Reclaiming a Life

Within a week of her release, she is flying over every hurdle.

She lands a seasonal job at the Ann Taylor store where her sister already works, and takes delight in folding sweaters just so. The employee discount seduces her into spending too much of her part-time paycheck on pretty outfits, she realizes, "but I need clothes for work." It's the first real job she's ever had. Her mother and two grown sisters have moved into the split-level to offer financial and emotional support. A neighbor is teaching Teressa to drive, and friends from her new church have promised to help her get a car from a good Samaritan who repairs beaters for donation. She peruses Christian universities online.

But she worries about her biggest challenge, the only one, she says, that matters: Teressa's children are living with Erin's mother, who moved to Northern Virginia to care for them after her arrest, living in the house where her son died until Teressa's own mother and two sisters arrived to reclaim it for Teressa just before her release. Now Teressa must convince the court's guardian ad litem that her sons, now 9 and 6, and her daughter, 5, should be returned to her.

Her first weekend home from jail, they came over to celebrate an early Thanksgiving with the relatives and friends who had shown up in court to support her. Etta and Earl Hardy walked over from next door with a huge casserole of macaroni and cheese, while Teressa's mother, Maria, fussed over a turkey in the small kitchen that Teressa couldn't yet bear to enter.

Teressa spent the afternoon playing cards with the kids and snuggling with them on the sofa. "They've heard different things about what happened," she says, knowing that their paternal grandmother disputes the court's finding of involuntary manslaughter, believing Teressa lost her temper during an argument and stabbed Erin on purpose. Erin's mother refuses to comment about what happened, or to testify on behalf of her son's memory when the judge invited her to do so during Teressa's sentencing. Teressa says she has told her children "that I loved their daddy very much, that it was an accident, and that I'm very, extremely sorry." She says they slept through everything that drunken midnight when she whirled around during an argument with a kitchen knife in her hand.

The six-inch blade sliced through Erin's lung, pericardium and pulmonary artery. Teressa at first told police she didn't know what had happened, that Erin was drunk and she came upstairs and found him clutching his chest. But she quickly confessed, and when told at the police station that Erin was dead, Teressa begged an officer to take his service revolver and shoot her, to please, please, just let her die, too. She was booked on charges of first-degree murder. It was Dec. 11, 2005. She was 24 years old and had rarely known love without violence.

A Troubled Start

Teressa met Erin Turner-Schaefer when she was 14, a wild child cast adrift, swallowed up by a nomadic teen subculture of drugs and petty crime, the empty hours swinging crazily between peril and play on the streets of Syracuse, N.Y. Teressa and a friend were riding a tourist trolley in a park one day when a handsome boy rolled up alongside on his skates. Teressa remembers laughing and holding out her hand to tow him, how he grasped it but then skated away. She tells the story now as tragic prophecy, recounting how she turned to her friend to declare: "I'm going to marry that guy someday!"

Her young life by then was already built more on heartache than hope. Teressa's childhood memories are of shuttling from one relative or family friend to the next, bouncing from one state to another, from what she remembers as one dysfunctional home to the next. She remembers her father beating her back purple after she refused to wash the dishes, at 12, because she was afraid of the maggots in the filthy sink.

When Teressa was 13, a neighbor man raped her and went to prison for it, but justice held little meaning for Teressa. He had taken "the one thing that was sacred to me," she would explain to her attorney more than a decade later, when facing prison herself. She began sleeping with older men and began living on the streets in the eighth grade. Drugs and booze offered blissful escape.

A couple of weeks after the trolley ride, Teressa was near the same park, this time fleeing some man she had angered. A friend flung open the door of a parked car and urged her to jump inside, it was okay, he knew who owned it. That, she says, is how Erin found her hiding in his back seat. She moved in with Erin, his mother and his six siblings. When Teressa fought with one of the sisters, she remembers, she and Erin were kicked out. They slept in a shared sleeping bag beneath a freeway overpass, and crashed with relatives or friends when they could, roaming Upstate New York and making their way to the Carolinas, where Teressa's grandmother took them in.

Erin became violent the first time, Teressa recalls, when she threatened to leave him because "I thought he was flirting with this other girl." Erin was 16 and Teressa 15 when she says he dragged her by her hair into a bedroom and pulled a gun on her. He then put the gun in his own mouth and put Teressa's finger on the trigger. "He snapped out of it," she says. He was filled with remorse, and she forgave him. After another violent fight, Erin came home with her name tattooed across his chest.

Teressa gave birth to their first son at 16. Erin joined the Army, and they married. Posted to Germany, Erin injured his back in a fall and was transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for treatment in March 2004. They rented the split-level while Erin sought a medical discharge. They had big plans that December he died. They bought a big white cargo van they couldn't afford. "We were going to be bounty hunters," Teressa explains. "We'd need it to carry prisoners."