THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 21, 1996 TAG: 9604200065
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EMILY PEASE, CORRESPONDENT
LENGTH: Long : 421 lines
IT IS A BRIGHT Sunday afternoon in March, the third day of spring. Inside a restored millhouse belonging to Ashland, Va., artist Nancy Witt, guests are gathered for a reception.
They walk among Witt's paintings and talk, wearing name tags and making introductions. Most of the guests are from Virginia: Chesapeake, Suffolk, Virginia Beach, Richmond, Alexandria, Norfolk. One has come from Pennsylvania, a relative of the guest of honor.
But the guest of honor will never arrive. No one expects her to. She is a convict sitting 40 miles away in her brick-and-tile cell in the Virginia Correctional Center for Women in Goochland County.
Her name is Sue Kennon, a Chesapeake homemaker and mother of three who took a toy gun eight years ago and robbed three stores in Portsmouth. Later, while out on bond after her arrest, she took a real gun - a broken, unusable gun - and tried to rob a drugstore in Suffolk.
She didn't succeed. Instead, she was shot in the shoulder by pharmacist Chris Jones, who is now mayor of Suffolk.
The guests at the reception know this story.
They also know that Kennon was a drug addict, that she falsified prescriptions many times in order to get the emotion-dulling narcotics she depended on.
They know she bore two sons in a hopeless relationship with a man who wouldn't marry her.
And they know about the central tragedy in Kennon's life, the accidental death of her husband, Charlie Kennon, when she was six months pregnant with their daughter, who is now 16.
They know all the details of this woman's confused and complicated past, yet still they gather in her honor. In their eyes, Kennon has become transformed. And they would like her to be released.
Kennon, they believe, has served her time. As of June, she will have served nine years - more time than many inmates serve for rape or murder. While in prison, Kennon has tutored other inmates, enrolled in special classes and studied so doggedly behind bars that she is the only woman in Virginia ever to receive a bachelor's degree while in prison.
To those now gathered at the first reception for the Friends of Sue Kennon, she represents the human capacity to overcome adversity: to find grace in awful circumstances, and to live in hope.
She also represents the worst the Virginia corrections system can do to a drug-addicted robber. Unless the courts or the department of corrections changes her sentence, Kennon, now 45, will remain in prison until she is 63 years old. By that time, her three children will be 34, 29 and 27, and her youngest child, Adam Boyette, will have no memory of her except as a prisoner.
This is because Kennon has been deemed a ``three-time loser.'' Under that classification, she cannot be eligible for parole.
To the guests snacking on vegetables and dip at Witt's house, this is an injustice.
``I'm 53 years old, and I've lived in Virginia all my life,'' says John Woods, an engineer for the city of Richmond. ``When I read about Sue Kennon, I was ashamed that my tax money goes toward keeping an individual like her in prison.''
Since 1993, when he first read about her case, Woods has been corresponding with Kennon.
``I've got all the admiration and respect for her in the world,'' Woods says. ``I don't think I could be half as strong as she is.''
During her stay in prison, Kennon has developed many ties with people like Woods. Some of them have been instrumental in helping her change her life for good. Gerald Weinberger, a clinical psychologist and adjunct instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University, began to correspond with Kennon after reading about her graduation ceremony, which was held inside the prison walls.
That ceremony proved to be a remarkable event. A total of 96 inmates dressed in blue caps and gowns received certificates and diplomas, but when Kennon stepped forward to receive her college diploma, the room erupted with applause. Shouting ``We love you, Sue!'' the inmates rose to give Kennon a standing ovation.
Weinberger was so impressed that the wrote Kennon immediately to help her pursue further coursework in psychology, her chosen field. Since then, Weinberger has worked tirelessly on Kennon's behalf - including organizing the Friends of Sue Kennon. At this first reception, he will collect $3,165 for her defense.
Of all Kennon's correspondences, none has been as unusual, or as productive, as one with Elizabeth Campbell, the founder of public television station WETA in Washington. Campbell learned about Kennon eight years ago, when Karen Powell, a former prison chaplain, gave a talk about life at the women's correctional center.
``We asked how we could help,'' Campbell recalls. ``She said they had a very remarkable woman in solitary confinement who wanted to get a degree while she was there. She just needed the tuition. I could hardly wait to go up front to write a check.''
Campbell and her husband, Ed, ended up paying Kennon's tuition in full. Kennon began with an associate's degree from Northern Virginia Community College, which allowed her to complete her courses by correspondence. She graduated from NVCC summa cum laude, and Fred Billups, the professor who directed Kennon's studies, became one of her strongest supporters.
After Kennon completed her associate's degree, the Campbells looked for a college that would allow her to study for a bachelor's degree in the same fashion.
The Campbells found what Kennon needed at Ohio University. Three years later, she graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology. Campbell, then 90 years old, drove with her husband to Goochland to present the diploma herself.
Through Campbell, Kennon has added several prominent names to her list of correspondents, which number nearly 100.
Bill Moyers has written and expressed an interest in creating a television documentary about women in prison. Dennis Wholey, whose show ``America With Dennis Wholey'' airs on PBS, has also written, as has essayist Phyllis Theroux.
Kennon writes to anyone who inspires her.
When she read a book on grief by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, she wrote the author to share her own experience in grieving the death of her husband, Charlie. Kubler-Ross wrote back, sending Kennon all her books. Eventually she hosted Kennon's daughter, Beverly, at her mountain retreat.
Most recently, Kennon wrote Elie Wiesel, whose writing on the Holocaust won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Wiesel responded with a note, saying, ``I am deeply moved by your words.''
Others who have corresponded with Kennon include politicians, clergy and strangers who have read about her case. She writes to each of them - articulate letters that are disarmingly honest and, to the amazement of many, always cheerful.
``She really is a rehabilitated individual,'' says the Rev. Ray O. Jones, pastor of Lee Memorial Baptist Church in Chesapeake. ``I think it's a slap on our judicial system that they can't begin a process to release her after nine years.''
Jones, who describes himself as a ``pragmatist'' with a conservative theology and a strong belief in capital punishment, maintains that Kennon received an unfair sentence.
``She lost control of her life, but she didn't hurt anybody,'' he says. ``Yet you read in the newspaper about drug lords who serve no time at all.
``Sue has turned the conscience of anybody who would read about who criminals are. I believe that when Sue Kennon does get out of prison, she'll be a great speaker and reach people that others could not reach.''
Sue Kennon makes an unlikely hero.
At a table in the prison gymnasium, she sits ramrod straight and looks out across the room. A choke catches in her throat, and she struggles to keep from sobbing.
She is thinking of her children.
``I consider that I've served eight years for the robberies,'' she says. ``Now, I'll serve the rest of my time for my children and all the pain I've caused them.''
She cannot help but be consumed by guilt. Lately, her 16-year-old has needed her mother's advice about troubles at school, but the distance between the prison and Chesapeake, where the girl lives with Kennon's parents, is too far.
``Each year, it's gotten harder,'' Kennon says. ``The older the children get, the harder it is for me to bear.''
Sunlight fills the upper windows of the gym. There are pansies in bloom along the sidewalks outside, and in the grass, there are tulips the color of wine.
Nine years ago this spring, Kennon had just been released from Serenity Lodge in Chesapeake after a month's treatment for her addiction to Vicodin, a prescription pain reliever. When she had gone in for treatment, she was thin and pale. Coming out, she was nearly 15 pounds heavier and drug-free.
``But I went back home,'' she recalls. ``They tell you that's the worst thing you can do, but I did it anyway. I thought I could make it.''
Her home should have been happy, but it wasn't. She lived in a contemporary, three-bedroom home in Chesapeake with her three young children and a man she had not married. Much of her trouble was grounded in that difficult relationship, but she kept her despair a secret from everybody she knew, including her own parents.
Going home proved too hard: Kennon turned to drugs again. She had just been served a warrant for falsifying prescriptions for Vicodin, so her old drug of choice - the one that made her feel calm inside and gave her energy - was no longer an option. She turned to heroin, making the back-alley connections to buy the drug and then privately injecting herself.
Sitting in the prison gymnasium now, with the children of other inmates squealing and the odor of popcorn filling the room, Kennon tries to recall the details of her dark past. It is a maze of disappointments, deception and tragedy.
To go back in time is so painful that she keeps wiping tears from her face with the back of a hand. ``It's good for me to do this sometimes, though,'' she allows. ``I have no one to blame but myself.''
As the only child of Al and Eloise Steinmeir, Kennon grew up in a quiet, protective home in Chesapeake. Until she was 17, she was more interested in horses than in boys, and when she graduated in 1968 from Churchland High School, she hadn't ventured very far from home.
She attended Chowan College in North Carolina for one year, then dropped out. A few months later, she enrolled in a program to become a flight attendant. But after working only briefly for Piedmont Airlines in Norfolk, she quit there, too.
In Richmond, where she had taken a job as a secretary, she met a young man named Paul Cohen. The two were married in a civil ceremony.
``There were all sorts of signs that should have told me we weren't good together,'' Kennon says, ``but I ignored them.
``I think I just wanted to be married like most of my friends. And I wanted to be independent and make my own choices.''
For Al Steinmeir, it was a bewildering time he now calls the ``swinging '60s,'' when young people liked to resist authority. But Kennon was only quietly rebellious.
``I always worked,'' she says. ``I was always responsible.''
Her rebellion came in the form of drug use. She and Cohen began to experiment with a number of substances, including heroin. Today, she looks back on that time with a sense of amazement.
``I don't know why I did it,'' she says.
Her marriage to Cohen lasted only one year. Then she met the man she still calls ``the love of my life'' - Charlie Kennon.
The son of an old Virginia family in Powhatan County, Charlie Kennon had worked as a helicopter mechanic in Pensacola, Fla. When he returned to Virginia, he suffered from hearing loss and migraines. He treated his pain with two prescription painkillers, Talwin and Valium.
When Kennon thinks about Charlie now, she thinks of the simple times, like the afternoons they rode in his truck down dusty roads in Powhatan. They were good friends before they married, she says, which is why she believes they were so happy. But she also admits they used drugs occasionally.
This ``recreational use'' of drugs, Kennon says, coupled with her earlier experiments with heroin, were like the memory of a pleasant dream.
``Once that feeling gets in your memory, you don't forget it. You know instinctively where to go for a crutch once you've tried it.''
Kennon would turn to that crutch later. While she and Charlie were living in his family home in Powhatan, a 200-year-old plantation called Norwood, he went for an afternoon swim in the James River.
He dived onto a submerged log. His spinal cord was severed, and he was killed instantly.
Sue was 29 years old and six months pregnant.
She felt so alone without Charlie that she chose to stay at Norwood, spending time by Charlie's grave in a morbid, lonely vigil while she awaited the birth of their daughter.
Even after the baby was born, Kennon couldn't cope with her grief. She turned to Talwin, the drug Charlie had been prescribed for his migraines.
From that time on, drugs would not only be her crutch, they would shape her personality.
After moving to Chesapeake to make a home for herself and her little girl, Kennon used drugs to get by.
In January 1980, she checked into Maryview Psychiatric Center to be detoxified, but the relief was only temporary. She began calling in her own prescriptions for Talwin. Three years later, she was convicted for fraud and placed on probation. And virtually no one knew.
Kennon describes this addiction in a recent letter: ``In my opinion,'' she writes, ``the worst addiction is a maintenance user. You believe with all your heart that you cannot function without your drug.
``You only take enough to appear `normal,' whatever that is. No one knows except a few contacts that you are an addict.
``With the addiction comes shame, guilt, self-hatred. Addiction presents you with a contradiction of self. You don't have a clue who you are any longer.''
Of all the people she deceived, her parents were most in the dark. Kennon says now that she wanted them to think she was perfect. She wanted them to believe that as a widowed mother, she could handle her baby and keep a job, too.
Later, when she moved in with Chris Boyette, whom she had known in high school, she wanted her parents to believe that they were married, with a promising future and a growing family.
Kennon built her life on so much fiction that she acted as if it didn't bother her when Boyette refused to go to the hospital when their sons were born.
Later, when she began abusing Vicodin, a painkiller that had been prescribed for her at the hospital, she pretended to be filling legal prescriptions for herself or her children. A neighbor often drove her to different pharmacies to get what she needed.
``I remember asking her why she didn't just go to one drug store all the time,'' the neighbor says. ``I just had no idea.''
When Kennon turned to heroin, however, it was only a matter of time before she would be found out.
The family was short on money, so Kennon resorted to stealing. Around the middle of May 1987, she bought herself a silver plastic pistol for less than $2. On May 25, after driving by her first target, a store in Portsmouth that sold used baby clothes, she finally gathered the nerve to go in and stage her first holdup.
She left with a bag containing about $250. Most of the money was in checks, which she threw away.
She would stage two more robberies, also with toy guns, over the next week. In at least one newspaper account, she was described as wearing white facial makeup, like a mask.
``I never wore a mask,'' she says. ``That was my real skin. I was so sick from drugs, my face was white as a sheet.''
Kennon looks back on that time and says she was simply ``lost.'' Her addiction took precedence over everything.
``People can look around this prison and see these mothers and wonder how they could commit a crime when they have children,'' she says. ``But for a lot of them, it was drugs. That's just what drugs will do.''
In early June, Kennon was arrested for one of her robberies. For six days, she sat in the Portsmouth Jail and endured a hellish, complete withdrawal from heroin: extreme vomiting, diarrhea and cold sweats.
``That's when I decided I wanted to die,'' she says. She resolved that once she got out, she would steal one more time - to get drugs for an overdose.
She chose Bennett's Creek Pharmacy in Suffolk, where Chris Jones, a pharmacist and city councilman, had filled a number of her prescriptions in the past.
``He seemed like a nice person,'' she says. ``He was young, with sandy-colored hair, friendly. I had no idea he was vice mayor.''
She also had no idea that Jones kept a gun behind the counter.
When she pulled her own gun - this time, a broken pistol she had borrowed - Jones reached behind his counter as if to get drugs for Kennon. Instead, he got his gun and shot Kennon in the shoulder. She fled outdoors with Jones in pursuit and ran into a field behind the store.
``I remember that field so well,'' she recalls. ``The side of my face was wet, and my shoulder was wet, and I looked down and saw blood. I just turned around and asked him to kill me.''
This was the turning point for Kennon, the descent to rock-bottom that recovering addicts describe as the beginning of recovery. As Kennon rode to the hospital in an ambulance, under arrest again for armed robbery, she recalls feeling a sense of relief bordering on elation.
``I could finally tell the truth,'' she says.
Truth is a like a credo for Kennon now.
``Ask me anything you like,'' she says. ``I don't have anything to hide anymore.''
She is aware that some people might view her rehabilitation cynically. She knows that one could look at her record of fraud and assume that now she is just creating another fiction about herself.
But she counters with a question: ``What more does anyone want from me?'' she asks. ``I have opened up every detail of my life, told every awful detail. I don't know what more I can do.''
Even during her first weeks in the Suffolk City Jail, as she awaited her robbery trial, Kennon impressed others as being the genuine article. She had been charged with only one of the robberies in Portsmouth, but she called an officer aside and confessed to the other two incidents.
Later, when she was asked for her plea to the charges, she pleaded guilty. ``It never occurred to her to plead otherwise,'' her father recalls.
After carrying out a psychiatric evaluation of Kennon in jail, Dr. Daniel Kay Jr., reported that Kennon was ``not the typical `criminal' person.'' He found her to be ``a strongly motivated woman who wishes to share her learning and experience with others in order the prevent the same degree of destruction befalling others. . . .''
He concluded that she committed her crimes out of desperation, and he blamed her ``altered state'' on drug use.
Despite incarceration, Kennon's life began to improve. She organized an exercise class for the inmates, and she began a jail newsletter. She also began to build a new relationship with her friends and family - especially her parents, whom she now says she loves ``more than life.''
Those early months of Kennon's incarceration were difficult for Al and Eloise Steinmeir. They had never expected to confront drug addiction in their family.
They also had never been in a situation that would take them to court. They hired a lawyer based on the recommendation of a friend.
Now, Al says, if he had known better, he would have sold their house and taken whatever steps were necessary to hire the best representation for Sue they could find.
Ironically, four years later, the Steinmeirs became the victims of a robbery. A young man broke into their house in the middle of the night and demanded money. Al Steinmeir begged him not to hurt anyone, particularly his wife or his granddaughter, Beverly, who was also in the house.
The only money in the house was about $60 Beverly had received for her birthday a few days earlier. The burglar took Beverly's birthday money and left.
Later, he was arrested and imprisoned, and the Steinmeirs learned he also had a drug problem. When he wrote from prison to ask forgiveness, the Steinmeirs wrote him back and forgave everything.
But their own daughter, they believe, never received the same consideration.
In court, Kennon was given a total of 48 years for her crimes - an unusually long sentence. When she arrived at Goochland, she was placed in solitary confinement, with only two hours a day out of her cell. But the worst punishment was her classification as a ``three-time loser,'' even though she had never served out a sentence in prison.
A few prominent lawyers have spoken out against Kennon's classification, but to no avail. Peter Decker, a Norfolk attorney who was chairman of the state Department of Corrections at the time Kennon arrived at Goochland, maintains that when Kennon was classified, it was someone ``three slots down'' in classification who applied the three-time loser law to her case. Once Kennon came to his attention, however, it was out of the hands of the Corrections Department.
``I think her case is one of the great tragedies that I've seen in our criminal justice system in the state of Virginia,'' says Decker. ``It's a great example of legislators who don't have the moral fiber to say this case should count in the three-time loser law.''
Decker believes members of the Parole Board fear repercussions if they reclassify Kennon.
``There is the sentiment that if we let her out, the floodgates will open,'' Decker says. ``If you redefine the law for her - and that should happen - then everybody will file due process in court. I can understand the sentiment, but I don't condone it.''
Over the past nine years, all Kennon's attempts to have her case reconsidered have failed.
In June 1989 - two years after Kennon's last robbery attempt - the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives petitioned Gov. Gerald Baliles for a conditional pardon for Kennon in order to get her a discretionary parole date. The petition was denied.
One of her victims, Chris Jones, told The Virginian-Pilot in 1988 that he was outraged to think Kennon would believe she could be pardoned. Questioned recently, he says he still believes her sentence was just, and would seek to testify at any parole hearing.
``I never asked to be pardoned outright,'' Kennon insists now. ``All I wanted was to be given a date for parole. I expected to serve my flat time, which is what I deserved. But I also thought I deserved an opportunity for parole.''
In 1992, Del. Marian Van Landingham, of Alexandria, introduced a bill that would have allowed the Corrections Department to review an inmate's classification as a three-time loser. A year later, the measure, which some lawmakers had begun to call the ``Sue Kennon Bill,'' was signed by Gov. L. Douglas Wilder. The Parole Board and the Corrections Department subsequently drew up guidelines for reviewing the three-time loser classification.
In March 1994, former U.S. Sen. Paul Trible used the new law to file a petition on Kennon's behalf to the Parole Board.
``This request is not presented to excuse Suzanne Kennon's criminal conduct or to deny the need for punishment,'' he wrote. ``However, this case and this offender are unique and deserve your thoughtful review and consideration.''
Trible argued that Kennon had committed her crimes as part of a ``common scheme'' within a few weeks. This sort of crime is not meant to qualify a convict as a three-time loser.
The petition was denied.
Last spring in Suffolk Circuit Court, Kennon's lawyer, Gerald Zerkin, filed a writ of habeas corpus, which demanded that the government justify Kennon's detention. That petition was also denied.
Kennon's last hope may rest with the Portsmouth Circuit Court, where Zerkin has filed another writ of habeas corpus.
If that petition is denied, Kennon may indeed remain in prison until she is 63.
She considers that a death sentence. ``To stay here until I am 63 years old would be death to me,'' she says. ``My children would all be grown up. I may as well be dead.''
But everything Kennon has accomplished while in prison has suggested only that she wants to live.
``To have lost the desire to live and regain it is my ultimate miracle,'' she wrote in a letter to her supporters at the reception of the Friends of Sue Kennon. ``No longer am I paralyzed or functioning every day without feeling. I am as alive as one could ever be through you and because of you all. You've given me the greatest tools for rehabilitation - to feel valued, appreciated, respected, and forgiven.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
JAY PAUL
Sue Kennon of Chesapeake is serving time in a Goochland prison for
robberies she committed while addicted to drugs.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE PRISONER DRUG ADDICTION ROBBERY by CNB