Most normal people think of my dad as this monster,
and I've spent most of the last 10-plus years
of my life actively not talking about it.
You think that...
because your dad is a murderer,
that people won't trust you.
You feel like somehow, that is sleeping somewhere
in you or it's down there,
and I have never been able to shake ever, to this day,
the fear that this is just genetically...
inside of me.
It is still, to this day,
probably one of, if not the hardest, things
I've ever had to do.
How do I explain that to someone?
How do I explain the huge difference between this
terrible thing that he did
and how I still care about him,
and how does that not make me a bad person?
How do I tell that story?
And I don't know if I'm gonna be able to,
but I never would have imagined
that he would do this
just horrible thing.
No, I never --
I never ever thought that would happen.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
[knock at door] [creaking]
[banging on door]
[creaking]
[water dripping]
[banging on door] [creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
This is a picture of my mom and dad on their wedding day.
When I look at this picture,
I see a guy that people really like to hang out with
and that matches everything
my mom ever told me about my dad when he was younger,
someone who's pretty charismatic.
I don't think any person could look at
these two people and say he's bad news.
He looks really happy. He looks like he loves my mom.
This is not what I remember of their marriage.
It certainly wouldn't be very long before
I was born and my brother was born, and...
like, the real worst of it
would start pretty much right after that.
This life of theirs seems like a choose
your own adventure, and somebody picked the wrong one.
We lived in Wyoming, but my grandparents all
lived in North Dakota, which is several states away.
And one of the things that is sort of a pillar of my memory
of my childhood is these road trips
from Wyoming to North Dakota.
Every few months, we were going to grandma's house.
Where are we going?
I -- I think we're gonna go to grandma's for a while, okay?
I always knew that if we were going to go see my grandparents,
were gonna be there for a while.
You never go to grandma's house for a day.
You wanna help me grab the bags? Come on!
If I was planning, you know,
a multi-week road trip to go see my family
three states away,
you know, you think it would take, like, a lot of planning.
But a lot of the times, it always felt to me really quick,
like, hey, we're going to grandma's house.
All right, let's go -- Hop in the car.
What about school?
It's okay, I'm gonna talk to your teachers.
And it only sticks out now to me as really odd that
my dad never came with and that he was never with us.
Where's dad?
Dad's not coming.
I don't think I really understood at the time why.
Why did we go back and forth so often?
Like, why were we -- Because it's a long trip.
It's a long drive.
Why would -- Why were we doing that?
But what I now think and, you know, kind of talking through
it with my mom is the realization that, for my mom,
going to her parents' house and getting away from my dad
was a way for us, even for
a little bit of time, just to be safe.
I don't think you can really understand that when you're
seven or eight years old,
but now, it makes a lot more sense to me.
As my dad began to become more unstable and more violent,
um, I think my mom honestly just needed to get away and go
to the safety and comfort of her family,
my grandparents.
If my grandma, specifically, and my grandpa had known what was
actually going on,
like if they had known...
[sighs]
...I don't think they would have let us go back.
One time, I was in my parents' bathroom.
Definitely probably shouldn't have been in there,
and when I was in there, there was a mirror on the --
On the bathroom sink.
And on the mirror, there were lines
of cocaine.
I didn't know what that was then, but I knew it was bad.
I knew it was a drug, but they don't really teach you,
what do you do when you find a drug in your parents'
bathroom, right? Like, nobody teaches you that.
People who do drugs go to jail,
that was what they would tell you.
And I didn't want my parents to go to jail,
and so I put it in the toilet, and I flushed it away.
- [toilet flushing] - Daniel!
What are you doing in here?
And my mom is just -- Just upset like I've never seen.
Oh, my God, what did you just do?
I don't know.
What is wrong with you?
Why is my mom yelling at me?
Why would you do that?!
My mom is frantic and upset
and a little bit violent, and that was terrifying,
honestly -- I'd never seen my mom act that way.
Go get ready for bed.
- I said go get ready for bed! - DANIEL: In the moment,
what was really hard for me to understand was
why is my mom upset with me about this?
I think now that was probably an early...
indication that my mom was kind of afraid of my dad.
He was abusing a lot of alcohol,
a lot of drugs, and she knew
she would have to explain it to my dad.
And I think my mom was afraid that she was probably
gonna get hit.
She was just terrified.
I wonder how many things my mom
did to stay safe and to stay, um...
on my dad's good side.
We often would go camping, and in Wyoming, there's
so many really beautiful places that you can go camping.
I don't remember where we were,
but I remember that we were camped,
and the first thing I remember is just the sound,
just this sort of loud crash.
Goddamn it!
And I don't know what happened, but something made my dad flip,
[metal clanging]
And then it was just
sort of like this tornado, throwing things,
kicking things, smashing things with his hand,
punching things.
[shouts indistinctly]
This switch flipped on him,
and he was just this explosion of anger.
Damn it!
DANIEL: It was the first time that I remember being in
the middle of an episode of my dad completely losing
his temper.
One thing I remember that just still,
like, sticks out is, like, this hatchet.
All I remember seeing is just this -- this
hatchet moving and then slamming in the tree.
It's like this picture I have in my head of, like, looking at
this tree, and there's a hatchet in the tree,
and I knew that my dad did it.
As a child in that moment, I just froze.
[can clanging]
[shouts indistinctly]
My mom, in those instances, knew what I now know, which
is that there was nothing that you could do to stop him.
He just had to go through the rage.
And after he had destroyed our entire campsite,
he just walked away, like nothing happened.
And what I remember is that my mom
was the one cleaning it up, and I saw that a lot
with my mom where, in the aftermath of
all of that violence,
she's left picking up the pieces.
And then, I don't know, an hour or two hours later,
he's, "Hey, Daniel."
"Do you wanna go -- Do you wanna go fishing?
Come with me buddy, come on, let's go."
I mean really like Jekyll
and Hyde 100%, like completely different people.
So I would see my dad have these huge violent
outbursts, and then he would become this entirely
different person, this very kind, sweet, nice dad.
As a child,
like, you don't know what's going on,
and what I found out later was terrifying.
This is a picture of me and my brother,
and my dad is building Legos
with us -- as much as I really,
you know, at this time in my life, I obviously really love
my dad -- he's, like, my idol at this time.
Makes me start to wonder about,
you know, how his life had --
Was starting to spiral out of control.
The first time that I really remember, like, seeing my dad
hurt something is when our dog,
Elway, ran away,
and my dad just really lost it.
Elway was the sweetest dog, and he was very smart.
He figured out all on his own how to open the fence.
He would hop up, use his nose, and open
the fence, and he would get out, and he would run away.
As he got older,
he would do that often, and one day,
he got out, and he had run away.
Daniel. Where's Elway?
I don't know. I just saw the gate open.
[sighs] God.
And I remember just this sort of, like --
Not panic, I don't know if panic is the word,
but she was so afraid of what he would do to us.
Um, I'm gonna look for him.
You stay here in case he comes back.
My dad found him.
What I remember very clearly now,
my dad just, like, picks the dog up by his collar,
and then he slams, slams the dog down
and hits the dog, punches this dog in the face.
And I remember, like, hearing, like, the sound of a dog yelping
because it's, like, being hit,
like, it just kind of sticks in your head.
I remember thinking, there's nothing I can do
to stop him, and...
is the dog gonna die?
Like, he's gonna kill the dog because he ran away?
I just remember thinking, like, this makes no sense.
Why would you do that? Why would you do that?
And then I just remember my dad walks away,
and the dog's, like, getting up from that.
Everything was okay, and very commonly after having one of
these fits of rage, my dad would go drink.
I can always see it -- it's this crystal glass, drops a couple
ice cubes in,
pours himself a whiskey, and just
starts drinking, like nothing had happened.
Like nothing at all had happened.
My feelings about my dad over time
did change, and whereas I first
saw him as, you know,
my superhero dad, over time...
I -- I started to become afraid of my dad.
Eventually, we did get another dog.
That dog's name was Teak,
and one day, all of my friends
in the neighborhood were running around,
they were playing, and we ended up in my yard.
- Mom! - What's wrong?
What happened?
And somehow, Teak got to the front yard
and actually bit one of my friends.
Oh.
Okay, uh, let me -- Let me take a look.
My mom was home at the time, and she actually grabbed
our neighbor, put bandages on her
and was, like, holding her and helping her out.
And remember the look on my mom's face was
sort of like, something is going to happen now.
This is -- this is more than just a dog biting the neighbor.
This is -- this is a lot worse.
[sighs]
My mom worked very hard to sort of clean up after that.
It looks okay.
I'm gonna call you mom,
I'm gonna tell her what happened.
DANIEL: She paid for all of the medical bills
for the dog bite.
She was, you know, really trying to make sure
that everything was okay with our neighbor,
but I remember my mom, it just seemed like she was worried.
It seemed like she was, like, worried
that this wasn't the end of it.
And it turned out that it was definitely not the end of it.
That ended very poorly for everyone.
Come here -- come on, careful.
Even though the neighbor was okay,
my dad was not okay with it, and he was upset about it.
My dad made my mom have the dog
put down in front of her two sons.
[somber music]
Completely unnecessary.
He could have taken the dog to a place
that was safe for the dog and for other kids,
but he refused to back down.
Don, we don't have to do this.
We're all standing there, we're crying.
Like my brother and I were just sobbing to
you know, please don't put the dog down.
I believe he wanted to punish us.
Do it.
DANIEL: He wanted us to experience the consequence
in the most horrific way.
What it takes for a person
to do that to their own child...
I don't understand.
Over time, I started to actually
see things that I knew were not right,
but I never really understood them.
Things like smashed cigarette trays,
[glass breaking]
Broken windows,
holes in the wall.
My mom having a Band-Aid on her face
or covering up her arm.
You can't put those pieces together
when you're that young.
But you know something's off.
My mom never sat me down and said, "Daniel",
"these are black eyes from your dad.
He punched me. He got mad at me. This is wrong."
In fact, she worked really,
really hard to make sure that I didn't see that.
But as it began to escalate, the sounds of my mom in
distress, like screaming because she was scared
or screaming because my dad was about to do something
violent like throw something or break something,
that gradually became an increasing part of
my evenings -- A scream and then a smash.
[glass breaking]
In our living room,
we had a huge picture window.
One morning, it was just broken glass,
and my mom is cleaning up.
She had also looked like she had been also beaten up
by my dad.
Mom?
What happened?
DANIEL: I didn't know at the time what had happened,
but I think as I got older, I couldn't ignore that there was
a part of my life that was not normal and not like my friends.
I knew my dad could be very violent, and I knew that
that was starting to be violence towards my mom.
Go get ready for school.
I'll be done in just a minute.
I think at that time in my life, looking at these big
pieces of glass, for me,
what I could no longer deny was that my dad was dangerous.
Fear of my dad and of
his anger and rage started to
fill in all of the other feelings that I had for my dad.
My dad handled repairs for large hydraulic
equipment that was mainly used in oil fields.
And so my dad traveled often, and he would go to some very
exotic places,
and he would bring us back pictures and souvenirs and all
sorts of really cool things.
And one time, he came back from Syria,
and he had this ceremonial blade,
this knife, it was, you know, probably about
a little bit over a foot long.
Has this really nice sheath, and you pull it out,
and it's decorated and it's really,
really beautiful, and I never saw anything like that in
my life -- for me,
knives were just things that you went hunting with
or fishing with or used at dinner, and here
was this thing that looks like a sword from a movie,
and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
I remember one day, um, I was
just playing around with my brother,
I'm looking around my house, and I'm like, what --
What can I do with this?
How can I -- How can I test how --
How awesome this -- This thing is?
And so I get a frying pan of all things.
We take the knife, and we're just -- wa-pow!
Just trying to go at this frying pan, and then I look at
the knife in my hand, and the knife has
just gashes and dents from where it hit the frying pan,
and I remember just being panicked.
I remember that was the first time I ever felt like I had
done something that I was going to experience
what my mom had experienced.
I just knew I had to hide it.
So I took the knife, I put it back in the sheath,
I put it back in the gun cabinet and actually put
something on the top of it.
A few days later, I heard my dad scream.
DONALD: Daniel!
And I knew instantly, he found the knife.
Did you do this?
What the hell is wrong with you?
His eyes are, like, black, blackened over,
and he's just angry
and -- and yelling and just at the top of his lungs just
screaming, swearing.
That's it. Come over here, come on.
DANIEL: I was terrified, terrified.
He was just out of control.
Don -- Don, calm down.
I remember just hearing my mom say, "Don't hit him."
"Please don't, Don. Please don't, Don.
Please don't do this."
Look, it was an accident. He didn't mean to.
I had never in my life been hurt by my parents like that.
I still, all these years later, remember how much that hurt.
I never felt safe being around my dad alone after that.
Until, I mean, a couple months ago,
I actually always assumed that it was my dad
that had hit me with the belt
because he was so angry.
But
I only recently found out that it was actually my mom.
I was asking my mom about the incident with the knife,
and she said, "No, it wasn't, it was me."
"I took the belt from him because I was afraid"
"of what he would do with the belt."
She was afraid he was gonna kill us.
And so because she thought that
it would be easier if she did it, she did.
I'm not angry with my mom about it.
I'm actually grateful, because...
I don't know if my dad would have
killed me,
but I don't think he would have stopped.
It's easy for me now to forgive my mom for that,
because I realized my mom
was doing the best that she thought she could
in that minute to protect me.
The incidents that would cause him to lose
control of his temper and become very violent,
it became less predictable, longer lasting,
and harder to stop.
My mom did her very best to make sure that we were away
from the arguments,
the fighting, and the violence.
The earlier indications that something was
happening were really sounds -- muffled, angry
sound of my dad yelling about something.
The sound of my mom doing her best to try to calm him down.
DANIEL'S MOM: Please just take it easy.
DONALD: Don't tell me to take it easy!
There's a really memorable sound that
a hand makes when it goes through drywall.
DANIEL'S MOM: Calm down, you'll wake the boys.
DANIEL: It's kind of like this scary
mystery happening outside of your door.
DONALD: Why are you always like this?
- DANIEL'S MOM: Like what? - DANIEL: Your brain learns to
kind of tune it out,
and you learn to kind of just like put your head down.
Like I remember that -- I remember like this,
like putting my head down like that.
Can I just close my eyes and go to sleep?
DONALD: When are you going to learn?
- DANIEL'S MOM: Stop it. - She never left.
She stayed, and I never understood why.
What I later found out was that my dad told my mom,
he said, "You can leave."
"You can leave any time you want to,
but I will find you, and I will kill you."
And she was afraid that he would do that --
That he would find her, and that he would kill her.
There were things that I saw and heard
but that I blocked out,
because they were so bad, and one of those examples
is probably one of the most dangerous times
where me and my brother and my mom
might have been killed by my dad.
I talked to my brother, and I asked him,
what did you remember? What do you remember?
And he told me about this story when my mom and dad
had been fighting, and my mom
and my brother and myself ended up
locked behind a door.
Stop. Stop, stop. What are you doing?
DANIEL: And then my dad had tied a cord around the door
and he had threatened apparently
to burn the house down while we were locked in the room.
Don, please don't do this to the kids, please.
DANIEL: And I think what's unsettling for me is that
I was there,
and that I don't remember any of that.
But I believe my brother, he's positive that it happened
and that my dad said he was gonna burn the house down.
But he didn't.
I think that day
the fear
of being burnt with your children in
the room was enough for my dad.
I think that's what he wanted.
It really does make me wonder, like...
what else did my dad do
that was so bad that we blocked it out?
I'm not sure if my dad ever thought that he would kill us.
But what I do remember is that one of the times that
we were traveling from Wyoming to North Dakota
to my grandparents' house,
we were driving along, laughing, joking, you know,
road trip, and just kind of out of nowhere,
I remember hearing what sounded like
a gong, just this huge metal clang.
And then the vehicle went down, and then the scraping sound.
And what happened was the tire from the van had literally
come off on the highway, rolled off.
[breathing heavily]
The first thing everyone did was, like, getting out
and sort of looking around to figure out what had happened.
What happened?
My mom had kind of said offhandedly that my dad had
just changed the tires.
He'd just put new tires on the van himself,
and my dad was a mechanic.
So strange. Your dad was just working on the tires.
Even at that young age, I knew my dad was
a very talented mechanic.
He worked on multimillion dollar, very complex machines.
The idea of, like, a tire change,
fixing a tire, and that he would mess that up,
even at that young age,
I felt unsettled, like that there was something wrong, and I
remember my mom saying, "Maybe this was not an accident."
I definitely remember the feeling, this sort of
panicky feeling, like how could this happen?
How could this happen?
There's no way.
This feels like more than just an accident.
The best case scenario is my dad was so drunk that
he was careless.
And the worst case scenario is that
he was angry, and...
he wanted to kill us.
I think that my mom probably to this day
still quietly wonders if it really was an accident.
Because I do, for sure.
I wonder.
Just seemed like it got harder and harder and harder for him
to stop, to calm down,
to stop breaking, screaming, kicking, yelling.
One of the most violent times he's ever been with my mom,
um, two black eyes.
I mean, the house was just completely trashed.
He had actually, like, really
violently pushed my brother, and...
my mom began to feel
less that she was in danger,
but more that we were in danger.
In the aftermath, I'm separated from my brother.
He's with my mom in one room,
and I'm with my dad in another room,
and he's sad, and he's telling me that my mom
and my dad were gonna be separating.
It's -- it's not your fault, okay?
I think on that night, my dad knew
that their marriage was ending.
I think my dad knew that whatever he had done was enough.
And then the next thing I know is the sound
of someone banging on the door, just banging on the door.
[banging noises]
"It's the police.
Let us in."
My mom or someone else had called the police,
which was new to me.
The police had not really, that I had seen,
been involved in this before.
And they knocked down the door, and they come in,
and they tackle my dad in front of me,
and he's not going down easy.
He's, like, fighting them.
I felt bad for him, he's getting arrested,
but I'm also, at this point in my life, very scared of him
at times.
I was struggling with how I still,
in many ways, love my dad,
and I knew my dad loved me, but I think I started to realize
that my dad's rage was stronger than how much he loved me.
He gets tackled down in front of me and hauled away,
and he looked back at me,
and I saw he was just, like, angry,
like that same kind of rage that I had seen many times,
but that the difference was that he was in handcuffs,
and he couldn't do anything.
I felt like at least at that moment that I was --
I was being rescued, you know,
I felt safe, because I felt like the police
had taken him away and that
maybe he would finally stop,
because he didn't want to go to jail.
Thankfully that was where my mom decided that she could
leave, and she did leave,
and she got a divorce, and we moved out of our house.
After we moved out, I began to see a lot less of
my dad than I had before.
I grew up, and I very quickly saw that
what I had seen him do with my mom
had not only continued but that it seemed
that it was getting worse.
My dad had a new girlfriend.
I remember seeing my dad pushing, shoving, smacking
with her.
[shouting indistinctly]
My dad's violence and rage against my mom and our family
had always been a secret in our family,
but now it was growing outside of our family.
Every woman that he was ever with,
every single one,
had had some type of, you know, really terrible,
violent experience with him.
It was very clear to me at that point
that this just violent explosion couldn't be stopped.
I instantly recognized her face.
This is a photo of Jennifer Randel.
If I, you know, closed my eyes and thought of the first time
I saw Jennifer,
this is almost exactly what it would look like in my head.
Very kind --
It makes me wish that she had not met my dad.
When I met Jennifer the first time, I think I was probably
grateful for her, because by that time, my dad,
I had seen 20 years of my dad being a mess,
and I was -- I was
glad for my dad that there was someone that cared about him.
One of the last times that I saw Jennifer with my dad was
at a bar -- we were all there, having a really good time.
I had no idea, no idea,
of how bad it would actually be.
[phone ringing]
I get a call, and it's my grandma, and my grandma
says something along the lines of, "Your dad has been arrested.
He's in jail. He murdered his girlfriend."
DANIEL: The very first thing I did,
I get on the computer, and then I started
to, like, read into the details of what he did.
He's at a bar, and he gets in a fight with his girlfriend.
He takes Jennifer and puts Jennifer in the car,
in his trunk.
- [buttons dialing] - [Jennifer shouting]
They drive out into the countryside.
He just brutally, just absolutely, just beats her
to the point that she's, you know...
there's massive internal damage, just massive.
You can hear...
that she's terrified, and I believe that she's terrified.
It's very hard to hear what's probably someone's last words.
This is a letter that my dad wrote
after he murdered Jennifer.
"I am not the one who stabbed Jennifer.
"She took the knife from the glove box to stab me.
"She started kicking the windows out of
"the truck and throwing things out of the window.
"I tried to stop her, and she fought.
"I didn't know she got stabbed until I heard
"that [bleep]-up sound.
"I did fight with her.
I didn't actually kill her."
I don't think you can listen to the call that we listened to
and believe anything that he wrote in this letter.
And it's shameful and embarrassing
that this is my dad,
because he did stab Jennifer.
Killed Jennifer -- Can we stop for a second?
The prosecutor in his case was
very adamant about him being put to death.
But well before my father ever committed this crime,
I have been and continue to be very strongly opposed to
the death penalty, and so I had this enormous clash
between my personal beliefs
and this horrible thing that my dad did.
But once I did make the decision,
it was very clear to me.
I knew that I would beg a jury not to kill my dad.
And I'm standing up there about to try to save his life,
and he won't even look at me,
so I turned to the jury,
and I took a breath,
and I started to tell them why...
they should not put my dad to death.
And I remember asking them all
to please
just stop the cycle of violence.
And I look at this one juror,
this one juror, she's looking right at me,
and I knew,
I knew,
I knew that she was not going to put my dad to death.
But the last part of his sentencing phase
was he would be given
the opportunity to speak to the jury, and he chose
to hurt me in that moment.
He is addressing
the jury directly, and for the first time,
he acknowledges what he has done.
He accepts and admits that he killed Jennifer, and...
then he tells the jury
that
they should put him to death.
I had just begged a jury to save his life,
and it was this sort of, like,
final act of cruelty after all this time,
and I don't understand that.
Then I got up,
and I walked out of the courtroom,
and I just...
I knew that
I could leave that part of my life...
behind me in Casper with him
in that jail,
and I got on the plane, and I flew home.
After my dad murdered Jennifer, I was a wreck.
I lost my job.
I couldn't focus, I couldn't concentrate.
I was constantly afraid of people finding out.
I have never been able to shake, ever to this day,
the fear that this is just genetically
inside of me and that I genetically
pass that on to my children.
I haven't really spoken to my dad in a while,
but less than a year ago, I got an email from him from jail,
seeing how I was doing and -- And asking me
if I could write him a letter.
I'm sure that I will talk to him again in the future,
but...
he's not gonna be the person that dictates that.
And, you know, like, maybe one day I will go see him,
but not right now.
He doesn't have that power over my family or my future anymore.