Mom wouldn’t hold me like the mothers I saw on television. She didn’t like to be touched or touch anyone else. She would say, “Stop that. You are all right,” with maybe a slight pat on the back if I fell down or experienced one of the many emotional bruisings that cause kids to cry. After years of getting no response from Mom to my crying, I conditioned myself to cry silently and later not to cry, or for that matter, to not show emotion in any circumstance. However, since May 12, 2013, I have cried more than at any other time in my life.
As my then-husband Jimmy turned off the ten o’clock news, I realized my older sister, Vicky, hadn’t called today. She lived 150 miles south of St. Louis in Puxico, Missouri—the “bootheel” of the state. Vicky didn’t use social media or texting, so phone calls were our primary communication. I sat in bed and knew I couldn’t sleep until I spoke to her. I called her. The phone rang, and her 30-year-old son, Kenny, answered.
“Where’s Vicky at?” I said.
“Where the hell do you think she is? She’s in Stoddard County Jail,” he replied.
“What for?” I asked.
“She killed Chris.” He replied as if my sister murdering her husband was common knowledge, something I should’ve already known.
I hung up and screamed at Jimmy to get me the number for Stoddard County, Missouri Jail. He bolted straight up in bed.
“Why do you need the number for? What’s going on?”
“Vicky killed Chris.” Those words slipped out of my mouth, but they weren’t my words. Someone in my body was saying them. I didn’t want to own them.
“What? What happened?”
I stood there dialing the jail number and hoping Kenny was wrong. “Yes, do you have an inmate named Victoria Isaac?” I asked.
“Yeah. We have Victoria Isaac,” the voice on the other end said.
“What’s she in jail for?” I asked, praying it was for anything but murder.
“First-degree murder—no bond.”
My legs went out from under me. As I sat stunned on the floor, Jimmy took the phone to speak to the deputy working the late night shift answering calls. My heartbeat thrummed in my ears. I couldn’t see the room through my tears.
“Calm down, honey. Calm down.” Jimmy, always with high anxiety, couldn’t stop talking. He went across the hallway and woke up my teenage son, Julian. Jimmy and Julian were speaking to me, but our world was stuck in slow motion. I was a cop down to the tips of my toes and as part of my police training, I understood how adrenaline works and how time stops during extreme stress. But this was my sister, not some random call from someone I didn’t know. I felt dissociated from my own body, and I heard, again and again, ringing throughout my scattered and shattered thoughts, my mother’s deathbed request to me: “Take care of Vicky and Kenny because they ain’t right.”
***
Vicky isn’t the first person in my family to be charged with felony murder. Murder is generational in our family. The Frizzells were known for two things: musical talent and quick tempers. Mom would describe her kin as the kind of people who “would rather shoot you than look at you.” They played old-time country music as feverishly as they fought. As a child, I watched Grandma Roxie play the guitar with her brother Toots who played the lefthanded fiddle while Aunt Lottie occasionally accompanied on the autoharp. My great-grandfather, Lee Frizzell, was the thirteenth of fourteen children born in Putnam County, Ohio. Lee married Lottie Carles in 1894 and started a family. Six years later, Lee moved the family in a covered wagon from northwestern Ohio to southeast Missouri. Lee and Lottie’s seventh child, my grandmother Roxie, was born as the family crossed the Black River. They settled outside of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, on a plot of land near that very same river.
An old family story tells how a Black family with two small children, a boy and a girl, moved downriver from the Frizzell homestead. The children would play on the logs cut down to make the family’s cabin and often strayed onto great-grandfather’s land. Lee repeatedly told them to stay on their own property. One day, Lee and my elementary-school-aged grandmother Roxie saw the two children playing inside a hollowed-out log on a hill near the water’s edge. Lee told Roxie to hide behind a tree while he took care of them “once and for all.” He waited for the children to climb inside the log, then pushed the log down the hill and watched as it rolled into the water. With her hair ribbons blowing in the wind, Roxie stood silently as Lee walked to the river’s edge and held that log, with the children trapped inside, under the water until the bubbles and water splashing stopped. Their parents would find the two bodies floating in the dark river a few hours later. Lee never denied or admitted causing their deaths. The police did not investigate. That’s the kind of man he was.
Roxie lived with violence and had developed a taste for it as she grew older. An incident in February 1922 turned her heart as cold and dark as the Black River. Her older brother Jessie was deep in the woods making illegal alcohol. A man attempted to rob him. A fight ensued, but Jessie got free and ran toward the family’s small cabin. Roxie, who had been out in the woods shooting squirrels, saw her brother running along the path. He told her to stop the man chasing him while he ran to get their father.
She stood silently behind a tree, wrapped her small hands around the gun, and fired a shot into the unknown pursuer. The man lay bleeding on the ground. Roxie held the gun over him until the brother and father arrived. Lee told her to go home and they would take care of the matter. No word was ever spoken about the incident. Days later, Roxie read a newspaper article that reported that a man’s torso had been found floating in Black River and that the arms and legs had been severed clean off. The head was also missing and later discovered a short distance downriver. It, too, was maimed beyond all recognition.
You could say that homicidal ideation seemed to be genetic as the thread of violence running through the Frizzell bloodline was present in all my great-uncles, aunts, mother, and siblings. Roxie’s older brother, my great-uncle, also named Lee, was arrested for murder on June 18, 1969. That night Lee had laid down in his bedroom to nap after a bout of heavy drinking. The noise of his step-grandchildren woke him. He loaded a gun and began randomly shooting through the closed door into the front room. His 17-year-old step-granddaughter was left dead, and his 13-year-old step-grandson was injured. He was charged with first-degree murder and sent to a psychiatric institution for three years. Her sister, Victoria, was infamous in Poplar Bluff. She was a madam who ran the establishment called “House of the Pleasurable Ladies.” Another great-uncle, James, disappeared after being implicated in a series of murders in Washington state. He was never seen or heard from after that.
Even my Mom, as she lay on her deathbed in 2001, confessed to her involvement in several unnatural deaths. She told of how she and an older woman she called Aunt Pearl used to “roll” men for money.
During the 1950s, the east side of Poplar Bluff had a red-light district frequented by the men changing trains between St. Louis and Memphis. Aunt Pearl and Mom went to the downtown bars and lured men outside with the promise of sex. They would take the men for a ride out into the country and, once isolated and alone, one of them would knock the man unconscious then steal his money. They’d leave him at the side of the road to walk the many miles back to town when he came to.
On one particular evening, a victim overwhelmed them during the heist and began beating Mom. Aunt Pearl always tucked a blackjack into her dress. She hit the man near his temple with all her strength and killed him. They loaded the body into the car and drove to the old Frizzell family graveyard. They found the fresh grave, that of a distant cousin, and opened it back up. Mom and Pearl threw the dead body into the hole with the coffin then shoveled the dirt back in. No one missed an unknown transient, let alone searched for him in a backwoods cemetery in rural Missouri.
Mom’s mercurial temper led to another incident that took place near the Dam at Lake Wappapello. Mom and a random man had been out drinking all night long. For reasons lost to time, Mom was drunkenly driving them down the highway as they began to argue, and, in a rage, she tried to kill them both by driving into Lake Wappapello. At the last moment, she swerved and hit the rocks that line Highway T on the lake’s eastern shore. The truck flipped. As she crawled out of the wreckage, the bleeding man threw a final punch that blackened her eye. In her drunken rage, she stood on his chest as he bled out and died. She stumbled miles down the road to a payphone and called her sister to pick her up, never once mentioning the dead man.
The Frizzell violent streak was in us kids too. My oldest sister Jackie was affiliated with motorcycle gangs and had multiple arrests because of her connection to several mysterious gang-related deaths. She escaped conviction in each incident. The June 1978 killing of her ex-husband and father of her children is still unsolved. The body had been found in a dump in Wyoming covered with milk cartons, dog food, and miscellaneous garbage in the hope to speed up decomposition of the body. He had been shot twice, execution-style, with a .22 caliber handgun. I can go on. There are more stories of aunts, uncles, and cousins who were perpetrators of violent acts large and small, while also victims of an endless and multi-generational cycle of poverty and mental illness. Now my sister Vicky, who was closest to me in age and least able to care for herself, was in jail and charged with killing her husband.
I’m a Missouri country girl. The way I was raised, when your mom told you to jump, you didn’t sass back; you jumped. When Mom was dying during the summer of 2001, confessing stories of her dark past, every request she made felt important. I thought it would be dishonorable not to go to any length to follow her commands, no matter how impossible. Oftentimes, I wished I was raised somewhere else, somewhere the burden of my raisin’ didn’t have a hold over me. Friends from other parts of the United States didn’t understand my devotion to my Mom—a woman I didn’t understand or even like.
How can I explain how we loved and feared our Mom? Psychologists today use the term “trauma bonding,” but as a kid growing up during the ’70s and ’80s, there were no terms for Mom’s constant yet unstable presence in our lives. It was our normal. Violence from the hands of your family was to be expected, but if outsiders dare threaten us, that was another thing altogether and would be met eye for an eye. Loyalty to our blood and kin was bred in the bone, and to disobey my Mom would be to betray that sacred bond. Mom’s last words haunted me—“Take care of Vicky and Kenny because they ain’t right.” It wasn’t so much out of love that I would fulfill my promise to take care of Vicky and Kenny, but out of duty.
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Excerpted from If You Can’t Quit Cryin’, You Can’t Come Here No More: A Family’s Legacy of Poverty, Crime and Mental Illness in Rural America, by Betty Frizzell. Published by Feral House. All rights reserved.
