“I’d never even seen one,” Mertie said. “Our apartment had a huge kitchen—compared to the rest of the place—with a big old stove. It was pushed so close to the wall that I was afraid the electric cord might be wearing through, so I pushed and pulled it out into the room a little bit. Well! There was a large hole in the wall, and these cockroaches came flooding out all over the walls and floor. Tracy thought it was funny, but I freaked and was fending them off with a Downy fabric softener bottle. I grabbed Tracy and we went to a park until Chuck got home. I was holding Tracy and sobbing and I told Chuck, ‘I have to go home!’ He got very quiet and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll get you a bus ticket and send you back home.’

“That woke me up,” Mertie said with a smile, “and I told him, ‘No. I can take it.’ We were there only six months. Chuck was slated to go to Vietnam…to be dropped into the backcountry ahead of troops and set up communications lines. Those men had a very high mortality rate, and the air force noted Chuck had a wife and a child, and they transferred him to Sacramento, California, instead. That’s where our son Chip was born when Tracy was three and a half.”

Chuck Winston considered a service career, and Mertie said she would go along with whatever he decided. But, in the end, he returned to the Boeing Airplane Company and they came home to Seattle. Their luck was teetering on the edge. By 1967, Boeing stock dropped and “They turned the lights off in Seattle.” Chuck was laid off shortly thereafter, but he found a communications job with a Fresno company. Kevin, the youngest of their children was born in Fresno.

They were a typical family of the sixties and seventies, with a little house in Fresno that had a “swamp cooler” instead of air-conditioning and a blow-up wading pool in the backyard. “We used to drive up to see the sequoias with the kids to cool off,” Mertie remembered. “The air smelled so clean up there, and it felt like home, but you could see the layers of heat coming up from the valley floor as we drove back to Fresno, and the kids would be cranky and tired by the time we got home.”

Illness in their extended families led them to return to the Seattle area, and they settled in Burien, a few miles from the SeaTac Airport. Tracy had grown to be a tall, slender girl who had a special bond with her dad. Chuck taught her how to play baseball and she was one of only two girls allowed to join the boys’ Little League team in District 7. “She could throw from center field to home plate without bouncing it once,” her dad said proudly. At five feet nine, 150 pounds, Tracy played forward on the Glacier High School first-string girls’ basketball team.

As close as Tracy was to her dad, she was a typical teenager with her mother, always taking the opposite stance from whatever Mertie suggested.

“It got so bad,” Mertie Winston said with a wry smile, “that I couldn’t even take her shopping. My mom would take her, and when Tracy brought home her clothes, I had to pretend to dislike the things I did like. Tracy would say, ‘Do you like this?’ and I’d kind of drag out my answer, ‘…Yeah…’ And so she’d say, ‘You don’t like it. You hate it, but I’m going to wear it!’ ”

It was teenage stuff, and almost any mother would recognize it. “Tracy used to tell me, ‘You’re more concerned about what I wear than about who I am!’ ” Mertie said. “And all I could do was shake my head and say, ‘You’re changing so fast, I don’t know who you are….’ ”

Things were still fairly normal for a family with a teenager. Mertie and Chuck went to all of Tracy’s games and school activities. When there were concerts or other events that Tracy and her friends wanted to attend, a group of mothers arranged to drive them there and pick them up.

When Tracy was thirteen she became friends with a sixteen-year-old girl who was planning to run away. The girl coaxed Tracy, insisting that they should run away together—along with the other girl’s eighteen-year-old boyfriend. Tracy was intrigued by the idea. The other girl’s father called Chuck Winston and said, “We’ve got a problem.”

And they did. Tracy always believed that she could help her friends with their problems. When the sixteen-year-old girl and her boyfriend actually made it to California, they called Tracy and urged her to steal money from her parents, take a bus, and meet them.

Reasoning with Tracy didn’t do any good. “I told her that she was too young to deal with their problems, that she couldn’t even handle her own problems yet,” her mother said.

Chuck attempted to talk with Tracy and, thinking he would help her understand her mother, he told Tracy about how hard it was for Mertie when Tracy was just a baby, how she’d had to fight to get her back from Catholic Charities.

“It backfired,” Mertie said. “She was shocked. Now, everything I did was not only wrong, it was wrong in triplicate. She said I didn’t love her. I tried to explain that I was trying to protect her because I wanted her to be safe, not because I didn’t love her. But she kept demanding that I prove I really loved her by letting her do what she wanted.”

In vain, Mertie warned Tracy that she could not always judge others by how they looked or what they said, that she could not automatically trust people. “You can’t just trust blindly.”

“Mom,” Tracy retorted, “I’m amazed that you have any friends at all.”

One spring afternoon, as Tracy was trying to determine her own self-worth, she demanded that her mother prove to her that she was more important to Mertie than anyone else. They sat on the Winstons’ front porch as Tracy spelled out what she needed in order to feel good about herself.

“I want you to love me more than you love Chip…or Kevin.”

“Oh, Tracy,” Mertie said, “I love you all differently. What do you want from me that you think I’m not giving you?”

“I want you to leave Dad and Chip and Kevin and just go away with me and we’ll live by ourselves,” Tracy said.

When Tracy Winston was little and could not yet count, she had told her mother, “I love you nine, and ten, and twenty-one!”—her little girl’s idea of the most anyone could love somebody else. But now she was sixteen, and Mertie tried to explain what it was like, back in the days before Tracy could remember, how much she had always loved her oldest child, her only daughter, and how she had fought to keep her when she herself was not much older than Tracy. Most of all, Mertie told her that she did, indeed, love her “nine and ten and twenty-one!”

And Tracy, who rushed to trust everyone else, could not bring herself to trust her mother’s love, even though it was her mother who stayed up late to pick her up from her job at a Dairy Queen in a borderline neighborhood. “I couldn’t let two young kids close up the place all by themselves.” Mertie sighed. “But she saw that as my controlling her—not that I was there because I loved her.”

Tracy met a man who was nineteen, older than she was, a smooth and glib sociopath who was already on his way to prison. Her mother detested him, so, of course, Tracy adored him. Even his own sister warned Mertie and Chuck that they had to keep Tracy away from him if they could. “He’s a con man,” she said. “He’s slick and he’ll change her so you won’t even recognize her.”

His sister was right. Tracy fell totally in love with the man who had decided to groom her to be absolutely dedicated to what he wanted. “She would do anything he asked,” her mother recalled. “And she was gone all the time—anywhere but home because we wouldn’t let him call her. We tried tough love…and she left so she could see him. She thought he was a nice guy, and that we weren’t giving him a chance.

“He controlled her,” Mertie recalled, “and even when he was in prison at the Monroe Reformatory, he wrote her terrible letters: sexual letters, demanding letters, guilt-producing letters. They were clearly designed to appeal to her sense of fair play and concern for other people, and prove to her that he couldn’t live without her. He said he loved her more than anyone else, and that she had to prove her love for him. Chuck wrote to the warden and asked him to stop this guy from writing to a teenage girl, and the warden said he couldn’t do that; it would take away the prisoner’s rights. And we weren’t supposed to open his letters or throw them away because that was against the law.”