#RememberThem: Rose
Oh, my lovely Rose. She is the one, out of the five women who lost their lives to John Eric Armstrong in Detroit, that I would most like to have met in person. Instead I have had to meet her through several people who knew her, but that almost didn't happen.
At the beginning of my research for "The ‘Baby Doll’ Serial Killer: The John Eric Armstrong Homicides," I set out to reach at least one person to speak for each of these five females. It was a challenge -- much more challenging than locating cops who worked the case or the attorneys or even people who knew Armstrong in his younger years. When you reach out to someone who has lost a family member to a serial killer, it has to be a careful process. Compassionate. And you have to be patient. Rose really proved that for me.
Rose was the one, for the longest time, for whom I could not find even a small amount of info. Nothing in the files. Only a birthdate and previous addresses online. The barest info. It's like she didn't even exist, as far as online records. Granted, she died in 2000, before we all started living our lives online. But the usual sites offering birth info or whatever else were scant for her. I really wondered if the name I knew her by was a fake name for her, maybe just something she used when police detained her, knowing that for a lot of these girls living at risk on the streets, they don't carry ID and they often don't give genuine info when taken in.
I put out all kinds of feelers for people who may have known Rose. I knocked on doors in Detroit, at each one of her former addresses of record. Finally, it was an obscure court record, and an unusual last name, that led me to the father of her child. First I spoke to one of his cousins. She knew Rose, thankfully, and was able to tell me quite a bit. Then I found my way to the baby daddy himself, and wow, that was a good talk. He was so honest. He was the one who had introduced Rose to coke, and he freely, remorsefully, admitted it. He missed Rose. He valued his memories of her. He called her beautiful, and told me not to write anything bad about her.
From there, I was able to connect with the daughter he shared with Rose, and what she said about her mom was very meaningful. Very affecting. Then, after the academic edition of the book was released, I heard back from one of those feelers I had put out a couple years earlier -- Rose's brother. And the talk with him was just so real, so sad, and so wonderful. As I blogged about earlier with Monica, this brother's life was devastated at the loss of his sister. He was very close to her. This was not just another person -- this was a sister who meant a great deal to him.
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| Scott has only these snapshots of his sister Rose these days. Above, she's wearing red, fourth from left. Images courtesy of Scott; see note below.  |
So, after thinking at one point that I would not be able to reach anyone to speak for Rose, I got several people. Each with a different perspective. Each speaking from a different angle of her life. And I learned how valuable she was, from every single angle. And that is something I am very thankful for.
This post is part of a series on this blog that I am calling #RememberThem, a chance to honor the women who encountered the two Detroit serial killers I have researched, John Eric Armstrong and Benjamin ("Tony") Atkins. In this continuing series, with installments dropping every week or so, we first learn more about the women Armstrong was known to have killed in Detroit, plus two of his survivors, then we turn to the women who encountered Atkins. Click on the "Honoring the Victims" label on the left to see all of the parts in the series. Also see the #RememberThem series on YouTube.
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