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"Hello and thank you for logging on to the web site.
I would like to tell you everything I go through in one day, but I doubt I have the space, :) just let me assure you it isn't as bad as HBO (Oz).
I live in a room with 3 other women, we do not have cells here. I also live with 2 dogs currently.
My full time job is dog training. They live in the room with us, they have a crate.
The dog I had been training since March, Tory, recently left. He graduated and will now be a service dog. I am quite proud of him, but miss him terribly.
I am currently training his younger brother, Nelson (I call him Nelly). Nelson is quite a handful. Tory was very mature by the time he left, so training Nelly is sort of like starting all the way over with a newborn.
It is a constant challenge, but one that is very rewarding.
I would really like to thank all of you for your messages. While I am not able to have access to the internet, I do receive your messages and appreciate them dearly. I cannot even begin to tell you how much your support and encouragement means to me.
Thank you."
Stacey |
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| Stacey's writing |
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Stone walls
by Stacey Lannert (written in 1993) |
| "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage ......" |
| Lines from a poem written centuries ago -- but time has not erased the truth in those words. |
| My name is Stacey Ann, I am 21, and in prison for killing my father-perpetrator. For ten (10) years, I allowed him to keep me in his own twisted prison before I finally broke free. |
| The abuse started when I was eight (8) years old, continuing until the night of his death. Only disassociation allowed me to endure his abuse. It was easy, then to push everything I didn't want to think about out of my mind, and to concentrate only upon my dream world. |
| Why did I endure the abuse for so long and then finally strike back? To answer that, I must think, think about the past. I must force my mind to go backward to the past, instead of forward. The past......how much of it do I really remember? To me, rain, still sounds like distant voices hidden away in my mind for all this time, wanting to be heard again -- to make me understand what was really said that night. At first, it returns to me in fragments, then, suddenly a flood of memories that overwhelm and almost drown me. Sheer rage. Sheer rage overcame me causing me to strike out at him with any weapon I could think of. I had to end the cycle and I had to end it NOW! I was angry, frightened, and confused. I felt fear surge through me, wiping out my rage. |
| He did not know, and would not remember any of his words or actions that night. He never remembered, but I always did. I just couldn't take anymore, and I was afraid of him. That night, he had become violent, and I could almost smell his anger. "Careful," a voice in my mind warned me. I managed somehow by some instinct I didn't know I possessed to make all the correct responses that he expected of me and even to smile at the right time. Yet I knew that it had to end. |
| Later that night, I returned to our house and shot him while he was passed out. That is how you kill a beast -- when it is least offensive, only I missed and he awoke. I don't remember firing the second shot, and I am thankful that I don't. However, I do remember the sigh of his last breath, that still haunts me in my dreams. |
| There are certain things that I would rather not remember, and others that I want to go over and over savoring. Like when he would just be my daddy and he'd hold me, talk to me, or just call me his tiger in a loving voice. Then, I felt as if I could go back to being a child again, a child who had stumbled into adulthood too fast and had found its way back to what was comfortable and familiar. |
| If only I could have stayed in that old, safe world! But, it was I who had purposefully broken out of my glass bubble, and I who had come to the bitter realization that nothing could or would ever be the same again no matter how hard I wished it could be. |
| There was no turning back. My father would brutally rape me. At times, he thought I was my mother and would punish her for hurting him. But, it wasn't her, it was always me. Feeling him lean over me and the hard pressure of his body against mine would automatically cause me to close my eyes and attempt to close my mind. This was a man -- a stranger -- not my father. Inside myself, I wanted to cry desperately, but at some time and somehow, I had forgotten how. Instead of releasing feelings, I had learned how to hide by crawling inside myself and living there, while my other, outside self acted and reacted as it had to in order to survive. Eventually, I had begun to feel as if I was turning into a puppet, moving on strings because I didn't have the strength to move on my own. |
| I lived in a dream world. How different waking; rational thoughts are from dream images which are thin and wove from imagination. Dreams are dreams and reality is what one has to live with from day to day, but at that time, I couldn't and didn't want to, until he changed. |
| Changes! Why is it that life is made up of so many changes! Everything changes without warning, especially my father's mood. |
| Shortly before my crime, my father became increasingly violent. After raping me one night, he was smiling in a certain way while he hurled hateful words......a smile that made me frightened, and that still frightens me to this day. I could read in both anger and violence and......something more. God, something even more terrifying, that I would rather not think of. I tried to crawl into that hiding space in my mind, but I stopped short feeling my body tense and getting a sudden shiver. For I had been permitted to see into the twisted tortured depths of my father's soul, and I couldn't stop from hearing both the child and woman within me screaming from sheer panic. |
| I wanted to run, to run blindly until I would suddenly fall into some unknown place that I neither knew nor understood, but I couldn't escape from him any longer. I knew the day would come when I had to fight back. |
| There were so many other things and so many other explosions leading up to this. It's over now, thank God, but now I am still without my freedom. |
| I am not that same, barely eighteen year old girl who understood nothing. I am now a mature woman of twenty-one who has learned enough self-discipline to think dispassionately instead of being driven by something primitive and mindless into some action. |
| There is no point for repeating past mistakes that occurred in my life, for it is done and over with. It is the future and only the future that I will concern myself with. Making sure that I never again find myself in the same situation like the one I was forced to survive. |
| This account doesn't have a happy ending, because now I have to serve a life without parole sentence. I still have my appeals, but I need help from other incest survivors. |
| *** |
| Thank you for listening, or rather reading and please remember that no matter how rough it gets -- DON'T do what I did. Two wrongs don't make a right, and it seems the perpetrator can reach out from beyond the grave and hurt you even more......through the justice system. |
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