Diane had done a stint in jail the previous year for possession of narcotics. She and my brother had a long history of arrests for drug-related crimes, which juxtaposed with trying to support habits. I remember as far back as my early teens the two of them being pinched for everything from stuffing meats up the shirts of their kids and trying to get out of the grocery store to stealing clothing from the TJ Maxx they’d try to return for cash, writing bad checks, scamming credit card companies, or using the Social Security numbers of their children to access credit. At one time, my brother was trying to prove he had Mashantucket Pequot blood in him so he could get a yearly stipend Foxwoods Casino was offering to anyone who could prove Native American tribal lineage. Diane and Mark were on a hamster wheel: drugs, alcohol, cops; drugs, alcohol, arrest, probation, move to a new hotel or find a welfare apartment complex they hadn’t burned. Looking on from afar as their lives sank deeper into despair was akin to standing on the shore of a lake, with a sick feeling of never being able to reach them, as the two of them descended into the water as if on an escalator, their hands extended.
As a child looking up to my oldest brother, Mark reminded me of a hippie you might hire to play Jesus off-Broadway: long, black hair past his shoulders, goatee and mustache, a shy smile, a lock of hair curled around one ear, cigarette tucked in the other. When we lived in East Hartford, the images that come to mind are of Mark standing in the driveway wearing a greasy wife-beater tank top, listening to the Allman Brothers Band (“Whipping Post” was his favorite ABB song). He would be working on his beloved brown Oldsmobile Cutlass 442 (he could pull the carburetor out on a Saturday morning, have it in pieces on the kitchen table Saturday night, and be driving the car Sunday morning), with a Newport dangling from his mouth, a can of Bud with the peel-off tab, sharp as a razor, on the side fender wall.
Mark was skinny, but tough. He had a reputation. Nobody messed with him. A kid could have me in a headlock down the street at the Nature Trail, a wooded area where we hung out, but if I pulled Mark’s name, it alone protected me. He had a hole on the right side of his belly we’d sometimes poke a finger into. It felt squishy, like a balloon—a scar left behind from Mark having had a kidney removed as a child. These images are from about the time Mark first started dating Diane, who, at thirteen (my brother four years older), walked into our lives as if she had been part of the family all along. Diane belonged, that was the impression. I can see her stepping out of a red Volkswagen (her sister’s, a girl Mark also dated in between breakups with Diane), a mound of snow piled in front of our Hollister Drive house from where the plows pushed the entire neighborhood snowpack, those sounds ringing out as I lay in bed (what could be better?): Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep, the plow truck going in reverse, telling us neighborhood kids we had a snow day. I can still smell the dust under the stairs in that small white house of ours, where I usually slept on a cot. The punch of the purple lilac bush as you rounded the south corner in the front yard, where a neighborhood kid once tripped and gouged his eye on our chain-link fence and my parents were scared they’d be sued.
And I can see Diane sitting on our front steps, a sweltering summer afternoon, watching Mark work on his car, her long, thick, dirty blond hair, smelling of Farrah Fawcett Shampoo by Fabergé. She was obsessed with that hair, always nervously twirling a lock, legs crossed over one another, bouncing a mile a minute, laughing and smoking cigarettes. There I sat, playing with my Matchbox cars in the sand, thinking how beautiful Diane was, and how lucky Mark was to have her. She was like the sister I’d never had. I grew up in a house with three older brothers. Diane smelled like a woman should.
No matter how bad things got for them later on, she made sure she looked the best she could—always. She’d spend two hours putting on makeup and doing her hair. She loved Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks, and to me she resembled Stevie. Those memories, when I recall life being normal (whatever the hell that is), Diane singing Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara” in our living room, dancing, Mark reading the sports page, watching basketball, explaining to me how point spreads worked. I think back now, what the hell happened to us? How had everything spiraled so out of control—all the death and dysfunction and drug use—in the years that followed?
*
ON VALENTINE’S DAY, 1993, Diane met Tom Myers at the Dugout Bar inside the Windsor Court Hotel. The two of them, for whatever reason, left. Diane drove. They wound up parked on Norwich Street, near the corner of Wyllys, at Dutch Point, downtown Hartford, in the same car she and my brother had been tooling around in. Tom sat in the passenger seat.
“Relatives [of Myers] believe he asked Ferris for a ride home—but Ferris instead drove to Dutch Point . . . where friends believe she often had gone to buy drugs,” a Hartford Courant article claimed.
Indeed, Diane and Mark often drove into downtown, Frog Hollow, Charter Oak Terrace, Garden Street (where Diane would be murdered a little over three years later) and Barbour Street, Dutch Point, and any number of popular areas in Hartford to purchase drugs. On this night, however, something went wrong. As I heard the story, Diane left Thomas Myers in the car and went up to a familiar residence to buy drugs or collect money somebody owed her. When she returned, he was dead, a stab wound through his chest (heart, I was told). My brother, incidentally, stayed at their hotel room the entire time, in no condition by then to go anywhere, no doubt waiting for Diane to hit the bar and find him drugs.
Every ounce of my being cannot associate the notion of Diane being a killer. It just wasn’t in her. I could see her robbing Thomas Myers. She’d stolen from me, my brothers, my mother, her immediate family. Could she have threatened him, gouged his eyes and arms and spit in his face, while screaming vulgar obscenities at him? I’d witnessed her do this to my mother, to my wife, and all of us had experienced Diane’s volatile wrath, her temper, and her violence. But could she drive a knife through a man’s chest?
No way.
“She was not a killer—she had nothing to do with it,” my brother Mark’s best friend, Gary Saccocia, told me. “She went up to get dope, came back, and he was dead.”
Thomas Myers was said not to be involved in drugs.
“No one was ever charged with the homicide,” but “Hartford Police,” that Courant article noted, “said they don’t know if Ferris was involved in Myers’ death.”
The next day, Diane called her daughter, my niece, Meranda VanDeventer. Meranda was fourteen and had been living with her aunt for almost a year by then. She kept in close contact with her mother and father, and visited Mark and Diane often. “Because my mom had me so young [Diane was sixteen], I kind of,” Meranda told me, “became the mother in the relationship.” Meranda had spent weekends at the Windsor Court Hotel, witnessing, firsthand, how deeply immersed Diane and Mark were in their addictions.
“They kept me and interrogated me for almost twenty-four hours,” Diane told Meranda, explaining what happened: She and Thomas Myers drove to Dutch Point, she went up to visit a friend about something, came back down, and found him dead. “I had nothing to do with it.”