Bond of Sorrow
A support group helps families of murder victims find some comfort in knowing they aren't bearing their loads of grief alone.
Published on 06/10/01
BY JENNIFER BERRY HAWES
The Post and Courier Staff
Janice Clark's young daughter took an evening stroll on Folly Beach with a friend. Her friend's parents called to say the girls were missing.
Vanessa Halyard's telephone rang in the middle of the night with word her son had been shot. Ann Phillips' phone rang with news her son and his new bride had been in "an accident."
In the end, all were dead at vicious hands. One hanged, one shot, one beaten.
The details of each murder are so different. Two are more recent, one decades ago. One killer remains on the loose. The other comes up for parole in January. The third killed himself in jail.
Yet, in the end, the stories are so much alike. The undying grief over a murdered child is the same, that rage and sorrow are the same, the lifetime of wondering what could have been is the same.
And that's what forms an instant bond among these families.
The wounded parents found each other last fall when the Charleston County sheriff's victim services office created a support group for families like theirs.
"We've all got the common bond, through no fault of our own," Clark says.
The group met for the first time in September, drawing about 25 people. "It was very, very intense," recalls Easter LaRoche, victim services coordinator for the sheriff's office.
They continue to meet twice monthly with no agenda, no scheduled speakers. Just a free-flowing conversation among people who share a bond they wish they didn't.
After that first emotional meeting, Halyard drove home crying and crying. Yet, the burden felt lighter.
"It's been a long, hard road," she says.
At least now she knows she isn't traveling that road alone.
COUNTRY MUSIC DREAMS
Robb Phillips used to retrieve the newspaper from his mother's driveway, bringing it to her with a promise: "Some day my picture is going to be on the front page."
Robb had planned to be a musician ever since he was 5 years old and got up in front of his church for an impromptu "Jesus Loves Me." He grew into a teen with a penchant for Western dress and a passion for country music.
A lanky man with bright blue eyes, Robb became a popular singer in the San Diego area where he and his new wife lived. He revered George Strait and formed a band called The Charleston County Band, named after the place Robb loved.
He became known for ending every show singing his idol's "I Cross My Heart," always calling up his beautiful blond wife, Kelli, squatting down and singing it right to her.
At 24, his musical career had been building up to that March 1994 day when he and Kelli drove to the country music capital to meet a producer and discuss a recording contract.
The couple planned to stop in Nashville before heading to South Carolina, where Robb wanted to show Kelli, his wife of just three months, the Holy City's lush beauty.
But Robb never showed up at the recording studio. Kelli didn't show for a catering job she'd lined up.
Kelli's mom called Ann Phillips first. The Tennessee police had called her to say there had been "an accident" in Nashville. Ann thought they'd been in a car wreck.
Hours passed before her doorbell rang. A police officer asked her other son, who was living at home, to step outside. Her first thought was that the son had gotten in some sort of trouble.
Another officer told Ann that Robb and Kelli had been found murdered in their hotel room. They'd been beaten. Kelli had been raped. The killer remained at large.
Ann's best friend hurried over. When Ann opened the door, she saw TV news crews setting up outside her San Diego home. Word was getting out over the country music radio stations. On TV, news of the killings broke in every 10 to 15 minutes, with footage of the body bags being removed.
The next morning, Ann walked down her driveway and picked up the newspaper. She unrolled it and there, on the front page, was Robb's picture. She collapsed, sobbing, in the driveway.
Over the next days and weeks, countless stories would run in the Nashville and San Diego newspapers. Some would be rife with errors that the police told reporters in hopes of throwing off the killer. Things about a hit killing, mostly.
Nor were the police always straight with Ann and David. "When you go to a doctor, you want to know the truth," says David, who adopted his stepson as a toddler. "It's wrong. They should spit it out."
Finally, Ann amassed enough courage - or was it anger? - to ask a detective, "Who died first?" Did her son watch his wife be tortured? Or did he return to their hotel room and surprise the killer?
The police told her that Robb appeared to have died first. It looked as if the couple had been in Nashville barely eight hours, just long enough to check into a hotel and play in a contest at a nearby club. That's where they met a man named Thomas Steeples.
Robb won the contest and called his mom to tell her he'd won $100. He held out the phone so she could hear the music in the background.
Kelli went back to the hotel while Robb ran out to get some food.
A housekeeper found their battered bodies the next day.
Inside the salmon door of Room 112, Robb lay dead with his skull smashed, his body too damaged for his parents to see. Police identified Robb by his fingerprints, Kelli by her dental records.
David often withdrew into a favorite deer stand, a private place where a man can think and pray and let his anger loose. Months passed before Ann could even dress to leave the house.
Finally, David convinced her to join him at a new McDonald's nearby. She put on her fuzzy slippers and robe. He sent her back to dress, and finally she did, taking a small, yet large, step in resuming something like a normal life.
Nashville police finally arrested the 49-year-old Steeples, a computer-supply-store owner who was out on bond for allegedly killing his business partner.
Five months later, Steeple killed himself by ingesting six grams of cocaine smuggled to him in jail while he awaited trial. His suicide left the Phillips with a complicated ending to their nightmare, one that robbed them of any real closure, if closure is possible after your child has been murdered.
Ann left California and returned to Charleston, where David already was, eventually taking a job in the victim/witness department of the solicitor's office.
"This is my justice," she says.
Yet, the woman who once crossed the United States alone now won't go to Wal-Mart after dark.
Seven years later, there are days when she still cannot fathom the gruesome scene, the terror, the fact that Robb is gone.
"In some ways, I still think that I will open the door and he'll be there. Maybe that sounds silly," she says.
And then there's the anger, a constant simmer on some days, a raging fury on others. "There are days when I could tear this house down with my own hands," Ann says.
Robb had two children from his first marriage, and today they are 9 and 11. An aunt made them two scrapbooks to help them know their daddy and how he died.
In one, she tucked the police report and dozens of newspaper clippings that Ann still hasn't been able to read. She can't move her eyes past the headlines that read something like, "Two Slain Bodies Found in Motel."
In the other scrapbook, she put the family's favorite pictures. Many show Robb with a happy Kelli, with her striking blond beauty, the petite body and big eyes that Robb loved - and that most likely drew the killer's eye.
The Phillips also have created something of a shrine. In a bedroom of their West Ashley home hang Robb's military flag, pictures of his children and a large photograph of Robb as a young Navy man. They had framed that picture for Kelli, and she carried it on the front seat of their truck when they left San Diego that day.
When Ann got it back from the police, she had to wipe off the blood.
By the time Robb was killed, Ann already had buried her parents. But this was so different. She rarely goes to his grave and can't look at the tombstone when she does. She doesn't even like to drive the section of Highway 61 near the cemetery.
Her anger brims as she describes how she raised her son to believe in God and to trust in a guardian angel. "Where was his guardian angel?" she fumes. "Taking a coffee break?"
SENIOR YEAR
His mom named him William Townsley Halyard. But everyone called him Tanzy, just like everyone knew him as a health nut poised to join the Army as a commissioned officer, a long-time ROTC member with dreams of becoming a lawyer.
In September 1998, Tanzy was 23 and poised to graduate from S.C. State University. Around 1 a.m., he got off from work at Wal-Mart and joined some friends at a local nightclub. He didn't plan to stay long; he had to pick up his 1-year-old daughter the next morning to spend the weekend with his mother in Charleston.
He was standing in a crowd of nearly 100 people in the parking lot when a man drove by and sprayed the group with bullets. Tanzy fell, along with several others.
At 2 a.m., his mother, Vanessa, awoke to her telephone ringing. It was someone from the Orangeburg hospital. Her son had been shot, and she needed to come.
Vanessa woke her youngest daughter, who was just 12, and drove onto I-26 for the nearly hour-long drive from their North Charleston home. She prayed that her son wasn't hurt too seriously, prayed that she could be there to comfort him.
Vanessa wasn't sure exactly where the hospital was, so she stopped at a gas station. A stranger inside warned, "I think you'd better hurry."
She did hurry. But it didn't matter. Tanzy was dead.
In time, Vanessa managed to dial the telephone number to her work, the YWCA of Greater Charleston, where she's the after-school care director. When she called, several of her co-workers were in a committee meeting to plan their annual campaign called "Stop the Killing and Violence."
Tanzy had been in ROTC for years and was about to be commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army. The day he was killed, he'd called his mother to plan a celebration. Vanessa's brother-in-law, also a military man, was going to return from Saudi Arabia to pin her son.
Instead, he pinned Tanzy in a coffin.
Two young men were killed that night. Yet, from such a large crowd of people, few witnesses came forward. Some who did later changed their stories. Vanessa is certain they are afraid of the killer.
Police arrested a young man and charged him with Tanzy's murder. Then, the Orangeburg sheriff's office failed to notify Vanessa of the man's arraignment - and robbed her of a chance to see him, to voice her pain. She learned about it in the newspaper.
Then came something worse: After a year and a half in jail, the man was released because the solicitor was afraid police lacked the evidence to ensure a conviction.
Vanessa was enraged. But she is no shrinking violet. She picketed the sheriff's office when the sheriff was up for re-election. He lost.
Still, Tanzy's killer remains free.
Vanessa and her close-knit family imagine the shooter is everywhere. They gathered in Myrtle Beach a few weeks ago, packed 12 people into her sister's home and tried to celebrate Memorial Day. But Tanzy was so obviously missing. And his killer seemed to be everywhere.
They tried going out, joining the throngs of people partying at the beach. Yet, the family was consumed by a suspicion that chased them back inside. Was that man over there the killer? Or how about that man?
"He's able to enjoy the holidays, special occasions," Vanessa says. "That's all been taken away from my son."
She talks publicly about Tanzy's murder, pleading that anyone with information will come forward so police can arrest and convict the killer. In the meantime, the anger that has fueled her life for two years still grows unbearable at times.
Today, Tanzy's daughter kisses a picture of her daddy at night before bed. It hangs in her bedroom. She won't remember, but he was the kind of dad who changed diapers and fixed his baby's hair. He shared custody with her mother and cared for his daughter every other weekend and on Wednesdays.
"I think about him constantly, about what could have been and what won't be," Vanessa says. "Your wound just keeps opening. I have no closure."
WALK ON THE BEACH
Janice Clark still lives in the same brick ranch house on James Island where she nurtured her premature baby, that tiny girl born on St. Patrick's Day.
It's the same home Sherri left on May 23, 1973, to join a girlfriend named Alexis Latimer for an evening walk on Folly Beach.
The Clarks thought nothing of it. They knew Alexis' parents, who would be nearby at their beach house. And at 14, Sherri was a responsible child who played in the honor band. They didn't worry about her getting into teen-age sorts of trouble, with her being still so much a flat-chested, naive child with braces and a dusting of freckles.
Janice was asleep, resting before her evening shift as a hospital nurse, when they got the call. Alexis' parents couldn't find the girls, but Alexis' twin brothers were out looking for them.
They were worried but not alarmed.
Then the hours passed. Soon, the police arrived. They labeled the girls runaways.
Hours stretched into 10 months. Janice struggled to keep her family going for the sake of Sherri's 8-year-old sister, Paula. But how do you explain something to a child that you cannot grasp?
As Charleston bloomed into spring 1974, a resident on Folly Beach called police to report surfers in the water after hours. A police officer checking it out heard what he thought was a wounded animal. He peeked under a house and found three terrified 16-year-old girls from Summerville bound and gagged.
Several weeks later, police had arranged a mess of puzzle pieces, causing rumors to fly that they might have found a clue to Sherri and Alexis' case. The Clark home turned into a command center of raw nerves and waiting. Finally, at 1 a.m. one morning, an off-duty police officer called anonymously to say the girls' bodies had been found buried in the sand on Folly Beach.
Still, the Clarks waited to hear an official word from police.
As they waited, Richard Valenti, a 31-year-old sailor stationed at the Charleston Naval Base, held his Bible as he watched police dig the girls' remains from their sandy grave.
The next morning, nine hours later, a relative in California called the Clarks to tell them what was on the front page of their newspaper: The girls' bodies had been found. Still, the Clarks had heard nothing.
Enraged, Janice tracked down the coroner, who finally confirmed it. After 10 months of agony, of waiting, he said he hadn't wanted to disturb them overnight.
Police later arrested Valenti. He told police how he bound and gagged the girls, how he wrapped nooses around their necks and tied them to overhead water pipes under a beach house. Then he kicked a stool out from under them and sat back to watch them twitch.
"That's the manner in which my 14-year-old died!" Janice cries.
He buried their bodies on the east end of Folly Beach, to the left of the Holliday Inn when you head toward the water. The body of another teen-age girl, Mary Earline Bunch, was found nearby.
Valenti also was charged with assault and battery with the intent to kill for abducting the three Summerville girls and for an assault on a Mount Pleasant girl. Those charges were dropped, although he admitted to the crimes.
He was convicted in 1974 of murdering Sherri and Alexis and received two life sentences. Watching Valenti in the courtroom, Janice couldn't help noticing his eyes. They struck her as vacant. They made her think of words like evil and wicked.
When they left the courtroom that day, the Clarks felt some relief. They thought the nightmare was over and their healing would begin.
That was back when Janice Clark was a quiet woman.
Then came 1984.
The Clarks got a phone call they never imagined. After serving just 10 years for two life sentences, Valenti was coming up for parole.
"I learned I had to stand up and be counted," Janice says.
For three years, Valenti's parole hearings came yearly. Then they dropped to every other year. Before every hearing, Janice summons her forces, sending out the petitions and contacting the politicians, the police, the media, anyone who can help.
"I've never had complete closure because every year and a half, I start petitions," Clark says. "Valenti controls my life."
She pauses and adds, "It gets old." And it could very well remain that way for the rest of her life. She is 68. Valenti is 61.
Before his last parole hearing, she collected 23,000 signatures. He comes up for parole again in January. Already, Janice's petitions sit on many a drug store counter.
Over all those years, Valenti has apologized to the parole board, insisted he has found God. He even married and divorced a prison psychologist.
But he's never spoken to the Clarks, never apologized to them.
Not that it really matters. Janice won't ever forgive him. If that's wrong in God's eyes, she says, so be it. Mostly, she fears the parole board will think he's a model prisoner who has spent enough time in prison - and will let him out.
Then, Janice fears, he'll find his way to another beach, to another child like Sherri.
It might surprise some people to know that Janice still goes to Folly Beach - she's always found the waves and the vast sea relaxing.
But she turns right at the Holliday Inn, never to the left.
