The Best American Magazine Writing 2023, page 63
This is not to say that all his victims have survived. Three of them are gone, and those who have survived them—their family members and friends—believe that Hodne hastened their end. Anne Wright was attacked in Wantagh on Long Island on the early morning of April 21, 1979, bludgeoned from behind with a heavy object and raped in the woods. She was staying with friends, one of whom, Edie Howell, still remembers the sight of Anne coming back from the hospital: “I was sitting on the porch when they dropped her off. She got out of the car, and her entire head was wrapped. They had her in a wheelchair, and she couldn’t walk. It was a hole. It was a big indentation in her head. I don’t know if that ever went away. Believe me, it was bad. There was a very large amount of stitches.” For the rest of her life, Anne Wright had to endure the debilitating pain of spinal stenosis. In 2011, she died of an accidental overdose of morphine. She was fifty-five years old.
Denise O’Brien was already struggling when Hodne grabbed her while she was trying to use a pay phone in Roslyn on May 22, 1979. She was twenty-two years old, without a job and estranged from part of her family. Of the six women Hodne attacked on Long Island, she was the only one who didn’t participate in his prosecution; she was too traumatized. Her family not only never really knew what happened to her that night, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe what she told them about it, especially as Denise kept on her difficult and erratic course, swallowed up by substance abuse. She died of lung cancer at thirty-six in 1993, and it is only now—now that they are learning what happened to her—that they can see in retrospect the point in time when the dark forces that seemed out to get her grabbed her for good: 1979. “Obviously, this person destroyed a lot of lives,” her brother Jeff says of Hodne.
Georgette Pirkl made it into her eighties after surviving Hodne’s sustained brutalities on April 23, 1979, in Oyster Bay Cove—after surviving being raped and sodomized in the presence of her mother, Caroline O’Neill, and then watching the lingering aftermath of Hodne flattening Caroline against the sidewalk. No, he didn’t kill them, Georgette’s daughter Kathleen says, but he took their lives anyway, their remaining years. Both Georgette Pirkl and her mother died at eighty-one, Caroline two years after the attack. Kathleen was lucky to be at school when Hodne invaded their home, but the more she learns about what her mother and grandmother survived, the more she understands the generational obligation survivorship entails. Though Kathleen burned the album Georgette kept about the attack, she battled the Nassau County bureaucracy for months to obtain the case file. “When I read it in black and white,” Kathleen says, “it explains a lot of things in my life, a lot of reasons I wasn’t allowed to do certain things that I wanted to do, that other kids could do. And now I forgive them. I forgive my parents because I used to think that they were horrible. And now, as an adult her age, [I understand that] being raped by a young kid, it’s humiliating. And what he said about my father [as he attacked Georgette], humiliating. And I now understand why they were the way they were in raising children. I mean, he was brutal on what he did.”
Despite his best efforts, Todd Hodne did not destroy all of them. Just as they fought for their lives then, they fight for their lives now. They not only can’t forget him, they don’t want to, because that means some part of themselves would be forgotten. The twenty-one-year-old secretary who was ambushed in the parking lot of a bustling shopping mall in Garden City is sixty-four now; she doesn’t want to talk about what she went through nor does she want her name used. But she wants her story told, so she has given her husband the task of telling it. He was her boyfriend in 1979, so he has lived with it too, and he remembers the aftermath of May 12, 1979, through the lens of nearly lifelong family attachment. It was her parents’ wedding anniversary, he says. She had gone to Roosevelt Field to shop for a Mother’s Day gift. For many years, she couldn’t shop in stores because of the memories associated with that experience, and even now, her parents’ anniversary is a bittersweet milestone. “I can tell you, it has had an effect on her through her life,” her husband says. “A lot of times we forget about it and life is normal. But there have been years where I’ve said, ‘What’s the matter?’ And she’ll say, ‘It’s my parents’ anniversary.’ ”
Surviving a predator like Hodne requires strength, of course—strength, resourcefulness, a clear-headed decision to live no matter what. In the case of the sixteen-year-old girl whose fight against Hodne in the kitchen of her parents’ home in Baldwin led to his Long Island capture, the strength seems frankly superhuman. On May 31, 1979, she was still a child. But she made Hodne run, and the people who knew her story were, she says, in awe of her. It has been part of her life all her life, the memory of her strength also proof of her strength. She became an artist, and she has had to live in rough neighborhoods, but as a survivor, she always had the confidence she would survive. “It may have been that I just trusted myself to get out of a bind,” she says.
The inevitable distinctions between survivors make it difficult to write about survival. The hard work of living with what has happened encourages the sharing of individual stories and ends up underscoring the fact that not all stories are alike, as Barbara Johnson, now sixty-three-year-old Barbara Kuffner, understood even at age twenty. On April 30, 1979, she went out running in her Bethpage neighborhood; when she ran past the local middle school, she felt Hodne running behind her, and then felt his knife. She does not in any way minimize the extreme brutality of the attack; when it was over, she felt certain that he would kill her, and she saw “the white lights.” But she didn’t die, and when Hodne left in the “sweater with the Mexican design” he would later throw in a dumpster, she went home with bruises on her face and rope burns on her wrists. “I ran home barefoot,” she says, “holding my sweatpants up because I didn’t even take the time to do the string.” She had told Hodne the truth when she told him her father was a cop. He was retired NYPD, and once she got home, he took her back to the scene of the crime in order to find evidence and get the story straight. “He said, ‘You have to do this.’ And I’m like, ‘Fine.’ ” After Hodne was caught a month later, Barbara went to the jailhouse to pick him out of a lineup and then to court to testify against him. And it was there she saw the other women; it was there she realized the differences between them.
“They looked awful,” Barbara says. “You could see they were just shattered by it. And it taught me a lot about myself, honestly, that I looked at these women who had been raped by the same man many months before and they were still suffering. I saw all of them. They all looked ruined. And it made me realize my strength in myself.” She got over the attack, she says, “the day after it happened. I was over it. I was not going to let it bog me down. But you never forget it. You never forget it for the rest of your life. You just don’t. It comes up. It comes up in conversations. It comes up in parenting.” And decades later, it also came up in sex with her former partner: “I said to him, ‘I’ve been raped.’ And it’s crazy. Because it was, what, forty-two years ago? And I said, ‘You need to be gentle with me.’ And he said, ‘I’ve heard the story.’ And I said, ‘But you need to still be gentle with me.’ ”
There is no prescription for surviving the trauma of sexual assault. The women who speak here offer their stories rather than their advice; they testify as individuals rather than as representatives of any sort of category or class. There is, however, a prescription for how the survivors of sexual assault should—and should not—be treated. The only universal response to trauma is grief for what came before. The women Hodne attacked on Long Island each responded to the experience in different ways, but they were allowed to grieve in court for themselves and each other. It was not that way in State College, where only one of the women whom Hodne was suspected of attacking went to court and where the rest had to grieve privately for, among other things, their loss of faith in the place they were supposed to love the rest of their lives. They had to grieve for their loss of happiness in Happy Valley during a season of frenzied celebration for a team and a coach pursuing the national championship. The team that provided the magic also had provided Todd Hodne support, moral and otherwise; the coach who provided leadership had provided him his scholarship. Joe Paterno took pride in his role as moral exemplar and had led millions of Pennsylvanians and then tens of millions of Americans to believe he had something to say about everything. He was very nearly silent about Todd Hodne.
Adrienne Reissman believes that Hodne was the man who attacked her in the parking lot outside the Train Station in downtown State College: “He did a fucking number on me, and I’m a brave soul.” But she also believed back then in Joe Paterno, and she expected something of him: “The decency and humanity to acknowledge the pain that the women [Hodne] hurt suffer. That’s what I expected. That’s what I expected from Joe Paterno. But nothing. Nothing. They washed it under the rug. ‘Oh, my God—it’s one of Joe Paterno’s football players? Oh, please God—no.’ They kept that quiet. They kept it quiet.”
Paterno is gone now, deceased and disgraced. But Adrienne is reminded of him every time she receives a fundraising letter from her alma mater, which she throws away unopened. She knows Paterno kicked Hodne off the team. In her mind, that was not enough.
“You only partly did the right thing,” she says, addressing Paterno forty-three years later. “The humanity is the other part. Really: Who the fuck are you? God? That you can’t acknowledge that someone that you brought to this campus hurt five women that I know of? And you don’t have the decency to at least write a note? Because this man who was hurting women all over campus went to school for nothing, nothing. He had everything. And you sought him out, Mr. Paterno. You brought that rapist on to this campus, and you gave him money to come. Excuse my language. Fuck you, Joe Paterno”
Irv Pankey was once the biggest man Betsy Sailor had ever seen. Now he is just too big for his rental car, especially after four hours behind the wheel. He has come a long way for this, flying across the country and then driving across the state of Pennsylvania. He climbs out of the car one long limb at a time. He moves with the unmistakable gait of a man who played football for a living, a sixty-three-year-old man in a Hawaiian shirt and a ball cap who doesn’t hurry, even in the rain.
He knocks on the door.
She is not surprised this time, and when the door opens, she embraces him, then clings to him, as if steadying herself after losing her footing. He has the same big cheeks, with the small, winsome smile squeezed between them. “What up, dear child?” he asks. “Where’s my cookies?”
They have not seen each other since a chance meeting outside Beaver Stadium a year or two after they graduated. But they’ve been in touch lately, more than four decades after they each did something remarkable. “When I think back on him doing what he did, I’m amazed that he even thought strongly about it. And that he took that risk,” Betsy says. “Here’s a [future] captain of the football team, in a championship year, looking at the NFL draft; well, a lot was on the line for Irv. To have him going against the powerhouse of Penn State football and what his leader, Joe Paterno, was telling him was absolutely amazing.”
Irv did not feel that Paterno had prohibited him from standing up for Betsy, but he did know he was taking a risk by breaking ranks: “Penn State football—we were winning, we were nationally ranked, we were doing well. It was a close-knit brotherhood, so to speak, kind of like an army platoon.” Few of his coaches or teammates remember what Irv did for Betsy, but to a man they say it sounds like something Irv would do. “Irv probably said, ‘This is a bigger statement than just playing football here at Penn State,’ ” says former defensive back Micky Urquhart.
And now here they are, reunited in 2021 over something that happened in 1978, Irv eating snickerdoodle cookies in the kitchen of a State College rental and Betsy immediately angled against his shoulder. “I had forty-three years’ knowledge of this person and his impact on my life,” she will say a few weeks later. “And I was never able to really express that fully and say a long overdue thank you. But then there’s that magic that happened. As soon as I saw him, it was the most heart-to-heart transfer of appreciation and love that went right through me, and then from him back to me. And just that smile and my smile and the eye contact. It was magical. It was a deep connection that was, I guess, ever-present but never realized. It was always there, but I couldn’t, didn’t, seek it out. I didn’t make it happen. So it was the magic of the moment and just seeing him and being able to hug him. Which I don’t recall doing much of when we first met. But now I could hug him and look at him and hug him again.”
A question often arises about the revelations in this story, a retrospective question about the responsibility and culpability of the coaches, players, and university officials, as well as of the cops, lawyers and judges, who found out about Todd Hodne in real time, without the benefit of hindsight:
What would you have had them do?
The story of Todd Hodne is so full of pain that to recount it is also to hope that someone steps in and stops him. There are people who perhaps have the chance to and don’t; there are people—Dave Smith and his father, Don, at St. Dom’s; Francis Quigley in Nassau County; David Grine and Duane Musser in State College—who try to. These are good people doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. But Hodne was an unstoppable force and a rare evil. He forced some people to find a place in themselves that went beyond themselves. The women, whose death-defying feats of courage, strength, and resolve in the face of their attacker seem unimaginable, had to go beyond themselves. So did Robert Gruber, who came out of his house in Huntington when Hodne was strangling Jeffrey Hirsch and offered testimony that enabled John B. Collins in Suffolk County to put Hodne away for life. And so did Irv Pankey, whose heroism was such that it allows a glimpse of what might be possible in the face of evil. He did not stop Hodne. Nor did he take the stand and testify against him. But he did something no one else was able to do. He saw himself in another and he took up her pain as his own. He imagined what it must have been like for her and led her back into the world. And so he became … he becomes what everyone in this story needs and what only Betsy Sailor actually gets, embracing him now in the kitchen—“my guardian angel.”
Jeffrey Hirsch, a cabdriver and father of four, died on August 16, 1987. He had been on life support for five days. He was brain dead. His wife, Mary Beth, was at his side. And thirty-one years after lying in court about strangling him and then arguing in appeals for more than a decade that he did it in self-defense, Hodne told the parole board he was sorry.
“I ended his life,” Hodne said. “It’s unforgivable; it’s inexcusable. And then I tried to blame it on him at the trial, tried to make myself the victim. I’m sorry.” Hodne’s daughter was born when he was in jail awaiting trial, and he married her mother when the trial began. His daughter had made him feel more empathetic, he said: “I’ve never been out there for her … and maybe the first family visit she had she was asking me when I was coming home. She wanted me home, and she started crying. And that night, I could only think about, ‘This is what I’ve done to [Hirsch’s] children.’ I believe it helped me understand a little bit better the damage that I caused.”
Kristen Hirsch has never really had a father. She was a baby when Hodne killed her father. Her oldest sister was seven; her youngest sister was six months old. Sobbing, she wants people to know: “To grow up without a Dad really sucks. The love from your father is the first true love you know, and I don’t have that. I’ve never had that, and I probably never will.”
Her mother, Mary Beth Hirsch, who died in January 2022, didn’t talk much about the murder: “She had a real bad time after my Dad died.” But she kept a briefcase with all the clippings from the trial. It was not something the children were supposed to open. But they did. “I was about eight years old, and I remember getting into it. And I remember reading that Todd knew my Dad and my Dad was selling drugs and I didn’t know what to make of it. I knew from a really young age that my father was killed but not the specifics.”
A few years ago, Kristen says, she was contacted by the parole board. “They got hold of me and asked about him being let out on parole. I said I really didn’t know—all I knew was the same story I had heard, that [Hodne] was addicted to drugs and was robbing my father for money. As someone who has dealt with drug addiction, I felt that maybe he should get another chance, you know? But I didn’t know the things I’m finding out now.”
She didn’t know who Todd Hodne was; she didn’t know how strong he was, how persuasive and how violent. She didn’t know what he had done before he killed her father. She didn’t know he lied to the police about what happened. She didn’t know her father was no drug dealer but simply a man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Kristen Hirsch is close in age to Hodne’s daughter. They have had very different lives, in that Hodne’s daughter, for all she had to endure in her life, had what Kristen didn’t. She had a father, and he was a constant and sustaining presence in her life. She has stories to tell of him and of growing up as a little girl in the prison yard. She spoke to him nightly by phone. She believes he got off drugs for her, and she believes his remorse over his crimes was genuine and agonizing. When he got cancer, she became his medical advocate. When he was dying on a ventilator, in the early weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown, she was able to see him for the first time in her life in a room without guards, who waited outside and told her when her five minutes were up. She had to wear PPE gear, “basically a hazmat suit,” she says. But she touched his wrist, and had the chance to say goodbye.
And yet the two daughters also have something in common. Kristen did not know about the crimes of the man who killed her father until she was contacted for this story. And Hodne’s daughter did not know about them, either; she had been told by her family that her father had killed a drug dealer in a drug deal gone wrong. She did not know what her father had done until after he died, when the prison handed her the few bags containing his belongings and personal effects. In them were his legal papers. In them were many of his crimes.
