horses, and when she was a teenager, she often skipped school to ride Patches, the family’s black-and-white horse. “Dee didn’t like school,” Camila recalls. “She didn’t do the work, so she flunked a grade and ended up in the same class as one of our sisters who was almost a year younger. She wasn’t dumb, but she had trouble in school. She was restless, and it was hard for her to focus.”
Dee fell in love with Greg Carowe, who was a couple of years ahead of her in school. They married when she was eighteen and soon had two sons. Dee was excited when they bought a cozy house with a yard for the boys to play in. The new home was in Comstock, Michigan, on Azuba Avenue, a quiet street, shaded by trees. Greg worked as a cook at a psychiatric institution, while Dee cared for their sons. One night, Greg failed to come home, and Dee was frantic with worry. “She tried to find him and called his relatives,” remembers Camila. “They told her he was okay but wouldn’t tell her where he was. She never saw him again.”
Greg abruptly stopped supporting his family and filed for divorce. He moved to Florida and married a woman Camila suspects he’d been carrying on with while married to Dee. History was repeating itself. Dee’s husband had left her and the children, just as her father had abandoned his family. Not only was Dee emotionally shattered, she was all alone with two small boys and no way to support them. She lost the house, applied for welfare and moved to an apartment.
When Dee met Alva Jenkins, six years older than she was, he might have told her he was one of ten kids, but he probably did not mention that he was an ex-con. A few years earlier, in November 1967, he’d been convicted of taking indecent liberties with a child and had spent nearly three years behind bars. The age of Alva’s victim is unknown. Perhaps he’d molested a small child, or maybe he’d been intimate with a teen just weeks shy of the legal age of consent. These are two entirely different types of scenarios, and without more specific information, Al’s trustworthiness in interacting with children is difficult to gauge. But that wasn’t the only issue. He was a violent alcoholic. That alone was a good enough reason for Dee to avoid him. If she recognized that Al had problems, she might have believed she could help him. She was, after all, “The fixer.” While he appeared sweet in the beginning, she soon realized he had a temper and no qualms about hitting women. Dee came to fear Al, but it seemed safer to stay with him than to test the limits of his rage by attempting to flee.
“They didn’t have shelters for battered women back then,” Camila stresses. When authorities became aware of Al’s abusive presence in Dee’s home, they took her sons away. Greg’s new wife didn’t want the boys, so they were placed in foster care. Dee was devastated. She wanted her sons back and tried to break up with Al. It was a difficult situation. She had lost her welfare benefits when the kids were taken, and Al was supporting her with his job at a foundry. Dee couldn’t go home because her mother was furious at her for “living in sin” with Al.
Sometimes Dee got her hopes up when Al promised to change. He would quit drinking. He would never hit her again. Together they would fix everything and bring her boys home. But he always broke his promises, and she blamed herself for making him mad. “It’s my fault,” she told one of her sisters. “Everything that’s happened is my fault.” As much as she wanted her sons with her, she may have felt they were better off in foster care.
Dee’s situation became more complicated when she got pregnant again. “But Dee was excited when Shanna Kay was born,” says Camila. “She was so happy to have a daughter.” The birth of his daughter brought out a tender side of Al. He adored Shanna Kay and was gentle with her. The little girl was still in diapers when Dee got pregnant with George. Camila insists Al was good to the children, but he was cruel to Dee. The smallest thing sent him into a rage.
Dee often asked her sisters to come get the kids so that they could play with their cousins. Camila