Reality of a Homicide Survivor
By: Todd Blumhorst
Imagine you are 16 years old and your sister drops you off at your part time job one day. She turns to you and tells you to stop in and see her at work on your way home. She says she loves you and drives away. After work, you intend to go see her on your way home; but as you go to enter the store where she works, you suddenly become violently ill and forgo seeing her. You know she will be taking you to school the next day, so you continue on your walk home. She calls you later that night to see if you made it home ok. You then go to bed. When you wake in the morning, you notice she is not yet up and begin your morning routine. When you are ready, you ascend the stairs to wake her up so she can take you to school. When you enter the room, it is empty. You go to the garage to find her car parked and everything is normal. You look for her and find nothing, eventually you think that she has simply forgotten and gone out to breakfast with her boyfriend, so you go to school. In the early afternoon you are called to the principal's office because your father is there to see you. When you see his face you see something is wrong. You leave with him and he begins to ask you if you had heard her come in the house the night before, you state that you did not. You tell him that you assumed she made it home because her car was in the garage. She is now missing without a trace. A day turns to two, and then three. Days become weeks with no word. Months drag along and the investigation is growing increasingly stagnant and no resolution is in sight. The facts you do know are that she drove her car home and parked it, then vanished. Her co-worker told police that she said she was tired and going home to bed. She rented a video to watch the next day. She was getting paid the next day. She was going to the doctor for a follow up appointment because she was recovering from mono the next day. She was even getting starting to get fitted for her wedding dress the next day. There was an overnight bag found in her car with several changes of clothes and none of her credit cards or bank accounts were attempted to be used. nothing points to her running away. You know by this point that the boyfriend is the main suspect and had told the police he did not know if he was involved because he blacked out at times. He also told the police that if he did kill her, he was smart enough to dispose of her body in a way that it would be impossible to find. You are also informed that he was the only on to fail the polygraph test.
The police themselves fail to do the basics of investigating in the early days such as securing the crime scene and fingerprinting the car. They tell you it will not be necessary. Even though the local police had never worked on a missing persons case prior to this, they refuse the assistance of the state police, who had worked on numerous missing persons cases. The police tell you after a few months that they cannot continue due to a lack of evidence of a crime being committed except for the statements made by the boyfriend. No body equals no crime in this case you are told.Now imagine the case going cold; a year passes, then two, then five. year ten comes and goes with no resolution in sight. Finally, 17 years pass with no body, no arrests, no word....simply emptiness.
Did you feel that knot in your stomach grow? Imagine how devastated your life would become. Nothing makes sense anymore; your trust in people is severely compromised. You start to look over your back more when in public out of fear, crowds become intensely frightening. Though you fear the public you are constantly looking you are constantly looking at the faces in the crowds of anyone who looks like your sister, hoping you will see her. You grasp at anything; a phone call where noone is there when you pick up, a body being discovered that matches her description, or you even begin to hope that she simply decided to leave. Reality sets in eventually that she is indeed gone forever...you will never be the same person. That knot is always there, the pain is vividly real every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year of every decade.
You may say, "I could never live through such a nightmare."I wish my option was that easy; I have lived the nightmare. The story I just painted for you is my story. My name is Todd Blumhorst, my sister Veronica Blumhorst has been missing for over 17 years and was presumably murdered by her boyfriend on September 20, 1990 in my hometown of Mendota, Illinois.
In the past 17 years not a day has passed that I dont think of my sister, who would now be 38 years old. She is forever 21 in my mind. I will never see her grow old or become a mother herself. I dont get to tease her about being so short, I dont get to talk to her on the phone...I have been robbed of all of that.
My good memories of her are often punctuated with visions of her being savagely beaten or raped. The visions of her being choked or stabbed run like a movie in my head that I cannot turn off. I think of her petite five foot one hundred pound body being dumped into a shallow grave and discarded like garbage. Knowing that Veronica was easily frightened just adds to the torment my mind goes through. The unimaginable horror that must have gone through her mind , knowing someone could turn on her in an evil manner is inconceivable. Was she taunted before they killed her? I have no idea if they made her suffer and linger or if they killed her quickly and by surprise. The only thing I have is the visions that plague my mind. Without detail, I will attest that the visions are beyond horrendous and they can be very detailed visions in which I have no escape.
Over the years, the psychological impact has manifested itself in very negative ways. I dealt with the pain through the use of marijuana. I found that it relieved the anxiety and made me forget the pain for a little while. It allowed me to go into public and not feel like someone was going to come up from behind me and do something. It also made me stop dreaming, the time when the nightmares were most predominant.
I also had extreme feelings of guilt myself. I was sleeping on the couch that night and I convinced myself that I should have stayed up and waited for her to get home or gotten up. I felt partly to blame for her disappearance and those feelings spawned even further at times. I wondered if it was possible for me to have had a memory loss and that I could have done it. I realize today how irrational that line of thinking is, however my mind had been traumatized and that was my reality at the time. I also felt guilty over the years for simply not being the one who was murdered, I can attest that survivors guilt is very real. I spent 11 years dealing with it in this manner before I acknowledged a real loss. It was when I moved to Tucson in 2001 that I found Homicide Survivors and began going to the support groups. There, I was able to tell my story to people who had also experienced a loss due to homicide. I began the healing process that was halted for over a decade and I finally began to see hope.
After two years, I had a much better footing on my loss and I started to seek other ways to continue the closure. In an attempt to move in that direction even further, I decided to write a letter to the editor of my hometown paper. In this letter I forgave the person who killed Veronica. I realized that I needed to in order to let go of the anger and move forward. I forgave him for me and not for him. I also exposed the crucial errors made by the police to the community for the first time. I also forgave them for their role in a lack of closure. I have faith that veronica and I will reunite when it is my turn to cross over and she will greet me when I do. On this plane, my ability to show forgiveness for those who hurt me helps me find some sort of peace until that day comes.
I felt I had to be a voice for my sister, I wanted justice for her and peace for her soul. I wrote this letter in October of 2003. I received a call from my parents in March of 2004 with some news. The Mendota Police Department had decided to reopen my sisters case and the present the information to an FBI cold case team for their assistance. The police were given an hour and a half to present their case to the FBI team. After their allotted time, the FBI asked that they continue. They were with them for over 3 hours and at the end the police asked what they should do. The FBI stated that they were going to see the boyfriend and interrogate him themselves. Now the FBI is involved in finding the truth. Maybe we will get further this time and get the answers we want, because I know in my heart that she is dead, but closure is needed.
It has become evident to me that I have been blessed and cursed at the same time. I am cursed by the horrors that run in my head. The mental anguish I have endured has been painful beyond words. But, I also have been blessed by something or someone bigger than the sum of us. I have been given insight into many things and I use that insight to help new homicide survivors cope with their new reality. Time has desensitized me to a degree I can help them see a future that is somewhat better the present, but we need to navigate those rough waters first. Navigating those turbulent waters is not a choice; it is required to stay in this game of life. I have realized that it is a calling for me to reach out tho those who have also experienced a loss due to homicide. I know what it was like to not have someone to talk to and ask questions that only those who have gone through it can answer. The more I give back, the more I heal and the more I heal, the better my life blossoms. Some day I will continue with closure through different means. I have begun to look at politics more, maybe someday I will be a lawmaker committed to victims rights. I do not know what life has in store for me from this day forward, but I am moving in the right direction to make it a very rewarding one, even though I will always have this hole in my heart.
In my opinion, life here on earth is a gift given to our souls. We are here to learn love and many other spiritual lessons. Patience, compassion, and forgiveness are some major lessons I have learned through this experience. I spent 13 years of my life hating and it left me nothing but empty and cold. Living to love fills my spirit with peace and tranquility. I still have my bad days, I still have my weaknesses, and I still have the loss; but that is ok. I appreciate my life for what I have been given and what I have done with it thus far. That is what really matters to me.
If we could just slow down enough to consider what is true and real, and always try to understand our fellow man noone would have to relay their loss experience through homicide to others. I can easily conceptualizing two people disagree on a subject, debate the subject, and never agree on the outcome. Why kill someone over a rather trivial disagreement when you look at the big picture? That I will never conceptualize.
