“Uncle Si.”
Uncle Silas was a man who had executed multiple roles in his life. Had he volunteered for the challenging roles in a benevolent spirit? Or, had he accepted the roles with resentment when they were rudely thrust upon him? The answer is not known. But Uncle Silas, a carpenter and widower with no children of his own, took custody of Judith’s mother, Helen, when she was sent to him at approximately three years of age. Helen’s biological mother had become erotically active by the age of thirteen and was drinking alcohol excessively. She married six times and gave birth to several children. She abandoned Helen to pursue men, and later, committed suicide after four failed attempts. The identity of Helen’s father was unknown, and her maternal grandparents had been killed in a car accident. Uncle Silas was the brother of Helen’s grandfather who had died in the car accident.
Great Uncle Silas became both mother and father to Helen while he worked in his trade as a carpenter. Young Helen and aging Uncle Si lived together near the tiny town of Vader, Washington, in a small, modest home that he had built with his own hands on five and one-half acres of fertile land—land that he had made claim to when he came to the area as one of the early settlers. The simple, square home had no indoor plumbing and no running water, but it was a cozy home and the occupants were mighty thankful to have it.
Vader, Washington, at the time of this writing, has a population of approximately 600; however, the town is considered to be a semi-ghost town. Incorporated in 1906, the town covers a total area of approximately one square mile and is located twenty miles southwest of Chehalis, Washington, along the Interstate-5 corridor that runs north and south in western Washington, on state route 506.
Vader experienced its paramount energy in the early days with a steady, dramatic, decline until present day. The community rose up from nothing in the early 1800’s when settlers arrived from the east. A post office, general store, hotel, and a one-room school gave the town a fresh, new face— a face that would later be blemished by brothels and saloons.
Helen and Uncle Si worked together as a competent team during the years that Helen grew through childhood, adolescence, and then as a young mother. Si’s modest income from his sporadic carpenter jobs and his skills as a handyman supported the basic financial and maintenance needs around the home. A well on the property supplied all of their water. They fed themselves with locally butchered meat and plentiful vegetables that they nurtured each year in their expansive garden. Potatoes served as a major staple for the household as they were easy to grow, easy to dig up in the rich, dark, loamy soil, and they did not require much for preservation—simply a dark, cool, area for storage. It seemed they ate potatoes as a part of every meal. They even ate raw potato wedges for snacks. Fruit trees on the property yielded abundant crops each summer. Helen treasured the once-a-year pleasure of tasting fresh, sun-ripened fruit. Most of the fruit was preserved to last the remainder of the year. It was endless, backbreaking labor for the duo, but somehow they made it work. They had all the basics for survival: water, food, shelter. But most importantly, they had each other.
When Helen was sixteen years old, Uncle Si sent her to work as a riveter at a Boeing airplane factory in nearby Chehalis. It was wartime and the United States needed more airplane riveters just as much as Uncle Si needed more cash. Helen went to work at her first paying job without question, and quietly slipped out of school, never to return.
At seventeen, Helen discovered who her biological father was and that he was living in California—a universe away from Helen’s small world in Vader. Uncle Si encouraged Helen to go meet her father. So, Helen left Uncle Si and the mini-farm in western Washington and courageously went to live with her newly found father who was, in fact, a total stranger to her. During her one-year stay in California, she worked at a purse factory and began a relationship her father. Then, at the end of the year, Helen felt a powerful yearning to go home to Uncle Si. Uncle Si welcomed her back, and the duo picked up where they had left off: working in the yard, tending the garden, hauling water up to the house, chopping wood, and preparing and preserving food.
At eighteen, when Helen realized she was pregnant after getting involved with Wesley Mawson, a handsome, restless, and charismatic young man she had met while hanging out at the local train station (one of the few sources of entertainment in the tiny town). Neither Uncle Si nor Helen had any experience with pregnancies or babies to reference. However, they did not panic. They simply continued moving forward, calmly accepting that they would just figure it out, like everything else they had faced in life. In the meantime, Wesley had already been drafted into service for World War II.
Helen’s pregnancy developed normally while she performed her usual chores with Uncle Si. With no woman available to offer advice and experience about pregnancies and birthing, Helen observed, with fascination and a child-like delight, her belly growing tight and round, and she felt movement from strong kicks by the baby. Once, she exclaimed to Uncle Si, “You know, it’s just like when a calf kicks inside the mother cow…my gosh, it feels like there’s a baby cow inside of me!”
Labor began unexpectedly and early at seven months when Helen slipped and fell over a large rock while crossing a creek near their home. The jolt to her swollen abdomen initiated labor, and the very worried Helen and Uncle Si walked quietly together down their long driveway and then down the first dirt road to neighbors who owned a car. The neighbors drove Helen to the St. Helens Hospital (named for Mt. St. Helens, an active volcano that would violently erupt in 1980) in Chehalis and dropped her off. Uncle Si walked back home to wait for news from the hospital.
Premature baby Judith was born and placed into an incubator. She was tiny but thriving. After sixteen days, Helen and her baby were discharged from the hospital. A staff person at the hospital kindly offered Helen and the baby a ride home. But they were gruffly dropped off at the mouth of Uncle Si’s driveway as the driver did not want to attempt to maneuver the car up the perfidious terrain. Helen, weakened from inactivity for sixteen days, thanked the driver for the ride home and then slowly carried her tiny bundle up the long, nappy driveway and introduced the sleeping baby Judith to Uncle Si.
The duo became a trio.
Shortly after Helen returned home from the hospital, a woman from the Red Cross paid a visit to the new mother, offering chatty, warm, advice and a layette, a starter kit for a new baby including diapers, blankets, and some clothing. Someone at the hospital had noticed that Helen did not have any supplies for her newborn. Uncle Si had polished up the wooden cradle that he had constructed years ago for Helen to sleep in when she first came to live with him. Carefully, Helen gently placed her baby Judith in the same cradle. A second baby girl began life in Uncle Si’s hand-crafted cradle.
Uncle Si and Helen silently stared down at the new miracle, watching her sleep, each fast-forwarding in their mind’s eye to the infant’s life ahead, wondering what kind of person she would become. Would she look like her mother or her father? Would Uncle Si live long enough to see her graduate from school? Marry? Neither Uncle Si nor Helen had a whisper of a premonition that little Judith would grow up and marry a notorious, dangerous, serial killer.
Just one day short of Judith’s first birthday, the Japanese surrendered to allies on August 14, 1945, ending World War II. Wesley Mawson came home shortly thereafter with his U.S. Army combat engineers battalion, based in Fort Lewis, Washington. He met his one-year-old daughter, instantly recognizing his eyes and nose on her little face. He asked her mother to marry him.
Having been raised a Mormon Wesley Mawson married Helen in a Latter-day Saints Ward in Seattle, Washington, about one hundred miles north of Vader. He and his new family began a life together, staying with Uncle Si. Wesley quickly found work in the booming logging industry very close to home. But Wesley, feeling restless and hungry for more excitement, grew weary of the mundane logging job in the first year of employment. Like so many other returning soldiers, he may have been having difficulty transitioning into normal life after fighting in the war. One day in 1946, Wesley abruptly packed up his family and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, leaving Uncle Si behind. Judith was a two-year-old toddler. The young family lived with Wesley’s parents, and Wesley went to work in a cement block yard. Helen began to observe the Mormon ways of life.
Again, Wesley did not bond with the colorless work routine, so he moved his family back to Vader, Washington. Again, they lived with