THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 20, 1994 TAG: 9411210232
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JOE JACKSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 343 lines
The snow was 2 feet deep and still falling when Daisy G. Cox rushed across the tree-lined street and pounded frantically on a neighbor's door. Her daughter, she cried. Her 8-year-old daughter, Gisela, had just been stabbed to death in their house by a stranger.
It was the morning of March 1, 1980, the day of one of the worst blizzards in Norfolk's history. The hush of snowfall enveloped the tiny Rose Gardens neighborhood near Wards Corner. Outside Daisy's white cottage in the 300 block of Sterling St., the pulsing red lights of police cars and ambulances would soon reflect off the snow.
``She knocked on the door . . . she was crying, hysterical,'' recalled the neighbor, Michael Fitzpatrick, now 35. ``I brought her inside. She was covered in blood. She was screaming, `My daughter, my daughter . . . a black man.' ''
Fitzpatrick ran across the street, barefoot and shirtless. ``The house was real quiet - I ran throughout the downstairs, into the utility room,'' he said. ``Then I got to the top of the stairs and looked to the right. (Gisela) was on the floor. I felt for a pulse. She was already dead.''
An autopsy showed the child had been stabbed more than 30 times. She lay at the foot of her bed, her right hand outstretched, dressed in blood-soaked jeans, an off-white sweater and blouse. A single-edged kitchen knife lay on the floor beside her. A serrated knife was wrapped in a blanket nearby.
Daisy told police she had been downstairs when she heard her daughter scream. She ran to the bedroom and found a black man standing over Gisela's body, a knife in his hand. They fought, and he stabbed her in the chest before running away, she said.
But there was no black man, no murderous stranger. An autopsy found no defensive wounds on Gisela's hands or arms. Daisy's wounds were self-inflicted. Nine days later, 32-year-old Daisy Gisela Cox confessed to the murder of the blond, blue-eyed daughter she called ``my world, my life.''
How could it happen? The question is always the same.
Daisy's neighbors asked it in 1980. In 1983, friends asked it of Diane Downs, who falsely told police a ``shaggy-haired stranger'' demanded her car on a dark road in Oregon, then shot her three sleeping children when she refused, killing one. There was no stranger, and now she is in jail for life, convicted of murder, the tale made into the movie ``Small Sacrifices.''
Last month, the nation was transfixed when Susan Smith told of a gunman who stole her red Mazda on a dark road in Union County, S.C., and sped off with her two young sons inside. A week and a half later, she was charged with their murders after police determined she had buckled them into their car seats and sent the car rolling down a boat ramp into a lake.
Justice Department statistics show that about 1,300 children are killed by their parents or family members each year; that includes two-thirds of all homicide victims under 10. The majority of these homicides are the end result of a family history of child abuse. The younger the child, the greater the chance the mother will be the killer, the figures show.
Among these cases, experts are beginning to recognize a grim pattern: mothers like Daisy Cox and Susan Smith, who kill their children in a bungled attempt to kill themselves. Their lives are often bracketed by severe depression, isolation, financial hardship and a history of abuse. The murder may be a confused attempt to save a failing romance. As the mother's life worsens, experts have theorized, her identity gets so tangled with her child's that a ``boundary confusion'' develops - she cannot tell where her life ends and the child's begins.
``The psychiatric term for the kind of relationship Ms. Cox had with her daughter is that of a symbiotic relationship,'' wrote E. Daniel Kay Jr., a psychiatrist hired in 1980 for her defense. ``She was seen by her neighbors and associates as a caring, overprotective and quite dedicated mother.
``This can be understood in the light of her seeing her daughter as an extension of her own personality, in fact, `a little copy and small part of' herself,'' Kay wrote. ``She has talked frequently . . . of a pact with her daughter that they would never be separated, and that whatever happened they would come or go together.''
Court records and interviews with people swept up in the tragedy provided a look into the mind of a woman who, by the state's own admission, ``lost an extremely important part of her life when her daughter died.''
Daisy Gisela Van Arsdale was born on Jan. 2, 1948, in Witzenhausen, Germany, the child of an American soldier, Fred Van Arsdale, and a German war bride, Gisela Goldman. In 1950, the family moved to Fort Sheridan, Ky., where the father's alcoholism and abuse ``dominated the family's life,'' court records show.
Daisy was terrified of her father. A respite occurred in 1951, when Van Arsdale was sent to Korea. Two years later, the family reunited in California, but Van Arsdale was worse than ever. Daisy's only protection was her mother, and in time she demanded Gisela's ``almost constant attention,'' records said.
In 1956, the Van Arsdales moved to Tacoma, Wash. By now, her home life had become a nightmare. She watched as her father beat her mother and threatened her with a butcher knife. Although by now Daisy had a younger brother, the father ``took out all the love or hate that he had on me and Daisy,'' the mother later told Daisy's psychiatrists.
By the time Daisy was 9, Van Arsdale accused her of sexual misconduct whenever he saw her playing with neighbor children. The mother turned to his company commander for help; in retaliation, Van Arsdale threatened to kill Daisy and her mother. In desperation, Daisy's mother sought a restraining order, and police removed Van Arsdale from the home.
But he returned each night. ``The family took to sitting up at night with a gun in order to protect themselves,'' court records said.
Gisela divorced Van Arsdale in December 1958, and Daisy rejoiced, believing she had her mother ``all to herself.'' But in August 1959, her mother married Alejandro Reyna, also an Army man. She hoped this marriage would work, but Reyna felt jealousy and resentment toward the children, records show.
Soon, Daisy told her mother that Reyna made sexual advances, an accusation he denied. When her mother dismissed the accusations, Daisy felt betrayed. As a result, ``Daisy never shared anything with me again,'' the mother later said.
On the surface, Daisy's teenage years seemed normal. Reyna was transferred to Germany, then Washington, D.C. Daisy graduated from high school and got a job at an Air Force exchange in Maryland. Her mother described her as ``sweet and nice to everyone, even to the point of denying her own self and being unable to separate her own problems from those of others.''
Daisy met James Cox, a career Navy man, while working at the exchange. They married on Dec. 2, 1969. She was 21. A transfer brought the newlyweds to Norfolk, where they settled in the house on Sterling Street.
Gisela Leigh Cox was born on July 22, 1971. Some said she was pretty enough to be on TV. She was smart, inquisitive, always polite - a teacher called her ``a model child.'' In school records, Daisy described Gisela as ``a very sensitive and loving child.'' Neighbors remembered the two, mother and daughter, as always together.
But as Daisy and Gisela grew closer, Daisy and her husband grew apart. His career often took him away from home. Daisy complained of depression, at one point showing up unexpectedly at her mother's house and announcing she was ``separating from Jim because he's too good for me and doesn't understand me.'' Her mother convinced her to return. Daisy took a job as a payroll clerk at DePaul Medical Center, but the nights were still lonely, she told friends.
In the winter of 1978, Daisy underwent surgery for cancer of the uterus. The following January, the couple separated. James moved to Washington, D.C. Daisy and Gisela stayed in Norfolk.
Money troubles had set in, and Daisy worked nights at a bar. But this added stress at DePaul, where the payroll was becoming computerized and she felt she was ``doing the work of four.'' She started going with a man, Larry Johnson, who introduced her to drugs. To keep pace, she downed stimulants, often losing track of the number. She lost 40 pounds, couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, missed work. In October 1979, during a trip to the Shenandoah Valley, she said she heard a voice warning her of the world's evils. Soon afterward, she was admitted to Maryview Psychiatric Hospital and diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.
She was soon released, but now two delusions began, psychiatrists later said. The first centered around Johnson. She started imagining he was testing her to become high priestess of a satanic cult. By December 1979, she imagined that a personal sacrifice was required. She thought Johnson was mad at her - she didn't want to lose him like she had her husband.
``She developed the idea that the ultimate sacrifice would bring happiness and that the sacrifice would have to be for her to give up something that she loved most,'' the state's psychiatrist reported.
Simultaneously, she began seeing Gisela ``not as a separate individual, but as an extension of herself,'' Kay wrote. ``It is quite crucial . . . to note that her daughter (when killed) . . . was at the same age where she (Daisy) experienced the disillusion of her parents' marriage.''
As she became more convinced that she was worthless and unable to tolerate life, she thought of suicide. That included ``a need to do away with the `other part' of herself, namely her daughter,'' Kay wrote.
So Daisy prepped Gisela for death. ``It crossed my mind many times . . . why did a beautiful child have to be born in this world,'' she later told detectives. ``We talked about it many times.''
On Jan. 9, 1980, the Coxes' divorce papers were filed. On Feb. 29, after Daisy arranged for Gisela to spend the night with neighbors, Daisy and Larry Johnson went out. But there was apparently a fight - they returned about 9:30 p.m., and Johnson left the house. Daisy stayed home alone.
The next day, children were playing in the street, excited about the predicted snowstorm. At 10:30 a.m., Daisy picked Gisela up at the neighbor's. They walked home. Gisela ran upstairs. Daisy followed.
Once again, they talked of death. Gisela sat at the foot of the bed, asking questions. ``If I die, Mommy, will I go to heaven?'' she asked. Daisy answered: ``Not your body, but your soul.
``She said she loved me, she wouldn't be afraid because she knew she would be with God,'' Daisy told detectives. ``I told her she would be.''
That was when she decided to kill Gisela. She went downstairs, grabbed the knife from the kitchen, slowly walked back up the stairs. Gisela waited calmly. She hugged her mother around the leg. ``I love you so,'' Gisela said. ``I love you so,'' Daisy answered.
``And then I started stabbing her,'' she told investigators.
She stabbed her from above, between the shoulder blades. She kept stabbing, in the back, the chest. She went downstairs, grabbed another knife, laid in the bed and started to stab herself.
But she couldn't commit suicide. The pain was too great. She ran across the street, covered with blood, and banged on Michael Fitzpatrick's door.
We suspected her from the first,'' said officer Conrad G. Hagert, then one of two lead detectives on the case. ``There was no forced entry. All her wounds seemed self-inflicted. Later, Dr. (Faruk) Presswalla, the medical examiner, looked at her in the hospital . . . and confirmed our suspicions. No composite drawing (from Daisy's description of the attacker) was ever done.'' Unlike the Susan Smith case, no roundup of suspects ever occurred.
Still, the police were quiet. Two days after the murder, they told Gisela's father of their suspicions, but warned him not to say a word.
``From the first, we had an idea it might be Daisy,'' said Mary Fitzpatrick, Michael's mother, who still lives on Sterling Street. ``The only thing the police would say was that the killer would be a woman. . . . Still, people were really scared. Lots of neighborhood children wouldn't walk down the street. They'd point at the house and say, `That's where the little girl was killed.' ''
Daisy attended her daughter's funeral in Mount Airy, N.C. - James Cox's hometown - on March 6, with a DePaul nurse accompanying her. Three days later, she was released from the hospital. Hagert and his partner, Investigator John Ackart, took her to the homicide offices. She immediately confessed.
``It was a strange moment,'' Hagert remembered. ``As soon as she started talking, we realized how emotionally unbalanced she was. But we had to solve the little girl's homicide. We had to do our job.''
She was charged with first-degree murder and jailed. The court appointed Thomas W. Moss Jr. as her lawyer.
``It was apparent to me from the first . . . that this woman had serious mental problems,'' Moss recalled last week. ``She did not understand the nature of the charges. She had difficulty communicating the basics of what happened. At one point, she said she couldn't understand why she was in court - that she had performed surgery on the child and failed, that's all.''
Moss planned an insanity defense and sent her to private psychiatrists, including Kay. Yet the results were two-edged. She was diagnosed as being mentally ill, but was also deemed competent to stand trial.
A jury trial worried Moss. ``It was a horrible crime,'' he said. ``The photographic evidence of the little girl was pretty bad. It might inflame the jury.'' The fact that Daisy talked to Gisela about death, that she ``had rushed out in the street screaming a black man did it'' could be interpreted as premeditation, an essential element for a verdict of first-degree murder and a maximum sentence of life.
``Plus, you never knew what the jury composition might be,'' Moss said. He worried that black jurists could be swayed against her for trying to blame the murder on a black.
Yet the diagnosis also presented problems for the prosecutor, William Rutherford, now a circuit judge. ``It was one of the few times I'd ever seen the state's and the defense's psychiatrists in agreement,'' Rutherford said. ``At that point, you have to think about what you can prove to the jury.''
So Moss and Rutherford made a deal - Daisy pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. On April 5, 1982, Judge Thomas McNamara sentenced her to 20 years in prison, the maximum then allowed.
Michael Fitzpatrick attended every trial, trying to understand what happened that fatal day. Daisy was sent to Central State Hospital in Petersburg, and Fitzpatrick visited when he could, taking her cigarettes.
``We talked,'' he said. ``Every time I brought the murder up she got the same look on her face, just one dead stare. It was like it never hit her, what she'd done.''
In 1984, Fitzpatrick married and stopped visiting. But he still heard from her. Daisy was paroled in 1986. She went to live with her mother, who had returned to Tacoma. Daisy was welcomed home, court papers said.
Fitzpatrick never saw her again. Yet there were letters. ``I remember one where she said she was sorry for what she had done to me,'' he said quietly. ``She didn't mean for events to turn out the way they had.''
The day of the murder, Fitzpatrick recalled, he got in his car. ``I drove, just drove, I was so worked up. I had to get away. I went to a minister's house and talked. It helped some, but I still couldn't understand.''
He thinks about it still. Fourteen years have passed since Michael Fitzpatrick entered the 10-by-10 room on Sterling Street and saw Gisela Cox, her face turned to the right, her eyes slightly open, lying at the foot of the bed. Maybe now, he says, he understands:
``Sometime in this life, the stress builds up for everyone, and you'll catch yourself doing stuff you normally wouldn't,'' he said, barely above a whisper. ``I can imagine now how Daisy felt. I can feel how Susan Smith felt. You can't judge people, you just have to understand how life can get the best of anyone.
``In the end, I think, it all comes down to willpower. If you can catch yourself in time, just step back and think a moment . . . maybe you can grab hold of reality and carry on.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Daisy G. Cox, left, confessed to the March 1, 1980, murder of her
8-year-old daughter, Gisela, right. Cox said she couldn't bear for
Gisela to grow up in a corrupt world.
Officer Hagert said Cox was a suspect from the start.
Defender Thomas Moss says Cox's mental problems were obvious.
Graphic
CONFESSION
Excerpts from the statement of Daisy Cox, given to Investigators
J.E. Ackart and C.G. Hagert on March 10, 1980, about the murder of
her daughter, 8-year-old Gisela Cox:
Police: Tell me in your own words what happened Saturday morning
at your home.
Daisy Cox: . . . She (Gisela) told me she wanted to go upstairs
and play. And then she called me upstairs. I went upstairs and . . .
we started talking a little bit then. Gisela and I are as close as
mother and daughter could be. When we were upstairs, we were sitting
on her bed and we were talking about family. I asked her if she
wanted to go live with her father, and she said no. And she was kind
of upset because her father was seeing another woman who had a
7-year-old boy. I asked her if she was happy being with me. And she
said she always wanted to be with me. She asked about when you died
did your body go to heaven. I said no, your body stayed, your spirit
went to heaven. And then we were talking about the world situation.
She was very unhappy about it. She said a couple of times that she
wished she wasn't born. I tried to explain why she was on this Earth
and how much I loved her, everything I did was for her benefit. She
talked about young kids getting into drugs. She told me about . . .
all the men coming in and out and . . . abusing her. I saw that this
is how the world is, how it's going to be, and how terrible it is
for the kids growing up. And that is when I decided I could not
watch my child grow up in this world, I didn't want to see my child
suffer. I wanted to see her go to heaven now, untouched, unhurt, and
not influenced by drugs or evil things going around, because I've
been through all of this and it's not going to get better. She said
she loved me, she wouldn't be afraid because she knew she would be
with God. I told her she would be. I went downstairs because I knew
I had to do this. She was my life. I gave her birth and I gave her
to God. So I got a knife in the kitchen. Went upstairs again. She
stood up, and we hugged each other. She looked up at me, she said,
``I love you so,'' and I said, ``I love you so.'' And then I started
stabbing her. I laid her down. Then I went downstairs. Then I got
the other knife. Went back upstairs and laid by her. And I was
trying to stab myself and kill myself, and that's what was in my
mind. I hugged her. I got up. At that point I didn't know what I was
going to do. I walked across the street and knocked on the door and
I just, I wanted him to go over there and get her. I think he kept
asking me what happened, and that's when all I could say was the
black man. And that's all, couldn't tell him, I couldn't tell
anybody my reasons because I felt they wouldn't understand. . .
Police: How long have you been thinking of taking Gisela's life?
Daisy: . . . I've always thought against the world. I've seen the
changes in the world and regretted having a beautiful, innocent
child living in the world going through this. I could have burnt the
house up and blamed it on the fire, could have done a million other
things, but I knew it had to be by me. I gave her life and that's my
world, my life. That's the way of protecting her, that's all I could
have done. . . .
Police: When you went to get the other knife, did you intend to
use it on yourself to kill yourself?
Daisy: I wanted to be with her. I felt like I had to sacrifice
her. . . .
Police: Why did you take your daughter's life?
Daisy: I took my daughter's life so she would not have to live on
this Earth and suffer as other kids and people are suffering now and
she wouldn't have to be around any evil influences. She died while
she was pure and she's happy with God. I hope her father will
understand the reasons why that I sacrificed my child from this hell
to be with God and to be happy where she belongs. And she was my
world, and I loved her very much. . . .
Police: Is there anything else you want to add to this statement
that we haven't asked you?
Daisy: All I can say is that right now people can't foresee the
future, but this world is not going to get better, it's going to get
worse and worse and worse. And you can talk with any of the young
children now, young teenagers, and they will all tell you the same
thing, that they wish they were dead, they weren't born. And they
will blame it on their families or what's being available on the
outside, nobody cares, nobody loves them. And all I can say again is
I'm glad I saw Gisela in peace and that she's with God in heaven.
KEYWORDS: MURDER STABBING by CNB