COLUMN ONE : Psychic Survival by Denial : For years, dad had his kids believing that mom just left them one day. But finally, some 20 years later, they went searching for answers. And they found that sometimes a lie is less painful than the truth.

The story sounded sadly, wearily familiar to Jean Nadeau. In his work as an investigator for the Riverside County district attorney’s office, he thought he’d heard it more than once before.

We’ve always been confused about our mother, an earnest account clerk from San Jacinto named Anne Hallberg was saying. When I was 9, she just was not there one morning. You cops know how to track people down, don’t you? How hard would it be to find someone after 23 years?

Folks not infrequently disappeared here on the hot, dry edge of the Mojave. They came from somewhere else to discard a past, then moved on again when things turned sour. Nadeau saw it all the time. It was an old story.

Her mom’s a drunk, Nadeau figured. She ran off with someone. I’ll run a DMV on her and find she has a new name, a new life.

That is not the way matters turned out, however.

What Nadeau found instead was a story more strange and terrible than familiar. What Nadeau found was childhood’s universal fear of loss and abandonment brought utterly to life. What Nadeau found were children who’d grown up isolated and scared in an ominous world where adults didn’t seem to notice that their mother had vanished.

Nadeau’s inquiries uncovered not a woman run off to a new life, but a body that had lain unidentified in a Texas pauper’s grave for 23 years. Despite pleas from the children, no adult--not her husband, not her parents, not her brother, not her cousin, not her neighbors--had ever reported Marie Jeannine Paulette Boissonneault-Durand missing.

Taken together, their conduct forms a singular portrait of one family’s psychic survival through insistent, unremitting denial.

“When you have an unidentified body, normally someone comes forward,” said Johnny Klevenhagen, the sheriff of Harris County (Houston), Texas. “All cases have quirks. The quirk on this is, no one came forward.”

“The family didn’t want to face what had happened,” suggested Ted Wilson, an assistant district attorney in Harris County. “They probably didn’t want to know the answer. It was something they didn’t want to face.”

So when the truth finally did emerge--Anne Hallberg’s father, Raymond Durand, beat his wife to death in February, 1968, a Harris County jury decided Sept. 2--the moment was not entirely welcomed.

At least not by Anne Hallberg, now 32. For her it remains unclear which is a worse companion--the unknown or the truth.

“It’s over,” Wilson, the prosecutor, told Hallberg when he called to report the jury’s verdict.

“It’s over for you,” Hallberg responded. “It’s not over for me.”

*

Only the two eldest of the four Durand children--Anne and Denis--can clearly recall their mother. Hallberg’s memories, like most culled from early childhood, are composed mainly of fuzzy and fleeting moments: mom giving her a doll for Christmas; mom playing the piano with grandma; mom and grandma curling her hair to look like Shirley Temple.

What she remembers most is mom always being there with the kids, first in their native Canadian town of Hull, not far from Ottawa, then later at homes in Florida and Texas.

“All the kids clung to her,” Hallberg said. “We sat on her lap all the time. We were a family. In Canada, we had a cottage on a lake and a motorboat with a red stripe and two little lights in back. My brother Denis water-skied a lot. My mom sat on a lawn chair watching us.”

Their father, a short gruff man known as Frenchy, ran an auto body shop but also seemed to be involved in other enterprises. Some may or may not have been illegal--”I heard later that my dad was in a small-town Mafia . . . and that he was dealing in stolen cars and forged birth certificates,” said Denis, three years older than Anne. All surely were designed to separate people from their money. The phrase most frequently offered to describe Durand is “con man.”

Move to Florida

He was rarely around, however, and so does not color Hallberg’s memories much. “It was always us kids and mom,” she said. “Above all, I remember feeling loved. I had not a care in the world.”

The first crack in that world came in early 1967, when Frenchy Durand left on his own to find work in Florida. That May, he settled his family in Ft. Lauderdale and introduced a woman friend named Patricia Holben, who was described as the wife of Durand’s boss.

A month later, Durand--complaining that there were no schools there for his French-speaking children--sent his family back to Hull. In September, he summoned them again, this time to Houston, where they rented a home in Bellaire, just southwest of downtown.

There was a tree in the front yard, Hallberg remembers, and a playhouse in back. She recalls playing in a park with her brother and sisters. She recalls a tabletop organ her mom got for that Christmas of 1967. She recalls also Pat Holben, the lady from Florida, now a regular fixture in their Texas home.

One night at the dinner table, Hallberg’s younger brother Mark, then 5, said, “Oh mom, you should have seen dad, he was on top of Pat.” Their father dismissed the report with a smile--”Oh Mark, don’t say those things”--but their mother flashed her husband a dirty look.

Mother Disappears

The meaning of the moment eluded Anne, then 9 and a fan of “Aunt Pat’s,” who gave the kids gifts and took them shopping in her nice white car with a black top. The meaning did not, however, elude Denis, then 12: “I knew my father was fooling around on my mother because when I went to my Boy Scouts meetings I used to go by the same street as Patricia Holben lived on, and I would see my dad’s car there all the time.”

One day in November, 1967, Denis heard his mother call their grandmother in Canada, and talk of their isolation as French Canadians in an English-speaking world. “Mother, we are very lonely here,” he heard his mom say. “It is very hot . . . I don’t see my husband very much because he works nights and most days.”

Three months later, in February, 1968, their mother simply was not there when the children awoke one morning. Patricia Holben was sitting at the breakfast table.

Where’s mom? Denis and Anne asked.

“She’s gone to Canada to be with your grandmother, who is very sick,” Holben replied.

That afternoon, Denis was puzzled when their father came home with two suitcases containing their mother’s clothing. But he assured them that their mother would be back in “a few weeks.”

“It was fine then, it was OK,” Hallberg recalled. “Mom, though, just kept not coming back. ‘Grandma is still sick,’ dad would say each time we asked.”

Less than a month after his wife disappeared, Durand moved his family to a new house in the same neighborhood. By then, Pat Holben was living with the family and sleeping in their dad’s bed.

Mom Not Returning

When is mom coming back? Denis and Anne kept pleading.

In a few weeks, their father kept answering. Grandma is not well enough yet.

Then one day Pat Holben told Anne, “Your mom is never coming back.” Anne rushed to the front yard to tell Denis. The meaning of the words didn’t register with her, but they did with her older brother.

“I could not believe my ears,” Denis recalled. “So I asked my father and he said, ‘Denis, never ask me this again. I’m tired of you asking me. Your mom is not coming back and that’s it.’ ”

One day soon after, when the family was driving past the Astrodome, Durand delivered this message even more forcefully. When is mom coming back? Denis implored. Their father turned, gruff and angry: “She’s not coming back. She doesn’t love us anymore. Pat is your new mom. Don’t ask me again.”

“I was scared, petrified,” Hallberg recalled of that moment. “What did we--I--do that was so awful for mom to leave? I wanted to ask so many questions but was afraid. Denis was crying. He always cried for mom.”

That September, the family moved again, to an area 70 miles from Houston. Here Denis and Anne’s fractured world entirely unraveled. Required to call Pat Holben “mom,” they did so through gritted teeth, for she was now their tormentor.

As Denis and Anne both recall it, Holben was always drunk, and often hit them. Anything they liked--a sweater, boots--she’d take away. They couldn’t wear shoes in the house because it might track in dirt. After dinner, they had to go back outside, even if it was freezing. They couldn’t drink anything with meals or raise their arms in the air.

“Dad was there, but always drunk too,” Hallberg said. “It was here I realized mom was never coming back. I hated my life. I used to cry and pray for mom to come back. My hope was I’d wake up one morning, come to the breakfast table, and mom would be there instead of Pat. Around then, dad told me mom went to a mental institution and then jail because she’d thrown me in front of a car. But this didn’t register. Why did mom leave? Was it my fault?”

Hallberg never considered seeking help, never considered talking to somebody about her shattered world.

“I was too scared to talk to anyone, not my brother or a teacher or anyone. After what had happened, I didn’t trust anybody. I was in my own little world. I had no idea Denis felt like I did. People wonder why I didn’t say anything, but people don’t understand. A child is so insecure, so unsure of life anyway, that this can destroy your whole sense of the world. All I had then was dad and Pat and my brothers and sisters. You will do anything in your power to make them happy. You just want to be loved.”

Mom’s ‘Up the Street’

In the fall of 1969 Durand moved his family again, this time to San Diego; a year later they were in Victoria, B.C. There, late one night when she was 12, Hallberg overheard her dad talking on the phone to her maternal grandmother. “Jeannine and the kids are up the street,” he was saying.

Hallberg froze. How could he be saying that mom was up the street?

“I was petrified,” she said. “I was shaking. I went back to bed and didn’t tell anyone what I had heard. I was scared--scared of the unknown.”

Soon after, the family moved once more, this time back to their roots in Hull, in the province of Quebec.

Denis, now 15 and aware that his maternal grandmother lived nearby, went one day to a pay phone and dialed her phone number. She begged him to come visit, which he did on a Sunday when Durand and Holben had traveled to Quebec City with friends.

She’d never been sick and she’d never been visited or cared for by their mother, Denis’s grandmother told him. The last time she’d talked to her daughter was when she’d called from Texas that day in November, 1967.

Everything my father had told us kids was a lie, Denis now decided. He started visiting his grandmother regularly, traveling by bus. One morning he took Anne with him, not telling her where they were going.

“I was shaking when I got there,” Hallberg recalled. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there. My grandmother gave me hugs and kisses. Dennis told me not to tell dad, but I wouldn’t have dared.”

Once when Denis returned from such a visit his father was waiting. “He told me never to go back there or he would beat me,” Denis said. “He told me they were bad people who were going to put ideas in my head.”

The warning did not quiet Denis. He continued to visit his maternal grandmother and question his father until October, 1971, when an agitated Frenchy--saying “I can’t take care of you anymore, you are driving me nuts”--sent Denis to live at his paternal grandmother’s house. A month later, Durand moved the rest of his family back to San Diego.

“Leaving me at grandma Durand’s was the best thing dad ever did for me,” Denis would say later. Now distanced from his father, he tried for a while to find the truth.

In the spring of 1972, at age 16, he took his story to a local Canadian newspaper, an action that yielded a colorful three-page feature spread--”What became of his mother? Could she have been killed? With our reporter, the teen-ager looks for the answers”--but no more tangible result. He also took his story to the provincial police in Hull, but they told him he was too young to sign a complaint. When he sought a signature from his maternal grandparents, they declined.

No One Called

It is this recoiling from the truth by the missing woman’s family that most baffled those who later stumbled upon the Durand case.

“It’s incredible to think that no one called,” said Wilson, the Harris County prosecutor. “But Frenchy always had an explanation. They never wanted to believe the worst, so they’d want to believe his story. We asked their cousin if he ever had looked into the matter. He said the family didn’t want it, never asked him. It was something they didn’t want to face.”

Hallberg agrees: “They were private people who really kept to themselves. They knew something had happened, but I think they feared we kids would be taken away if they reported it. There was Frenchy’s power--he was a con artist--and there was lots of denial.”

The denial was such that for years no one in the family told the youngest child, Martine--born just eight months before her mom vanished--that Pat Holben wasn’t her true mother. How could you not tell me? Martine wailed to her sister when she finally found out at age 16.

Wanted to Shield Her

“How to explain?” Hallberg said, recalling that moment. “How to explain that I never wanted her to know because then she’d have to deal with ‘where’s her mom.’ How to explain that I always wanted her to keep her childhood? How to explain that I wanted her to have the childhood that I lost at age 9?”

For Hallberg, the turn toward the truth came only gradually, in halting increments, over a number of years.

Graduation from high school brought no more than a numb distancing: her own apartment, a job at a San Diego car dealership, a move by the rest of her family north to Aguanga, in Riverside County. “I just lived,” Hallberg recalled of that period. “Something was missing. Something I didn’t want to find out about.”

In 1981, she returned to Canada to visit her brother Denis in Hull, where he was working as an auto body man. Sitting at his dining room table, Denis showed her the Canadian newspaper clipping from 1972. Then, quietly and surely, he said: “I think dad killed mom.”

Denis laid out his case--the suitcase full of mom’s clothes, dad’s changing versions of what happened, grandma’s declaration that she never saw her daughter in 1968. “Mom loved us very much,” Denis argued. “She wouldn’t just leave us, or her own parents.”

As compelling as this argument was, Hallberg simply could not accept what her brother was saying. By then, her relationship with her father had warmed; he offered advice, he helped with her car.

“No way did I think it was true,” she said. “Something happened, I reasoned, but I was not going to worry about it. I was totally freaked when I left that visit with Denis. ‘No,’ I told myself, ‘that didn’t happen.’ ”

A seed had been planted, though. Three years later--after Hallberg had moved to the Riverside County town of San Jacinto, not far from where her father lived--she visited him at his home, a trailer sitting on 40 hardscrabble acres that the family called “the ranch.” Midway through her visit, she impulsively blurted out an unplanned comment: “You know what dad? Denis thinks you killed mom.”

Her father laughed and brushed it off. Why would he say that? Durand asked.

Greedily, Hallberg clung to that dismissal.

“I accepted that answer,” she said. “I didn’t want to think otherwise about my father. Yes, facing the truth would mean that mom hadn’t abandoned me. But it would mean losing my dad. I’d spent nine years with mom, but all my life with Dad. We talked regularly, every week. He walked me down the aisle when I got married. For dad to have killed mom would be an enormous loss. Deep down did I think he did it? No. I still didn’t think so.”

Four more years passed. In January, 1988, Hallberg married, and that summer, after years of working without documentation in this country, she decided to get a green card. Frenchy Durand joined his daughter and her new husband at a lawyer’s office in downtown Riverside, for only he could provide much of the information needed.

Startling Question

“Where’s your mom?” the lawyer inquired after looking at Anne’s birth certificate.

Hallberg froze. No one had ever directly asked her that question before. Before she could answer, her father interjected. “I divorced her in Canada,” he said.

Hallberg felt as if her head were spinning. Why is he saying that? she thought, clinging to her years of denial. Mom went back to care for her grandmother. Mom tried to throw me in front of a car and was in jail. Why is he saying he divorced her?

Hallberg couldn’t sleep that night. Something was wrong. Something she still didn’t want to accept.

The next crack in Hallberg’s armor came a year later. In need of her family’s genetic history after getting a dubious Pap smear result, she called her father. By then Durand, who’d ended his 18-year relationship with Pat Holben, had a new wife, Gloria. She answered the phone and shouted the news about the Pap smear across the room to Frenchy.

Listening, Hallberg said she heard her father say, “That’s what happened to her mother.”

“What?” Hallberg exclaimed.

Here was yet another version of her mother’s fate. Durand had offered it to others before, but never to Anne, a circumstance he’d apparently forgotten.

“Frenchy, she doesn’t know what you’re talking about,” Gloria called to her husband.

“Yes she does,” Hallberg said she heard her father say. “I’ve told her about that. I told her that her mother died of cancer.”

That night, Hallberg finally revealed her history and her fears to her husband, Phil. “Could he have killed her?” she asked him. Her husband dismissed the notion, but Hallberg was no longer willing to stay behind her shield.

Devised a Bluff

Soon after, in early 1990, she called Denis with an idea. Let’s see how dad responds to a bluff, she said.

Hallberg handled the phone call herself.

“An investigator is asking about mom,” she told her father. Then she took a breath. For the first time, she asked Durand the direct question: “Dad, what happened to mom?”

“She left,” he said.

“She just left?”

“Yes, she just left.”

“What am I supposed to tell the investigator?”

“I’m not hard to find,” Durand said. “They know where to find me.”

Days later, Durand dropped out of sight and moved away, leaving no hint of where he’d gone. For years, Hallberg had dodged the fearful unknown. Now her ploy had yielded an answer she could no longer avoid.