A Life That Matters (16 page)

It was clearly not a trial to determine what had caused Terri’s collapse. In her preparation, Pat had gone through thousands of pages of medical information and so must have initially missed the MediPlex bone scan, conducted in 1991, which showed bruises on Terri’s bones that indicated possible abuse, perhaps over a span of years. After the trial, however, haunted by Hammesfahr’s testimony that Terri might have been strangled, she asked two volunteer nurses to go through the records again. One of them, Eleanor Drechsel, discovered the bone scan in one of the boxes containing Terri’s medical records handed over to Pat by Michael’s attorneys.
⁴

Pat called us. “You’re not going to believe this. There was evidence that Terri might have had broken bones all over her body.”

The news made me frantic. Had my daughter been the victim of ongoing marital abuse? Had she covered up marks as so many abused women do, and kept quiet about it? It was too much; I could not believe it was true.
⁵

Bob could. “In 1990, you and Michael were joined at the hip,” he told me. “You knew everything, supposedly. When I heard about the bone scan and the fact they’d found all those bruises, I figured that Schiavo was hiding the scan and the fact they’d found all those bruises. MediPlex might have hidden it if they were responsible for the bruises. If Michael had caused the bruises, however, then their silence helped him.”

Before Judge Greer issued his ruling on the trial to determine if Terri was PVS, Pat filed a motion requesting time to investigate the recent evidence suggesting that Terri’s heart failure might have been caused by physical abuse.

Her plea was passionate: “Look, the very person who’s trying to have her feeding tube removed—the very person who’s trying to kill her—might have put her in this condition in the first place.” She asked for a discovery period to find out what the bone scan was all about.

Greer denied the motion. The evidence was interesting, he granted, but irrelevant to the question of whether Terri’s feeding tube should be removed.

While Greer didn’t follow up on the possibility that Michael had abused Terri, the media did. “Do you think Michael did this to your sister?” they asked Bobby.

“It is still undetermined what caused Terri’s collapse,” he said. “However, the growing amount of evidence suggests that something violent might have happened to Terri the night she collapsed. Surely the question calls for a thorough investigation.”

The investigation has never been made.

Pat would use the doctors’ hearing, particularly the videos
of Terri, to build up a solid record so that we’d have the strongest possible case when we appealed. She was actually cheerful as the trial progressed. But I, more than any of my family, became gloomier, more depressed. How much hope do I have in me? I wondered. How many trials are there going to be?

As it turned out, what changed our lives had less to do with the appeal than with the perception of the public. Forces I was only dimly aware of were beginning to emerge.

CHAPTER 14

Frustrations

When the doctors’ trial started, we were struck by the fact that there were so many people, friends and strangers, on our side of the courtroom and so few on Michael’s. The reporters, who had taken up the story and whom Bobby recognized, sat on Michael’s side because there was no more room on ours. We would at least have emotional support, I thought, if not Greer’s.

One of the most vocal supporters was Glenn Beck, who had left Florida for Philadelphia when his talk show went national. He set up shop at one of the restaurants across the street from the courthouse, and he sometimes came into the courtroom, the better to give his listeners an accurate picture of what was happening.

When the videos came on, showing Terri responsive, I looked at Glenn. The audience was gasping, murmuring, turning to each other, weeping, cheering—the commotion was out of a Hollywood movie—but Glenn simply sat there, his eyes on a monitor, tears streaming down his face. He was crying—it seemed like he couldn’t stop. I looked at the monitor myself, and when I turned back to see him, he was gone, I suppose to tell his listeners what he had just seen. But I’ll never forget his tears and what they meant to me.

We began to receive messages of support from across the country. We put the picture of Terri looking at me on our Web site, and the videos of Terri responding and interacting drew an emotional and passionate response.

I was deeply touched by the public’s voice. It didn’t matter to many of those we heard from what Terri’s actual condition was, or to what extent she would recover. They simply understood a mother’s love and devotion. When I read the court transcripts today, I’m struck by how emotionless they are, how bloodless. I realize they are meant to be factual documents. The messages from the public showed the other side, the emotional side. The letter writers empathized with the pain in my soul; to them, the law was secondary.

Nevertheless, it was in court that the battle for Terri’s life would go on.

After a dizzying four months of motions and appeals, Greer’s ruling on the October doctors’ trial was scheduled for oral review by the appellate court. These were cruel days. As each decision came down, I felt tossed and turned by a whirlwind that would not stop blowing, one day encouraged, the next depressed, my mood dependent on the actions of lawyers and judges whose language I barely understood.

Pat went into the appellate court on April 4 full of optimism. She had provided the appellate judges with CDs made from the doctors’ videotapes, which were clearer and had more definition than anything seen in Judge Greer’s courtroom, and she now expected a favorable verdict. The judges this time were Altenbernd (once again) and new arrivals Carolyn K. Fulmer and Thomas E. Stringer. Altenbernd looked like the king of the court when he walked in. His presence was ominous. If anything, he seemed angry.

Our side, as usual, was packed with our supporters, Michael’s with few. Michael himself was there (he seldom came to the hearings and indeed showed up less and less as time went on) and more of the press. The national news services had picked up Terri’s story, and there were continuous pieces on local television, but the national networks were not yet interested.

The judges sat down. “I viewed the videotapes of Theresa Schiavo and I didn’t see anything there,” Judge Altenbernd announced.

I looked at Pat. She had melted like a snowman in the blazing sun. The courtroom went quiet. Pat didn’t know what to say, what to do.

It’s peculiar, but I don’t remember my own emotions when Altenbernd said those devastating words. I had melted along with Pat, incapable of feeling, incapable of thought.

The court criticized us for failing to provide adequate evidence for our argument, in particular why we hadn’t included testimony from Dr. Jacob Green, one of the neurologists who had sided with us earlier. This made Pat all the angrier because the only reason we didn’t was that Green had recently had hip replacement surgery and couldn’t make the trip.

On June 6, 2003, the appellate court affirmed Judge Greer’s ruling.

Two weeks later, Pat filed for a full appellate court hearing. Denied. But the court later granted Terri the thirty-day stay so Pat could appeal to the Florida Supreme Court. To do so, she would need new evidence, new facts. The court would not overturn the appellate court’s decision unless we had them.

With time running out, we were forced into desperate measures.

A year earlier, in 2002, Bob had learned of a Texas-based therapist, Dr. Joseph Champion, who was doing state-of-the-art speech therapy with patients like Terri.

“One day I smuggled in an audiotape recorder and put Terri on the cell phone with him,” Bob remembers. “Terri talked to him. She wasn’t saying words, just making sounds—you couldn’t understand what she was saying.

“All of a sudden I see Terri rise up and almost fall out of her chair. When I grabbed her and sat her back down, I took the phone and put the earplug in my ear.

“‘What in the world did you say to Terri?’ I asked Dr. Champion.

“‘I told her, if she doesn’t get out of her chair, they’re going to kill her.’

“The reason I was making the tapes,” Bob went on, “was so I could get them to Pat’s paralegal, Tom Broderson. He’d make copies and send them out to speech therapists across the country.” Champion’s testimony wouldn’t have held as much weight, Pat told us, because the therapy he was practicing was experimental, less in the mainstream.

One of the people Broderson sent the audiotapes to was Sara Green Mele, a speech/language therapist at the renowned Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, who wrote an affidavit saying that within a reasonable degree of clinical probability, Terri would be able to comprehend spoken language and follow one-step commands—
if she were given appropriate therapy and training. Pat and Broderson also included information on Terri’s ability to swallow, and
in her affidavit, Mele added that she thought Terri could do so—a vital piece of the growing evidence that contradicted the diagnosis of PVS.

This was the kind of ammunition Pat was looking for. So Bob brought in a videotape recorder to show Terri moving and responsive. “I was a nervous wreck,” he says. “The hospice people were keeping a closer watch on us. And I’m sitting there and I’m glancing at the door for fear I’m going to be caught, because if they catch me, I’m out of the hospice forever. It was a tremendous risk, making that tape, but it showed that Terri wasn’t PVS, so it was worth it. I sent it to Pat the next day.”

To combat Michael, we kept going back to his testimony in the medical malpractice trial. The money he promised to spend on Terri’s rehabilitation was now being used to try to kill her, an irony I found particularly painful.

Bobby had an acquaintance who worked in a district attorney’s office. “My friend looked specifically at Michael’s testimony during the medical malpractice trial,” Bobby says, “and then he looked at what Michael had said and done afterwards, and he felt that Michael had definitely defrauded the court when he refused to use the money he won for Terri’s rehabilitation. He also looked at evidence that Michael might have caused Terri’s collapse. We had Cindi Shook’s deposition, for example, even before the MediPlex bone scan. He wasn’t sure we had a strong case there, for we only had circumstantial evidence, but he was sure Michael had committed fraud. But there was a statute of limitations on fraud, and it was now ten years after Michael’s testimony. He urged us to put everything we had together
fast
and get it to Pinellas County State Attorney Bernie McCabe.”

Bob compiled a file with all the relevant facts, including his belief that the bone scan showed that Terri had been abused, and sent it on. A week later, he got a call from a Robert Lewis in McCabe’s office: “There are no crimes to investigate further,” Lewis told Bob. Even though Michael had indeed vowed under oath to take care of Terri, it was not illegal for him to change his mind.

Pat determined to take the case to McCabe’s superior, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and had her assistant, Tom Broderson, call Lewis for a copy of his report.

Lewis said there was no written record of his investigation and there wasn’t going to be one because all of those allegations had already been adjudicated. When Tom said, “No, that’s not so,” Lewis said he was misrepresenting the facts and hung up on him.

Pat told us that we probably should have gone to the police to file a formal complaint before we contacted McCabe. It didn’t seem too late to try, though. Bob called the St. Petersburg Police Department. “I know the case,” the detective who answered told him. “There’s nothing to investigate.”

“The police
have
to take your report,” Pat said. So Bob, Bobby, and Suzanne marched down to police headquarters.

They were met by an officer named Strong. Bobby was the spokesperson:

“She basically wondered why I was filing a report thirteen years after the fact. I explained why. She created a file for it and said it would be processed.”

We found out that our report went directly to the same detective Bob had spoken to on the phone, the man who had told him there was nothing to investigate. The matter ended right there.

We had one final shot: the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. They read the report Bob had given to McCabe and the St. Petersburg police. There are definite grounds to conduct an investigation, a department representative said, and promised to do what he could.

He later contacted us, apologetic. His superior had told him not to pursue the case—his hands were tied. We discovered later that if he
had
investigated it, he would have lost his job.

I suspect this next part will sound bitter. And this is a book meant to honor Terri, not to get back at the officials who made uncovering the truth impossible. Still, the connections between the people who hindered any criminal investigation are too striking to go without mention. As Bob put it:

“It’s a well-known fact that Judge Greer was a county commissioner before he became a judge. He had political connections in Pinellas County, one being Bernie McCabe, and the other, State Attorney General Charlie Crist.

“We feel that everything was getting stonewalled, swept under the rug. We had the most unfortunate luck because the people who were in positions to help Terri were all friends and they were all protecting each other. And, in essence, protecting Michael Schiavo, who we still feel to this day could have been responsible for Terri’s collapse.”

Suppositions, yes. What’s certain is the connection between George Felos and the Woodside Hospice. And the hospice was making Terri’s life, and ours, more and more difficult.

CHAPTER 15

Hospice and Hospital

We visited Terri as much as we could during the spring and summer of 2003, sometimes as a family, often alone. Each time I went, I rejoiced and grieved: rejoiced because she was happy to see me, and I knew I was bringing her comfort; grieved because of the evident lack of attention the hospice paid her. She was bathed and her sheets were changed, and one or two of the nurses were kind to her, but she was being “warehoused,” as it’s called, and my resentment grew every time I saw her.