Kehoe: In tragedy's wake

Gene Kehoe and I have been talking this week after his wife, Michelle, was sentenced to serve more than life in prison for killing their 2-year-old son Seth, and trying to kill herself and their then 7-year-old son Sean. I'll be telling his story in Saturday's column. For now, here's a column I wrote last year, shortly after Michelle was charged with first-degree murder.

A quiet place becomes site of family's shattering

Jennifer Hemmingsen

The Gazette

Nov. 1, 2008

LITTLETON -- Fallen leaves like tiny shriveled hands cover the tire tracks near the shoreline at Hook-N-Liner Pond. The grass is fading through yellow to dun along the silty ground where 2-year-old Seth Kehoe bled to death nearly a week ago. At his mother's hands, police say.

The barricades are gone now, the investigators have packed up and driven away, the evidence bagged and filed for trial. All that's left is what was here before: bone-white, naked birch trees mirrored in the water; decaying plastic bottles and abandoned work boots half devoured by mud; casual discards from anglers and high school sweethearts at this tiny toeprint of a pond hidden in the scrub trees, so removed from everywhere. So completely and absolutely nowhere.

How, as police describe, did Michelle Kehoe come to this nearly invisible place, armed with a knife and a plan to kill her two young sons? It's one of the unanswerable questions they asked each other at the Littleton Lounge, in living rooms and in the hushed telephone conversations that have connected this unincorporated town this week.

Theirs is not the grief of losing someone you love. It's an attack on the idea of childhood that leaves everyone feeling betrayed and a little scared. A mother taking a knife to her own children -- “Most people want to see her hung,” Marie Schares told me. Not Marie, who lost a son to leukemia years ago. She wonders if something just snapped inside the Coralville woman. What went wrong?

Marie closed the lounge for a while to show me the pond on Wednesday. “It's farther than I had thought,” she said as we drove past the white one-story house where an injured Michelle Kehoe is said to have climbed the steps early Monday to say her children were in danger.

Researchers say that, on average, nearly every day a mother in this country kills her child -- but not here in Littleton. Marie walked up the trail, pulled from her pocket a neatly folded length of crime scene tape she'd retrieved from the weeds.

People think they might have seen the van here Sunday, a miserable day, so cold and windy it blew a tree across the road nearby. Of course, they wouldn't have thought anything of it then -- maybe wondered in passing whose white minivan that was -- it's only important in retrospect. Now everyone's become an amateur sleuth, trying to answer: why?

But there are no answers here, just a tractor's hum in a far-off field.

Drive back through the hidden path in the grass, follow the gravel around the corner and past the white house. Turn at the Crestview Cemetery and pull back onto the county road through Littleton.

Tractor trailers fat with corn crawl toward the elevator like ants to an anthill. In the fields, cows pick among the golden stubble. Soon, farmers will finish the harvest. Snow will cover the shoreline.

And in the spring, grass will grow green again at Hook-N-Liner pond. Fishermen and lovers will return as they always have, maybe a little changed -- a little more grateful for a mother, a child. Time will dull the sharp edges of our grief. It is all the world knows how to do.