Friday, December 17, 1999
Reburial ends family's long ordeal
Demons led to grisly death
BY STEVE KEMME
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Cheryl Durkin's brothers dig up her coffin Thursday.
(Michael E. Keating photos)
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RED LICK, Ky. — As a cold wind whipped through the pines, 25 of Cheryl Ann Durkin's relatives and friends huddled together Thursday afternoon at her freshly refilled grave at a hilltop cemetery.
Vester Alexander, a minister and a family friend, strummed his guitar and sang hymns, and the mourners shed tears over the loss of Ms. Durkin, who was killed and dismembered in February 1998 in Middletown.
For her family, the unusual reburial ceremony was an important step in what has been a long, tragic ordeal.
“I feel good that she's all in one place,” said her mother, Dorothy Bond, who lives a few miles from the cemetery. “Her spirit's at peace. Now maybe we can all go on with our lives.”
The victim's mother, Dorothy Bond, left, weeps with her cousin, Jo Ann Alexander, at graveside.
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Ms. Durkin's torso had been buried in June 1998 at Webb Cemetery, in the Red Lick Valley near Berea, in the Appalachian Mountain foothills about 150 miles south of Cincinnati.
But the rest of her body parts had to be held for evidence in the murder trial of the man who killed her and cut up her body.
With James Lee Lawson's murder conviction Monday in Butler County Common Pleas Court, the body parts were released to a Berea funeral home. Thursday, a friend with a backhoe and four of Ms. Durkin's brothers dug up her coffin and reburied it with the rest of the remains before mourners arrived.
After the simple, poignant half-hour graveside ceremony, Ms. Bond, whose ancestors have been buried in the graveyard since the early 19th century, was able to smile through her tears.
Cheryl Durkin
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There have been few reasons to smile for the close-knit family since the 33-year-old woman was killed Feb. 24, 1998, in Mr. Lawson's home in Middletown.
According to prosecutors, he struck her four times in the head with a blunt instrument. The next day, he cut up her body in his basement. He threw the torso in the Great Miami River and, at his request, his mother, Ellen Peck, and his sister, Melissa Botts, buried her head and other body parts in woods in Preble County and Brookville, Ind.
Mr. Lawson was convicted Monday of murder. He had previously pleaded no contest to charges of gross abuse of a corpse and obstruction of justice. Judge Patricia Oney sentenced him to 20 years to life in prison. Ms. Peck is serving a prison sentence for her coverup, and Mrs. Botts will be sentenced Jan. 4.
The portrayal of Ms. Durkin in Mr. Lawson's trial as a drug-addicted prostitute deeply disturbed her family, who preferred to remember a far different woman.
Her sister, Karla Edwards of Madison Township, looked at a photograph of a young woman tilting her head back in laughter. Her sandy blond hair pulled back behind her ears, Ms. Durkin looked strikingly pretty and full of joy.
“That's the real Cheryl,” Mrs. Edwards said softly.
When Ms. Durkin was born in 1965, her family lived on Central Avenue in Middletown, the same street where, in the last year of her life, she sought crack cocaine and turned “tricks.”
Her parents divorced when Ms. Durkin, the sixth of nine children, was 4 years old. She never saw her father again, a factor her family thinks contributed to her lifelong problem of low self-esteem.
Divorced three times, Mrs. Bond raised her nine children by herself. She and her children moved often when Ms. Durkin was growing up, living in Middletown and Franklin before moving to Richmond, Ind., when Ms. Durkin was 13.
The family moved back to Middletown when Ms. Durkin was 16, and she dropped out of high school. She later earned her General Educational Development diploma.
She lived a nomadic existence, alternately staying with Mrs. Edwards and her mother, who moved to Dreyfus, near Red Lick, in 1989. Ms. Durkin married in 1990, but she left her husband four years later and resumed dividing her time among her sister, her mother and friends.
Mrs. Edwards always reserved a bedroom in her spacious log-cabin-style house in the country for her sister.
“I don't think Cheryl wanted to be alone,” Mrs. Edwards said. “Maybe that was because she was from such a big family. She loved people and could not be by herself. I don't think she wanted the responsibility of being on her own.”
Ms. Durkin worked as a drywall contractor and, using her middle name, operated Annie's Housecleaning.
A boyfriend introduced her to crack cocaine in late 1996, beginning her swift descent into drug addiction. She would stay with friends when she used cocaine. Her family never saw her high on drugs and didn't know she worked as a prostitute until after her death.
Ms. Durkin spent six months in 1997 at a Christian drug rehabilitation center in Florida. During her stay, she called her mother almost daily, talking and praying with her.
During her rehab and afterward, Ms. Durkin avidly read the Bible and wrote pertinent biblical passages in a notebook. During the last months of her life, she once told her mother, “Don't worry about me. Wherever I go, God walks with me.”
Ms. Durkin delighted in being with children.
“At family gatherings, she'd walk off and leave the adults and go over with the kids and have them giggling,” said her brother Gary Caudill, 40, of Enid, Okla.
Ms. Durkin displayed a generous spirit throughout her life, even when she was battling cocaine addiction.
Three months before her death, Ms. Durkin asked her sister for old clothes for needy people in a run-down part of Middletown. She walked out of the house lugging three large garbage bags of clothes.
“Cheryl could not stand to see anybody suffer,” Mrs. Edwards said. “If she saw somebody who was sad, she would want to get them laughing.”
On a bitterly cold winter day two years ago, she and Ms. Durkin drove past a homeless man who had no coat. Ms. Durkin insisted that they get an old coat from home and drive back and give it to him.
“After she gave the man that coat, she was so happy,” Mrs. Edwards said. “She felt like she gave him a million dollars.”
Despite her lifestyle at the end, Ms. Durkin's family believes that her soul is now with God. That conviction provides solace for a family that has been battered by the shock of her grisly death, the torturous court hearings and trial, and the anguish of her absence.
“If we didn't believe she was alive and well in heaven, it would be easy for us to be full of bitterness and vengeance,” Mr. Caudill said.
On hursday, with all of Ms. Durkin's remains buried in the same Kentucky soil as her ancestors, her family felt an overwhelming sense of relief.
After the funeral director placed her remains in the exhumed coffin, out of view of the family, Mr. Caudill said to Mrs. Edwards, “Now there can be peace in the valley.”
During the graveside service, Mr. Caudill, who had helped exhume and rebury the coffin, knelt in the dirt at the foot of her grave and cried.
The 21-month nightmare was ending. Cheryl Ann Durkin, who had struggled with many demons that led to her death, was home at last.
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