My biological father spent the majority of his adult life
incarcerated for one thing or another. At some point he was institutionalized…
maybe he was born that way. I just don’t know. He was the youngest of his
siblings, with around 40 years between his age and the next to youngest
sibling. They said he was spoiled rotten and likely had little direction with
aging parents and no other siblings in the house.
My mother divorced him while he was behind bars. She married
again, divorced, and remarried by the time I was five. My biological father
gave up his parental rights at her request and her husband adopted me. Years
later, I reconnected with my biological father, realizing that my dad was not
my birth father, and we began writing each other often. I was 12 years old and
he was incarcerated again. Over the next five years, he was in and out of
prison more than once. I would have to look back over the letters to piece
together exactly how many times. I remember him going to Texarkana and not telling me where he was
going that time, because he was afraid I would try to go see him.
In 1989, I was 17, he was on parole, and having only a few
months of freedom, he caught a charge. This time, it was far more serious than
any other time. He had been drinking and had a firearm. He had been in an
argument with a female and someone called the police. I do not know exactly
what happened. However, he received multiple charges, including attempted first-degree
murder, aggravated assault of a law enforcement officer, and unlawful carrying
of a weapon. The police chased him and he likely shot at them and missed. They
returned fire and he took a bullet in the abdomen. He was not a good man, he
worse a worse husband I’m told repeatedly, and an absent father, but he was
still a human being with rights, even incarcerated. He had parents and he had
children. To anyone else, he was just a convict, but I am his youngest child.
Within a few weeks of my bio-father being locked up in Wichita County Jail, I
was invited to participate in a drum & bugle corps in Hutchinson , Kansas
From what I can tell, over the next 8 ½ years, he was
transferred from one state to another, from one facility to another, from one
cell to another, from general population to solitary confinement SIXTEEN DIFFERENT
TIMES. My mother always said they moved him around so he didn’t get to know a
place long enough to plan an escape. Being a teenager, I didn’t know a thing
about the system so I didn’t question her story. She didn’t know what was
really going on, either.
In 1994, I was married and had a baby. My bio father, Richard,
began calling me collect several times a day, asking me to make long-distance
calls to his attorney in Kansas .
He was very agitated and nervous when we talked. He seemed panicky and I didn’t
realize what was happening to him, nor did he explain. Nevertheless, I was very
busy being a young mother, and was soon to be raising a child alone, so I lost
contact with him. I received a Christmas card about a year or two later from
him then nothing more.
For the next decade, however, I was constantly searching for
my two siblings, whom I had met once at the age of 18, then lost touch with
them as well. It was difficult to establish a meaningful and consistent
relationship with them, having grown up without even knowing about them. They
were both older than me and had families of their own. My search for them also included
the search for any new information about my father. I didn’t know where he was
incarcerated anymore and didn’t really know how to find a federal inmate. I
always did an online query for inmates through the Bureau of Prisons, but his
name never returned anything. I looked them all up on google but never found
anything. Every few months, I did public data searches on all of them and never
found anything until January 2004. And this time, I made a heartbreaking
discovery. He was dead.
