...And Never Let HerGo by Ann Rule Page B

Psychiatric Hospital once again. Bill committed his wife, and when she was released this time, he found her an apartment in Media, Pennsylvania. He had accepted the truth that she could never come home again, not with the children there. Her psychiatrist recommended that she have a quiet place of her own.
    As a good Catholic, Bill had married for life. As a man, he still loved Sheila with a devotion that few could understand. He was terribly conflicted—but he stayed with the children.
    “My mother just couldn’t manage us as teenagers,” Debby said. “It was ruining her, ruining the family—so she moved away. My brother Ralph, who’s eleven months younger than I am, had been in boarding school since the seventh grade. My sister was invisible—that’s the way she dealt with the situation. I have no idea where she went, but she was never there. I was left to care for my younger brother. I was sixteen and Michael ten.”
    Scrambling as they all were for a small place in the sun, there was little cohesiveness among Bill and Sheila MacIntyre’s children. Debby was fully responsible for her youngest brother. “I was given the responsibility for raising him and running the house when I was sixteen.”
    A long time later, Bill MacIntyre admitted to his younger daughter that what he did was wrong—that he had compromised his children in his efforts to save his wife. “He loved my mother,” Debby said, “but he never dealt with the fact that she had all these problems. And all the time he still loved her, and he put us [in line] behind her at a very critical time of our lives. And so we were really left to fend for ourselves. We all reacted differently. I continued to placate.”
    But sixteen-year-old Debby was finally angry at her mother. She had bailed out on the family, and Debby refused to talk to her for a year. “Then I came around to realizing she couldn’t help it; she was sick.”
    D EBBY M AC I NTYRE met Dave Williams when she was a junior at Tatnall. She had broken up with her boyfriend the week before the prom, and a friend set her up with Dave. He was quite short but handsome, with wavy dark hair. He was an escape from all that was going on at home.
    “No one guided me about choosing a husband—or anything else,” Debby remembered. “My home life was terrible. Dave came into my life, and he was my savior. And all the time it was a match that never should have happened. But my dad always said I was impressionable. Later, he said, ‘I knew it wouldn’t work—but you were so impressionable that nothing I said would have made a darn bit of difference. You were so stubborn, so determined that you were going to make it work.’ ”
    Debby and Dave dated all through high school, and continued to go together when she went off to Mt. Vernon College for Girls in Washington, D.C. She dated other boys casually, but she always planned to marry Dave.
    Mt. Vernon was a two-year college, and Debby MacIntyre graduated salutatorian in her class, with honors. She earned a Phi Beta Kappa key, but she burned out and decided she didn’t want to go back to college. She took a year of business courses, where the pressure to excel academically wasn’t nearly so strong. After that she still didn’t feel like going back to college, so she got a job as a receptionist in a brokerage firm.
    Debby loved Dave and she was emotionally dependent upon him. She would always feel safer with men than with women. Even though her father had often chosen his wife over his children, she had come to understand that her mother was more helpless than she was, and that her father loved her; it was just that he loved her mother more. Dave would love
her
more, and she visualized marrying him and being the most important person in someone else’s life for the first time.
    “I do think that I loved Dave,” Debby said later. “I told him that I loved him. I’m not sure how capable I was of understanding what that meant. I thought that I was