Life After Death

Again, Linda and Peter Biehl swallowed hard and told the media this week: We understand.

Just the way they did five years ago, when a mob stoned and stabbed their 26-year-old daughter to death in South Africa. As onlookers chanted anti-white slogans, a 19-year-old high school student plunged a knife up to the hilt into Amy Biehl’s heart. And the Biehls forgave him.

On Tuesday, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission pardoned Amy’s four convicted killers--including the young man who stabbed her--and the Biehls understood.

How do they explain?

Linda and Peter used to be homebodies, Palm Springs Republicans, childhood sweethearts from the Midwest. When a shaken Amy called home in 1993 to say African National Congress hero Chris Hani had been killed, well, they didn’t really know who he was. Now, a picture of his widow hangs on their wall at home.

Now Linda, 55, a former Neiman Marcus couture manager, and Peter, also 55, a business consultant, spend half their time in South Africa--at President Nelson Mandela’s birthday party, at a squatter camp where tired men clop by on horse-and-buggy carts, at a violent prison that reeks of marijuana.

Now they work alongside South Africa’s black radicals, with a white African National Congress activist whose arms were blown off by a letter bomb.

Now, in Cape Town, one of the most violent cities in the world, they run a foundation with a staff and a car and a $440,000 anti-violence grant.

Somewhere, Amy is laughing with approval at her parents’ transformation. She’d be half-embarrassed, half-proud--they are sure of it.

Amy, they are sure, also would have forgiven her killers. How often did Amy hammer home that you can’t blame blacks who had been systematically brutalized under apartheid for turning to violence themselves? Amy would have understood that the amnesty process is part of something bigger than herself. And if she could do so. . . .

Linda and Peter crumpled with grief when the phone call came with the news. But the pain did not spin the Biehls toward rage, the way it often does. Instead, a grace fluttered into their hearts that would humble even their daughter’s killers.

The path toward forgiveness led them to a sometimes lonely passion for the land where she died. So when a UC Berkeley student called out of the blue and asked them to phone her dad in Kansas and tell him that it’s OK for her to study in Cape Town, they did, and then they met her there.

It’s not a religious instinct that drives the Biehls to upend their lives for a place that bespeaks their tragedy; it’s a human instinct that their three other children don’t always understand. For this, in South Africa, they are introduced simply as, “This is The Mother,” or “This is Amy’s father.”

Last winter, outside Cape Town, at a preschool ringed with barbed wire, a white priest stared at the Biehls in disbelief: Why are you coming back? Stay away from this doomed land.

But Linda and Peter cannot stay away, not when they feel Amy pushing, pushing, not when they know their cachet as her parents will slip away someday. The press calls to ask how they feel about Amy’s killers walking free, not about their projects in South Africa, including a community bakery and a literacy program.

The world’s press loved her--loved pointing out the irony of her death. Blond, blue-eyed Amy Elizabeth Biehl, killed Aug. 25, 1993, the day before she was supposed to fly home to Newport Beach.

A Fulbright scholar, working on voter education programs, killed by some of the very people she was trying to help. More than 4,000 South Africans--mostly black--had died in political violence in that year before Nelson Mandela won the presidency in the country’s first democratic elections. But the U.S. media made Amy the face of the madness.

No question, she was a great kid. After 10 months there, she could kapzella--pound a beer lying down--she swore in the Xhosa language, she danced the phantsula. She wrote policy papers for top U.S. officials, she taught an old tribal chief how to vote for the first time. . . . Linda and Peter think about her every day, and somewhere, they know, she’s laughing.

One Settler, One Bullet

The killer saw Amy at dusk. He had just come from a rally at his high school for the youth and militant wings of the Pan Africanist Congress, a black nationalist party at odds with Mandela’s ANC. One settler, one bullet! speakers exhorted hundreds of students. One white person, one murder!

Afterward, the killer, in a group of about 80, took off to the black township of Guguletu, chanting, waving political banners, bebopping in a high-kicking toyi-toyi dance. At a busy intersection, they spotted Amy’s mustard yellow Mazda 323. A white girl.

At 5 p.m., a brick crashed through the windshield and into Amy’s head. She tried to run from the hail of stones. The killer, 19, caught up and tripped her. She fell on a patch of grass at a gas station. Amy’s black friends ran from the car to beg for her life. “She’s a comrade,” they shouted. “A comrade!” But the killer had already borrowed a pocketknife.

That night, Amy’s roommate, Melanie Jacobs, was summoned to the Guguletu police station. Amy’s body lay outside the back door. Jacobs turned away from the mangled face. But she said yes, that is Amy, because she saw her clunky black shoes sticking out from the pink blanket. Jacobs had hated those shoes because she thought that Amy would not be able to run in them. Please, pick her up, please. The pavement was cold and damp, and Amy hated the cold.

In Newport Beach, Linda had the week off from work. On that bright morning, she went back-to-school shopping with her 16-year-old son, Zach, a high school junior. She and Zach were unloading bags from the car when the phone rang. It was Kim, her oldest daughter, sobbing. “Mom, are you sitting down?”

For a few minutes, Linda was hysterical. “They stabbed my baby,” she kept screaming. Five minutes later, the media started calling. Linda had gathered herself. Amy’s words came back to her. Zach reached to take the phone off the hook, but his mother stopped him. No, she said. We’re going to celebrate Amy’s life.

Peter got the news in Salem, Ore., where he flew every week as marketing director for a frozen foods company. He took the next plane home. A neighbor picked him up and warned that satellite trucks had staked out the house. The neighbor plucked a couple of boards off a back fence so Peter could slip in. It would be the last time he ducked the press.

That night, Linda, Peter and the three kids gathered at the kitchen table. Look, Peter said. We can hole ourselves away, or we can use Amy’s death to try to do some good. The next morning, the family walked outside to the outstretched microphones.

The media looked for, and found, a hero in Amy. High school co-valedictorian. Stanford honors student. Captain of the NCAA championship women’s diving team.

Hundreds of people sent contributions, cards and flowers. Condolence calls and faxes rolled in from Mandela, President Clinton, Coretta Scott King. Two months after Amy’s murder, her family visited South Africa at the invitation of Cape Town’s mayor. The ANC sent bodyguards with Uzis to guard them.

On that trip, through the fog of confusion and grief, Linda and Peter began to understand the impact of Amy’s work. The people she knew! She had set up a meeting between ANC women and liberal female attorneys who she thought might work together. She had taught voters in squatter camps and townships to mark the picture of their favorite candidate in the April 1994 elections. She had worked with ANC activists who now run the country, including the current minister of justice.

Back home, Linda and Peter read their daughter’s journals and papers over and over. They used her words, and the donations people kept sending, to start the Amy Biehl Foundation. The Biehls never sought therapy. Instead, they kept returning to South Africa--alone.

The Mothers Meet

Last summer in Cape Town, the hearing room was packed. Linda caught the eye of Evelyn Manqina, the mother of the young man who had stabbed Amy. Evelyn Manqina wore an Amy Biehl Foundation T-shirt to her son’s amnesty hearing. The two mothers hugged.

“The message that was sent out,” retired Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu says of the gesture, “sent electric shocks down your spine.”

Since 1995, Tutu has headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has compiled a history of apartheid-era violence, including murders by state-run death squads and ANC guerrillas. Applicants must provide detailed confessions to be eligible for amnesty. They also must show a political motive--that their actions were part of either an apartheid or anti-government agenda.

Manqina’s son, Mongezi, had asked to be pardoned from his 18-year prison term, along with three young men who admitted to stoning Amy. At their amnesty hearings, they approached Linda and Peter in a hallway to shake hands.

“To be honest, I don’t have it in me to hate [the killers], I just don’t,” Peter says.

“To me, I never personalized it with these killers,” Linda interjects. “I think you can say who really is responsible for this killing. You go back to the creators of apartheid. These guys were political victims.”

Linda and Peter ran into Evelyn Manqina again last winter. She runs a shebeen, an unlicensed pub, at her home, 200 yards from where Amy was slain. She put her hand on Linda’s, her eyes sad. He didn’t pass, she said. Her son didn’t pass his high school graduation exams. Will he take them again? Linda asked. Tell him I hope he does.

Last year, Mongezi Manqina, now 25, had something for them. In a prison workshop, he had carved a foot-long Viking schooner. The Biehls got it in a plastic sack, wrapped in newspapers.

Linda and Peter keep the ship in a closet at home. They aren’t sure that their kids are ready to see it. Zach, now 21, doesn’t like to talk about Amy’s death. He is tired of being known as the guy whose sister got killed in South Africa, tired of the hate mail that brands the family “n----- lovers.” His parents say he doesn’t understand their attitude toward Amy’s killers.

“I’d rather not really comment on that because I don’t necessarily agree [with their forgiveness],” says Zach, a baseball coach at a Newport Beach high school. “I don’t want to upset anybody. But it is kind of surprising.”

Successful Parents

Linda and Peter are the type of parents who built Amy a mini-bar in her dorm room at Stanford University and then ducked under the beach umbrellas to down her powerhouse margaritas. Peter is stout, an ex-college football player who prefers jeans and loafers with no socks. A successful businessman, he’s also goofy, with a laugh so boisterous that he sometimes has to take off his glasses and wipe his eyes. He calls his wife “honey.”

Of the two, Linda is the one who greets strangers first. In a rich voice, she talks up a storm about the kids, their childhoods, their astrological signs. With perfect makeup and hair, Linda, who modeled in high school, looks at home in St. John knits or a T-shirt. Sometimes she wears a heart-shaped locket that holds Amy’s picture.

They grew up together in Geneva, a farming community outside Chicago, where the action was at the drive-in and ice-skating parties. Both graduated from Whittier College, where Linda majored in history and Peter studied marketing.

As the kids grew up, the family moved to Palo Alto; Tucson, Ariz.; Santa Fe, N.M.; and Newport Beach. Linda headed a Brownie troop and joined Junior League. In southern Arizona, Peter was finance chairman for the GOP and hosted cocktail parties for guests like Gerald R. Ford and Bob Dole.

Before Amy’s death, Linda and Peter had started to make time for themselves, with getaways to Europe. Time had slowed after years of car-pooling to swim meets and ballets. Time, though, goes haywire when you lose a child.

In August 1994, Peter quit his job in Oregon to work for himself and spend more time on their South Africa projects. Four months later, Linda resigned from Neiman Marcus when she couldn’t focus anymore on customers who needed to replace a sequin on a party gown.

Now, work and life collide. Township residents call the Biehls in California to talk in the middle of the night. A German man once flew to Cape Town and begged Linda and Peter to smooth things over with the South African woman who had dumped him--They were Amy Biehl’s parents. She would listen to them!

Linda and Peter have built a life in Cape Town, where the vineyards and rocky coast remind them of Carmel. They are at home there--they have good friends, have found a favorite restaurant-- but it’s hard to feel at home in a city that still promotes an annual black talent show called the “Coon Celebration.” Here, they can’t believe the middle-class white residents who lock phones and refrigerators so the hired help won’t steal. Here, they have lunch at the home of a white U.S. diplomat, who snaps at her black domestic worker for taking the wrong plate away (Peter winked at him).

Until last November, Linda and Peter had gone with escorts into the townships. Now they drive alone to gritty places like Nyanga, past sangomas--traditional root healers--who sit at plywood stands stocked with porcupine quills. They love being here, for Amy, and for themselves. Says Linda: “I’ve told people that it’s not just her work. . . .” Peter interrupts: “No, it’s not her work. It’s her work, it’s our work.”

A Big Project

In Cape Town, Linda and Peter are scheduled for an afternoon interview at a hip new radio station. The talk show host, Gaye, a sunny woman with blond hair, threw off her headset and turned to them. “So you’re here for the anniversary or. . . .” Maybe it was the anniversary of Amy’s death?

No, no, Peter explained on the air. Until now, they’ve had a few small projects going. Now they have a big one. The Amy Biehl Foundation recently was awarded a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development for a violence prevention project. Details are pending, but they want to work with kids in the townships near Cape Town, including Guguletu, where Amy’s killers lived. My God, Amy’s killers were just kids--maybe if they had some sort of community support, who knows?

Besides the USAID plans, the foundation has started a golf project in Khayelitsha, a shantytown of 700,000 that is 20 miles outside of Cape Town. As an anti-violence project, they want to open a driving range there. . . . Gaye put up a hand. “Whoa, whoa!” she said. “Violence prevention? Khayelitsha! Driving range?”

Khayelitsha sits on sand dunes. The land swells with heaps of rusted tin and cardboard scraps cobbled into shacks with no electricity or running water. But the Biehls see something else. They see kids playing golf, an elitist sport here, and one more white wall felled. They see donors offering building materials and contributions, and contractors hiring residents to build the project.

On an overcast afternoon, a couple of days after the radio interview, the Biehls met with township golfers.

One of them was a gangly 24-year-old in a baseball cap, an ex-caddy at a whites-only golf course. After hours, he would climb the fence and play with steel pipes twisted into clubs. Another was a lanky 45-year-old in a sweatshirt and jeans. He and other unemployed men are known as streetwalkers because they loiter with nothing to do. Today, there was something to do. He was meeting with the Biehls about their 17-acre project. He opened his notebook and carefully wrote: “Khayelitsha Golf Club.”

Linda and Peter hooked up with the golfers last year through a news photographer. This is how they work--stumble across a need and jump in. That means they are sometimes stretched thin and without focus. Advisors tell them to come up with a strategic plan, but who has time to write one?

Two years ago, for instance, the Biehls arranged for Solange Jacobs, the daughter of Amy’s Cape Town roommate, to study at Rolling Hills Preparatory School in Palos Verdes and live with a local family (Solange is now a sophomore at Stanford University).

Last year, in a handwritten fax, Linda and Peter pitched the idea of running an anti-violence project to USAID, the government agency that awards foreign aid. The agency’s head, J. Brian Atwood, had worked with Amy at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Washington. Atwood was intrigued. He was a little worried that Linda and Peter lacked experience in social work. But the symbolic value of the Biehls returning to work in South Africa. Now that was something.

Part of the USAID grant will go to their bakery project run by volunteers in Guguletu and other townships. In a donated space, local companies have agreed to train residents to bake white bread and organize a business. Linda and Peter want soccer kids and others to be selling and delivering more than 3,000 loaves a day, door-to-door, mostly to shacks with no addresses.

On most Sundays, Peter and Linda attend services at St. Gabriel’s Church, where the choir sways to handmade marimbas. This is South Africa’s poorest Anglican parish, the neighborhood where Amy was killed. No one called police the night of her attack, although dozens witnessed the stoning. Some of them are here praying. When he’s in the neighborhood, Peter thinks: My God, why didn’t anyone help her?

Trips to Townships

Did you see the train station? Peter asked. I saw it, Linda said. In separate cars, they had passed the Guguletu train station where Amy’s killers had stopped off, five years ago. . . . And then it was on to the next meeting, the next idea.

That morning, the Biehls met with two music teachers at an elementary school. One of them, David Shuping, 34, is a slight, quiet man in a cardigan who learned English by listening to the radio. He was not surprised to see the Biehls return to Guguletu. He thinks of a Basotho phrase when he sees them: Ukonakala kwenya kukulunga kwenya. Out of the ruins, good will come.

Shuping and the other teacher dream of opening a music school in Langa, a nearby township. They unrolled a worn blueprint of their dream, for which they have no money. The blueprint is 10 years old.

Peter is usually upbeat, but on such days, his spirits droop. Where the hell would they find the money for such a school?

Still, Peter doesn’t think that they take too much on. “Well, it doesn’t worry me necessarily. There’s only so much you can do. . . . But you need to listen. What’s bad to say is, ‘No, I can’t, don’t have the time.’ That’s wrong.”

So, in back-to-back working meals, through offerings of sheep’s head stew, they listen. They are the first to tell experts and township residents: We don’t know what we’re doing, we’re here to learn from you.

On a cool evening, a news photographer arranged a meeting for them in Mannenberg, a township ruled by hard-core gangs. Perched under bullet-pocked windows, their backs against a cinder-block wall, nine members of the Wonder Kids gang stared as Linda and Peter approached. One of them had triple hoop earrings; another wore a Georgetown University cap. They turned to an interpreter, who translated the Biehls’ questions into Afrikaans. Any advice for their anti-violence program? The young men looked at one another.

The awkward moment was broken by a wrinkled woman who approached with a rickety chair for Linda. A girl with a red ribbon in her hair grabbed the back of the chair so it wouldn’t falter on the dusty streets. Linda sank into the chair gratefully in a black dress, silk scarf, stockings and flats.

Darkness began to fall, and the Biehls moved on to a group of youth leaders. What do you want, more sports, what? Linda asked a lanky, sweet-faced young man in a track suit. Mark, 20, is a high school dropout raised by a single mother. He is one of the few who speaks English well. What are your dreams? The teenager fingered his jacket zipper and rocked on the balls of his feet. His dream is to be a lawyer, he said, looking Linda straight in the eye.

That night, Linda dreamed about looking up, up into a half-moon of black faces, endless pleading faces. The one that stuck in her mind was Mark’s. He doesn’t have the money for school fees to finish his last year. She and Peter talked about it. Why not pay his fees, about $40, directly to the school, as a scholarship from the foundation? They would ask him to write a proposal and commit to finishing. Later that week, Linda and Peter met Mark for brunch in Cape Town. He was excited; he would love to go back to school. Afterward, he kissed Linda goodbye on the cheek.

On other trips to Mannenberg, the Biehls asked around about Mark. Turns out he hangs out with a bad crowd. Turns out he may be wanted for murder. They never hear from him again.

Life in Palm Springs

The Biehls live on a golf course near Palm Springs in a gated complex with fountains and flower beds. They moved to La Quinta because they wanted a simpler life after Amy died and the other kids left home.

Their three-bedroom condominium is neat and warm, filled with Southwestern and Mexican antiques and candles. On walks, Hannah, their chubby black Labrador, sniffs out stray balls, which Linda collects in a wicker basket for the golfers in Khayelitsha.

In a small home office, they run the foundation from folding tables piled high with files on South Africa and Peter’s business papers. Through contributions and fund-raisers, the foundation has raised more than $50,000. The Biehls, though, pay for their travel and phone calls to South Africa.

Their two daughters, Kim, 32, and Molly, 28, want to carry on the foundation’s work. Neither is surprised by her parents’ drive or forgiveness; they aren’t angry at the men who killed Amy either.

All three children say they are proud of their parents. But sometimes they wish that their parents were around more and that the family could go back to being just the family. Not a day goes by, says Kim, when someone doesn’t note her name tag at Neiman Marcus in Newport Beach and ask, aren’t you the sister of that girl?

“Yes,” says Kim, “my parents are the parents of Amy Biehl, which is their new job, but they’re also the same people. They’re my parents. They’re Molly’s parents, and they’re Zach’s parents. From a selfish standpoint, there are times when I just feel like, could this just stop for a little bit?”

Last November, Linda and Peter visited South Africa, dashed home for Thanksgiving and then returned, two weeks later, to meet Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Cape Town.

“I was mad,” Kim says. “I was very angry. I said, ‘What do these people think you are, made of money . . . that you can just drop everything and travel 27 hours to South Africa?’ ”

Linda and Peter don’t want to talk too much about South Africa with the kids. Or with neighbors in the desert, where conversation revolves around golf, the weather and the stock market. How do they tell someone over a cocktail about the first time they met the mother of Amy’s killer in her concrete block house and then saw a rainbow outside?

They talk about scattering her ashes in South Africa someday.

“I feel very connected with Amy there,” Peter says. “I reconnect with her there. Because to me, she’s there rather than here.”

Linda thought that Amy led the kind of life she herself might have, had she not grown up at a time when young women didn’t go galloping across continents. As a kid in the Midwest, Linda would look at a map of the world, way across to Africa, down to its southernmost point. So far away. The year Amy died, she stood at that very spot, at the country’s tip, the Cape of Good Hope, where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet. It was spiritual, mystical, chilling: The world was coming together at one point in Africa, the mother of us all.

Researchers Lois Hooker and Sheila A. Kern contributed to this story.