‘I’ve Always Wondered, Why My Child?’ : Southside Killer Has Claimed 17 Lives; Families of Slain Are His Other Victims

Now begins the holiday season--and for Annette Harris and the six kids, it is the cruelest season of all, calling up a rush of memories of their lost loved one.

Today’s Thanksgiving and the upcoming Christmas festivities will be difficult. But New Year’s Day will be the worst.

“I’ve already told the kids,” Harris said the other day, “that on January the first, I’m closing my bedroom door and I’m not coming out. They understand.”

They understand because it was on Jan. 1, 1984, that Patricia Coleman was found strangled on a picnic table in Inglewood’s Darby Park.

The petite 28-year-old black woman was Victim No. 2 on the list of 17 women whose deaths have been attributed to the Southside Serial Killer.

Patricia Coleman also was the oldest daughter of Annette Harris, the sister of Keisha Harris, then 9, and the mother of four sons and a daughter, then ranging in age from 2 to 11. At the time of her death, the young divorcee was 6 1/2 months pregnant.

In a very real sense, the 45-year-old Harris and the six children also are victims of the serial slayer. Harris was forced to leave her job, Keisha has tried to take her own life and grief has driven the family to move from familiar surroundings. And they are not the only “other victims” scarred psychologically, their lives disrupted and thrown into disarray by a killer or killers whose murderous attacks began in September, 1983.

Community activist Margaret Prescod, founder of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, said she knows of at least six other children in four other families left behind by Southside victims. “And,” Prescod said, “the effect on all of the families has been simply devastating.”

Patricia Williams, coordinator of the coalition’s efforts to aid the other victims of the Southside Slayer, estimates that there may be as many as 30 children, all of them in need of both counseling and financial aid. Williams is the aunt of Southside Victim No. 15, Verna Patricia Williams. She and others are trying to put together gifts of food and clothes for the families. Turkeys and traditional fixings were delivered Wednesday to three of the families, including Patricia Coleman’s.

Although they may or may not be typical, the surviving family of Victim No. 2 certainly is the largest household, and there is no question that Patricia Coleman’s violent death has been devastating emotionally and financially.

Today, nearly four years after the murder, her mother is able to talk about her first-born child and sometimes even smile as she remembers her daughter. But neither Keisha nor the children can bring themselves to talk about the vivacious, bright-eyed woman they miss so much.

“Pat, she was a very loving person,” the mother said in an interview. “To tell the truth, that was one problem she had--her generosity. She and I had the same problem. She would give her last penny, go without, to give to someone else. And she didn’t have very much. Sometimes, when she wasn’t living with me, she would have people who didn’t have a place to live come stay with her. And she would take food from my house and give it to friends who didn’t have food.”

Her voice can grow tense with suppressed anger when she is asked whether Pat was a streetwalker. Police, who believe there may be two or more multiple murderers preying principally on black prostitutes in South-Central Los Angeles, say that records show Patricia Coleman had been arrested on a prostitution count on Jan. 23, 1981.

Despite the fact that her daughter pleaded no contest, and served a sentence of two weekends in jail, Harris still does not believe that her daughter worked the streets.

“At the time that happened,” the mother said, “she was living with me. . . . She didn’t have any rent to pay; I was doing everything for the kids. She was getting the (welfare) check. So why did she have to go out on the streets?”

Pat’s story was that she was simply walking down the street “and the policeman saw her talking to one of those ladies of the night. . . .” Harris paused, then went on with her daughter’s version: “So when they picked this other girl up, they picked up Pat, too. . . . I had to bail her out of Sybil Brand (the women’s jail), and I asked her about it, and she told me what happened, and I don’t think she lied to me.”

Harris can even recount how she learned that her daughter had been murdered. But in the telling there are moments when her voice fades to an almost inaudible whisper and tears come to the corners of her eyes.

Pat, then studying child development at Southwest College, was spending the holiday vacation with friends. She had left the children with their grandmother. Harris recalled that she had the flu and was lying down when the detectives came. The children were outside playing.

“This was Jan. 2, maybe 4 o’clock in the afternoon,” she recalled. “The detectives had a picture of her. And they showed me the picture of her lying on the picnic table, and they had covered up this part (indicating the chest), but you could see the face--and, uh, he. . . .”

The mother’s words died in recollected horror.

By her own account, Harris came very close to a nervous breakdown. A divorcee like her daughter, the mother found her grief compounded by the responsibility of taking care of her five grandchildren, themselves suffering from deep emotional wounds.

‘We Talked About It’

About three weeks after the funeral, the $1,000 cost of which was paid by the state Victim/Witness Program, Harris sat down with the kids and discussed their pain and how to cope with it

“We talked about it, the kids and I, and I told them that we had to go on with our lives, that we couldn’t live in the past,” Harris said. “I told them Pat would want us to keep on going, not to sit around crying and feeling sorry for ourselves.”

But getting on with life was hard.

“I was just really, really nervous,” Harris said. “I cried a lot,” she said. “And I prayed a lot. And praying was the only thing that helped me to try to make it, to keep going. If it hadn’t been for the Lord, I don’t know what I would have done. I was ready to--well, I just don’t know what.”

Did she ever think of taking her own life?

“Not really,” she said softly. “But I’ve always wondered, why my child? I know you’re not supposed to question the Lord, but I’ve wondered why, out of everybody out there, why mine? . . . Because she was sweet, loving. She never bothered anybody, she went out of her way to be friendly. . . . She doesn’t--she didn’t--ever meet a stranger.”

Keisha, who had been exceptionally close to her older sister, was shattered, not only by the slaying but by the talk that Pat had been a prostitute.

‘To Join Her Sister’

About six month after her sister’s death, Keisha apparently tried to kill herself, gulping nearly a dozen Valium tablets. Harris found the semi-conscious girl, roused her and kept her awake until she and neighbors could get the child to the hospital.

“Afterward,” Harris said, “she told me she did it because she wanted to join her sister.”

A 17-year employee of the Pacific Bell Co., Harris tried to continue working but found she could not look after the children and do her job properly.

“With all these kids, it was very difficult,” she recalled. “I had to call home four and five times a day to find out what was happening with them, it really got on my nerves.” So when the company, which was cutting back its work force, offered her a cash incentive to take an “early quit,” she took the opportunity.

At about the same time, she also decided she must get away from the Lennox neighborhood where she was living. Her home was about two miles from where Pat’s body had been dumped. Harris remembered an especially traumatic moment: “ About a month after it happened, a friend was giving me a ride, and we just happened to pass by Darby Park,” she recounted. “And I saw some guys sitting at that picnic table. . . . They were eating. I knew they didn’t know, but I wondered how in the world they could sit at the table and eat. . . . I knew they didn’t know--it was just the way I felt.”

‘You Can’t Run’

She and the kids packed up their meager belongings and moved to Sacramento in September of last year. “Really and truly,” she said, “just being in that area, it just got next to me. I mean I thought I wanted to get away from there. I really didn’t want to, but I thought I did. . . . But you can’t run away from your problems, and that was what I was trying to do.”

Harris quickly realized that the Sacramento move was a mistake. “I started thinking I wanted to go back to L.A. But every place I tried, I either had too many kids or I didn’t have enough money.”

At last, she found a three-bedroom house for rent in Rialto and took it sight unseen, not realizing that it was 40 miles--and a $9 round-trip bus ride--from Los Angeles. She and the children moved into the Rialto house last May. By then they were living on $1,037 in monthly welfare funds, plus $200 worth of food stamps, about half what she had earned at Pacific Bell.

Although the house is in a pleasant suburban neighborhood, the $800 rent a month is too much, and there is no chance for Harris to find a job. She realized that she had made another mistake.

The house is sparsely furnished--a couch, a bed and a television in the family room, the front room virtually barren except for stacks of cardboard boxes containing personal items, many belonging to her dead daughter, which Harris simply has not had the heart to unpack.

Then, last June, 15-year-old Charles was hit by an uninsured motorist while riding his bike; ligaments and cartilage in both legs were badly damaged. Charles was hospitalized for two weeks; the medical bills totaled about $17,000, most of it paid by Medi-Cal, although Harris believes she still owes a considerable amount. “I don’t know how much it is exactly,” she said. “But you know what? I just can’t let that bother me now, because you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip.”

‘I Want to Get Back’

Charles’ accident only reinforced Harris’ determination to leave Rialto.

“Oh, God, how I want to get back to L.A.,” Harris said. “ If somebody would let me have a one room shack I’d take it, but most places are $800 or $900 a month.”

And landlords require prepayment of first and last month’s rent. “I can handle that, I can save that, if I can find a place,” she said. “But I will have to wait until after Christmas, because I have to do something for them then. Because Christmas morning, all the rest of the kids in the neighborhood are going to be playing with their toys and my kids are going to feel pretty bad if they don’t have anything. They’re going to have something. “

A small, sensitive woman of quiet pride, she said she doesn’t like living the way she and the children are now. “I never used food stamps before, nor welfare,” she said, “because I was always working. I’m not used to this,” she said. “I don’t like it because I been working since I was 14 or 15, started working in Florida, working in a laundry with my mom.”

But even more than a job, she wants her daughter’s killer caught and punished. “I’m pretty confident he will be caught,” she said. Then, for the first time, Pat’s son, Charles, spoke up: “He should be executed.” Annette Harris, mother of Victim No. 2, nodded in agreement.

“You got it,” she said emphatically. “He should get the maximum. I mean not only for my child, but for all those others.”