The Rough Years

We moved into our new house and office in 1970 and about that same time
things started to go bad professionally and personally.
One of the problems that physicians encounter is delayed payment from third party payers ( insurance companies). This greatly affects cash flow and with salaries, expenses and taxes being on going it becomes impossible to stay current with debt. I soon was behind in payments on loans and than taxes which provoked an IRS audit. From there things went downhill since even after getting a payment agreement with them, I defaulted the terms.
With this going on it began to affect my marriage and led to a separation and later divorce.
Now I was burdened with maintaining living space for myself, the new house and the new office. My architect partners in the office were having a down turn in business which eventually led to foreclosure on the building. So in the midst of all this, I had to move to a new office.
An opportunity arose that fortuitously got me thru some of the financial hardships. The Supreme Court legalized abortions in January 1973 and I established the first abortion clinic in Indiana in July 1973. This was something that I had felt was necessary since during my residency I saw my share of horribly botched abortions some leading to death and I had no philosophical or religious reluctance to do them.
The clinic was a way for me to give up OB and concentrate on my Gyn office and surgical practice.
I also remarried and we had a new baby girl, Becky who brought a new dimension to my life. Things were looking up! We moved into a town house and were soon joined by my stepson Lenny.
To go back in time a little ways, my father and mother and brother had lived in Evansville for all these years and Evansville was going through a recession that had really crimped my Dad’s practice. He took a job with the VA hospital and they moved to Indianapolis 1965. My favorite Aunt Madeline had retired and moved from DC to join my parents. They had decided to build a new house about the time I moved out of mine. So both of our lives appeared to be on the upswing. As I have learned, life is a series of peaks and valleys and I was about to go through the deepest valley imaginable.
On the morning of August 7, 1975, I was at the hospital and my secretary said my Aunt wanted me to call her right a way. When I called she said she had called my wife Rena to see if she had talked to my mother that morning because my mother was not answering the phone and they talked daily at around 10AM, so she went out to the garage of the apartment building where they lived to see if my Dad’s car was gone, thinking they had gone on a errand. She said the car was in its parking space. I told her to get someone in management to open the apartment and I would be right over. Driving over I had this premonition that something bad had happened. My thoughts were that both of them wouldn’t have had some dire medical problem at the same time so what could have happened.
When I pulled up in front of the apartment building my apprehensions were worsened because there were several police cars at the curb with flashing lights. They lived on the first floor in a garden apartment and as I ran down the hall I saw my aunt slumped against the wall crying and as I approached she said “ Burley, Gwen and Earle are dead. ” At that moment I was paralyzed. A police officer stopped me and said I couldn’t go in the apartment until the crime lab comes. So my aunt and I went to sit in the neighbor’s apartment next door waiting for the investigators to finish. She was trying to tell me what she found when she went in with the maintenance man. As I recall I arrived at about 11AM and it wasn’t until around 2PM that they asked me to come make an identification. I had called my wife and brother who was in school in Bloomington. And now I sat trying to comfort my aunt about something I didn’t even know what.
A detective came and got me and said they had been brutally murdered and was I able to go in and identify them. I indicated that I could and as I climbed the stairs to the 2nd floor hallway I saw a hand sticking through the banister railing and steady myself to go on up. When I looked down the hall the carpet was soaked and the wall splattered with blood and there they lay in their night clothes stabbed innumerable times. The details are imprinted in my brain and I don’t want to describe the horrible picture I will carry to the day I die. I told the detective that they were my parents and staggered back to join my aunt and await my brothers arrival from Bloomington.
I had to get home to my wife and baby and I told my aunt she had to come with me so pack some things and we would go as soon as the police allowed us to. Because I had friends on the police force the murder was made a priority and by the time I arrived home many of my friends were calling or at the house.
I remember having this overwhelming sadness and wanting to cry but couldn’t and I was standing on my patio with one of my best friends and he said let it out and I wept in his grasp like I had never done before. My mother and father had reached a place in their lives where they were getting ready to enjoy the fruits of their labor……two sons raised and seven grandchildren between us; me with six children and Bruce with one and now their lives extinqished by a later to be an unsolved murder.
The stress of all this was not immediately evident and as I tried to take charge of their burial, cooperate with the police investigation and care for my aunt, I noticed that I was having anxiety attacks. At this time in my life I was a heavy smoker so between the cigarettes and the alcohol I was drinking to cool out, I noticed I would have these occasions of rapid heartbeat. This had happened before when I drank too much and I ignored it……too much to do and arrange and I was the only one that could physically and financially handle it all. My aunt was a basket case and my wife was recovering from recent surgery. The funeral was planned for August 11th which was a Monday and because of their disfigurement it was to be a closed casket service.
The morning of the funeral as I was getting dressed, I started feeling weak and dizzy and decided to lay down for a minute in the guest bedroom not wanting to disturb my wife. I asked a doctor friend to take my pulse and it was over 240/min. On the morning of my parents funeral they rushed me to the hospital with a cardiac arrhythmia, me thinking, is this how all this ends.
Until I wrote these words I haven’t recounted any of this to anyone or even gone over it in my mind. I am not a religious person so I cursed no god but I have never felt after their brutal deaths that life had much further meaning to me. I had escaped early death with tuberculosis and now my parents suffer death by murder so what ever becomes of me now is welcomed.
Whatever happens to me I look at as being on borrowed time from that day in August 1975. Much of me died along with them.
I did promise my aunt that as a kind of memorial to them I would finish the dream house they were so eager to build. That is the story that follows.