“I was living in Kentucky with a girlfriend of mine and he was a bouncer in a bar,” she said. “If you met him, you would realize how funny that is. He stood maybe five feet eight and weighed one hundred forty pounds. But he was, as you can imagine, pretty tough. The toughness was mostly in his personality, though.
“Cleo and I were together for seven years before we got married. We got married in 1986—and we’re still together. When I met Cleo, I was already pregnant with Cyril, but I didn’t know it. I guess I was about two months along when I found out. I told Cleo that there was something about me he should know about. I was pregnant, I was still married, and the baby wasn’t my husband’s—since we hadn’t been together in a long time. Cleo said, ‘So?’ That was his only response.
“Cyril was born in 1981 and Cleo raised him like he was his own. When Cyril was thirteen or fourteen, Cleo adopted him. It wasn’t just that Cleo wanted to adopt Cyril. Cyril wanted to be adopted.
Chris was born July 15, 1983. He was born in Bemidji, Minnesota. Bemidji is only about eighty miles from Canada; you’re up in Indian Reservation territory. Chris was three when Cleo and I were married.”
The 1986 wedding of Cleo and Ginny was, according to her, a “good old-fashioned shotgun wedding—literally.” Everyone got dressed up in older clothes. Reverend Sparks, the neighborhood minister, performed the ceremony. They lived out in the country and the minister came out to the house. With a wedding decor mostly consisting of bales of hay, the ceremony was on the front porch. Ginny’s sister and her current boyfriend held a hangman’s noose. The maid of honor’s dad escorted Cleo up onto the porch while holding a broken-down shotgun. A tape on a cassette player performed the bride’s march. Afterward, there was a cookout. A lot of family and friends were there and everybody had a great time.
“In 1987, we moved to Tingley, Iowa, and we bought a little house there. It was a little retirement [and] farming town. It was a very small town. They had twenty kids in town one year and the town was going crazy trying to figure out what to do with them. You could tell that it was a retirement town.
“A lot of people in the town thought that I was strict with my boys. I guess I had rules that other moms in the area didn’t have. I didn’t let them run around without me knowing where they were.”
Ginny remembered her boys as chivalrous, opening doors for her, holding out a chair at a restaurant. She said there had been a sibling rivalry, but nothing out of the norm. “They got along and they fought like normal brothers,” she said. “They were very protective of one another. They could pick on each other, but they didn’t like it when anyone else picked on the other. They had a lot of the same likes and interests. The only difference was that Chris was a lot more like his dad.”
Cyril had physical and mental difficulties while growing up, his mom noted.
“Cyril, if you were ever to have seen a picture of his real father, he’s identical to him. Cyril’s never met him. We contacted him once and he didn’t even want to know about him. That was pretty hard for Cyril to deal with, growing up. Cyril had a weight problem when he was growing up, so naturally he got picked on—a lot. He was also extremely intelligent. When they tested him once, he was five points above gifted. So, needless to say, he was pretty bored. And the school system down there isn’t prepared to deal with kids like that.
“Cyril was one of those kids that, if he liked you, you knew. And if he didn’t like you, you knew that, too. He didn’t mince words. He showed respect to his elders, as long as they showed it back. He wouldn’t take any crap.
“He had a hard time dealing when he was younger. He had a behavior disorder. He had a hard time with the fact that his real dad didn’t want anything to do with him. He’d get frustrated and have mood swings. One of his teachers was wonderful. Sometimes he would just cry, and she knew what the reason was. She would take him out in the hall and talk to him and let him get himself back together before she took him back in the room.
“Cyril was never in trouble with the law—but Chris was. Chris had one of those personalities that you just had to like. He was like Tabatha. When he met someone, he was quiet at first, but it didn’t take long for the quiet to go away.”
Speaking of Cyril’s younger brother, Ginny noted no physical or behavioral problems. She said, “Chris could chat a mile a minute. He had blond hair, blue eyes. Cute, and he knew it. Tall. He was probably a good six feet. And he had the personality to go with it, and everybody liked him.”
Sometimes Ginny would get letters or small packages from her girls. When Tabby was little, she sent her mother a cassette tape of herself singing. She gave a half-hour concert, singing along to some clumsy organ accompaniment, perhaps provided by herself.
At the beginning of the tape, Tabby said, “Here’s the tape I promised you. It’s me singing. I’ll start with the song I was telling you about—the one I won second place for.”
In a high, piping voice, which sometimes sounded as if it were straining the limits of her upper vocal register, Tabby then sang “I Believe,” yet her pitch remained strong and on key. She sang: “I believe that for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows.” This was followed by other inspirational and church-approved songs.
CHAPTER 7
Vermont Law School: 1985–88
In the autumn of 1985, Kevin Bryant was twenty-seven years old. He was born on February 22, 1958. Kevin’s life had centered around two things: bad health (a congenitally bad heart) and—like the Bassetts, who had raised Samantha and Tabatha—the Community of Christ Church.
Kevin’s dad, Vivian, was an official with the church. Vivian Bryant and his wife Joyce lived in Penfield and belonged to the Pittsford branch of the church. In fact, Vivian Bryant knew Essie Bassett from church get-togethers dating back to the 1950s.
Kevin had always been smart as a whip, but he had been held back by his bad heart. He was nicknamed “AV boy” as a teen because, in school, he was frequently seen pushing audio-visual equipment. He graduated from Penfield High School in 1976, by far the smallest boy in his class.
At age twenty-seven, he had achieved his bachelor degree and was ready to enter law school. There were only a few independent, private law schools in the country—that is, not affiliated with a university. In 1985, Kevin was accepted at and attended Vermont Law School, the only such school in Vermont.
Kevin was not the sort of guy to strike terror in anyone’s heart as he walked down the street. He was five-two—five-four with his shoes on—and bespectacled. He did not radiate a picture of health, but he was neat, both in grooming and in dress. His black hair was always freshly combed.
Tabatha’s father, Leroy Bassett, who had known Kevin ever since Kevin was a little boy, had always assumed that he was unhealthy just from the looks of him. “Kevin had always been kind of sickly,” Leroy said years later. “His health was not the greatest. I lived on a farm. He lived in the city. I thought city folks were strange anyway.”
Vermont Law School’s “Mission Statement” proposes: “To educate students in a diverse community that fosters personal growth and that enables them to attain outstanding professional skills and high ethical values with which to serve as lawyers and environmental and other professionals in an increasingly technological and interdependent global society.” Its motto, “Lex pro urbe et orbe”, means “Law for the community and the world.” The nineteen-building, thirteen-acre campus was small and beautiful, located in the village of South Royalton, on the banks of the White River, in a National Register Historic District. There were only a little more than six hundred full-time students and less than forty full-time faculty members.
Although it’s unknown if this factor entered into Kevin’s thinking when he was looking for law schools, Vermont Law was considered one of the top law schools for women anywhere in the country. Even back in the 1980s, more