s school and gave him some money.”
Carol desired neither recognition nor praise for this surreptitious expression of honest, loving concern. Sadly, Bob Smith got wind of his stepson’s financial windfall. “When Bob found out,” recalled George Clark, “Richard was beaten as punishment.”
Frequent school absences characterized the Clark brothers’ school records. “We were kept home from school,” explained George, “because the beating left us so bruised and swollen. Smith didn’t want some teacher seeing the signs of severe abuse.”
According to George Clark, Smith was continually under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs, and he seemed to concentrate his meager mental efforts on making George, Richard, and Leslie’s lives miserable.
“When the family lived in Arlington, Washington,” explained George, “we were forced to sleep in a woodshed. When we moved to Darrington, Smith bought a two-bedroom double-wide trailer. Then he built what he called a bunkhouse fifty yards away from the main mobile home. It had electricity, but no heat. That’s where Richard and I lived. We were only allowed in the house for meals.
“To keep us kids out of the house,” he explained, “Bob would make us go out into the yard and pick up rocks and stack them up into piles. Once we finished that, he had us move the piles around the yard.”
According to George Clark II, Bob Smith’s treatment of Richard was not only physically painful, but also emotionally humiliating. “There was one event that I’ll never forget as long as I live.”
Richard and Jennet, young and mischievous, got up in the middle of the night and ate up all of sister Leslie’s Camp Fire Girls cookies. “There were dozens of them,” said George, “and they ate them all. My mom and Bob were responsible for the money. Bob went down to some store and bought this big cigar, very big around. That night we had roast beef, mashed potatoes, a great big dinner. And Richard had to stand next to the kitchen table with a glass of water, had to eat that cigar while we ate our dinner.”
The sight of his younger brother gagging on the cigar diminished George’s appetite. “I couldn’t eat my dinner, and I don’t think any of us kids could. Richard was shaking like a leaf, and Bob was telling him that if he didn’t eat it, he was going to get the hell beat out of him.”
When asked why Kathleen allowed Bob to beat her children, George gave the question serious consideration. “I figure Mom must have really loved Bob Smith a lot to let him do that to us. That’s all I can figure. Mom must have really loved him.”
Richard Clark was fourteen years old when his loving yet terminally inebriated mother died in an auto accident on September 19, 1982. “She was full of drugs and alcohol when she died,” said Carol. “She hit a bridge on Highway 9.”
“The next morning,” recalled George, “Leslie took the girls, Jennet and Crystal, out in one corner of the yard, and I took Richard out to the other corner of the yard and told him of our mom’s death. I don’t know how he was affected by it—I was in shock; Bob was in Alaska. He and our mother were not on good terms at that time.”
George Clark telephoned Bob Smith, the man who beat him with a fireplace poker, and told him of Kathleen’s death. “When Bob got home, all the kids scattered—left, kind of went our own ways.”
After the funeral, Richard Clark went to live with his aunt Carol. “When he came to live with me, he was very upset over his mother’s death, but refused to openly grieve,” said Carol. “He wouldn’t talk about her death. He kept everything inside. I couldn’t even get him to cry. Then, one night, he was at the home, and he was outside and he was all upset and he was crying. He said, ‘I just want to die.’ And that was the time when I told him that I couldn’t be his mother. I had to be my son’s mother, and that upset him.”
Desperate, disoriented, and self-destructive, Richard Mathew Clark attempted suicide three times within twelve months. “He slit his wrists,” noted Carol sadly. “He still has the scars.”
Richard Clark, still seeking a surrogate mother, moved in with his mother’s ex-husband and his new wife, Toni. “I married George Clark, Richard’s father, on November 2, 1974,” said Toni Clark. “After Kathleen died, Richard came to live with us for a couple weeks, but it didn’t work out because we lived in a two-bedroom house, and we crammed all the kids into one bedroom. It was just so crowded,” she said, “that they didn’t have sneezing room. Richard had to walk to school, and he didn’t like that school too much anyway. So he went to live with his grandma Feller, Kathleen’s mom, for a while after that. After that, he moved into the house of his mother’s best friend.”
Although there was always an open door for him with Aunt Carol, Richard Clark remained disconnected and disenchanted. His teenage years were dissipated, bouncing back and forth between a hodgepodge of particularly unimpressive associates who shared his fascination with intoxication. Moments of semiclarity only accompanied the occasional respite with compassionate relatives, none of whom could replace his tragically taken mother. He simply could not bond with any of them.
From that point on, Richard Clark’s primary passion was conspicuous consumption of alcohol; his highest educational attainment was seventh or eighth grade. His sadly predictable life-trajectory of emotional distancing and personal boundary violation via burglaries and car thefts escalated in 1988.
At the age of twenty, his inappropriate behavior reached an apparent peak when he locked four-year-old Feather Rahier in Aunt Carol’s garage, tied her with socks, and touched her in ways that made her perpetually uncomfortable. He was still under thirty in