Remembering Lisa French: Living With Horror, But Still Living

FOND DU LAC, WI — I use the dateline near my hometown because that is where I am when I see the name "Lisa French" in a headline at Halloween. Trauma can do that.

A girl my age disappeared on Halloween, and for days, we held our breath, waiting for what could only be bad news. The story went national, long before there was an Internet. Lisa French's body was found four days later.

At Halloween, Patch publishes maps that identify the residences of sex offenders based on public, mandated registries. This practice was criticized three years ago by a reader who pointed out that the man who heinously raped and murdered Lisa French and left her body in a field was not a known sex offender on that awful Halloween in 1973. Sex offender registries and maps would not have prevented the death of 9-year-old Lisa French, the writer argued, because Gerald Turner had no such prior record of offenses.

Sex offender registries did not yet exist at this time. They do now.

Maps that tell us where a registered sex offender lives serve a purpose, even if they fall short of the full intention for their existence. They are information. Parents can decide to go to that red-tabbed house, or not.

The local trauma this Patch reader writes of was my trauma. I was only months older than Lisa French, living in a smaller town, close by. We drove to Fond du Lac often for shopping. The details of her death were unfathomable to me at 10, and are not any easier to comprehend today. Trick-or-treat fun ended that year for me. I was never a kid again at Halloween.

It was a long move out of the horror of Halloween 1973, and the memory of that little girl my age. There was no special counseling made available at schools. No one asked us about our feelings. When I saw the photo of Lisa French this week, my mind also saw the photo of her rapist and killer, Gerald Turner, that had appeared in newspapers. It's burned in my brain, and comes with a cold chill.

Yet, I've moved out of paralyzing fear. In the twists and turns of graduate student life, I was a case worker for a short time — for sex offenders. Nine men lived in a designated group home with high fences and warning signs on the gates, subject to random visits by probation officers. It was a dirty job that someone had to do. My duties included checking in on the "S.O.'s" to see if they were making their counseling visits and taking their medications. Most had jobs. I had access to their files and found in them a disturbing mixture of the unimaginably sad and the terrible. Sex offenders are often grown-up rape and abuse victims, a sickening fact that doesn't make anything OK, but means we have to ask how we can possibly make something better of something so bad.

Was I afraid? Never. Reading through cases histories I was appalled and disturbed at times, but I had to reconcile that with the human sitting in the chair by my desk. I think that is our work as communities. What do we do about "those" neighbors?

Crimes that will land a convicted person on a sex offender registry don't come with life sentences, so sex offenders will be back. Laws requiring their registration and making their residence known are for the benefit of communities.

Do the registries and maps "mean absolutely nothing," since other sex offenders are out there, unidentified, anyway?

I don't think so. The sex offenders who were my "cases" needed to be accountable; it was a condition of their release based on the rarity of pedophile rehabilitation. Sex offender maps and registries inform us. With information we can make choices about our interaction with those neighbors.

We can live with less fear, and maybe enjoy trick-or-treating with our children.