The Truth Tellers: Mary Stavik

It has been my privilege to interview some extraordinary people. Two of those — brave women who told difficult truths— have recently been in the news. I am writing two blog posts to honor them. This is the first.

Eighteen-year-old college freshman Amanda Stavik (“Mandy” to family and friends) disappeared on Friday, November 25, 1989, while jogging  near her mother’s Acme home in rural Whatcom County. It was the day after Thanksgiving.  I was a 28-year-old reporter, assigned to write the story for the Bellingham Herald. I had no idea, when I set out to knock on her mother Mary Stavik’s door for the first time, what a profoundly moving and important story I was about to cover.

                Mandy’s body was found in the Nooksack River three days after her disappearance. Nearly thirty years later, shortly after 11 a.m. on Friday, May 24, 2019, a jury of his peers found Timothy Bass, a neighbor of the Staviks’ at the time of Mandy’s death, guilty of her murder.  This time, I was following the story of the trial in the paper like everyone else.

                Through all the years, Mandy’s mom, Mary Stavik, has been on my mind. Every Thanksgiving, I have thought of her. When each of my own children reached 18 years, I thought of Mary. When I feared for them after school shootings, I remembered her telling me that having a child was like agreeing to have your heart outside your own body for the rest of your life. Truth, Mary. You have such a gift for it.

                I was a rookie reporter at the Bellingham Herald in 1989. About ten years older than Mandy, I could easily  relate to her life, her death — and to the shattering grief that crashed over her mother.

                The way Mary Stavik stood up under that grief was extraordinary. She displayed a kind of personal integrity that comes from only one thing, in my experience: the truth. She told the truth, over and over again. About her fear when Mandy was missing. Her desperate pleas to “look for her.” Her hope . . . and then her shock and despair when Mandy’s body was found.

                I will never forget the drive from the Bellingham Herald parking lot — with photographer Martin Waidelich, a good friend as well as a colleague — out to the Stavik property on Strand Road. It was like standing over an icy pool of water, steeling myself to dive in: into the depths of fear, and then despair, bewilderment, and shock. And then, the overwhelming grief.

                There was no other way for me to tell Mary’s story of losing her daughter, but to live it alongside her whenever I was interviewing her. To be there in the room with a mother and a sister and brother: jittery, terrified, stunned, shaken, angry, and, eventually, heartbroken. There was no way to tell this story but to feel it.

                Mary told us the truth about her wish to “keep Mandy to myself,” not to have to share her with the public that turned out in droves, first to search for her, and then to mourn her. The stress of the public spotlight probably created a bizarre, unreal quality to the most irrevocable truth: Mandy was gone.

                On the first anniversary of Mandy’s death, I interviewed Mary again. She had thought and felt a great deal in the previous year about the blaze of publicity surrounding her daughter’s death. As I wrote then, “she is often angry when she hears of other murdered women — homeless or poor, prostitutes or drug addicts — whose deaths bring only minor mention in the media. Those women have mothers who love them, too, she said. She rejects the social phenomenon that made the death of her own daughter — honor student, cheerleader, musician, and athlete  — more worthy of outrage.”

                Recently the Herald  quoted Mary saying that there was no “closure,” to finding  and convicting Mandy’s murderer. “The only closure . . . would be to bring Mandy back.”

                Truth, once again. Mary never gave us any soundbites, no glib conventions. The truth is that grief does not go away even if “justice” is done in the courts. I suspect this is often the case for those bereaved by crime: the justice system does what it can. But it cannot heal the wounds that trauma and death leave.

                I have only seen Mary once since I left my post at the Herald to venture into book editing.  I was taking my own children to the fairgrounds in Lynden, as Mary, her older daughter Molly, and a grandchild in a stroller were leaving. We passed at the turnstile, and there was no time to speak. But my heart was too full in that moment, to do so, anyway. It was so good to see Mary going forward with her life, despite the hole in her heart. I knew the absence would never go away — but I was glad to see her engaged in a small, ordinary pleasure.

                When a producer from ABC’s 20/20 recently contacted me and asked for an interview, I agreed. I felt I had just one worthwhile thing to add: the importance of Mary’s truth-telling to me and my readers. I understand that the episode will air sometime in the fall. When I learn specifics, I’ll post them here.

                When I saw Mary’s comment about “closure” after the guilty verdict, I heard her voice in my mind. She has a clear, quiet way of speaking  her truths, even when they are not what her listeners are hoping to hear. We’d like to hear that somehow the justice system has delivered a form of relief. Perhaps sometimes it does, but we can trust Mary to tell us that for her, this time, it has not.

                It is ironic, to me, given that Mary has never offered anything but the truth, that the man who took her daughter from her cannot, even now, do the same. He continues to deny his guilt. It seems to me that the very least he could do, now, after thirty years of grief and suffering, is tell the truth.

                But whether he does or not, Mary Stavik will remain, to me, an example of a courageous, honest human being: one whose story of grief and loss did not destroy her, but lifted her and her daughter, shining, into the public eye. Her example says, to me, that while losing someone we love may devastate us in one way, in another, there is no ending, no oblivion, as long as the love lives on.