The Bullet in My Mother’s Head
2015
I first became worried about the bullet in my mother’s head two days after she died. I was afraid the bullet was going to explode.
In truth, it was bullet fragments, and they weren’t what ended my mother’s life. She was the rarest of cases: a woman who had survived her own murder. When the mortician handed me her death certificate, it read, “Age: 58. Cause of death: Cardiopulmonary failure”—as a result of her lung cancer. One room away, my mother’s body was being prepared for cremation. I imagined the fire incinerating her flesh, then tried to shake that thought. She was in her white nightgown, the one with lace, the one she always wore when she appeared in the kitchen at night, emerging from a dream, crinkles around her eyes, happily curious about where I’d been that day and what I’d seen.
I was sitting in a funeral home in San Pedro, California, surrounded by carpeted floors, inaudible footsteps, and clasped hands. And then—I couldn’t help it—I imagined her body ripped apart. Would the powder in the bullet explode in the flames? My body tried to jump up from the heavy green leather chair, but my mind stopped it—of course the ammunition was exhausted when the bullet was fired, twenty-eight years before. But even though I understood this intellectually, still I asked my question out loud: “Is the bullet going to explode?”
The mortician—unaware of the assault my mother had survived all those years ago, when she was kidnapped, raped, and shot—struggled to understand my panic and my question. While my mother was alive, the crimes perpetrated on her in that alley remained abstract to me—a story. I knew one fact for sure, that had the bullet been, in the words of the neurosurgeon who treated her, “a hair over,” she wouldn’t have survived. I wouldn’t have ever been born.
Why, now that she was gone, now that her body was in the next room, was the incident starting to feel closer than ever?
I don’t remember when, exactly, I learned about the origin of the fragments, because the information itself was fragmented, delivered before I could read, when touch was as important as sight. Once, when I was about five, my mother took my hand and ran it through her hair, slowly pressing on her skull. She stopped, holding my pointer finger where her skin sank in an indentation, and looked me in the eye. This is where Mommy was shot. And later, when she became forgetful and the seizures revealed themselves as a result of the bullet’s damage to her brain, the mark seemed to be an explanation and a plea for my patience. If the indentation in my mother’s head was the first lesson, a bracelet was the second.
1987
The incident that bifurcated my mother’s life into the before and after occurred on September 16, 1987. It began on a busy street in Los Angeles when my mother, Carol, was thirty. She was driving her boss’s Porsche, having just dropped him at LAX for a business trip, when another car rear-ended hers.
She pulled over, knelt down to the bumper, looked up at the two men in the beat-up Datsun behind her, and smiled—there was not a scratch on the Porsche. But when she returned to the car and pulled the door shut, one of the men stopped her, and the other slid into the passenger seat and jammed a gun into her side. They forced her into the tiny space behind the front seats of her boss’s car, which had no backseat.
After my mother died, the incident remained, hanging over everything. Because those twenty-four hours were so horrific and so influential on her life as well as mine, which made them feel both unresolved and dynamic, I fixated on the incident more than I grieved her death. As months passed, then years, I came to believe I could learn about my mother by learning about the incident. Did she find the strength to survive in the faith that she might eventually raise a child? If I could find out the make of the gun, could I know if our relationship ever dulled her pain or chased her nightmares? If I found the names of the two men who shot her, would I feel closer to my mother or further away?
For twenty-three years of being her son, I could have asked my mother all these questions. Now, without her, I had to go out and find the answers on my own.
2015
At the funeral home, the mortician asked whether we wished to include any personal articles for cremation. I considered a silver piece of jewelry Mom wore throughout my childhood. The chain, a medical-alert bracelet, was inscribed with two words that I, as a kid, agonized to memorize. In deep grooves: NO MRIs. I didn’t know what that was. My mother offered her hand, turned over her wrist, and explained why it must never be removed. This is for if Mommy has a seizure, do you understand? She illustrated what might happen. She could have something called a grand mal seizure, which would make her fall onto the floor, flopping like a fish. Ambulance people would take her away and—if she didn’t have the bracelet to warn them—slide her into a giant noisy machine at the hospital, the magnetic-resonance-imaging machine. The machine, using a powerful magnetic field, could violently disturb the bullet in her head, ripping it apart. That’s why it said NO MRIs. So the ambulance people would know.
While my mother was alive I often forgot about the bracelet, the fragments, and the incident itself. Not long after she showed me the bracelet for the first time, we were at an amusement park and my mother coaxed me into riding a roller coaster with her. She lowered the lap bar over my head. “You’re going to love this, I promise!” she said. Our wooden cart lurched forward. My mother raised her hands over her head, her utilitarian jewelry fluttering on her wrist in the wind, and hooted over my own screams and laughs. I forgot about the threat. Like an MRI, sudden jerks such as a quick turn of a roller coaster could dislodge the fragments in Mom’s head and cause a seizure, loss of vision and motor faculties, or death. Instead, I giggled and told her about the “tingly” in my belly, and she told me she had the same “tingly,” too. Her life with the bullet in her brain became my life with the bullet in her brain. I could see how it affected her, both in the way she feared and in the way she defied fear, raising her hands high and allowing her eyes to close while the roller coaster rattled across the tracks.
A week after my mother’s cremation, I handed an iPod to the director of Wayfarers Chapel, a celestial house of worship made of stone and wood. Outside the glass windows as big as walls, pine trees swayed, lulled by the Pacific Ocean across the road.
The mix of classic rock I arranged, Mom’s favorites—“Wild Horses,” “Stairway to Heaven”—began playing as friends and family filled the chapel. Over somber salutations I felt my grandmother’s gaze, and she pulled me aside to ask me why a particular song was playing. Overhead, under saturnine, slow chords, Nancy Sinatra sang, “You shot me down, bang bang / I hit the ground, bang bang / My baby shot me down.” My mom and I both loved “Bang Bang,” having discovered the song on a movie soundtrack, neither of us realizing how eerie it was, or should have been, to listen to. Or maybe she did—she often found ways to summate her pain and her survival into joy. To my grandmother, I just shook my head. I didn’t want to explain something Mom and I knew so easily, and in that moment, I didn’t know how.
2017
Two summers after my mother died, I moved to Wyoming. In my teens we had spent time in Jackson Hole and Yellowstone, and I wanted to be there, where those memories lived. That summer, I sat in bed, reading Helter Skelter. I’d picked up the book because it was one of many my mother had kept on her shelves back home, their titles a checklist in my mind.
As I read, it occurred to me that I was learning a distasteful amount of information about the Manson family. Until Helter Skelter, I’d avoided any book or film that I felt glorified the murderer. I wondered if someone would one day read about my mother’s assailants. I bolted up in bed, as if struck by the same lightning as that day in the mortuary. I now knew more about the Manson family’s whereabouts than I did about the men who kidnapped, raped, and shot my mother. I didn’t even know their last names. But where to begin? Any notes my mother left were scribbles on the back of used paper or buried within a document on my laptop. I sat on the bed, my legs sweaty against the quilt, and began a search.
In an email from one of my mother’s coworkers from back then—Deborah, who’d noticed that Carol hadn’t returned to work from the airport—I found the names of detectives who worked on the case. Maybe someone could tell me the names of the men and I could find out where they were. I knew the two men were in prison, serving three life sentences combined—but what if they had been released? My mother always feared that. I opened all the windows and the porch door.
2019
I became breathless when I discovered the cell-phone number of the lead detective, published right there on his website, as he had retired from law enforcement and become a private investigator.
In the photo on his website, Don Tabak looked like someone the universe would cast as a detective who helps find your mother’s attempted killers. His thick, gray hair was cut tight and square, and he had a mustache that looked like it could break an arm. He had been with the LAPD for twenty-four years, eight as a homicide detective (when he worked on my mother’s case). He still lived in Los Angeles, and I flew out to meet him in October.
We met for lunch at Canter’s Delicatessen in the Fairfax District, just a few blocks away from Fairfax High School, from which my mother had graduated in 1975. I asked Don if he remembered the immediate aftermath of the crime. His voice was deep and graveled. Of course he did, he said. Still wrapped in white gauze, my mother’s head had just been mined for the bullet remains when Don was first permitted to ask a few questions before letting the victim rest. As we ate, and he talked, he shook his head and grinned, still grateful, he said, for the invaluable shards of information my mother had offered from her hospital bed:
One of the men had a tattoo of a bunny on his chest; the other had rotting teeth.
I was in a motel with black-and-white tiles.
“Your mother’s case was the most important case of my life,” he said. I didn’t ask him why this was true. I wanted it to be true, and for a moment I wondered if Don had been in love with her. She was beautiful. It was one of the reasons the men abducted her. But Don later came out and told me himself the biggest reason the case had meant so much to him: He worked in homicide, he said. It was rare, unheard of even, to meet a victim.
1987
By 2:30 in the afternoon, not long after she had been rear-ended, my mother was crammed behind the Porsche’s front seats, terrified. The two men, both in their twenties, told her to shut up and drove to an apartment in Inglewood. There they stripped her of her clothes and jewelry. She was thrown into a bedroom, and before the men grasped her by the head and thrust her face into their groins, she noticed the curtains on the window, yellow and green with characters from Sesame Street. She was in a child’s bedroom. The men used such force that her jaw became sore. They took turns raping her, entering and exiting the room, a constant flow, until another woman opened the front door of the apartment. When my mother begged to use the bathroom, she was told to urinate on the carpet.
Perhaps ten hours later, in the early hours of September 17, the two men drove to an alley in South Central Los Angeles and threw my mother out of the car. As she lay on the ground, helpless and trembling, she saw one of the men fumbling for the gun. She asked for God. The man held the pistol to her head and fired. The bullet ripped through the base of her neck. He fired again, and the second bullet shattered on her inner-ear bone, one of the hardest bones in the body. When that second bullet collided with her skull, and all of her body fell to the chipped asphalt in the alley, she considered dying there. High-voltage wire lined the night sky above her, and babies began to cry at the cracks from the gun. Pain seared in her head. Her brain was exposed to the breeze that moved from one street to the next.
Assuming she was dead, the men drove off in the Porsche, leaving her bloodied body in the alley.
Her mind, flickering, went to the bathroom remodel she was planning and how her boyfriend disagreed with her choice of tiles.
She staggered to stand up and started to call for help. There was no sign of safety.
Dammit, she wanted those tiles.
People inside the windows with the screaming babies began to answer her cries. Shut up! She continued on to the end of the alley. Across the street.
After two blocks she collapsed, finally, in an Ampm gas station. Behind the register, the attendant called 911.
Soon after, a police officer arrived on the scene and, twelve hours later, would pursue the Porsche, driven by one of the assailants, until the car collided with a light pole in downtown Los Angeles. This meant that the same officer was present at both the Ampm scene and, the next day, the scene of the crash. When Tabak explained this coincidence to me, I felt others could also see what I knew was within the incident: a reason to keep digging.
I have wondered, nearly daily, whom that officer found when he walked through the automatic doors and discovered, under the fluorescent lights, a young woman with part of her scalp missing, covered in blood, alive. Despite my many attempts to make contact through email, phone, and social media, he has never responded. I wanted him to show me more of her pain, because for so many years, her pain was proof of her survival. I’ve heard from the detectives who worked on my mother’s case that John, the officer, has built a fire wall against his past life. He is retired now and lives in Tennessee, a million miles away from the alley.
2015
I arrived at Red Lake, in Wisconsin. JoAnn, my mother’s cousin, greeted me on the road with the smile I came to respect most in that first year—a half smile with heavy cheeks, as if dimples were weighing down the curve. Inside the cabin, we planned how I would spread my mother’s ashes. I drank a gin and tonic, got into my rental car, lit a cigarette, and played classic rock. For two days, I drove around the lake in laps.
I drove until I cried, then returned to the cabin to face the mahogany box. In forty-eight hours, I would get on a boat with my family and release my mother’s ashes into Red Lake. After two nights of sleep—God, I hope I can sleep—I would reconnect her with the lake she grew up visiting, the one that inspired our road trips from the West Coast to the lake she had taken me to when I was a baby, holding me above and then slipping me into the iron-rich water as if christening me. For those two days, my last moments with some physical part of my mother, the bullet was at its smallest, its quietest.
On Red Lake, I wasn’t thinking of the incident, and I assumed its echo would finally cease on the evening we spread my mother’s ashes. The sun had set over the trees that encompass the small lake when we walked down the hill from the cabin to the wooden dock. Silently, we boarded the pontoon. The only sound was the dribbling motor, slow, and music from a distant party. Smoke, heat from earlier in the day, simmered on the surface of the dark, calm water. We arrived at a cove, and I moved to the front of the pontoon. I looked to my grandmother, seated in the back, but she shook her head. So I took the mahogany box and tilted it to the side. I allowed the bullet and ashes to pour out of me. Hands began touching my back, and I trembled. One hand, and then another and another. I heaved into myself, but I kept releasing. I never saw any sign of metal, only bone. A cloud of dust blossomed under the water, and for a second I let myself believe it looked like an angel.
When we returned to the shore, I couldn’t distinguish one part of the lake from another. Usually I could locate the family cabin, even through the thick trees. But when we hitched to the dock, someone reached out their hand to offer support. I was guided to the steps of the hill to the cabin, but I turned back and walked down into the water. JoAnn’s son—my namesake cousin Ryan—and my best friend, who had met me at Red Lake, followed. We didn’t talk. I don’t even know if we took off any clothes. But we fell into the water. I held my breath, lowered my head, and then opened my eyes underwater. On the surface, light danced somewhere through the trees. When I resurfaced, crackling accompanied the sparkles, and I realized they were the spidery contrails of fireworks. Over the drumming of the bottle rockets, I lay on my back. I felt carried by the water, newly infused with my mother’s ashes, but I was drawn to the flash and bang before me. I was being pulled in two directions. In one way, I did not want to disturb the memory I had of my mother, behind me, but in another, I wanted to understand the incident, the flash and bang.
2021
Don recommended that I go with him to the alley. But I felt a bit blind. I wanted someone to tell me if I was being foolish, that I was digging at the concrete with my bare hands, for even considering going to the alley. My mother’s notes about the incident were scattered. But she wrote about two portions of the ordeal in detail. The document I have placed on multiple hard drives, desktops, and online storage services is marked by dates, with years between entries. Over the years, in a Word document on her laptop, she continually returned in her writing to the apartment where the men had imprisoned her. But it was the alley I understood and could visualize.
By the time I was old enough to read her medical-alert bracelet, I could envision the alley where Mom was shot, the second place she wrote about most often. There were gates over the windows that people cursed out of when someone asked for help, and like the print of Jesus that Mom kept in her office—nocturne and black, save a thin white halo, looking out from the garden of Gethsemane the night before his death—the place was damned yet holy.
And even the moments in the alley were made brief in comparison with those in the apartment, where she had heard another woman enter, speak with the men, and allow them to leave. In my mother’s writing, she returned to the apartment again and again to make sense of the woman’s inaction. After the incident, she needed to find the goodness in people and could not understand how the other woman stood idle. During my time with Don when we visited the locations where my mother was held, we could not return to the apartment. There were new tenants, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to see that place where my mother’s faith was fractured.
Don asked me to meet him north of LAX, blocks away from where the incident began. We drove up Sepulveda, tracing Mom’s route. Don pulled over around the same time Mom would have, about 2:00 in the afternoon. I stood near a tall concrete wall protecting a residential area from constant traffic. Opposite me was a church and its parking lot. Don guided me to look at the intersection, pointing to the corner where the men inside the beat-up Datsun must have first seen the Porsche and then my mother. I had driven past the place dozens of times.
Days after I had first contacted Don, during that summer in Wyoming, I found my mother’s captors: Ray Scoggins and Kenny Walton. Both were being held in California, living out their multiple life sentences. I gathered what files I could access, including their initial statements on the crime and those given later, after years in prison. Scoggins was the driver, and he was the one who noticed Mom behind the wheel. His initial plan was to simply take the car, as he had done many times before, but things did not go as planned. The woman resisted. In my mom’s writing, I never found this moment, this revelation, that her unwillingness to be subordinated existed before the incident, not as a result of it. If I hadn’t gone to the intersection, if I hadn’t searched for Scoggins, I wouldn’t have known my mother’s mettle was always part of her character.
I now have a hard time remembering what the alley once looked like in my mind. The dark version of the place began to dissolve as Don parked the car and pulled something from the glove compartment. Once we were standing out in the white light of the sun, I realized it was a gun. There wasn’t anyone driving nearby, and the street was motionless. Bits of a smashed car were lying in a median. I wondered whether the place was so inhospitable that no one dared make themselves known. Don walked ahead of me, nodding at a man with a collection of rusted metal chunks against a fence. Then we passed a group of men standing by their motorcycles, listening to something soulful and upbeat. The route to the alley was paved with concrete.
The alley was nothing like I’d imagined. I half expected to find the other bullet on the ground. I searched for a second, then remembered that more than thirty years had passed, my mom was gone, and there wasn’t much more to discover. Cars rumbled blocks away, and the song we heard faded. I noticed cracks in the concrete and envisioned Mom scraping to get up, crawling to the fluorescent lights. I turned to Don and told him I had got what I’d come for. What that was, I wasn’t sure. At times, I thought it was my mother’s strength I was looking for. In other moments, it was to imagine myself facing what she experienced, wondering whether if I didn’t come to this place, I would be a son lacking devotion.
2022
Two years ago, I received two letters, one regarding Scoggins and one about Walton. Each of my mother’s assailants was being given a parole hearing. A newly enacted law in California compelled the Department of Corrections to review both of their lives in prison. There was a threat that, despite their combined three life sentences, they could be released. At the time of the hearings, I was thirty-one years old, a year older than my mother when she was taken. This meant that both men had spent the span of my entire life in prison.
In the letter, I was asked to inform the department as to whether I wanted to attend the first hearing (for Scoggins) via video conference. I prepared a statement to read to him and the parole board. The idea of their release seemed impossible, and if there was anything I hoped, not feared, it was that Scoggins could tell me something that shocked me. Somewhere, I believed that those glimpses into her pain were echoes of a mother who was not dead but simply down some canyon or across some iron-rich lake.
I did not see Scoggins during the hearing. I asked my husband to cover that part of the computer screen with a sticky note. I sometimes worried my hand would somehow jump to the mouse and move his face into my view. I was afraid I’d see his face in the faces of others after that and afraid his eyes would be fresher in my memory than my mom’s were. At the time, I thought nothing Scoggins could say would upset me. I thought I had faced it all. He seemed startled by the news of my mother’s passing—seven years ago. I decided Scoggins thought of my mother as much as I did. I wondered if he saw my mom’s eyes in my own. I hope he saw them, blazing and forgiving and half of me. I was relieved my mother never saw Scoggins again.
I took the Post-it off the screen during his second and final hearing in 2023. The man did not look menacing, as I’d imagined he would for all those years. He was handsome. How could I think such a thing?
A parole commissioner cited Scoggins’s two life sentences. She reviewed his horrendous crimes—her life’s work, this. Then something strange: She appeared flustered and asked for a recess. When she returned a few minutes later, she was sniffling. Surely, I thought, this was it—she looked so overcome with anger at this man that this would be his final hearing. But just moments later, the commissioners granted Scoggins parole. He cried. My face tightened. For fifteen minutes the commissioners outlined the stipulations of his parole, one of which being that he could never contact me. I wondered if I was allowed to contact him.
In the days and weeks after, a fear made me shake whenever I was in a confined space. My breath became short and my fingers went numb in elevators when I imagined Scoggins free—which, in April 2024, he would be. (Walton did not get parole.) If this was even a portion of the fear my mother felt, had I succeeded in my mission to understand her? That thought made me want to give up my search for information about the crime, made me ask when I should stop digging. When did my mother’s life end and mine begin?
In the past, I had wanted to return to the alley where my mother was shot more than I’d desired to wade in the waters of Red Lake. The alley demanded my attention. I could scrape my hand against the concrete and feel the outline of the world she crawled back to be a part of, to have a son. I told myself that in the alley I could catalog each detail and even create a timeline of the events. Doting and researching became one and the same. I questioned my devotion in order to create drive and purpose. I had been trying all along to find out whether her mettle and spark lived in me—and to do that, I thought I had to replicate her pain. Now I knew that wasn’t true.
Now I consider Red Lake, where there is no concrete but sand. Springs bubble up from within the lake, and loons call out in mournful cries, even when they are simply speaking to their young. The song of the loon, its black-and-white-feathered body bobbing in the water, is difficult to distinguish. A melody of loss and a melody of the elation of a child’s return sound nearly the same. It’s calm on Red Lake, and on windy days the waters lap at the rocks, playful and uncommitted. I can dig into the red earth with my hands if I want. Were temptation to arrive and I were to search for the bullet fragments in the sand, I’d never find them. At Red Lake, they are gone. I can dig and dig and I will find nothing but what I was already given.
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