Saturday, September 18, 1999
Daughter follows grisly footsteps
Woman killed the same way as her mother
BY RACHEL MELCER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Searching for the security she knew during her mother's life, Patricia DeChristopher wandered down a lonely Indiana road one April night and found herself following in the footsteps of her mother's death.
Just like her mother, Mrs. DeChristopher, 36, got into a car with two men she hardly knew and wound up dead in the woods, her throat slit.
The two men arrested in the Lawrenceburg woman's death — Ronald W. Pavey, 38, and George James Liapis, 33, both of Lawrenceburg — are in jail and awaiting trial early next year. Mr. Pavey was charged with murder, Mr. Liapis with aiding in murder and assisting a criminal. If convicted, they each face up to 55 years in prison.
Dennis Mitchell was convicted in 1980 of killing Mrs. DeChristopher's mother, Marie Odette Huckings, exactly the same way. He has a parole hearing scheduled next week and, if successful, could be released from prison Nov. 28.
Patrick DeChristopher will do his best to see that all three men remain behind bars. He blames them all for his wife's brutal fate.
“That instance right there was the defining moment in Patricia's life, when her mother died. Everything else came back to that, that her mother died that way. She never recovered from it,” he said.
He paints a picture of a happy young girl, full of energy and hope, whose life was forever changed when her mother left their upstate New York home for the evening and never returned.
After her mother's death, the family fell apart. Patricia, then 16, and her four siblings scattered to the winds, some to foster homes. Her father was either unable or unwilling to help, Mr. DeChristopher said. Patricia lived with one friend of the family after another until she finished high school, then she wandered through New England from one waitressing job to the next.
“Her only sense of protec tion was taken away from her when she was 16. She tried to go on with her life and through it all, she never became bitter. She had that love for people in her heart,” Mr. DeChristopher said.
He met Patricia in Vermont in 1991 and spent six months working his way past her emotional walls and earning her trust. She had had a troubled family life, he said.
She was always careful with strangers, wary of repeating her mother's mistakes.
Mrs. Huckings, 42, met Mr. Mitchell on Dec. 1, 1979. The next day, she embarked on a hunting outing and a night of bar-hopping with him and one of his friends, according to court testimony reported in the Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times.
Later that night, she and Mr. Mitchell parked in a secluded spot. Her body was found in the woods, her throat slit.
Thirteen years later, Patricia Huckings married Mr. DeChristopher, on Jan. 2, 1992. She and her daughter, Mandy, followed him back to Cincinnati. Mr. DeChristopher is a University of Cincinnati graduate who works as a business consultant.
Mrs. DeChristopher stayed at home and struggled with more thoughts about her mother and a growing manic depression. “It came over her like a time bomb and it just took over,” Mr. DeChristopher said.
The couple separated a few years ago, but remained close. Mr. DeChristopher moved to nearby Guilford, Ind., continued to see his wife and her daughter and had hopes of a reconciliation. Her last words to him, the day before she died, were “I love you.”
“In my mind, (her mother's death) put her out and about, looking for something that wasn't there. It was a sense of family, a sense of belonging, of acceptance,” Mr. DeChristopher said when asked why she got into a car with strange men.
According to police, Mrs. DeChristopher was celebrating her 36th birthday on April 5 in a Lawrenceburg bar with a girlfriend when they met Mr. Pavey and Mr. Liapis. She left alone with the men that night and was found dead three days later in a Switzerland County woods.
Mr. DeChristopher is caring for Mandy, now 13, and has started a legal adoption. With counselors, he is helping to restore her faith in life.
“As I told the parole board, this guy who killed Patty's mother had a generational effect,” he said.
“When your daughter looks at you and says, "My grandmother was killed, my mom was killed — does that mean I'm going to get killed, too?' How do you deal with that? ... She's doing as well as can be expected in this situation.”
Every day, Mr. DeChristopher passes by St. Joseph Cemetery in Delhi Township, where his wife is buried. He visits her grave two or three times a week.
He will sit for her in a Switzerland County courtroom and testify against the men accused of killing her. He spoke to the New York state parole board weighing Mr. Mitchell's possible release and will take his wife's place in fighting to keep him in prison.
“It just pains me that for most of her adult life Patty struggled and then to have it end this way, that's what makes me heartbroken. To have these people do this to her. I'm very, very angry,” he said.
Mr. DeChristopher is a man of faith. He prays for the peace of his wife's soul and for the power to overcome the evil that has touched their lives.
“Apparently the people who did this to her were full of hatred ... or else why would they do this to somebody? And I'm not going to hate because that makes me like them.
“Hatred takes energy away from me being a good father and doing what I have to do. If they get what they deserve, which I believe they will, then that's the best I can do.”
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