Secrets in the Box

Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

There it is, in a corner of the closet. The package of papers.  “The box,” they called it, as they moved it when they moved, house to house, and pushed it  out of sight - unopened.  Unable to throw it away, unable to look inside. Afraid of what they might find in the box.

Susan Waller: Our whole family moved to California when I was really small.      

The story is about family. A family like any.  Not so different, really.  At least...in those heady days when the sisters were small, and the world of adults a mystery.

Susan Waller: My sister Sherry was-- eight years older.  And Shauna was-- was ten years older.

Keith Morrison: Were you a surprise?

Susan Waller: Uh-huh.

Keith Morrison: Huh.  A good surpri--

Susan Waller: A good surprise.  For my mom.

Shana, Sherry, and Susan Kirkup.  Three rather well-to-do little girls, kissed by the privelege of success.

Shana Thomas: My dad-- was in senior management. 

Shana, the eldest, remembers him best. Robert Kirkup.  An upwardly mobile corporate executive who provided quite handsomely for the family he all too rarely saw.

Shana Thomas: As a young child up, of my dad, I recall, is him gettin' on a plane and havin' to leave.

Keith Morrison: You saw him going off on airplanes.  He was an important man; had a good job.  It must have been wonderful to watch him come home, then.

Shana Thomas: Yes.

And waiting at home, with the three girls, was Robert's wife, Janet.

Susan Waller: Everybody loved her.  She was sweet, nice, happy.  She loved to cook, bake.

It all fit some sort of traditional ideal: successful father, stay-at-home mom, three lovely little girls.

Susan Waller: It was a typical family.  You know, she stayed at home, cooked and cleaned.  And he went out and made the money

Robert provided Janet and the girls with all the trappings: big house, pool, even a horse for little Susan.

Keith Morrison: It was good for a while.  For a long while.

Shana Thomas: A long time.

But nothing stays perfect forever.  Things  happen to people. And in 1989, things happened to the Kirkup family. The company to which Robert had devoted his professional life began to spiral toward bankruptcy.  He didn't wait for the axe to fall.  He left with his dignity intact, announced his intention to try something completely different.

Susan Waller: And-- him and-- his friend that he worked with-- decided to buy a bar business.

Here it was: not exactly upscale, even though it held the remaining hopes of the Kirkup family. But for all his success in senior management, robert did not appear to possess an aptitude for running a saloon.

By the fall of 1991, less than two years after they started their great new adventure, the bar went under.  And then the bank forclosed on the kirkup house.

Keith Morrison: So, their financial circumstances took a real hit?

Shana Thomas: Correct.

Video   ‘We firmly believe that this is going to be a life sentence’ Genessee County District Attorney Lawrence Friedman describes the case against Robert Kirkup and his decision to charge Kirkup with second-degree manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. Dateline NBC

What could they do?  No home, no job, barely a dribble of income from leftover investments. But they did have this:  a motorhome.  And, back in 1991, it still looked pretty good.

By then, Shana and Sherry were on their own.  Each with young children.  Shana had made a career as a respiratory therapist. Only Susan was still at home with her parents.

And so Robert and Janet got in their motorhome and took to the open road, and offered their youngest an option.  

Susan Waller: I was given the choice (chuckle) to either go live with them in their motor home and go travel around the country or to go live with my sister Shauna.

Keith Morrison: How old were you then?

Susan Waller: Sixteen.  So I went and lived with Shauna.

Shana Thomas: They dropped Susan off with me.  And they went on the road.  And they were just going wherever.

The Kirkups meandered east.  Making prolonged pit stops with relatives -- first with Janet's mother in Illinois, then with Robert's in Michigan. Janet would call and write all her children, discussing her trip, inquiring about her expanding family, which by then, included grandkids.

But a subtle change occurred in late summer, 1992.  Those occasional letters from mom stopped arriving.  No phone calls, either.  And when any of the girls called their parents, though none of them did all that often, they could never reach their mother.  Only their father, Robert. 

Susan Waller: Every time I would call He would say-- "She's sleeping.  She's walking the dog.  she's shopping.

Keith Morrison: And what'd you say?  "Have her call me"?

Susan Waller: Uh-huh.  "Tell her I love her.  I miss her.  Have her call me."

Keith Morrison: And she never did.

Susan Waller: No, she never did.

Christmas came and went, and still, only dad on the phone.  Then finally, in January 1993, a letter arrived.  From Robert.  Their father had decided to come clean.

He poured out his heart, apparently, a six page letter.  And in that letter, he spelled out exactly why it was, they hadn't heard from their mother.

Keith Morrison: What did your dad say?

Shana Thomas: That she met a man that had a big bus.  He dropped her off in Buffalo and she took off.

Susan Waller: Some random man in a big motor home bus, and that was it.

Video   ‘He's re-living that homicide’ Retired Michigan State Police Detective/Sergeant Mark Siegel describes Robert Kirkup's strange behavior while he was supplying handwriting samples. Dateline NBC

Ran away with another man.  A man with a lot more money than Robert could spend on her.

Shana Thomas: I believed it, because my mother was so materialistic.

Susan Waller: And because I was close to Shana and so young, I just kinda went along with it. 

Robert, meanwhile, carried on.  Lived his nomadic life in that motor home. He lived simply.  Spent little.  And rarely mentioned the humiliation of his abandonment. But that's when that box, which would end up for years tucked away in the closet, began to grow. 

It was the middle sister Sherry who started to fill it.  If her mother had left them, the least they could do was try to find her.

Susan Waller: She went down to the San Bernardino County-- Sheriff's Department and filed the missing person's report.

An investigation was started, but it seemed to go nowhere. And so into the box went their father's letter and that missing person's report. To join the unwritten things, the unspeakable memories, already there. And - perhaps at least - the answer to the riddle that would soon begin to drive three sisters apart.

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