Eileen and Susan played outside in the brush and trees for a while and then climbed back into the van. They continued driving around, eventually heading up into the hills on Half Moon Bay Road and pulling off the highway to stop in a wooded area. But instead, he announced that they were going to play hooky. George Franklin drove Eileen and Susan around for a while and, at one point, pulled up to the front of their elementary school as if to drop them off. Eileen recalled that when Susan jumped into the van, her father asked Janice to get out. She asked her father if they could give Susan a ride. George Franklin was driving Eileen and her sister Janice to school in the family's beige Volkswagen van when Eileen spotted Susan Nason. Her story began early on a Monday morning-September 22, 1969-when she was in the fourth grade.
As amazing as it seemed, this woman appeared to be telling the truth. As she added detail to detail, faltering only occasionally, the detectives exchanged looks. Her memory was perfectly formed, filledwith colors, sounds, textures, emotions, and word-for-word conversations. On November 25, 1989, Eileen Franklin sat down in her living room with detectives Morse and Cassandro to relate the astonishing details of a playful outing that ended in rape and murder. In November 1989, ten months after her memory first returned, Eileen decided to tell her husband, who insisted that they call the police. But the flashback disclosed another shocking fact: The man who murdered Susan Nason was George Franklin, Eileen's father.įor months, Eileen tried to avoid the memory, but it kept returning and gaining detail and precision. A memory she had buried for two decades, almost two thirds of her life, had returned without warning or premonition to reveal the shocking truth: She had witnessed her best friend's murder. In that burning flash of memory, Eileen believed she had made contact with the forgotten past. The rock crushed Susan's skull, and Eileen covered her ears against the sound of bones shattering. Seconds later, the man's arms came down with tremendous force.
Lifting her hands to protect herself as the man moved toward her, Susan glanced at Eileen, her wide eyes conveying her terror and helplessness. Behind her, silhouetted by the sun, a man held a heavy rock above his head. In the vivid scene that flashed into her mind, Eileen saw her best friend, eight-year-old Susan Nason, sitting on a rock in a wooded setting. Her daughter and two playmates sat on the carpeted floor at her feet, and as Eileen looked into her daughter's eyes, the memory returned, and Eileen Franklin's carefully ordered world plunged into chaos. Eileen Franklin, a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old woman with long red hair, cuddled her two-year-old son inher arms. It all began in a room bright with sunshine. HEADLINE: Truth or invention: exploring the repressed memory syndrome Įxcerpt from 'The Myth of Repressed Memory'īYLINE: Loftus, Elizabeth Ketcham, Katherine One chapter - excerpted in Cosmopolitan Magazine, is here:
0 kommentar(er)
