Where is My Mother’s Body?

She’s always felt blessed that she doesn’t suffer from nightmares, so when the dream began, it didn’t frighten her.

In the dream she’s lying very still, and all around her is sand. She looks to the right and there’s a small dune – the only feature in this barren landscape. The coyotes are coming from behind the dune. Their padded paws hit the hard surface of the desert floor. They’re panting. Some are yelping. And just when a coyote starts nipping at her fingertips, Terri Bowersock wakes up screaming.

Fortunately, it doesn’t horrify her anymore to think that she was experiencing what happened to her mother’s body somewhere out in the rugged Arizona desert.

She’s probably right. By now, coyotes have likely eaten Loretta Bowersock, a beautiful 69-year-old woman presumably killed and buried on December 14 by her longtime boyfriend. They’ve had six months, there was all that rain, and if anyone can find a meal in the desert, it’s the shallow-grave-robbing coyote.

Scattered bones are likely to be the only remains of Loretta ever found. Of course, considering the alternative, that would be merciful. Tempe police have gently – so very gently – informed Terri that coyotes only eat the fleshy part of a body, and there isn’t much flesh on a face.

Terri knows that fact as she and her friends search a stretch of desert that presumably was her mother’s last resting place. Of course, “resting” is a strange term to use, considering how the woman probably ended up dead and how badly her remains were probably treated. Police agree with the psychics and mediums that have flocked to this case that the end was violent. They’ve pieced together the evidence, and it points them to a place where the body is likely buried – those who rely on other types of evidence have “seen” the precise place where Loretta is buried, but Terri has done plenty of digging in those places, and her mother isn’t there.

Others have come to her, claiming far more success. One woman showed up on Terri’s doorstep with a sack of bones from the desert, declaring, “This is your mother.” Terri graciously took the sack and had it tested. It wasn’t her mom, but instead of being sickened that someone would do such a thing, she expresses gratitude that people care. And she’s moved that so many people have proved over the last six months how much they care – for both the woman who lost her life, and for her well-known daughter who has vowed to never stop searching.

Anyone who has ever loved a mother prays in one breath that Terri’s mother will be found, and in the next breath that it isn’t Terri who finds her. After everything she’s been through, she deserves to be spared from that.

The Ideal Mother-Daughter Team
Terri Bowersock has the familiarity of a sister – a face recognized from 20 years of TV ads and guest spots on morning shows and newspaper articles announcing her latest honor – so it isn’t surprising that her loss felt like a family tragedy.

Terri’s mother and partner in Terri’s Consign & Design Furniture was reported missing as Arizonans everywhere prepared for Christmas last year. Just 11 days before the holiday, Loretta Bowersock “disappeared” during a shopping trip to Tucson. At least, that’s the story her boyfriend of 18 years told.

Loretta, a former tennis pro, was familiar to anyone who had watched the amazing rise of the Terri’s business empire. It began in 1979 when mother and daughter borrowed $2,000 from grandma to open one store, where they bought and sold “gently used” furniture by day and delivered it in an old blue van by night – elegant Loretta worried they were too much like “Sanford and Son.” In the 25 years since, it has grown into a 16-store, coast-to-coast empire with $36 million in annual sales.

The success was even sweeter because it represented such a win over adversity – Terri is dyslectic and had grown up thinking she was “dumb” for not being able to read or write like her classmates. She found college impossible, and knew she’d have to support herself by creating a business, because, she says, “I couldn’t fill out a job application.” When she learned about consignment stores – at the time, most specialized in just one thing – she quickly envisioned the entire range of household needs, and her mother supported her dream.

Year after year, Terri’s was named the No. 1 female-owned business in Arizona, and Terri herself racked up dozens of other honors. She even won the national Avon Woman of Enterprise Award, landing on Oprah’s show to tell her story.

And through it all, Terri credited her mother. When she wrote a book on success, her dedication read: “An extra special thanks to you, Mom, for your love and support. You not only guided me as a child, but went above and beyond when you stuck with me as an adult and helped me find a way to support myself.”

To the rest of the world, these two were an enviable mother-daughter team. And they kept up that image, even when it fell apart.

Terri Gets Bilked by THE BOYFRIEND
Looking back now, the mother-daughter team started disintegrating when Taw Benderly came into their lives, and Terri was the one who set it in motion. Her mother was divorced and anxious to find another man. “My mother’s generation believed in standing by your man and white picket fences,” Terri says. “They weren’t women who wanted to be alone.”

Being a helpful daughter, Terri suggested her mother advertise for a roommate: “Executive woman, big home….” Benderly answered the ad: “Tall, handsome, charming, suave, an inventor who has no family, a suitable kind of man for a beautiful businesswoman.” As Terri puts it now: “Everyone thinks bad guys are nasty. Uh, uh. They’re charming.”

He would spend the next 18 years with Loretta, and Terri considered him a “stepfather.”

Over the years, now and then, Terri would get a little suspicious and try to check on Benderly’s autobiographical story – raised by a grandma and no family, headed a company in Scotland, never in trouble with the law – but she never found anything.

Only afterward would she find he’d been in prison in Texas for defrauding and embezzling an old girlfriend. Then he ended up living with the female warden of his prison, who had his record expunged. He ended up defrauding her, too. In addition, two other women would eventually show up with stories of him leaving them in debt – one for $2 million and with his two children.

But all that information came when it was far too late.

“We never knew it, but he was a pathological liar,” Terri says. “He was addicted to the lie – with that kind of person, the rush is lying and getting away with the lie.”

She saw one great example the day her mother disappeared. “He was off by two hours in his timeline, and when the police confronted him, he said, ‘Oh, I wondered why I had to set my watch back by two hours’ – he could be so quick.”

But when he was new in their lives and love was in the air and everything seemed fine, Loretta brought him into the consignment business to help it expand. “Within two months, we were in the red,” Terri remembers now.

Terri’s employees were very uncomfortable with his free-spending style. So was she, and when she tried to talk to her mother about it, they fought. Loretta defended Benderly and turned away from her daughter. Benderly eventually talked Loretta into selling her share of the business to Terri, and then he suggested that in order “to save money,” he should draw up the paperwork. Terri paid them $150,000 as their share – a little every month for several years.

Then, five years after the buyout, she had the rudest awakening of her life. “Mom showed up, dressed to kill, and you could tell she had to be rehearsed to do this, and she said, ‘I’m still an owner.'” Terri cited the buyout papers, and Benderly pointed out that they weren’t legally correct. Terri told her mother to take a hike.

The next day, Loretta sued her daughter for half of the business, which then consisted of four stores. “That’s the day she died for me,” Terri says now, remembering the anguish. A court would eventually decide in Loretta’s favor, and Terri would start making payments all over again.

“Taw had her convinced it was just business, not a personal thing. It’s mind-altering to live with someone. He was always home. He never left to go to work – he was inventing out of the house. We negotiated the settlement down to $100,000, and then we worked through it, but it was never the same. Over the years, I continually saw her change and change and change.”

The money was the least of it. It was the betrayal that hurt the most. “Mother was always my confidante. Being dyslectic, I’d call her and ask how to spell this, and what does that mean… I’m doing this business without an education, and she was always there for me.”

But now, she was there at the side of a man she’d known for only a few years, and everyone involved knew the couple was cheating. And Benderly did not seem as charming and charismatic anymore, even if he shared Terri’s astrological sign of Virgo. “I didn’t trust him, but I knew she’d never leave him,” Terri says. “She told me she didn’t want to be alone, and was too old to start over.”

Benderly and Loretta supported themselves – not through his “inventions” that never seemed to make it, but through smart buying and reselling at garage and estate sales. And, unknown to Loretta, they made it because Terri was secretly loaning money to Benderly, because she couldn’t bear to see her mother going without. Last year, Terri gave him about $40,000.

But what neither Loretta nor Terri knew was that Benderly had found other sources of income. For one, he stole Loretta’s identity by applying for numerous credit cards offered through the mail. He’d spend the credit limit with one of his own companies, pocketing the cash. By the end, he had at least seven cards – each one maxed out to $25,000 to $30,000.

For another, he got Loretta to give him power of attorney and made himself the broker for her IRA – he took the money out of legitimate investments and put it into his own company, pocketing every cent. And for a third, he took the monthly mortgage payment Loretta faithfully wrote out, promised to mail it off, and junked it instead, taking the money out of their shared account.

He was able to do this because he controlled not only Loretta, but also the phone and the mail. “You couldn’t have a conversation with her without him being right there – he always monitored the phone,” Terri recalls. “We found boxes of mail everywhere in that house afterward. She only saw what he wanted her to see.”

He certainly did not want her to see the credit card bills that piled up so effortlessly, and he surely didn’t want her to see the foreclosure notices that started arriving last summer for the four-bedroom home they shared in Tempe.

And, finally, it took him no time at all to steal the $69,000 Loretta had earned by selling a house she’d bought as an investment. The money had gone into the bank and was withdrawn just one week before Loretta disappeared.

Records show that Loretta discovered at least some of this in the last couple days of her life. She was repeatedly calling the mortgage company and her bank on December 13 – up until 4 p.m.

At 6 p.m. that night, Benderly called Terri and then her brother to tell them he and their mother were going shopping in Tucson the next day, and then to Mexico for three or four days.

By then, the flowers Terri had sent her mother that day were decorating the Tempe home. “I don’t know why, but for the second time in my life, I sent her flowers,” Terri recalls. “I’m not a flower sender, and the first time was on a Mother’s Day right after the lawsuit. But that day it just came into my heart that I wanted to show her that I loved her.”

She remembers that Benderly twice told her over the phone on that Monday night how much her mother loved the flowers. But now she’s convinced that her mother was dead by then.

Inside the Briefcase Was a Note: “Loretta and I vowed to be together”
Terri first knew something was wrong when Benderly called from Tucson at around 5 p.m. on Tuesday, December 14, to say that Loretta had disappeared. He said he’d driven her to a shopping center at 2 p.m. and returned at 4 p.m. for a prearranged rendezvous, and she hadn’t shown up. He was still looking, but he wanted Terri to know he was worried because this wasn’t like her mother.

It was so not like her mother that Terri immediately jumped into her Porsche and raced down to Tucson, making the two-hour trip in 75 minutes. She drove right to the shopping mall, searching the place herself, fearful that her mother had been nabbed and was probably being raped by then. Then she joined the police, who were already questioning Benderly. Terri couldn’t believe how calm and blasé he was. “I was the only one flipping out,” she remembers. “I was expecting him to be shouting, ‘Let’s get out there and search for her,’ but he wasn’t.”

Police suggested everyone go back to the hotel where Benderly said the couple had checked in earlier that afternoon. They got there to find seven suitcases, attesting to the extended trip Benderly had outlined. As police had him go through his story again, Terri was on the phone, calling friends at the local television stations to alert them that her mother was missing. Benderly was casually answering the officers and toying with his laptop computer – Terri is now convinced he was calmly erasing files. He had a picture of Loretta in his computer files, and Terri printed one out, writing up a “missing person” flyer she’d eventually have printed at Kinko’s.

Police suggested that Terri go through the suitcases, and the minute she started opening them, her heart knew something was wrong. Only one bag and a tiny carry-on contained her mothers’ things, while the other six were filled with nearly every article of clothing Benderly owned – “It was enough for months and months,” Terri recalls. “I was stunned.”

Worse yet was what her mother’s suitcase contained for what had been sold as a trip of four or five days: four pairs of slacks, four shirts, one pair of pajamas, two panties, one bra, two pairs of shoes. It’s easy to see how wrong that inventory is – the number of panties alone is enough to tell you a woman didn’t pack this bag.

Terri noticed her mother’s makeup was sitting out on the bathroom counter, all the bags opened as though they’d been used, and that setup seemed phony, too.

When she finally got to the small suitcase, Terri’s entire psyche moaned, “Oh shit.” She found all of her mother’s valuable diamond rings. “She always wore her rings, and there they were,” Terri says. “It just goes right through you.”

But she stayed calm and didn’t raise a fuss because she now suspected that Benderly had done something to her mother, and he was the only person who knew where she was. “You keep your enemies close,” she explains. “Besides, he was my best resource.”

Terri left with the police. Benderly said he wanted to stay in the hotel and rest. “He said he had a sore back,” Terri says now, rolling her eyes as she imagines just how sore your back would get picking your way through the rugged desert to bury a body.

“I told police the packing was all wrong, the makeup was not right, the rings should not be there,” she says. They told her his demeanor was inappropriate for an innocent man.

Then there was the couple’s 1996 Chrysler Caravan, which was packed “with about everything of value they owned,” Terri says. Inside the red minivan were valuable paintings, guns, jewelry, computers…. An experienced eye could see that list and suspect that the owner wasn’t planning on coming back. Worse yet, there was a pick and shovel, a rope, and a map opened to a remote desert area off Interstate 8 toward San Diego.

But, even with the evidence piling up in front of her eyes, Terri still found it hard to believe that Benderly was capable of doing any harm to her mother. Being a mooch was one thing, being a murderer was quite another.

While he was a “person of interest,” police didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him for anything. Specifically, they didn’t have a body to say a crime had even been committed. And Terri didn’t want to believe what seemed so obvious. “I was still hoping; I wasn’t ready to say it happened,” she recalls.

She spent Wednesday in Tucson, still praying that her mother would show up. Finally, on Thursday, she came home and, by necessity, went back to work. Three days after her mother’s disappearance, Terri had the coyote dream.

“Then it all got to be a hairy mess with the police,” Terri says, as jurisdiction got split between Tucson, where Loretta supposedly disappeared, Tempe, where the couple had lived, and Casa Grande, where police soon suspected Loretta’s body was buried.

Terri used her extensive media contacts to get enormous coverage of her mother’s disappearance, and those stories helped bring forth valuable information about the case. You couldn’t turn on a television set and not know what was happening – or not happening – in the disappearance of Loretta Bowersock.

And Benderly had to be watching, too. He’d come back to the Valley, and checked into a hotel. On Sunday, he called and asked Terri to send over one of her employees to pick up some paintings from the minivan. Terri sent a trusted friend, but decided to go along, arriving to find the paintings and a briefcase waiting. Inside the briefcase was a note: “Loretta and I vowed to be together for eternity, and so we shall be.” With the note were the key to his hotel room and the key to the van.

“With all that, the Tempe police didn’t see it as a suicide note,” Terri says with amazement and frustration.

She and her friend rushed to Benderly’s room, finding him groggy. She thinks he’d started taking sleeping pills to kill himself. She knew she had to act immediately if she were to ever know.

“I went in to make him a deal,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Tell me where she is, and I’ll get you out of this.’ He started telling me the same story, and I said, ‘Taw, don’t tell me this story. You need to stop it. They have enough evidence on you, and you are going to go to prison for this. I need to know where she is, and he said, ‘I don’t know where she is.'”

She remembers he looked right at her and lied. “I didn’t know yet that he was a pathological liar, and they have no trouble looking you straight in the eye.”

The next night, the hotel kicked Benderly out, and he went back to the house he’d shared with Loretta. On Wednesday, December 22, he hung himself. “He chose a hard death,” Terri says without much emotion.

And about the only time she criticizes police is over this part of the story. “They had enough evidence, why didn’t they take him in?” she wonders. “If they’d have pressured him, he’d have told where she was. Why wasn’t he on a suicide watch?”

But they didn’t pressure him, he wasn’t on a suicide watch, and he never told Terri a thing.

The Body Was Wrapped in Something
No one will ever know for certain what happened in what was likely the last day of Loretta’s life and the first day of her death. The only one who knew didn’t do the one decent thing he could have done before he threw a hangman’s rope over the garage beam – he didn’t leave directions to her desert grave.

So, the best anyone can do is guess – educated guesses, yes, from the shreds of evidence that trace Benderly’s movements the day he claimed Loretta “disappeared.” Terri also has some guided guesses from the psychics and mediums she’s consulted – or who volunteered information about her mother – to piece together the horrible story. But while no one will ever know for sure, Terri is convinced her mother was dead before she ever left her home on December 14.

The final drama appears to have begun on Saturday, December 11. That day, Loretta and Benderly visited a Tempe jeweler who came forward after seeing all the publicity to say that Benderly ordered a cheap wedding ring for Loretta and demanded it be sized immediately. The jeweler said Benderly told her they were going to Tucson the next day and needed the ring right away.

“The jeweler said when mother heard about the Tucson trip, she looked like she’d never heard of it before, and she started to cry. That wasn’t like my mother,” Terri says.

Then there were her mother’s calls to the bank and mortgage company on Monday, December 13, as late as 4 p.m. And then there was Benderly’s 6 p.m. call informing Terri of the trip. Loretta could have been dead when he made that call – if not, Terri believes, she was probably killed later that night or early the next morning.

Psychics have almost universally declared that the end occurred like this: In the midst of a fight with Benderly, he hit her in the head with a blunt instrument that didn’t break the skin – and therefore didn’t leave any trace of blood inside the home. He then carried her to the utility room and laid her on the floor near the water heater (the water heater was such a strong image that some psychics thought her body was hidden inside it). Some believe she wasn’t dead yet, and that he eventually strangled her there, in that small room off the garage. But there was a large scratch on his hand, and when Terri first saw it, she was convinced it came from a manicured nail – such a scratch suggests that at some point, Loretta tried to fight him off.

Did he wrap the body in canvas, as some psychics have declared? Did he use a sheet? Or did he just put her in the back of his minivan, which he packed with all their valuables? Best bets are that he wrapped the body in something, so that if someone looked into the van, she wouldn’t be visible.

Regardless, according to police, he drove away from the Tempe home he had shared with Loretta for 18 years a little after 9 a.m. on Tuesday, December 14. He stopped at a nearby phone store and bought two mobile phones. By 9:20 a.m. he was at their bank, withdrawing $24,000 – almost everything in their account. About 10 a.m., he called Terri on his regular cell phone, telling her they were leaving soon for Tucson. (Terri thinks he was checking where she was and wanted to be sure she didn’t come by the house.) He got gas near the Baseline on-ramp to Interstate 10, and headed south on the freeway toward Tucson.

Did he think of Terri when he passed Elliot Road, the normal turnoff to her ritzy home? Did he notice the casino signs to Wild Horse Pass? Did he see the billboard that shouted a strange message at this particular moment: “It’s a short drive to a luckier you.”

It’s a safe bet he drove the speed limit – close to 75 mph, but not much faster and not much slower – so he wouldn’t attract any attention. Was he looking for a turnoff the whole way, past the large expanses of shrub-dotted desert? Did he already have his map? By the time he got to the first rest area south of Phoenix, the foothills were snuggling up to the freeway, covered with their saguaros and chollas, and you have to wonder if they looked like good hiding places. He drove past the Florence exit, which takes drivers to Arizona’s first prison – the one that still houses the death chamber. He watched the mountains fall away again from the highway, revealing clusters of trailers and a shabby house every now and then.

Just before 11 a.m., he took Exit 198 to the Outlets at Casa Grande, where he used his credit card to buy baseball caps at two different stores. More than two hours later, at 1:15 p.m., he took Exit 200 to Love’s Truck Stop, using his credit card to buy two lunches at Arby’s and $10 worth of gas.

Those two exits are so close to one another, you can almost see one from the other. The only thing between them is Exit 199 – the Interstate 8 turnoff to San Diego.

Police are convinced that during those two hours, Benderly drove west on I-8 toward Stanfield Road, where he stopped to dispose of the dead woman in the back of the minivan.

Police can also place him because of three cell phone calls between noon and 12:30 p.m. The first was Benderly’s dentist calling about an upcoming appointment, but the phone was not answered, and the dentist left a message. (Terri now thinks that Benderly was digging the grave when that call came in.) The second was Benderly returning the dentist’s call. And the third was placed on Loretta’s cell phone, checking for her messages.

This much is known for sure: Within minutes of turning onto
I-8, Taw Benderly drove past the Casa Grande Cemetery, where folks have received proper burials since the 1920s, and their relatives still honor their memories. By then, the marigolds left on Hispanic graves to mark the Day of the Dead were wilted, but the refreshed bouquets of plastic and silk flowers that carpet many of these beloved resting places still looked brand new.

Nothing of the sort signaled the secret, lonely spot where Benderly presumably picked and shoveled a shallow trench to hide Loretta, because in the Arizona desert in December, there aren’t even wildflowers to pretend they’re marking a grave.

His Pockets Were Full of Cash
You don’t have to be a detective to figure out that Benderly started with one plan and then changed course in the middle of the stream. His 6 p.m. call on December 13 established a story that would have given him at least a four-day head start – it wouldn’t have been suspicious not to hear from a couple who were in Mexico for a few days, even if that stretched to five or six days.

The suitcases clearly show he’d packed to leave – he had all of his clothing, his passport and legal papers. His pockets were full of cash. The van was full of valuables that could be sold or used to start a new life, including Loretta’s beautiful rings. It’s easy to imagine him not even stopping in Tucson, unless he needed gas or a bathroom break. He could have stayed on the highway all the way to Nogales, and then just disappeared into a country where the border from north to south is no big deal, while the border from south to north is. He could have sold the van, buying something else untraceable; he could have set himself up in any number of towns where American expatriates are not unusual. Given his history, he probably would have hooked up with a widow or divorcee soon enough.

But he didn’t do any of that.

“I think he intended to run away, but on the drive to Tucson, he convinced himself he could get away with it,” Terri says now. “His lies had been so successful in the past, he got himself convinced he could pull it off.”

He tried to leave a trail to support his story. That would explain two baseball caps – one for each of a traveling couple – and two lunches, all bought with traceable credit cards. But, certainly, even he had to realize those purchases were made within a couple miles of one another over a two-hour span, and that timeline conflicted with another one he’d later feed to the police – the claim they’d arrived in Tucson about noon and checked into the hotel before Loretta went to Dillard’s at 2 p.m. Not only would police eventually find he was still at Love’s Truck Stop – a good hour from Tucson – at 1:15 p.m., but a quick check at the main desk showed he hadn’t checked into the Tucson hotel until 2:48 p.m.

Was it the strain of what he’d really done that led him to make such obvious and stupid mistakes? Or did he really think he’d fooled everyone with his my-watch-needs-resetting fantasy?

A Friend Offers to “Work Him Over”
The day that Taw Benderly hanged himself, Terri spent 12 hours searching the desert for her mother’s body. “We were out there from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.,” she says. “I was so tired and so desperate. A friend offered to have people work him over [to make him reveal the location of the grave], and I actually agreed. But two hours later, I called it off.”

She believes that change of heart saved her from making a fatal mistake: “He probably killed himself that night, and if we’d carried out the plan, we might have been charged with his murder,” she says.

His body was not found until the next morning, December 23. The story led most of the television newscasts and was front-page news the next day in the local papers.

But most heartbreaking of all was that Benderly never left a note to reveal Loretta’s resting place.

Because the body was never recovered – and probably never will be – Loretta Bowersock isn’t officially dead. “She’s legally alive for seven years,” Terri says. “Taw changed the wills and left everything to himself, so now it all goes to his two children. I’ve told the police, ‘You mean, after everything you know, everything he did, my mother’s things now go to his kids?'”

She’s bitter that “frivolous lawsuits” have seemed to make the police shy and cautious. “They tell me they have to be so careful not to get sued,” she says, giving them a total pass at inaction.

But there was no inaction in the medium community. Terri remembers mediums started contacting her “very early on,” and she sought them out, too, including a medium that worked on the Scott Peterson case in California, and one associated with the famous Phoenix medium whose life story is now a weekly television series. All in all, about 30 mediums or psychics from “all over the country” have chimed in on the case.

“Some people have sent pictures they drew, saying, ‘Your mom has been visiting me,'” Terri says. “A lot of the psychics saw a head injury, a lot saw her struggling.” One medium sat in the minivan and declared that Loretta was dead before she ever entered the van on December 14.

“People question me about going to psychics, and I ask them back, where am I supposed to go? I think the police are following society’s agenda. I was always ahead of the police, I did quite a bit of the work myself.”

She thinks the night she dreamed of the coyote nipping at her fingers, she was feeling her mother’s fear. She believes it took her mother a long time to “go over” into the spirit world. And she’s absolutely convinced her mother has been sending her messages.

“She keeps saying, ‘I’m so sorry I left this mess for you. You need to know I love you,'” Terri says. “The psychics say we’ll find her, but I know she doesn’t want me to find her. Never in a million years would I have thought I’d miss her so much.”

There were so many unrealized dreams.

“We always dreamed of making it rich and doing the shopping spree on Rodeo Drive, and we never got to do that,” she says with remorse. “I always knew something would happen before we could spend the money. I had a hard time enjoying my money because my mother didn’t have any. But in November, I took her on a trip to Alaska. She took Taw along, but we had a great time. We had always dreamed of traveling.”

Terri still wants answers, even though some questions will always remain. “I don’t want the thought of her being tortured,” she says. These days, she takes one day at a time.

One of the worst was last Christmas. Loretta had planned to have Christmas dinner, and, as usual, would have had special gifts for her daughter. “We had a game that we didn’t buy expensive gifts, but tried to see who could find the best thing at the cheapest price at yard sales,” Terri recounts. “Each year we’d brag, ‘I only spent a dollar on this,’ or, ‘Guess what I paid for this?'” It not only was fun, but it erased any concerns about money.

When Terri was going through some of her mother’s things, she had no idea the placemats and golf club socks and fondue kit were anything special. “One of my mother’s friends said she was bragging about what she’d found for me for Christmas, and those were the things – they were all things I’d said I wanted,” Terri says. “I hadn’t gotten around to finding her gifts yet.”

She’s painfully aware that the last gift she ever gave her mother was the flowers delivered in the last hours of Loretta’s life. And it hurts her to know those flowers were eventually found, strewn across the garage floor.

“I Can’t Wait to Die”
“This has just been horrific, but what I am learning about goodness and love… sometimes I feel my mother is holding my hand.”

There just has to be something positive that comes out of this, Terri says, because her mother’s memory deserves that.

She keeps writing things down, making lists, thinking of ways to help other women who may be in danger but don’t realize it.

“I made lists to forgive,” she says. Her mother was at the top of the list. After everything they’d been through with the business and the lawsuit, there was a need for forgiveness. “I forgave her, and I believe she forgave me,” she says.

She’s also stopped playing the second-guessing game. “You can imagine the what-ifs,” she says. “I should have just moved her out, gotten her away from him. But that’s not what happened, and I can’t change it now.”

Remarkably, she doesn’t spend any time hating Benderly.

“I have absolutely let go of any anger,” she says. “I can’t change it now. I’m not going to spend my time on that. He had taken so much time from her when she was alive, I’m not going to let him have any time now.”
If she had a magic wand, she would make women more self-assured and not so dependent on men. She says she knows her mother was unhappy with Benderly for the last several years, but felt that being alone was a worse sentence. “She’d say, ‘He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t run around, he doesn’t hit me,’ but he was abusing her. Abuse is more than hitting. Abuse is stealing your identity. Abuse is taking your money. Abuse is turning you away from your daughter.”

As she’s searched in the desert, complete strangers have joined her, and many have stories similar to the life her mother led. She thinks of them as “silent divorce-era women.” Terri wants to create a computer program she calls “Silver Community.”

“It’s for our parents who are not old enough to go to a home but have problems,” she explains. “We’d have online daycare and medical information and chat rooms and special movies. We could have meals delivered. It would be sold primarily to kids for their parents. If their parents didn’t sign on within a specific time, we’d notify their family that something was wrong.”

She’s learned since her mother’s death that Loretta confided to a sister about her unhappiness with Benderly, saying, “I wasn’t listening to the small taps on the shoulder.”

Terri wishes more women would listen and obey their instincts. “Quit walking in fear, and living in fear of being alone,” she declares.
Her mother didn’t – wouldn’t – and so her daughter searches for her body in the desert.

“She’s with me a lot,” Terri says. “I’m actually having a better relationship with my mother now than before. Boy, did I love her. I can’t wait to die – the first thing I’ll do is run into her arms. I now know she loved me – I didn’t know it before. When she was alive, I never felt I did enough.”