From Unimaginable Grief, a Reason to Go On

MERCED, Calif. -- She went out for a walk on a spring morning a year ago and, when she returned, everything about her life had been changed.

Just beyond the front door in a well-to-do neighborhood here, Christine McFadden found the bodies of her four children, all shot by her former husband. After killing the teenagers, ages 17, 15 and 14, he killed the youngest, 5-year-old Michelle, and then himself.

When the funeral was over and the house full of guests had emptied, McFadden made her life bearable by making a promise to herself: If her pain hadn’t eased by a certain date, she said, it would be OK to take her own life. Before that day, though, she would dedicate whatever purpose she had left to honor her children.

Last week, the 45-year-old veterinarian returned to the high school her two oldest children had attended and announced a $250,000 gift -- in the names of Melanie, Stanley, Stuart and Michelle -- to the library at the still-to-be-built UC Merced.

She had taken out a loan on her house to come up with the money and vowed to give tens of thousands of dollars more -- from the children’s trust and memorial funds -- to award college scholarships to local high school grads.

“I feel so strongly that these murders have nothing to do with who my children were and what they dreamed,” McFadden said in a recent interview. “They were amazing kids with bright futures, and there’s no better way to memorialize them than for me to give to education.”

She talks about the last 11 months, even the tug of suicide, without self-pity. The date she has set is something she keeps to herself. She attributes her matter-of-fact tone to the four mood-altering medications she takes each day. But don’t let it fool you, she says. “Instead of crying a dozen times throughout the day, I cry only once or twice.”

Of all the horrors short of war or genocide, she has tried to find a tragedy that compares to hers. Not as a way to feel superior in her grief, she says, but to encounter mothers or fathers who have managed to find their way out of such darkness. She is still looking.

The drugs, no matter how powerful, have failed to numb all the anger she harbors toward her second husband, John P. Hogan, a former Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputy who was working as a private investigator at the time of the killings.

He appeared to be a good father to little Michelle and a decent stepfather to the older three. He and McFadden had divorced a year earlier, and she made sure to invite him to Michelle’s birthdays and school events. They were planning to color Easter eggs together the following weekend. There were no fights, she said, no threats.

“As far as foreseeing anything like this, my God -- I still don’t understand why. He knew my routine, knew when I left the house to take a walk. It’s clear that he wanted to destroy me.”

Her friends still treat her with delicate hands, wondering how much they should talk about the children, wanting to spare her any sad memories. And yet she has chosen to remain in the same house where they lived and died.

“Everywhere blood has been spilled or spattered, they cut holes in the carpet and lift it out,” she explained in a May 2002 letter to her former classmates at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

“If they can’t clean the walls, they just remove the door framing. And they re-carpet your whole house, and they repaint, and you buy new beds and bedding and put rooms back together for people who will never come home again.

“In the process, they sanitize things and you lose a little more of the very people you’re trying to find. The people, my children, that I feel lost without and can’t let go of.”

They were handsome children with wide open futures. Melanie, 17, the first-born, her mother’s “Golden Girl,” was set to graduate with a 4.5 grade point average. She had taken honors and Advanced Placement courses and excelled in ballet as preparation for her dream of attending Stanford University. She was killed with a bullet that tore through the prom dress she had bought a week earlier on a field trip to San Francisco.

Stanley, 15, also an honors student, stood 6-foot-2 and played catcher on the baseball team and lineman on the football team. He had a sense of humor that belied his age. “Stan looked most like my father, who was a retired colonel in the Marines,” McFadden said. “He was very popular.”

Stuart, 13 months younger, was a fiery kid who wouldn’t back down from his older brother. He was the most social of the children, dancing with the pretty and not-so-pretty girls at the school sock hops. He was his youngest sister’s tormentor and protector, roaring through the house in a scary impression of T-Rex and then tucking her into bed at night. Three days before the murders, he played soccer in a state championship.

Michelle, 5, was the happiest of the brood. “Because she was the youngest by so many years, the older ones lavished her with a lot of love,” McFadden said. “She radiated it all back. She was sunshine.”

McFadden has yet to return to the Merced veterinary clinic she built four years ago. Her colleagues tend to the dogs and cats, zoo animals and birds that were her specialty. She and her psychiatrist have talked about her trying to return this summer, but she’s not sure she’ll be strong enough.

“This is my whole life now, trying to raise money for the foundation. I’ve been told that, to do all the things I want to do in the children’s names, I need to raise $3 million.”

Last week, UC Merced Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey said the $250,000 donation would help build the library’s fourth-floor reading room, and the entrance would celebrate the lives of McFadden’s children. The money would also fund a garden on the roof of the third floor. “I am touched that Dr. McFadden has chosen UC Merced as a partner in this legacy,” the chancellor said.

McFadden is planning a celebrity golf tournament April 11 in Thousand Oaks to raise more money for the McFadden-Willis Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit that she hopes to use to give dozens of college scholarships and other gifts. “I don’t care about me or my life,” she said. “I’ve given myself permission to go, if that’s what I need to do. But in the meantime, I’ve got this duty.”