The following is an excerpt from Chapter 12, “My Strawberry is Gone,” of the bestseller “Goodbye, Butterfly: Murder, faith and forgiveness in a small Kansas town.” You can order the book online.
Once Bob finished his message, the service moved to the cemetery to the south and just off Douglas Road, less than a quarter mile from the school and the same distance from where Brenda died. Because there were so many people at the event and so many cars along the road, everybody walked down the highway to the spot where her headstone would rest.
“It was a huge, huge funeral,” Ted Lassen said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in Dover. There was a huge entourage of police, there were motorcycles. It’s probably the biggest event they’ve ever had in Dover.”
The Kellers did their best to keep it together. Jean got through her son’s message of forgiveness, but she didn’t make it through the final portion of the service at the cemetery, leaving with her sister.
“We had to go out and sit in the car,” Aunt B said. “Jeannie said, ‘I can’t talk to anybody.’ I said, ‘You don’t have to talk to anybody.’”
Tracy appeared to be handling the event well, though she says years later that she was “out of it.” Janice noticed at one point that Tracy even laughed when some people talked to her that day, but said, “I thought, ‘How could she laugh?’ and I judged that. I realized you’re not there really. You’re going through the process. Later, that hurt really comes.”
Among the convoy of people at the cemetery were law enforcement officers from the Sheriff ’s Department and attorneys from the DA Office. All were there to pay their respects, but they were also working. David Debenham and Maggie Lutes took in the environment, getting a sense of the psychology of the community and the impact Brenda’s murder had on it. Meanwhile, members of the Sheriff ’s Department videotaped the service to see who attended and find more potential evidence.
“We were back where we could hear it,” Lutes said. “It was very moving, very moving. The community was so overwhelmingly grieving. There was overwhelming sadness at such a loss of this beautiful child who had so much going for her.”
Overwhelming sadness was an apt description for the mindset of Brenda’s schoolmates. Two days before the funeral, Bob asked Byron Waldy if they could find a way to include Brenda’s friends and other children at the school in the service. Waldy, who previously worked for Warren and Susan Wilson at Joy 88, called Susan to see if she had any ideas.
“It was that Monday that this woman called and said they have a service or business where they will bring white doves and release them,” said Susan Wilson, who took a van of employees to the service. “They asked me if I wanted to hire them to do this, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ Byron called me and said the students are just so distraught and want to do something to help. What can they do that’s tangible that might help them in their healing?”
Moments after Brenda was laid to rest with several hundred people surrounding her burial plot, her classmates lined up, took a dove, and released it. One by one, the doves took off for the sky, but instead of flying out of the area immediately, as they typically did, they fluttered into the trees surrounding the cemetery and watched over the crowd for several minutes.
“The husband and wife told me, ‘This is unbelievable. As soon as they’re released, they go straight home. They’re flying around in the trees,’ Susan Wilson said. “They knew there was something going on, something more than us.”
When the doves did leave the trees, they flew to the southwest. A few minutes later, as Larry Lister and his son, who did not attend the funeral, worked in their yard, several doves coasted into the yard, flew around a tractor on the property, and turned to the north before leaving Dover.
“They went out and came back over to the south, and my thought was surely they’re not going to go back over the Blakes’ house,” Penny Lister said. “But they probably did. There was a reason.”
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART VIII: The old man and the high-speed chase
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART VII: Christmas and Lebanon Junior High
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART VI: Christmas with mono
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART V: ShowBiz, Dragon’s Lair and other difficult games
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART IV: “Dutch,” a guilty pleasure
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART III: Christmas in Independence
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART II: Craving an NES Classic
TWELVE DAYS 2025, PART I: An update on the search for James Danny Hollingshead
ABOUT MY SECOND BOOK: THE OLD MAN
ORDER “GOODBYE, BUTTERFLY: MURDER, FAITH AND FORGIVENESS IN A SMALL KANSAS TOWN”