Digging Up The Truth

When I stepped off the plane, I actually did kiss the ground. Then I headed home to surprise my folks. I had fibbed to them about the exact day I would return from Vietnam. First stop, Genio’s Cafe in Burbank. My mom was the harried lunchtime hostess coming from the back dining room, and I was just some impatient GI who wouldn’t “Wait to Be Seated.” She shook her head in frustration--she didn’t really focus on my face until she was 15 feet away. I think my scrawny attempt at a mustache threw her off, but then she looked me in the eyes. She gasped, she screamed and started running. She flung the menus she was carrying into the air and catapulted herself into my arms. It took the customers a beat or two to piece together what was happening. Then they all stood and applauded.

As memorable as that was, my encounter with my stepfather later that day was even more so. What I would learn that day would trouble me for the next 30 years.

“Surprise! I’m home!” He looked up at me from his recliner with those penetrating grayish-blue eyes--eyes that had sent chills through me so many times in the decade he had been in our lives. He gave me that silent stare. I expected something akin to “Welcome home,” but instead he greeted me with one of those questions that was really his way of picking a fight: “When are you going to cut off that goddamn mustache?”

Now I was the one who was surprised--add to that incredulous and hurt. I tried not to react, but he kept poking at me with more insults. It was when I asked him if I could use the car that he pushed me over the top. “Do you think you’re grown up enough to borrow the car?”

For the first time in my life, I faced him down. You see, from the time he married my mom when I was 10, he had reigned as the undisputed power. I addressed him as “Sir,” or else. He was always bigger, so I didn’t dare challenge him. Those eyes alone could make me buckle in fear. But not this time. I told him that I’d just spent a year dodging mortars and rockets and bullets and putting up with jungle rot, monster mosquitoes, cold showers and outdoor latrines. “I’ve already been through hell, and I’m not going to put up with it here,” I said.

Zowie! For about three seconds I was the king. Then he not only dethroned me, he also chopped off my head--at least his words did.

“You don’t know what hell is,” he said. Those eyes now seemed to cut right through me. “You don’t know what it’s like to follow some older idiots and end up in prison for 15 years. Don’t tell me about hell!”

Any details he provided were lost on me. I was too dazed. I recall him saying something about teenagers knocking over a gas station, but I’m not sure. I am sure that I spent the next 30 years imagining how his jail time might have accounted for his treatment of me. It certainly accounted for his two crooked fingers. It explained why he never voted and why guns were taboo in our house. And maybe I could even understand why he would become almost enraged if I blindly followed any group. And then there was his homophobia.

We never talked about it again. He died five years later. Strangely, it’s been in the 25 years since that I’ve felt the need to talk with him--to tap into his life experiences and street wisdom. A couple of times I’ve awakened in a sweat after being face to face with him in a dream. I couldn’t escape those eyes.

It wasn’t fair the way he had treated me. And I’m sure it was my reaction to that unfairness that eventually led me to investigative journalism, a profession that empowers me to root out unfairness and injustice. How does the saying go? “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable?”

But it was not until two years ago that I steered my skills to my own life. My mother had recently passed away. A trusted psychologist cautioned me that secrets from the past could be overwhelming, but I had to do it.

All I knew was his name, Edward C. Ripley, and his date of birth in 1910. I was pretty sure he was from Illinois. My mother was his second wife. Or so I thought. I tracked down his prison file at the Illinois state archives: Edward C. Ripley, Inmate B-442.

The first thing I saw were the mug shots of a 20-year-old kid in a coat and tie and round spectacles. Chills swept over me. Those eyes were looking through me again. Then a strange realization hit me--I was now the 50-year-old looking at the 20-year-old.

With each page I turned, I learned more shocking things about the man who had raised me. It wasn’t a handful of teenagers at a gas station--it was three grown men and 19-year-old Edward C. Ripley pulling off what today we’d call a home invasion robbery of a farmhouse in Evansville, Ill. And it was my stepfather who tied up the couple, the grandparents, even the grandchildren, and held a loaded revolver on them while the other men ransacked the house. They fled with $40,000 in negotiable bonds, a fortune in 1930 dollars.

That wasn’t all. Before this heist, he had embezzled $10,000 from a bank in St. Louis and was suspected in at least one bank robbery. This was the guy who’d occasionally use his belt to paint red stripes on my bare backside, the guy who one time decked me with a punch in the face when I came home late for dinner.

The file also showed he had quit high school at age 15 and gone to work at a bank so that he could support his alcoholic, abusive father, his dying mother and two younger brothers. When the bank collapsed in 1929, he went to work at another bank just long enough to steal the $10,000. Then came the home robbery.

The file recorded that he served 11 years of hard time and was paroled in 1941, and noted at the time of his final release in 1945: “He was divorced in 1944 and then married Pauline, his present wife. He has one son, David, age three years.” David? My sister and I dimly recalled hearing in childhood that we had a half-brother named Richard. Was this yet another son? One born to yet another wife?

When I made the call to Bismarck, N.D., a man answered. “I’m looking for the David Peter Ripley who was born in Illinois to an Edward C. Ripley,” I said. There was silence. “Uh, yes, that’s me.” I told him that I was pretty sure his father had brought me up and that he had passed away 25 years ago. David’s voice quivered slightly as he said, “I’ve been looking for him for 50 years.”

David had known about the prison time--his mother had told him the gas station story. And he knew his father had left them for another woman. We talked for hours over the next couple of days and decided we had to find Richard. My sister remembered hearing that he had gone to college at Texas A&M.; The university confirmed that a Richard Ray Ripley had graduated back in the 1960s, and that he was last reported living in Port Lavaca, Texas. He, too, was listed, and was equally shocked and thrilled to hear from me. He had known about the previous marriage and a possible half-brother, but knew nothing about the prison time.

I quickly put him in touch with David, and within a month they decided to fly to Los Angeles so we could meet. When I looked at Richard for the first time, it was like looking at my stepfather. The same mouth, chin, nose, posture. But not the eyes. Instead, David had those eyes, that piercing look. He was smiling when we met, but the eyes could see right through me.

Because I write books on the subject, I had accepted an invitation to teach classes--in this case to law enforcement officers in Sacramento--on how to use public records to find people and research their backgrounds. My two brothers made the long drive with me. They sat in the back of a class as I told of the search. At the end, I introduced my guests as my brothers. The class broke into applause. Many officers had tears in their eyes. I know I did.

As the story of my father’s life came into focus, we learned he had married four times: to David’s mother, to Richard’s mother, to a woman with whom he moved to California but bore him no children, and to my mother.

We dropped David off at a relative’s house in San Francisco. He gave me the hug neither of us ever remembered getting from Edward C. Ripley. We vowed to be brothers forever. Those penetrating eyes suddenly had new meaning; they were loving and accepting.

Then Richard and I drove back to Burbank. Like his father, he didn’t say much, other than to offer occasional words of wisdom, advice, encouragement. The next morning I took him to the airport. We hugged and avoided eye contact. I stood on the roof of the parking garage and watched his plane disappear. When I got home I looked again at the mug shots of Edward C. Ripley. Now I see the warm eyes and friendly faces of my two stepbrothers.

I’ve stopped looking for someone to be my father. And I tell people today not to mess with me “or my two older brothers will come here and kick your butt.”