[Traci Todd] Daughter at rest but peace eludes her family
Anne Warfield
Daughter at rest but peace eludes her family
By Russell Working
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 12, 2003
For three years, Traci Todd's family has waited. Ever since the flight
attendant's remains were discovered in a forest preserve on the Far
South Side, her relatives have asked the state's attorney's office
when they could schedule a funeral mass and lay her to rest.
The prosecutors counseled patience. Her bones--roughly 80 out of 206
were found--might be needed in the murder trial of her boyfriend, a
Chicago developer named Kevin Williams.
"The only way that I thought we could convict Kevin was to let the
state decide when we could have her body," said the victim's mother,
Gloria Todd. "I asked the whole first year for it, and they kept
telling me, `No, not yet.'"
On Friday, at last, the mass will be said. Williams was convicted of
murder Nov. 26, and a requiem is planned for 6 p.m. in Our Lady Gate
of Heaven Church, 2338 E. 99th St.
It is unusual to store a victim's body for the length of a homicide
trial, said Jerry Lawrence, spokesman for the Cook County state's
attorney's office. But there were fears that the defense might
challenge the conclusions of a prosecution forensic expert about the
body, which the killer mutilated in an attempt to hide his crime.
"Traci Todd's remains contained unique evidence which could have been
involved in expert testimony from witnesses that either side could
have called," Lawrence said. In the end a challenge never
materialized.
The jury concluded that Williams killed Todd in September 2000 after
she confronted him with her discovery that he was already married to
another woman.
Harsh lessons have accompanied the Todd family's long wait. They have
learned that the victims of murder are not only those whose bones are
left in the woods for dogs to find. They also include the loved ones
who must live with the aftershocks.
During the years the remains lay in the morgue, the case took its toll
on Todd's relatives. Even now, as the family seeks closure, the
prospect of a funeral has sharpened the pain of their loss.
Her father, Ernest Todd of Naperville, has given up trying to sleep
through the night; he usually rises at 2 or 3 a.m. and works out
rather than lie in the dark grieving over his daughter. Traci Todd's
grandmother, Rubye Washington, suffered a stroke that she blames on
the pressures of the case. The grisly slaying and subsequent trial
shadowed the high school years of the victim's kid brother, Brandon
Marshall-Todd, 18.
And Gloria Todd, once a heavyset woman, lost more than 100 pounds as
she found herself unable to eat. Horror over her daughter's violent
end and the fate of her remains suppressed her appetite. And although
the family had a less formal memorial for Todd in 2000, her mother's
emotions have crashed once again this week as she prepared for the
funeral.
"This has been the worst week of my life," she said in an interview at
her South Side home. "It's even worse than when it happened. This is
the reality now, that she is truly gone."
Her house has a little of the ambience of a shrine where pilgrims pray
for lost souls. The walls and shelves are crowded with portraits of
Jesus, statuettes of the Virgin Mary, and a rug woven with the faces
of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. In
the entryway are photographs of Traci Todd and a flier with the young
woman's face and the words "Missing person: Traci Todd."
This week Gloria Todd is assembling a collage of pictures from her
daughter's life, even as she faces the stark realities that a
cremation brings.
"When they asked me about after the service, about the urn, what we're
going to do with it, I hadn't even imagined what I was going to do,"
she said. "And then the reality hit. I can't have her in here with me,
because I would never be able to come into this house and know that
her urn is here. I don't think I could take it."
Instead, she agreed to store the urn in a family mausoleum.
Ernest Todd, who now is divorced from Gloria and married to Adelena
Marshall, found his life consumed by the trial and the wait to bury
his daughter. Although a mass is what the family wanted, there was
small comfort in arranging it this week.
"You expect your children to bury you," said Ernest Todd. "And I guess
the morbid thing about all that is you have to sit up and say, `Well,
I'm burying my daughter.' And I would wonder at this time of life what
would she be doing, what would we be doing."
Even after the trial's conclusion, the family has had difficulty
obtaining Traci Todd's remains. As Ernest Todd and several family
members spoke of the case in his Naperville home, the phone rang.
"They haven't released her yet?" he asked the caller in amazement.
It turned out the funeral director had shown up to claim the remains,
only to be told the state's attorney's office hadn't released them.
Several phone calls cleared up the matter, but it amounted to yet
another delay after a three-year wait.
As they grieved, the family also continued to wonder why the Chicago
police weren't quicker to act. It took eight days to convince police
that Traci Todd was the victim of foul play, even though a neighbor
had called 911 the day of the murder to report crashes and screams
from her apartment. Officers who responded to that call left when
nobody answered the front door of the building.
"Why wouldn't the police take the time to go check out the apartment?"
asked Traci's sister, Lisa Todd, 40. "Why would they just wait and
say, `OK, we can't get in, so forget it'?"
Police spokesman David Bayless said officers' hands were legally tied
when they showed up at the front door and found nobody there,
including the neighbor who complained.
"This is a tragedy no matter which way you look at it," Bayless said.
"However, you have to look at the facts of the case. We had reports of
a woman screaming in an apartment. No answer at the apartment door.
We're not authorized and we're not allowed to break into apartments
where no one is answering."
As Traci Todd's bones lay in the morgue, it seemed to her family that
they were crying to be heard. The family was often left with a sense
of her presence at the scenes associated with the crime. "It was like
Traci was leading us," her mother said.
This week, Traci Todd's sojourn as evidence in a criminal trial is
over. She has been reunited with her family, and she will be interred
alongside her grandmother.
"This time it's final," said Gloria Todd. "It's homecoming. I want
people to just say, `She's finally in her resting place now.' Because
that was not a resting place in the morgue."
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
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--
Anne Warfield
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