On July 2, almost exactly a year after she had been raped by a man who was out of jail on probation, Angella Wilz, 15, went out to the woods behind her parents’ home near this small Wisconsin town and committed suicide by hanging herself.
Her 16th birthday would have been July 24. She had just finished a high school drivers ed course, and had told her parents and friends that she was excited about getting her license. She wanted to get it as soon as she could, she said.
“We thought she was getting better, she had these immediate plans. But she was just hiding it,” her mother said recently.
“That man killed her the night he did that to her. It just took her a year to die.”
The year between the rape and the suicide was a year of unrelenting agony for Angella’s mother and stepfather, Phyllis and Dan Smith, as they watched Angie change from a vivacious young teenager to a moody, depressed girl given to outbursts of violence and anger.
She showered three or four times a day, changed her clothes at least three times a day and “wouldn’t even go to the mailbox unless she had her makeup on,” her mother says.
“And she slept so much,” Dan says. “She would go to sleep when she got home from school, about 4:30, get up for supper and go back to sleep.”
The Smiths are sitting at their kitchen table, talking about Angie. Their daughter Emily, 7, is in and out of the kitchen, cuddling Cecil the kitten and wanting to be cuddled herself.
“Emily needs so much attention now,” her mother says. “I hope she’ll be able to remember Angie the way Angie was before this last year. She was always fighting with Emily last year.”
A stack of mail is on the table, and the top letter is from Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson. Dan opens it. “It says, `We are thinking and praying for you,’ ” Dan reads. “It’s not every day you get a letter from the governor, is it?”
Phyllis and her first husband, Joseph Wilz, who lives in Appleton, were divorced when Angie was about a year old. She and Dan have lived together for 11 years, and have been married for three.
The family lives in a plain, white house that sits off a county road five miles from Hilbert, a town of about 1,100 people. The closest big town is Appleton, 15 miles to the northwest.
Angie was in intensive therapy for most of the year after the rape: one-on-one therapy twice a week in Chilton (the county seat, a few miles south) and group sessions at a sexual abuse center in Appleton.
“They struggled all year to keep their daughter alive, and now they’ve lost her,” said Hilbert High School principal Terry Fondow.
Angie was raped by Gary Etherington, 31, last July, after her freshman year, while she was staying with her aunt Sue Lingnofski and her family in Elcho, Wis., about 110 miles north of Hilbert. She was working in two restaurants, washing dishes, trying to make money so she could buy a car when she got her driver’s license. Etherington is the son of one of the restaurant owners.
“Angie called me in the afternoon, to ask if she could babysit for Gary’s two nephews,” Lingnofski said. “At first I said no, but then she said, `Aunt Sue, please, I’ve already told him I would.’ So I said all right, but told her to call when she got there and give me the number.”
Lingnofski said Angie called with the phone number and that she and her husband later went to bed. Around 3 a.m. she awoke and realized Angie wasn’t home yet.
“Right after I woke up, the phone rang and it was Angie, saying they (Etherington and those he’d been out with) were back, but they were drunk and she’d better stay the night rather than have him drive her home. The roads are real curvy here, so I said all right, but as soon as I hung up, I had second thoughts and called back to say we’d come get her. I got one of the kids on the phone, and he said they (Angie and Etherington) had left.”
When Angie wasn’t home within 20 minutes, Lingnofski’s husband and 18-year-old son left to go look for Etherington and Angie. While they were gone, Etherington pulled his truck up into the Lingnofski driveway.
“(Angie) got out, and as soon as she was out of his sight, she collapsed on the ground. She just sort of melted there,” Lingnofski said. “I got her inside, and she was crying so hard, she kept saying, `I kept telling him no, I kept telling him no.’ He had taken her to an old logging road and raped her.”
3 years vs. a life
The Lingnofskis called the police, called the Smiths and then took Angie to the hospital. The police arrested Etherington later that morning.
According to Langlade County District Attorney Ralph Uttke, Etherington was on probation after serving about two years of a four-year sentence for a drug offense.
He pleaded no contest to the charge of second-degree sexual assault and on March 29 was sentenced to three years in prison.
“The three-year (sentence) was a compromise,” Uttke said. “I hate the term plea bargain; it was a negotiated plea. My reason was the witness (Angie) did not want to testify. Had we gone to trial, she would have had to testify. If he had been convicted at a trial, the maximum (sentence) would have been 10 years. I told them (the Smiths) that based on my experience, I believed he would get a sentence of four or five years if she testified.”
Phyllis is consumed with rage at that three-year sentence and how the legal system worked.
She wants rapists to be tried for attempted murder rather than sexual assault, and is preparing petitions to that effect. She plans to distribute the petitions at rape crisis centers, hospitals-any place that will take them.
“Why isn’t rape treated seriously?” she asks, as she chain-smokes Marlboros and paces the kitchen. “The law has to be changed. If I need to get a million signatures, I will. Angie is dead and he’ll be eligible for parole soon. He got a slap on the wrist and my daughter is dead.”
When Phyllis and Dan were awakened by Lingnofski’s phone call at 5 a.m. that July 10, they immediately left for Elcho.
“She insisted on taking a shower before we left Sue’s,” Phyllis said. “And then she took a shower as soon as we got home. Our lives were never the same after July 10.”
Angie was terrified at the thought of having to testify, her mother says. At the same time, she wanted the case resolved. Unbeknownest to her parents, she wrote her state assemblyman, Rep. Al Ott (3rd assembly district), asking why the court system moved so slowly.
“It was about six months ago, and it was a sensitive letter. My staff and I discussed it,” Ott said recently. “Then, when I saw the obituary, the name rang a bell. I asked one of my staff members, and she said, yes, that was the girl who wrote.”
Thoughts of suicide
Also unbeknownest to her parents, Angie was writing poems about death, with lines such as “The death of me will be no loss, it’s just my body you’ll have to toss” and “All I think about is dying, and I can’t stop crying.”
In November, while Phyllis was briefly out of the house, Angie took all the pills she could find-old antibiotics, aspirin and so forth. Then she called one of her best friends to say goodbye. The friend called 911. Angie was in the hospital 16 days.
“She said (she did it) because she didn’t want to go to court,” Phyllis said. “I think if she hadn’t done that, they would have made her testify. So when we found out she wasn’t going to have to (testify), I thought she could start to heal. It wasn’t hanging over her any more.”
After Angie came home from the hospital and learned she would not have to go to court, the family celebrated. “We bought steaks, we had a little party. And Angie did seem to be getting better. She acted like she was. But inside. Oh, inside, she was so sad.”
“She missed so much school that first semester, but then she came back and brought her grades up,” school principal Fondow said. “You couldn’t tell outwardly what she was going through. Her mother told me that what we saw on the outside wasn’t what was going on inside. When you think of all that agony that had to be going on inside, and the strain of keeping it in.”
There were clues that Angie was reaching a breaking point, but, Phyllis says now, she didn’t always see them.
“Memorial Day weekend, she started getting rid of all the posters in her room, all her stuffed animals. She told me she was going for a new decor. Well, she was going to be 16, she was going to be getting her driver’s license, so I thought, all right, this makes sense.
“Now I remember, after she got out of the hospital (after the first suicide attempt), we were sitting here one day, and I had said to her, `Angie, I would have had to go through your room, go through all your things, and I couldn’t have handled that.’ I told her, `There’s a law that parents have to die first,’ and we both laughed.
“Now I realize, she was getting rid of her things because she knew it would be too hard for me.”
The end of a young life
Phyllis and Dan and Emily went to a 4th of July pageant in Oshkosh on July 2.
“Angie didn’t want to go. For the first time in a long time, she had slept over at a friend’s house the night before, and said they would probably do something. I told her to leave me a note if she went anywhere,” Phyllis said.
Driving back that night, the Smiths’ tail lights went out, and they were pulled over by the police twice. It was 2 a.m. before they arrived home.
“We came inside, and it was strange because the dog was in the house. We never leave the dog in. Angie wasn’t there and there was no note. It was too late to call any of her friends. When Angie slept at a friend’s, she always called at 11 the next morning. At 5 after 11, I started calling. No one had seen her,” Phyllis said.
Dan went to the Civic Park in Hilbert, where 4th of July festivities were going on, but Angie wasn’t there.
“I went out to the garden, and I just kept staring at the woods,” Phyllis said. “I felt she was close. I kept looking over there. I came in the house and called people again. Then I took a shower, and when I came out I saw all her makeup was there. Angie doesn’t go anywhere without her makeup.
“I went in her room. She knew the only place I ever looked in her room was her jewelry box, because we shared jewelry. I found these papers all folded up, in the box. They’re her poems, I hadn’t seen them before.
“And the last poem was that she would be hanging from a platform.”
Phyllis gave the poem to Dan. “My body was shaking so hard. Dan got this scared look on his face and said he was going back to Hilbert, maybe he’d find her there. I said, `No, Dan, go out to the woods.’
“I was crying, and walking back and forth. Then I went outside. Dan was halfway through the field. He was walking, and then he threw his arms up in the air and fell on the ground. I went to him, and he was saying, `No, no.’
“Then the police were here and it was real.”
Angie had hanged herself from a deer stand, a high, tree-mounted platform on which hunters hide.
The pain will never go away
Almost 200 people signed the guest book at the funeral home. The funeral director told the Smiths he had to add extra pages to the book.
A couple of Dan’s friends are going to tear down the deer stand. He’ll never hunt out there again, he says.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever get through it,” Phyllis says. “We fought so hard for Angie. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.”
Her days are filled with the petition drive she’s planning, to try to change the law so that rapists are tried for attempted murder.
“I looked the word `murder’ up in the dictionary last night,” she says. “One of the definitions is `spoil.’ That’s what he did. You don’t have a life after rape. It eats your soul.”
Rep. Ott says changing the law to attempted murder would be a huge step, and “perhaps unrealistic, but this (petition drive) could certainly create more of an awareness about rape. I think the public would support tougher penalties. We (the legislature) would definitely look at suggestions.”
One thing that Phyllis is grateful for: She knows Angie knew how much she loved her.
“I don’t think a day went by in her life that I didn’t tell her I loved her. Every single day. That’s the one thing I can feel good about.”
