THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 24, 1995 TAG: 9512230051
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EMILY PEASE, SPECIAL TO SUNDAY BREAK
LENGTH: Long : 416 lines
ON A QUIET ROAD in Norge, about a mile west of the Williamsburg Pottery in a neighborhood called Kristiansand, kids like to play in the street. People who live there say it's a real family kind of place, with campers in the driveways and barbecue grills out back.
But nine years ago, this neighborhood was the scene of unspeakable violence. Just two days after Thanksgiving 1986, Ronnie Kishlicky, a 16-year-old Ojibwa Indian, went into the family kitchen, took out a butcher knife and stepped into the living room. There, he stood over his adoptive mother, who was napping on the sofa, and lunged downward with the knife, cutting her deeply on the temple.
When she rose to her feet, startled and bleeding, she briefly confronted the boy, then headed for the door with her 2-year-old daughter in tow. Ronnie followed, burying the knife into his mother's back, just below the shoulder blade. Then he ran out into the near-darkness, saying the parting words ``I love you'' to his mother, who was now struggling through the yard with her baby girl. She crawled onto the front step of the house next door, the knife protruding from her back.
Her neighbors, Ed and Barbara Hiler, answered the rap on their door, where they found Debbie Kishlicky Conlon bleeding and near death. ``Tell Garcia that Ronnie did it,'' she gasped. Garcia was a friend she had hoped to see that weekend. Then she added two requests: ``Get the knife out of my back'' and ``Take care of my baby.''
She died an hour later at Williamsburg Community Hospital.
Ronnie Kishlicky was caught about the same time just a mile away on Farmville Road, near the home of his adoptive grandparents, James and Doris Ware, and his aunt, Jamie. On this holiday weekend, Jamie was working the night shift at Charter Colonial Institute, a psychiatric treatment facility where Ronnie himself had received care. James and Doris were off visiting family.
It was James and Doris who first received word of their daughter's death. They asked another family member, Ethel Trickett, to break the word to Jamie. But when she called Jamie at work, she didn't have the heart to break the news. ``We want you to come home,'' she said.
Nine years later, Jamie Ware still recalls the feeling she had when she drove home that Saturday night. She sped up Route 60, convinced that something bad had happened. Then, she recalls, ``When I drove up to the house, death just smelled.''
She found her mother and father standing in the front hall. ``Ronnie has put a knife in your sister and killed her,'' James Ware said. Then, for the first time she could remember, her big, strong father, a Rappahannock Indian who was the first to interpret Indian life at Jamestown Settlement, wrapped Jamie in a tight hug. Jamie, then 27 years old, was overcome with grief. She screamed - so loud, she says, ``people could have heard me all the way out on Richmond Road.''
Ronnie Kishlicky had changed her life forever.
This is the story of Jamie Ware and the little girl who was left behind on the night Debbie Kishlicky Conlon died. It is also the story of Ronnie, who was released from prison in September.
It is a story of love, and fear. In the end, it could be a story of redemption.
All Debbie and Jimmy Kishlicky wanted was a baby. They had married young - she was 17 and he was 21 - and they wanted to settle down quick and start a family. In the next three years, Debbie gave birth three times, in each instance delivering a son who would die soon after birth from a rare genetic disorder. Losing the babies was hard on Debbie; she covered her grief with work, doing 12-hour shifts at the Food Fair as a cashier and store clerk. Jimmy worked at Newport News Shipbuilding.
In 1974 they decided to adopt. Debbie wanted an Indian child, preferably a son. Jimmy, a Polish Catholic who had first moved to Virginia from Long Island to join the Navy, agreed to look for an Indian, like his wife.
The adoption turned out to be long-distance, taking Debbie and Jimmy all the way to Winnipeg, Manitoba, where they would meet their new son: a skinny, 4-year-old Ojibwa Indian named Ronald Roulette. Debbie and Jimmy spent two weeks in Manitoba getting acquainted with Ronald and then drove the wide-eyed little boy home to Virginia.
The Kishlickys knew little about their adopted son, only that he had many brothers and sisters and that he had spent all his life in foster homes.
What they did not know was that Ronald was part of what has been called Canada's ``lost generation'' - hundreds of native children removed from their homes to be adopted abroad, mostly in the United States. Five children in Ronald's family were adopted away from their mother, who believed she was placing them in foster care only temporarily. She was struggling with alcohol abuse and what she now says was a nervous breakdown. The Children's Aid Society, a public social service agency in Manitoba, arranged the adoption.
In his new home, Ronald, renamed Ronald Patrick Kishlicky, was like a little stranger: timid, with a small frame and a big belly that revealed poor nutrition. He showed little interest in the colorful American toys that awaited him.
``He was happier with an old box and a rag,'' Jamie says, ``and he had an affinity for railroad tracks.''
The little boy also had a peculiar fear of the bathtub. Getting him to bathe was an ordeal, since the tub and the running water terrified him. Jamie remembers the struggles over the bathtub, which ``disgusted'' Jimmy, she says. Jimmy liked to think of himself as tough, with a love of fast sports like motorcycle racing and water skiing. Ronald, or ``Ronnie,'' as they called him, would have to shape up.
To teach him to swim, Jimmy threw the boy into the river at age 7. By the time Ronnie was 9, his father had bought him a motorcycle. Even Debbie had a motorcycle, and the three of them would go on outings and races with a cycle club.
They were strict parents. When Ronnie had trouble doing his schoolwork, Jimmy called him ``Dummy.'' Says Jamie, ``I often wonder if he was ever proud of Ronnie doing anything.'' School progress reports were consistent: Ronnie didn't pay attention in class, he didn't focus.
At home, Ronnie often found himself in the middle of wild fights between his parents. Debbie kept long working hours, moving from the Food Fair to Anheuser Busch on the night shift. She made more money than her husband, who had begun to spend nights away from home going to the bars with his buddies, leaving Ronnie with his grandparents and Jamie. When Debbie and Jimmy were home together, they fought violently.
``Fighting was part of their life,'' Jamie says. ``They got into physical fights, but they took their anger out more on things. We made a joke that they went through a set of dishes every week. There were plants and dishes all over the floor.''
Jamie recalls entering the house one day while her sister and her husband were fighting. Ronnie sat in the corner. Jamie approached him to see if he was all right.
He shrugged. ``It's O.K.,'' he said, ``I'm used to it.''
Jimmy and Debbie divorced when Ronnie was 11 years old. According to Jamie, Jimmy had completely lost interest in being a father to Ronnie. Since her sister's death, Jamie has not been in touch with Jimmy. He could not be reached for this story.
The divorce left Debbie despondent and bitter. Ronnie was becoming hard to handle, and she was alone. But within a year, she had fallen in love with John Conlon, who was nearly 10 years her senior and apparently successful. Debbie liked his nice house in the settled, tidy neighborhood called Skipwith Farms. He would offer her security. And he would help her with Ronnie.
Jamie believes her sister was blinded by her need to make a secure home for herself and her son. What she didn't realize was that John Conlon had not held down a job for any long period of time.
As soon as Debbie moved in with Conlon, Ronnie began to run away. He would run for hours in the afternoon and night, eluding the police who were called to help find him. Jamie recalls Ronnie's uncanny ability to hide out by the train tracks or in the woods. Once, as the family drove to King and Queen County, they couldn't find Ronnie to take him along. Miles out of town, near Barhamsville, they saw a boy running through a cornfield. It was Ronnie.
Debbie and John Conlon were married for less than a year when Debbie looked out the window of the house one morning and saw a man taking photographs. She stepped outside to see what he was doing. ``I'm taking pictures of the house,'' he told her. ``It's going up for sale.''
That was when she learned that Conlon had never owned the house she had admired, that she had actually been paying his rent with money she was giving him from her job. So she and Ronnie moved to the house she had held onto from her first marriage.
Ronnie became increasingly hard to control. By the time he turned 16, he had been treated at four mental health facilities and two therapeutic homes for children with emotional disturbances. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic, with poor impulse control.
``Everywhere he was institutionalized, Ronnie did something,'' says Jamie. ``He set a bed on fire at one place, knocked a kid's lights out at another place. Once he put his hands through a wall. He stayed in cool-down a lot.''
Meanwhile, his mother had met another man, and became pregnant. She gave birth in 1983 to a girl she named Tashina. This time, the child survived.
She never married Tashina's father. Instead, she took care of her baby alone, and when Ronnie was at home, she fought with him to make him settle down. But she couldn't handle him - no one could. He was admitted to Eastern State Hospital on Sept. 16, 1985.
The following November, Debbie asked to be relieved of parental responsibility for Ronnie. He was devastated. On Nov. 26, while out of the hospital for a brief visit with his family, Ronnie lost control of his rage. He killed his mother.
Before Ronnie was sentenced for murder, he was placed in custody at Central State Hospital in Richmond. Five months later, he escaped. Television stations broadcast his photograph with the news that a convicted killer was at large.
Jamie herself went on TV, telling a reporter, ``I don't trust institutions.'' In private, she now had to face a new, powerful emotion, and that was fear for her life, and fear for Tashina's life. When Ronnie was captured on a street in Richmond two days after his escape, Jamie still didn't feel safe. Ronnie's escape had given her a glimpse into the future: One day, he would be free, and he would want to go back home.
Ronnie was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1987 but to Jamie, it always felt as if he was living just around the corner. He wrote frequently. His letters were carefully handwritten, with kind words for everyone and requests for money and photographs from home. About two years after the murder, he sent Jamie a Mother's Day card.
Jamie could see that in Ronnie's mind, she was beginning to take Debbie's place. It was a frightening thought.
Then he started writing to Tashina. On one occasion, he sent her a watercolor he had painted of Bart Simpson, with the initials RK in the bottom corner. On another occasion, he mailed an acrylic painting of a green forest with blue water running through it. With the exception of a mountain in the distance, the landscape looked strikingly like Jamestown Island.
Jamie's first reaction was to hide all correspondence from the little girl.
``I thought, `My God, she can't know anything about this, this crazy kid. She can never know about this. I don't want her to have anything to do with him. I want him to leave her alone.' ''
She responded by writing pleas to the parole board to make sure Ronnie would not be released back into the community from which he came. When Ronnie would come up for parole each September, she would wait nervously to see if he would be coming out.
``I always hated that time of year,'' she says.
But slowly, imperceptibly, a transformation began to take place in Jamie's thinking. Even though she still struggled with fear, she began to think of Ronnie as a young man who needed help. She began to talk honestly with Tashina about the troubled teen-ager who had killed her mother. On May 7, 1991, four days before Ronnie's 21st birthday, Tashina sat down and wrote him a letter. Jamie has saved it. On a sheet of lined paper torn from a looseleaf notebook, in big, elementary-school letters drawn with a pencil, Tashina wrote:
Dear Ronnie
I miss you
I forgave you for killing my mom
I still love you
From Tashina and Jamie and Grandma
Tashina's act of forgiveness was the beginning of what Jamie now calls ``the healing,'' and it was born in part from her determination to lead a normal life.
``When I made a different interpretation of Ronnie, Tashina's feelings changed,'' Jamie says. ``She read into me the fact that I wanted him healed. I wanted him changed, I wanted him better, and so she made that statement, `I love him, I forgive him.' And if anybody could be angry at him, it would be her.''
Without realizing it, Tashina was walking ``the Red Road,'' and she was leading Jamie along with her.
To walk the Red Road, in Native American tradition, is to walk in forgiveness. As Jamie struggled to know what to do about Ronnie, she found her answers on that road.
The older Tashina grew, the more Jamie became convinced that she had to be honest about Ronnie. She showed Tashina the paintings and letters, and she spared no detail when Tashina asked questions.
``I tried to paint a picture for her that's real about our family life,'' Jamie says.
In 1992, Ronnie once again did not make parole. In his letters to Jamie, he admitted he had trouble getting along with the other inmates. At times, he was placed in lock-down, which could only suggest to Jamie that Ronnie's old behavior problems were following him into adulthood. Once, Jamie heard that Ronnie knew she had gotten a new car, even though she hadn't told him about it. She began to fear that he had been checking up on her from within the prison walls.
``I had this tremendous fear that he knew so much about me,'' Jamie recalls. ``It was wicked.''
Yet she decided to visit Ronnie in prison anyway. This was her first and only visit. She drove to South Boston, one of several penitentiaries where he was placed, to talk to him about what he would do once he was released. She had been working with Mattaponi Pamunkey Monacan Inc., a job training and placement agency for American Indians. She told him she was there to see him as a relative and as a professional social worker.
Jamie recalls that Ronnie looked bewildered. No one had created a release plan for him, and as far as Jamie could tell, no one had come up with a plan for treatment, either. All he wanted was to return to Williamsburg.
Yet both Ronnie and Jamie knew he had another home.
While Jamie visited Ronnie that day in South Boston, he asked about his Canadian roots. It was clear that Canada, and the Ojibwa family he had left behind as a little boy, held a place in Ronnie's imagination.
Jamie, too, began to think of Canada. Somewhere in Manitoba, there was a woman who would remember Ronnie as her son. Perhaps she was hoping to take him back.
At a meeting of the United Indians of Virginia, Jamie approached a visitor who had come to talk about Disney's plans to open a theme park in Northern Virginia. Jamie told him, ``I may not be gorgeous enough to play Pocahontas, but I have a story to tell.''
The man was Mike Cywink, a Canadian Indian. When he heard the story of Ronnie, particularly the part about his adoption from the Ojibwa people in Manitoba, he knew just the man Jamie should call: Stan LaPierre, a social worker at Dakota Ojibwa Child and Family Services in Brandon, Manitoba.
Jamie sent a letter by fax to Manitoba. Within minutes, LaPierre called her.
``I have just received your letter,'' he said, ``and I must tell you that at this very moment, Stella Dorene Roulette, the boy's natural mother, just happens to be meeting with me here in my office.''
Jamie calls this ``the miracle.''
Stella Dorene Roulette never intended to put her children up for adoption. All she wanted was to place them in foster homes until she could get back on her feet. She was mother to 11 children at the time, and the father of her youngest - the infant boy she had named Ronald Alfred - died before the baby was born.
It was the youngest five children she couldn't handle - at least not for a while. She turned to the Children's Aid Society for help. She believed the agency could find good homes for them - temporarily.
But the last time she saw her little boy, he was living in a foster home. He was 2 years old. She never saw him or the other four children again.
Roulette's story is so common among the 62 bands of native Canadians that for them it seems almost normal to have children who were lost. Bev Flett, assistant director of Dakota Ojibwa Child and Family Services, says more than 1,000 native children were adopted out of Manitoba alone in the 1960s and 1970s. Native children were taken from all 10 provinces in Canada, and the adoptions continued for another decade.
In Canada, the Children's Aid Society arranged the adoptions as a way to help children living in poverty. But far too often, children were taken without the informed consent of the parents.
``Social workers went into situations where a family might be having problems, but instead of working with the family, they just took the kids,'' says Flett.
In the United States, adoptions of Canadian Indians were arranged by churches, social service agencies, and private adoption agencies. Jamie is not sure how Debbie and Jimmy were able to find Ronnie, but she clearly remembers their visits to the James City County Department of Social Services before they got their son.
By 1980, tribal leaders from all native Canadian bands were ready to challenge the decades-long policy of sending native children away for adoption. Chiefs of all native bands called for a government inquiry, and the findings were shocking.
As a result, legislation was passed that restricted adoption of native children outside their home communities. Children's Aid Societies were renamed Child and Family Services and they began working more cooperatively with native communities.
Shirlene Parisian, who works in Child and Family Services as ``repatriation coordinator'' for adoptees who wish to return, looks at the numbers of children who were taken from native communities and sees whole generations lost: The little ones who left in the 1960s, if they never return, will bear the next generation of children outside of Canada.
But Ronnie Kishlicky plans to return.
As early as 1992, before Jamie was even aware of it, Ronnie made the decision to trace his roots to Manitoba. From prison, he wrote for his adoption records and his original birth certificate. When he needed money for the paperwork, he asked Jamie to send it.
Once Jamie knew she had found Ronnie's natural mother, she wrote Gov. George Allen with the request that he arrange for Ronnie's transfer from the Virginia corrections system to Canadian authorities. She wrote the Canadian Embassy with a similar request. Within months, Ronnie began corresponding with counselors and social workers at Dakota Ojibwa Child and Family Services. He talked with LaPierre, who advised him to be honest with his natural mother, telling her the truth about the murder. Another social worker, Gloria Beaulieu, arranged to bring Ronnie's mother to Winnipeg, where a phone call could be arranged between the agency and Ronnie's prison.
In that first phone conversation, Ronnie told his mother what he had done as a 16-year-old boy. He attributed the murder to his dysfunctional family life. Stella Dorene Roulette, by then a grandmother and great-grandmother, was moved to tears.
She had no idea her son was in prison, she said, and in her own way, she had been looking for him. She had been able to locate two of her daughters in Salt Lake City, Utah. All she knew of the other two was that they were ``in Kentucky someplace.''
Since that first call, Ronnie and his mother have talked frequently. She desperately wants to see him come home.
``Sometimes I don't feel like sleeping or anything,'' she says. ``I want to see him very bad.''
LaPierre also wants to meet Ronnie when he returns to Manitoba. Already he has seen a number of young men - all adopted away from Canada as children - return and seek help. Many of them suffered from alcoholism and drug abuse.
``It should never, ever have happened,'' LaPierre says, ``but they can be healed.''
On Sept. 18, Jamie received word that Ronnie had been released. She was seized with panic. Immediately she arranged to have her mother taken to her old house in King and Queen County. Then she stuffed some clothing in a bag and drove to Williamsburg Christian Academy, where Tashina is in the sixth grade. The two of them fled to a shelter and stayed through the night.
``Now you know what it is to feel afraid,'' she told Tashina.
Jamie argued with parole officials: Did they have a plan for Ronnie? Was he merely going to be out of prison and back in her home, where a young girl still remembered seeing her mother murdered by his hands?
Within 24 hours, Ronnie was taken back into custody and placed in a halfway house in Richmond. The parole board determined that Ronnie might be a danger to Jamie and Tashina. The next day, Jamie received a letter from the Virginia Parole Board. Its language was vague, but reassuring: After Ronnie's release from the community corrections system, the letter said, he would be ``escorted to Canada by Canadian authorities and released to the jurisdiction of Manitoba Social Service.''
That night, Jamie and Tashina went back home. Tashina stood behind Jamie in the way of a traditional Indian dance, and the two of them stepped together in a circle, dancing in Thanksgiving for their security and safety.
It has now been three months since Jamie and Tashina ran to the shelter. Looking back, Jamie thinks she understands why she ran.
``I obviously don't have enough faith,'' she says. ``But I'm going to protect what I feel is my gift of life, and that is Tashina.''
Still, Jamie says she wouldn't run again.
``If he were to come out and do harm to me, and if I hadn't done anything to try to help him, then I would have done a disservice. But now I can stare him in the face and I can stare my maker in the face and say, `I've done all I could.' ''
On Christmas Day, Jamie, her mother and Tashina will celebrate alone. They will remember Debbie, how she shared her last Thanksgiving with Ronnie and then died at his hands. And they will remember James Ware, who died two years later of a heart that failed, still grieving for his daughter. It was James Ware, Jamie says, who was careful to tell Ronnie about his Indian past on the cold plains of Manitoba. He helped instill in Ronnie the idea of a distant, Indian home.
They will celebrate Christmas without him. But in her dreams, soon after, Ronnie will leave the halfway house and board a plane for Canada. She and Tashina will go to the airport to tell him goodbye.
Then, Jamie's hard work on Ronnie's behalf will have paid off. If all goes according to plan, she will use what she has learned to help other Indian children by opening a cultural center in Williamsburg on their behalf.
``Now I know I'm capable of it personally, and I know I can do it professionally,'' Jamie says. ``I took this on when no state agency and no private agency cared.
``We as a nation, as a bunch - everybody - have got to take proactive steps to heal wounds.''
Jamie is sure Ronnie will be healed in time.
``I would love to see Ronnie come out of this darkness and return to his family in Canada where he can someday help those like himself,'' she says. ``I would like him to be a testimony in teaching forgiveness because he was forgiven. I've prayed for that. God can make him a vessel to change others' lives. This tragedy can be turned around to something positive.''
``Someday, I hope to hear what a wonderful man he has become.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
Daily Press
Courtesy Jamie Ware
In 1986, Ronnie Kishlicky, above and below left, killed his adoptive
mother, Debbie Kishlicky Conlon, shown below with John Conlon on
their wedding day. Debbie and her previous husband had adopted the
Ojibwa boy through a now-discredited Canadian program.
TAMARA VONINSKI/The Virginian-Pilot
Above: Jamie Ware and her niece, Tashina, felt a growing urge for
healing in the years after the murder. In the Indian expression,
they were ``walking the Red Road'' of forgiveness. In a 1991 letter
to her brother in prison, Tashina wrote:
Dear Ronnie
I miss you
I forgave you for killing my mom
I still love you
From Tashina and Jamie and Grandma
by CNB