FRAGMENTS OF MY DAUGHTER'S LIFE

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 2

Camilla had always been generous to Kimberly Anne with both her time and money. It was Camilla who had paid for the plane ticket to enable Kimmy to fly from California to join Mark during the first part of 1992. Kimberly Anne then moved into the Guglielmo family home located on Jackson Road in Bedford, New York, where Camilla acted as her confidante. In February of that same year Kimmy married Mark, according to a wedding script that she had written, but which was performed by a non-conformist female minister that Kimberly Anne had chosen. Yet Camilla knew that deep inside Kimmy was not a happy young lady.

Kimberly Anne often talked to her mother-in-law, and because Camilla listened to her, she confided in Camilla. Kimmy told her about the "40 Biblical Beatings" that she had received from her mother and step-father, and about her step-father's hands attempting to grope her well developed breasts, and about the frumpy clothes that he made her wear to school, where she changed into her own clothes to match those of her peers.

Mark has told me that Kimberly Anne was told by her own mother that she was a worthless slut. This is not the sort of talk that inspires a child, but rather it is the kind of mental abuse that undermines and destroys self-image and personal worth. Kimmy stood behind all of her accusations, except for the one involving sexual abuse. At first she told Camilla about this event as fact and then she recanted, but she never changed her story concerning the physical and mental abuse that she received from her mother and step-father.

THE SAD LEGACY OF DIRECTED ABUSE

Whether she had also been sexually abused I do not know, because Kimberly Anne may have felt that this was just too personal, and that to tell others may have seemed to her as if it justified her mother's accusations. Whatever the truth of the matter, Kimberly Anne did not ask to be abused and she should have been protected by those who abused her. Kimmy related how she had been bounced from the home of her mother and step-father first to one aunt, and then to another in different states. Kimmy was like a foster child within her own genetic family unit.

Of course her own mother confirmed the mental abuse that she heaped upon Kimberly Anne. To make matters worse her mother's abuse had followed Kimmy into death when Kimmy's mother denounced Kimberly Anne in a fax that was sent from her home in Oxnard, California, to South Daytona Police in Florida. When her mother was questioned in deposition about this fax the year after Kimmy's death, her mother shifted the blame to Mark or to Kimberly Anne herself for making her mother mad at her. It was all very sad, very, very sad indeed.

I READ IT ON THE INTERNET

I first learned of my daughter's death on the Internet. I was conducting a periodic search of the Internet to see if I could find any references to my daughter, when I came across an old obituary notice about my former wife, Kimberly Hoskins. That was at 11:15 AM on Wednesday, October 17, 2001, and it was the morning that everything changed.

Until I found that reference I had accepted the fact that my relationship with my daughter had been interrupted because of divorce. The circumstances that created this interruption were not welcomed, and they will be related in context as this story unfolds. But on that Wednesday in October of 2001, I learned, much to my surprise, that my ex-wife had died the year before as a result of sudden illness.

TO TOP TEXT CONTINUES ON PAGE FOUR