Jerry Evers relived a nightmare every time he turned on his television in January and saw the story that stunned a nation and topped all the news reports — the drowning of two children by their own mother.
The story of Susan Smith in South Carolina was frighteningly similar to a tragedy that has dominated his own life since New Year’s Day 1980 when Evers’ wife murdered their three children by drowning.
As the Smith story unfolded, Evers says he didn’t see Susan Smith in the news reports; he saw his first wife. He didn’t see the Smith children; he saw his own. The pictures of grief and shock were only too familiar to him and his family.
As painful as it was to watch, it provided a way for him to put to rest demons that had haunted him for years. Since the days when the death of his own children dominated the news in central Florida, he has agonized over the question that everyone seems to have asked since Susan Smith was arrested: How could a mother murder her own children?
No one, Evers says bluntly, will ever be able to answer that question. As expected, he has been pursued by the media and offered payment to tell his story. But he chose carefully the outlet for sharing his story saying, “It is one of God’s grace and love and — at last — forgiveness.” He chose to tell his story through an article in the November 1995 issue of “Home Life,” a magazine for parents published by the Baptist Sunday School Board.
In 1979 Jerry and Dianne Evers were the young parents of three daughters — four-year-old twins Sherrie and Carrie and two-year-old Mandy. Living in a fishing camp in one side of a duplex shared with her parents, they struggled, as they had since they were married when he was 17 and she was 16.
Mental health problems had plagued Dianne since 1973. When they resurfaced, she made weekly visits to a doctor in Orlando. However, she stopped the sessions at a time when she was having delusions of being the Virgin Mary and hearing voices she said were telling her what to do.
In October, when his wife’s behavior became blatantly bizarre and erratic, Jerry pleaded with doctors to commit her to a state hospital, but they determined she should not be institutionalized and would be better off at home.
On New Year’s Day, after telling relatives she was going to bathe the children, Dianne methodically drowned them one by one in a tub of water. Then she walked into the living room and told her uncle: “Call the sheriff. I’ve drowned the three babies. They’re better off now because they’re in heaven.” While her uncle fought in vain to revive the children, another relative struggled to restrain Dianne, who kept trying to put them back in the water.
Evers remembers asking his former wife, “Why, why, why?” did she do it.
Her response was irrational. “She told me because I couldn’t afford to take care of them and they were going through pure hell.”
A neighbor at the fishing camp remembers Evers as a hard-working $192-a-week truck driver and a doting father who took the kids everywhere. Still, for many years, Dianne’s words haunted him.
“She said she did it out of hatred for me,” he says tearfully, in a barely audible voice.
Dianne was sent to the Florida state mental hospital in Chattahoochee where she remained under evaluation for almost a year until December 1980, when she was declared competent to stand trial.
In the February 1981 trial, she confessed her guilt and entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. After a three-hour nonjury trial, the judge found her innocent and ordered she be returned to the hospital in Chattahoochee, where she has spent the last 14 years. She has tried to commit suicide at least four times, including one case when she asked a fellow inmate to drown her.
After the trial, Evers drifted, feeling his life had no meaning. He went from job to job. Dianne divorced him in 1982, and he enrolled in Trinity Baptist College in Jacksonville, Fla.
“That,” says the 38-year-old Evers who accepted Christ as his Savior at age 22, “was my salvation.”
At Trinity, he found grace but not peace. There were still too many unanswered questions. Evers agonized almost daily, trying to bring meaning to the tragedy: Why? Why me? and Could I have done more to prevent what happened?
He served on church staffs for two years and gave his testimony everywhere. Still, he sought forgiveness, but it eluded him; he couldn’t forgive his wife and he couldn’t let go of the blame and forgive himself. He wandered, still numbed, just existing.
Evers admits he lived in a sort of limbo until October 1987, when he met Dorrie Jacobs at a gospel concert for single adults in Baxley, Ga.
“It was love at first sight for both of us,” Evers says with a smile. They were married two months later. Then came Jessica, now 6; Jerry Jr. “Bubba”, 4; and Rebecca, 2.
“We’ve been happy ever since,” Evers says, beaming while he describes life with his new family. “People ask me how I got to where I am from where I was, and I tell them I couldn’t. It was God’s grace. Only God’s grace.
“God has blessed me so much, and all I have to do to know how blessed I am is to look around me at Dorrie and my kids.”
But looking at his beautiful children can also strike fear in Evers, because of their strong resemblance to the children he lost.
“I was fearful for my new family for a long time, especially for my kids,” says Evers. “The last time I talked with Dianne was at her trial in 1981, and she said then she would make me pay.”
His former wife wrote a chilling letter to a Florida judge in 1989, asking to be released: “The court made a crucial mistake,” she wrote. “I confess that I was not mentally ill before, during or after the offense.” In the letter she also stated she knew she could not be retried because of the double jeopardy law.
In January 1992, after she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and housed in a Florida mental hospital for 12 years, a court ruled she could be moved to a halfway house. From there, she began petitioning regularly for her release.
“Can you believe that?” Jerry exclaimed, looking at the 1989 letter. “I was terrified for both myself and my family.”
During the years he drifted, Evers was also angry at his wife, who confessed to the killings from the beginning, spent only two days in jail.
“It’s wrong,” he said tearfully. “She has to pay her debt.”
The loss of his children took the heart out of Evers, and he felt it was his mission to help other abused children. He deplored the insanity plea and fought his wife’s release when her hearings came up every six months. He founded Concerned Citizens’ Foundation, a victims’ rights group, and lobbied to have the insanity plea defense modified.
Eventually he began rebuilding his life through what he calls his “ministry in law enforcement.” He has worked for police departments in Nicholls, Ricon and Vidalia, Ga., as well as several sheriff’s departments. Since March, he has been the chief of police of the one-man force in Canon in northeast Georgia.
“Law enforcement is definitely a ministry I was called to,” says Evers, whose life has finally come together so completely that he wears a chief’s badge on his belt when he’s speaking in churches, and he carries a Bible on the front seat of his squad car when he’s on patrol.
His testimony to church and civic groups alike has always been filled with the beauty and comfort of God’s grace. Yet he still could not forgive Dianne or himself. He worked hard to put the past behind and to turn the pain into something positive. But the fight became increasingly difficult, and Dianne’s hearing in November lasted one hour longer than her trial in 1981.
“That’s when I began asking God to deliver me,” says Evers. “He had to.”
“We each have to find it in our hearts to forgive because that’s what the Bible teaches us. I’ve got such peace about me now; the burden has finally rolled away.”
Then came the tragic drowning of two little boys in South Carolina.
Seeing the Smith case unfold, Evers realized he had been too traumatized in 1980 to feel anything. Watching the events in South Carolina on television was like being there and reliving the tragedy he had experienced but was too numb to feel. It was almost too painful to watch, but as he watched he began to feel healing and to forgive himself.
Then he made a conscious effort to forgive his ex-wife. God’s grace, which had been so real and brought him through such a tragedy, flooded him.
“I am still for the death penalty. I believe if you take a life, your life is forfeited. I noticed David Smith made some statements that were almost identical to those I made. I can truly say I know what he means when he says his wife took something away from him that he will never get over. I feel especially sorry for David Smith, and I understand his writing the book he has been criticized for, because it’s therapeutic. I’ve tried to make myself available to David if he needs me and wants to talk.”
Today, Evers understands with certainty God’s grace and his love and, now finally, his forgiveness.
The exact date this happened was Jan. 17, 1995. He remembers that even more clearly than he remembers New Year’s Day 1980.
The act of forgiveness has not eradicated the painful memories, but it has freed him to move beyond the nightmare of 1980.
——————–
Mich Livingston is a free-lance writer from Buford, Ga. This article was reprinted with permission from the November issue of Home Life magazine.
Copyright (c) 1995 Baptist Press
RNbp5C13mrjB5C13f5C20