Yvonne Bornstein - Eleven Days of Hell

It was as if somebody had thrown bricks at the front door. Instinctively, I panicked. I was on the top floor, in our bedroom, and I ran to the window overlooking the driveway. I could see right down to the garage. The Mercedes was parked just outside of it, next to my car. The interior light was on. The driver’s door was open. Nobody was inside.

I knew in my gut that something bad had happened, but what I didn’t know. Just then, my eyes caught sight of three figures sprinting down the driveway and out into the well-lit street.

I felt my feet carrying me down the stairs and out through the back door to the driveway. As soon as I hit the asphalt, I saw George crumpled on the ground. He was lying in a gathering pool of blood that was streaming down the driveway. His body was full of holes. He was lifeless. His eyes stared vacantly ahead.

I dropped to my knees and began to shake him. ‘George! George!’ I wailed, my words echoing in the still night.

Hearing and feeling nothing, I somehow managed to get to my feet and ran back upstairs, where I dialed the police and blurted out to an operator what had happened. She told me not to go back downstairs in case someone was watching for me, so I cowered in the corner of the bedroom until I heard police sirens outside and fists pounding on the door with voices saying they were cops. I shakily went downstairs to let them in, whereupon officers began roaming through the house. Without one word of comfort, plainclothes detectives began questioning me.

Through all this drama, George’s kids remained asleep, and when I would periodically look in on them, a policewoman followed me, her brows furrowed as if she believed I needed to be watched closely. Indeed, and shockingly to me, it seemed that the cops were suspicious of me. In the kitchen, they began to grill me, peppering me with rapid-fire questions such as whether George had any enemies, whether he was involved in anything shady, and so on until I could hardly think straight.

I was so numb with shock and fear that during this questioning I realised they had told me nothing about George. I banged my fist on the counter.

‘I’m not going to say one more word,’ I yelled, ‘until you tell me if George is dead or not!’

A detective looked up calmly from his notebook. ‘Yes, ma’am, he is, unfortunately,’ he said. I wanted to cry, but I was too disoriented, too numb. All I could think to ask was whether he had died instantly. They said he did. In some very small way, I was relieved to hear that.

The detectives then returned to grilling me, focusing on what my motives might have been if I had killed George. By then, they had done a record search and seen the complaints I had lodged against Avi over the years. And in fact, Avi had still been making trouble for me recently. Even after we had split, he would call George’s house and yowl about not wanting his ‘wife’ being there. George would roll his eyes and hang up.

But, now, the police had formed a theory: that I killed George to make it look like Avi had done it so that he would be put away. As absurd as the theory was, at about 3am the next morning, before George’s body was cold, the police went to see Avi.

After four hours of questioning, the cops finally asked me if I wanted to call anyone. I then called one of George’s closest friends, who listened incredulously as I told him about George’s violent death. He rushed right over and pulled into the driveway as a police forensic team was sniffing around. He practically had to step over George’s body—which still lay where it fell, covered by a sheet, only his shoes visible.

Later that morning, they took his body to the morgue. I had to go there to identify it, though I could barely recognise who it was. Lying on a slab, this once handsome man was now bloated, his skin purple. I nearly crumbled from the shock.

As daylight filled the sky, I went back to the house, where the mother of George’s first wife had come to stay with the kids. They were never really told the truth about what befell their father until years later; up until then, they were merely told he’d had an accident. I knew I could not bear to stay there, so I went to stay with a friend. When Romy returned after the weekend, we moved back to our old apartment. For the next few weeks, I sat on my bed, my legs curled under me, and cried all day long. Often I would awaken in the middle of the night, sweat bathing my face, calling out for George. To this day, the pain lingers. It always will.

George’s family had arranged for a funeral. Yet because the police would not release the body for three days, he was not buried the next day, as is customary under Jewish canon. Instead, they held him in the morgue so they could perform an autopsy, which is also barred by Jewish law. No one within the police department seemed to care very much about our traditions. Finally, George was laid to rest. Watching his casket being lowered into the ground, I couldn’t help but think that my life had ended as well.

Finally, after three interminable months, George’s killers were tracked down. That’s when all the pieces of the puzzle fell together. George, it was revealed, had been stalked for some time before that night in a plot rigged by one of his employees who knew George carried a lot of cash with him on Friday nights. The three men I had seen running down the street had, several times, waited underneath our house, in a wine cellar, for George to arrive home. However, because we had usually been to dinner, we had often come home late, and the trio gave up and left before we got home.

On the fateful Friday, George had come home alone, earlier than usual, and they struck, forcing him out of the car. One of the men pointed a double-barreled sawn-off shotgun at him. Trying to be a martyr, George reached for the gun; it went off, spraying buckshot all over his body. The killers ran away, empty-handed.

For their bloody deed, the gang of three was convicted of manslaughter, yet they were sentenced to a mere four years—because, astonishingly, they had no previous criminal records and were set free inside two years. The employee who had organised the robbery walked away a free man. Never did any of them show any remorse.

The trial only added humiliation to my pain. At one point, I was put on the stand and asked to locate the house on a map when the judge said with a sneer, ‘It’s not going to do much good, anyway, because women don’t know how to read maps.’ Again, as I am prone to do, I blamed myself for the tragedy. If I had just gone to be with him, as usual, on that night, we would have come home late, and the killers wouldn’t have waited. If they had confronted both of us, maybe I could have somehow fought them off, altered their plans, done something, anything. Self-incrimination, I have found, never really goes away.

Still, once more I tried to put another body blow behind me and return to a normal life, but it struck me that normalcy might well be an impossibility. I began to think that I didn’t need to go looking for danger—it seemed that danger came looking for me. What I didn’t know was that the real danger lay just ahead on the next road.

The nights were especially long following George’s death. Getting through those interminably sleepless hours meant a lot of introspection about where I had been and where I was going. Although I had the joy of my life in my daughter, Romy, everything else had gone wrong for me. I wasn’t even thirty, and I’d been burned by divorce, the death of a loved one, and the dashing of a music career.

Indeed, for all my restive ambition, I had no formal university education and couldn’t imagine what kind of career I might forge. Taking account of all these cons, and seeing so few pros, introspection soon morphed into alienation. At times, I felt myself sinking into a shaft of hopelessness.