DownloadMarch 23, 2009 issue
After murders, families find a healing path
By Emily Dougherty For Mennonite Weekly ReviewGOSHEN, Ind. — Four sisters — Ruth, Frieda, Bess and Suzy — have lived 40 years without their mother. Helen Klassen, a Sunday school teacher, was murdered March 14, 1969.
Bess Klassen-Landis, Ruth Klassen Andrews, Bill Pelke and Suzy Klassen are active in Journey to Hope, an organization for murder victims’ family members seeking alternatives to the death penalty. — Photo by Emily Dougherty/for MWR
Bill Pelke’s grandmother, Ruth Pelke, was killed by four teenage girls in Gary who robbed her house May 14, 1985.
These acts of violence devastated two families and, for the Klassen sisters, infected the years of their youth. Their path to adulthood was fraught with struggles of how to heal and when to forgive.
On March 15 at College Mennonite Church, Pelke and three of the Klassen sisters spoke about their evolution from fear and anger to healing and forgiveness. Their stories have been told around the world through Journey of Hope, an organization co-founded by Pelke and led by murder victims’ family members, such as the Klassens, who oppose the death penalty.
The Scream
Suzy Klassen was 11 in 1969 when she walked into their Elkhart home after school one Friday to find her mother raped and strangled. Klassen was the youngest in the family, and at that second she was set apart.
“From then on,” Klassen said, “I would live in a world where I had met evil face to face.”
The first time Klassen saw the painting “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, she was flabbergasted. It was like seeing a reflection of herself and the physical horror she confronted that day.
On Friday their mother had died. On Sunday the family returned home, seeing bullet holes in the floor and fingerprint powder on the walls. Monday was the funeral. Tuesday the girls returned to school.
After Helen Klassen’s death, family members lived on their own islands of grief, isolated from each other by pain and fear.
Comments
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Thank you for a sensitive, accurate summary of our service at College Mennonite Church. I hope many of your readers will find hope and healing through difficult experiences of their own, through the healing power of forgiveness.
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I, a teenage farmer, helping my father who was failing in health, started farming the field across the road from the Klassen house two years after the murder. I was somewhat fearful, even two years after the murder, as I came close to the house. I am glad for this story and the victory through forgiveness of the children. I did not remember that there was such a young daughter. I do not remember that it was reported what happened before the murder nor the type of murder. As I remember, they did not want to publish that information at the time.
I thought again of the murder as I read of Otto Klassen's recent death.
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To truly forgive is beyond the ability ofmost people who have been so sorely injured; you who have done so, stand tall with grace, love and dignity....with the deep knowledge that you are doing God's work. Quakers don't take their hats off for kings; I take my hat off to you
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