“I’ll never be the same person”
Photo
Mary and Gary Schmidt in the Bahamas soon before he was killed.
Photo
Gary Schmidt
JANESVILLE — Mary Schmidt’s life is cruelly divided.
Before the murder.
After the murder.
Terry Lee Erickson shot Mary’s husband, Gary, as he made a deposit at a Beloit bank in 1982.
Mary was 31. Gary 32.
Before the murder, they worked hard and owned successful Co-Op Tapes and Records in Janesville, Beloit and Rockford, Ill. Later, Mary would write that it was the best life she could imagine.
After the murder, she navigated years of grief and depression. She closed the businesses.
She continues to live with the loss, the regret and the horror.
After 25 years, Mary thought she would have moved on.
Erickson, after all, was quickly caught and tried for Gary’s murder.
But every year, she attends Erickson’s parole hearings. She tells the board how Erickson changed her life, how she still doesn’t trust him to be on the outside.
Even though he was sentenced to life in prison, he has been considered for parole since 1993.
The hearings are difficult, but she feels a duty to Gary.
Erickson recently was granted work release, and she believes his next parole hearing will be his last.
So she has created a petition on a Web site that she is encouraging people to sign. She will print if off and take it with her in November, the next time she appears before the board.
She doesn’t want people to forget.
- - -
Mary met Gary at a Halloween party in Rockford in 1971. She thought he was brilliant, energetic, positive. He always had a smile. He told corny jokes.
“He had vision and drive, and he knew what he wanted. You just felt he knew how to go about getting it and making it happen,” she said.
“I had never met a guy like that.”
The two worked hard every day, determined to make a go of their business. They moved to Janesville in 1978.
“The stores were doing very well,” she recalled. “We were very proud that we were a married couple and running a business together.”
- - -
Mary and Gary celebrated their 10th anniversary with a long vacation in warm, sunny places.
Back in Wisconsin on March 3, 1982, Gary stopped at a Beloit bank to make a deposit before heading home. It was snowing. It would pile up 12 inches that night.
He wasn’t quite out of his van when Erickson shot him at close range with a sawed-off shotgun. Erickson pumped the action and fired again.
“What we do know is Gary tried to get away,” Mary said. “His fingerprints are on the barrel of the gun.”
The murder was cold-blooded, gruesome. The prosecutor argued it was premeditated. Erickson had told a hardware store clerk that he was buying “five bullets for five men.”
Gary managed to put the van into drive. It lunged onto Pleasant Street but veered into parked cars and trees. Gary toppled out of the van and into the road, where a college student found him and called police.
The moneybag was still on the passenger seat.
At 8:25 p.m., Gary was only a few minutes late arriving home. Still, Mary felt something was wrong.
She called police and asked them to check the store.
Shortly after, she got a call to get to the Beloit hospital as quickly as possible. As Mary was ready to leave, a deputy appeared to take her. They sped down the highway, lights flashing.
At the hospital, she was told Gary had died. She couldn’t go inside. She remembers sitting in shock, in the cold stairwell near the emergency room. The faces of detectives, doctors and her mother swam in front of her.
Everything was a blur after that.
“People coming and going at the house. You’re not sleeping, not eating. It’s a bad dream, and you think, ‘I’m going to wake up.’ And you never do. It ends up being your life, something you have to settle in with.
“I don’t think I slept through the night for four years after he died.”
A death is hard enough. It is surely more shocking when it comes violently.
Back then, Mary couldn’t find a therapist who had experience dealing with murder. She has found great support with the state’s office of victim’s services beginning in the early 1990s.
Mary was supposed to be at the couple’s Beloit store the night Gary was killed, but Gary relieved her so she could go home and finish some bookkeeping.
She might have been standing in the same spot when Erickson raised his sawed-off shotgun.
“It could have been me,” she said.
Many times she wished it had been her.
“It was so difficult to go on.”
- - -
Mary recalls sitting in the courtroom, listening to testimony about her husband’s horrific death, how police found him lying in the street, his intestines spilling out, his lower torso missing.
She stared for six days at the seat of their van, dragged into the courtroom and covered in dried blood. It took her breath away. When prosecutors displayed Gary’s down jacket, feathers flew from its gaping hole.
“It was like firing a cannon at close range in a person’s body,” she said.
“There was a lot of shock that came with the trial.”
Mary eventually closed her Co-Op record stores. She could never get herself to enter the Beloit store, anyway.
She hung onto the Janesville store at 1821 Milton Ave. the longest. But the music industry changed.
“Not having Gary there, I couldn’t figure out what to do next,” she said. “I didn’t have the vision he had.”
The store closed in 1990—another March loss—a final end to the passion for music the couple once shared.
Meanwhile, Gary’s father’s health continued to deteriorate. The family is convinced his death in 1998 was caused by the stress of his son’s.
- - -
In the 25 years since the murder, Erickson has worked his way from maximum- to medium- to minimum-security facilities. He now is at the Thompson Correctional Center in Deerfield.
He committed his crime before Wisconsin’s Truth in Sentencing Act, so parole hearings automatically started in 1993.
At first, Mary could bring herself to attend only by video.
The last two years, she’s been in the same room with Erickson.
“You just get stronger with time as to what you can deal with,” Mary said.
“When you lose somebody like that, and they’re so young, and you see this person who’s only 45, you kind of want to get a glimpse of them. You want them to see you, to show them that you didn’t go away.”
“I kept staring at his hands,” she said. “To me, his hands were the reason. They held the gun.
“He’s made statements he wishes he could take back what happened, but he can’t.
“I never heard him say those words that he’s sorry.”
She tells the parole board about her life after the murder.
Erickson was given work-release privileges in 2006, and Mary fears he will soon be paroled.
She thought hard about starting the petition to keep Erickson in jail, but she decided it is her duty. She missed only one parole hearing, and she felt later that she let Gary down.
Mary said she doesn’t have hate in her heart.
But she doesn’t trust that Erickson can live in the community.
She worries he’ll kill again.
“I was dealt this,” she said. “I can’t just walk away from it. My heart won’t let me.”
“What kind of person goes out to rob somebody and takes that kind of weapon and fires it at close range?” she asked. “It’s the most gruesome thing I can imagine … He had it ready to fire the first shot. He had to pump it again to fire the second shot.
“There was definitely an intent to kill.”
It’s a “right and wrong” thing,” she said.
“Twenty-five years just isn’t enough,” Mary said.
Erickson might have half of his life left.
He still owes.
“Gary’s was taken at 32. He was literally gunned down. He died in the most gruesome manner.”
So far, 70 people have signed her online petition. She’ll print them off and take them to the next parole hearing.
- - -
In her second life, Mary sometimes wonders how the first one might have played out.
She and Gary may have had children. She is certain they would have had some sort of business together.
She thinks about him everyday.
On bad days, she asks him why he had to leave.
But her depression deepend after a failed, second marriage.
Recently, she stopped resisting anti-depressants, which her therapist prescribed for what was diagnosed as post-traumatic stress.
The pills steady Mary’s emotions, but she’s OK with giving up the highs along with the lows.
“I try to be a really upbeat person,” she said. “One thing I learned from Gary is to be a positive person.”
The second part of her life has its own milestones.
In March and August—the months of the murder and the trial—she is not herself. She feels jittery, distracted, isolated. She doesn’t sleep. Depression drifts in and out.
When it snows, the flakes transport her to a squad car speeding down the Interstate in a blizzard. She sees herself sitting in shock in a chilly stairwell at the Beloit hospital.
“You don’t go through something like this and not think about it,” she said.
“It changes you.
“I’ll never be the same person because of living through this.”
PETITION ONLINE
People can find Mary Schmidt’s petition at www.gopetition.com/petitions/block-the-parole-of-terry-erickson.html.
Aug 7, 2008 at 9:43 p.m.
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I signed it. I was signature 1240... I hope we can double that. I also emailed it to my friends and posted a bulletin on Myspace to get people to sign it as well. I hope this helps Mary.
Feb 18, 2008 at 11:03 p.m.
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It would be nice if people could take 2 min. out of their busy lives to sign for something they believe in!
Feb 5, 2008 at 9:45 a.m.
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It would be great if this story could be put in a larger paper to reach more people (ie: Wisconsin State Journal).
Feb 1, 2008 at 1:01 p.m.
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I am Gary's sister. Our family has been so proud of Mary for her courage and conviction. Erickson's murder of my brother was a profound and sad loss for my parents, whose health and well-being were forever compromised by it. I have lived more than half my life without my brother - I miss him everyday. Right now I have kidney disease and will need a kidney transplant likely within 10 years. My sister and children are the wrong bloodtypes - perhaps Gary was. Erickson may become responsible for my premature death as well.
Feb 1, 2008 at 11:49 a.m.
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cbrltr- i agree they should run a follow up report to ask people to sign petition. you dont have to put your name just address etc
Feb 1, 2008 at 11:28 a.m.
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I am sincerely shocked that of the thousands of readers, only a small fraction took the few moments out of their busy lives to log on and sign this petition. Please everyone send this article and link to everyone you know. Mary needs more signatures. Can we repeat the plea in the gazette??
Jan 31, 2008 at 9:10 a.m.
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Why in the world are our liberal courts and liberal justice system even considering such an outrage? If you commit murder, you should be required to stay in prison for the full term. In this case, life, for the low life that this animal is. What makes him think he can take a life at will? I hope and pray for the death penalty to be reinstated nation-wide. It by itself may not reduce crime, but it will put low life like this in a place where they can never hurt again. By the way, that place is Hell.
Jan 30, 2008 at 10:38 p.m.
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My answer regarding how many signatures,I need as many as possible! Please pass it on to anyone and everyone....everything speaks louder in larger numbers!
Jan 30, 2008 at 2:21 p.m.
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mary- how many sigs do you need??
Jan 30, 2008 at 11:35 a.m.
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I just want to give a big thank you to my friend, Denise Gilbertson for helping me put the petition together and get it up and running. She is a dear friend and very sweet. I meant to mention her in the article to Marsha, but with all the emotion rapped up in this story, I missed it. I am very sorry and just wanted to acknowledge her. Thanks Denise! You are very special to me!
Jan 28, 2008 at 11:06 p.m.
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Mary, Thank you so much for telling your story. It was great that the Gazette was willing to follow up and bring this back to the public's attention. I've sent your petion on to family and friends. Unfortunately, my own family will be making a trip to the parole hearing in two years for the scum that murdered my sister, Susan Anderson in Janesville in 1995. I can't imagine the YEARLY parole hearings you've had to suffer through. Life in Prison is a joke! Our law makers need to keep prisoners in for life when they hand down that sentence. I hope this petition keeps Terry Erickson in prison and that you don't have to worry about a hearing again for awhile. God bless you and all those signers!
Jan 28, 2008 at 2:39 p.m.
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i am already seeing some of this people on the list
Jan 28, 2008 at 1:49 p.m.
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emailed to over 60 peopple and put in a link so easy to sign it. over 500 so far signed
Jan 28, 2008 at 12:47 p.m.
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God willing we shall never have to walk in Mary's shoes...So the least we can do is walk beside her and support her along with all victims of senseless crimes. I implore you, please sign the petition.
Jan 28, 2008 at 12:24 p.m.
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More than happy to sign on. Good luck, I hope the petition does some good.
Jan 28, 2008 at 11:48 a.m.
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if they ley him out maybe this is his new life goal-to get released from a life sentance and go do it again.the old one life goal was to rob and bank and kill somebody.
you can sign petition anonmouse
Jan 28, 2008 at 11:40 a.m.
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Death penalty aside, I at least wish "life" meant "life".
Jan 28, 2008 at 11:32 a.m.
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www.gopetition.com/petitions/block-the-p....
i see it now. in the paper form of paper it was in middle of article
Jan 28, 2008 at 11:28 a.m.
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i cant seem to find the site to post for survey in this article online. can somebody post it in reply. how many signatures does she need. the power of a mass email to your friends can do wonders!!
Jan 28, 2008 at 11:26 a.m.
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will sign too. fed up freddy well put.
i remember coop op records i was just little. they had a really neat store and some very interesting things for sale! i read this article yesterday and cant even believe he is out on work release-so he can go gundown somebody else. what are these people thinking!!!! she not be released at all for no reason.prayers to Mary and her family may the guy got in jail then burn in hell
Jan 28, 2008 at 10:37 a.m.
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i signed the petition and my heart goes out Mary. with that said i have to comment on the "death penalty" people. it is wrong and the fact that people don't see that is disturbing! death is too good for this person. the state can not put people to death it's a crime ! how can you not see murder is murder. killing is wrong and makes nothing and no one right.
Jan 27, 2008 at 11:39 p.m.
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Our prayer's our with you Mary.
Jan 27, 2008 at 11:30 p.m.
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I am Mary Schmidt and I want to thank Marsha for doing such a great job for me and Gary. I also want to thank the Gazette. Words cannot express how much this means to me. We need the public to be informed and involved. It is very emotional and heartwarming to read some of the comments on the petition. I recognize lots of old friends of COOP Tapes and Records. Thank you to everyone for signing! I appreciate all of you so much!
Jan 27, 2008 at 10:52 p.m.
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Many of us have heard the quote - "Evil arises when good men (and women) do nothing." This situation is a perfect example of this - here is an opportunity for all of us to sign the petition and do the right thing.
Jan 27, 2008 at 9:46 p.m.
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Does anyone know if Erickson will ever see this petition?
Jan 27, 2008 at 9:06 p.m.
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Capital punishment is not the issue here. That's a whole 'nother beast.
That said, my heart aches for all survivors of such an un-imagineable tragedy.
Death is too good for these lowlifes.
And in that vain the system - mainly the courts- give them way more than they deserve.
Rights? HA!
Lock them in 4 X 6 cell. All of the other court ordered "fringe benefits" is baloney.
We as a citenzry should be more concerned with the rights and privilages bestowed upon prisoners by the courts. It's ridiculous. And it goes directly to the the JUDGES for allowing this kind of crap to happen.
And who's responsible? We are for electing politicians who appoint the judges to continue to give prisoners more rights than they deserve.
If this guy ever gets out, it's an injustice to all of us.
Sign the petition, but also contact your legislator to change the law's so people like Mary don't have to go through this every year.
Jan 27, 2008 at 8:35 p.m.
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Everyone should sign this! I am a believer of the death penalty but in some cases I believe it should be up to the family. Sometimes they want this person to live everyday knowing what they did, and other times they want them to get what they did to their loved one. I don't think this man should be back on the street. He didn't accidentally kill someone, he killed a man in cold blood.
Jan 27, 2008 at 7:28 p.m.
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This is a story that will never end for Mary. I encourage everyone to support her and petition the courts to keep this murderer behind bars. And, kudos to the Janesville Gazette for writing this story! It's incredible to think that this man could be on the streets again! Keep him behind bars.
Jan 27, 2008 at 7:03 p.m.
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I signed it. I encourage everyone else to do the same. How would you feel if this happened to you. Close your eyes and think about it. Good job Gazette for covering this
Jan 27, 2008 at 12:42 p.m.
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Death penalty is definately the way to go. Not only did this guy ruin her life 25 years ago, he still is around causing havoc. At least not having the guy around can give her some sense of closure, how little that might be.
Jan 27, 2008 at 11:15 a.m.
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Cases like this scream for capital punishment. It's not revenge, it's justice. A man was murdered. The facts are not in dispute. We know who did it. The murderer's life should be forfeit. Instead he's about to be released after less than 30 years. What an outrage!
Can the parole board be influenced? I wonder why they should have to be?
Jan 27, 2008 at 10:14 a.m.
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I remember my mother saying "You know it's bad when you cant even drive up to the bank anymore". How true. This is such a well written story and my deepest heartfelt sympathies go out to Mary and the Schmidt families. How courageous of her to share this story and to start this petition. May the voices of many finally be heard!
Jan 27, 2008 at 10:03 a.m.
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Gary was a friend of mine. He was a great guy. Just a week or two before he was killed, I was looking for something new to listen to. Something to beat back winter's blues. Steve Winwood - that was what he talked me into.
His death forever changed the lives of many. The tragedy continues to play out for Mary - year after year. What horrible pain it must be for her. I wish her strength and peace.
Jan 27, 2008 at 6:42 a.m.
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This is an incredible piece of journalism giving this reader insight into the life of those left behind to mourn a murder victim. Thank you to Marcia Nelesen for writing it --- and thank you and all my blessings to Mary Schmidt for sharing her story. I will be signing the petition. Terry Lee Erickson has no business rejoining society.
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