WHEN THE NEED TO CONTROL BECOMES DEADLY

A Firsthand Account of Murder

As Told to Author Lynn Bohart

True crime is all the rage these days. From books to podcasts to documentaries, we can’t seem to get enough. And yet, we are merely the audience, experiencing the horror of said murders through a variety of filters, such as print, film, or audio.

But consider for just a moment standing right there, witnessing the loss of life due to the shocking and appalling act of a perpetrator. Suddenly, barriers are down, and the filters are gone, and the gravity of that one act of violence hits you full face. You can’t put the book down or turn away; you are connected to that horrific event forever, living through the aftermath, picking up the pieces, and battling with your own fear of reprisal.

That’s exactly what happened to my oldest brother. This is a story about the ripple effect a single act of violence can have on the people left behind.

Art is a psychologist, having earned his PhD from UCLA in 1972. At the time, he taught at California State University Dominguez Hills and lived with his then partner Kathy (names changed for privacy purposes). 

In the summer of 1975, Kathy introduced Art to her friends Jeff and Renee Ceder. At the time, Jeff was getting his PhD in Sociology and Renee was studying to be a veterinarian. Being the seventies, Jeff looked very much like the typical anti-war, social justice liberal – long hair and a bushy beard. He was also consumed with the injustices in American society, and when the two couples socialized, he often espoused a number of radical beliefs with an off-putting intensity. Renee, on the other hand, was distant and reserved, even cold at times, and the combination of the two personalities made Art reluctant to spend time with them.

In June of that year, Jeff and Renee split up. Renee moved back to Ontario, CA, to live with her parents. Shortly after the breakup, she came to visit and shared how bad her relationship with Jeff had been. She talked about how moody and dark Jeff was, and how oppressed and controlled she felt. Even though he was liberal in his beliefs, she said that he didn’t behave that way toward her. In fact, he was the boss in the relationship, expecting her to cook and clean like a traditional housewife.

Art was surprised by Renee’s transformation after splitting up with Jeff. She became warm, friendly, and outgoing. Not at all the distant, guarded person Art had known her to be.

During her visit, Renee mentioned that she wanted to start dating, and Kathy set her up with a guy named Trevor. They decided on a double date and met at Art and Kathy’s house before going to a concert on campus.

The foursome returned to the house and left the front door open (screen door closed) because it was warm. When Art and Kathy went to the kitchen to get a bottle of wine, they noticed the back door was open, although they were sure it was closed when they left. Since nothing was amiss with the rest of the house, they ignored it and spent time in the living room, talking and drinking wine with Renee and Trevor.

After a while, the neighbor’s dogs began to bark. No one thought much of it because there always seemed to be cats or possums moving around outside at night. And within a few moments, the dogs stopped.

Finally, to give the new couple some privacy, Art and Kathy decided to go to bed. This was a small house, and the master bedroom was down the hall from the living room. Art was reading in bed when suddenly there was a crash followed by a scream. Kathy ran out to see what had happened. Thinking someone had just knocked something over, Art stayed where he was until Kathy yelled for him in panic. He struggled into a pair of jeans before running into the living room to find Trevor standing there looking confused. Kathy and Renee were gone, and he heard voices and shouts outside.

Art ran onto the front porch, stopping short when he found Jeff standing over Renee crouching in front of him holding her hands over her head. Jeff was striking her repeatedly with what looked like his fists. My brother has never been a physical person, having been unable to play most sports because of asthma growing up. He’s also an intellect with an almost photographic memory. So, I was surprised to hear that although Jeff was bigger than him, he grabbed Jeff and yanked him away from Renee, allowing her to run back into the house.

Art remained outside, arms wrapped around Jeff while he struggled to stop him from going after Renee. At one point, Jeff went suddenly still and said in a calm and deadly voice, "Let go of me, Art, or I will stab you." Then he showed Art the large knife in his hand. Art flinched, releasing his hold, and Jeff sprinted into the house. Art hesitated for a fraction of a second, not knowing what to do. Who wouldn’t? Then he boldly went after Jeff, thinking he had to stop him any way he could.

This time, he came up behind Jeff in the kitchen. Renee was once again crouching before him, but instead of hitting her with his fists, Jeff was furiously striking at her with the knife. From Art’s position, it appeared as if Jeff was only inflicting superficial wounds, because the knife was too big and broad to actually penetrate deeply. Once again, my brother pulled Jeff away from Renee, and they struggled for the knife. Finally, with no other way to stop him, Art grabbed the knife blade in his own hand and held it. Ooof!

He strained to hold on to Jeff, and the two of them fell to the floor, where Art continued to hold Jeff in a bear hug. In the meantime, Kathy had called the police, and Renee had collapsed into a bloody heap. The two men remained frozen in that tableau, with Renee lying a few feet away, while Jeff repeated over and over something like, “Why did you make me do this? Why did you make me do this?”

The police took Jeff away while the ambulance whisked Renee off to the hospital. She was unconscious and bleeding heavily, but Art felt sure she would recover from what he thought were shallow wounds.

Officers remained to search the house and yard looking for evidence. In the end, they found that the dome light in Renee’s car had been disconnected, along with a recently smoked cigarette in the back seat ash tray (Jeff smoked). And Art, curious about how Jeff had gotten there, went searching the neighborhood for his car. He found it parked a block away.

Because Jeff had no way of knowing that Renee was coming over to their house that night, Art speculated he must have been watching her parents’ house in Ontario and followed her when she left for Long Beach. He then parked in a discreet location and found a hiding place where he could watch as the two couples left for the concert, waiting until they returned. Creepy.

There was evidence to support this theory. For instance, the police found that the old, unreliable lock to the kitchen door had, in fact, been forced open. Earlier that night, Kathy had cooked bacon to go with the roast beef they’d had for dinner. A few cooked slices of bacon had been left out, along with the dinner dishes in the sink. The bacon was gone, and the knife Jeff had used to stab Renee was the chef’s knife Art had used to slice the roast. Even more creepy.

The evidence in Renee’s car was also chilling. Having already gotten the knife, it looked as if Jeff had originally planned to wait for Renee in the back seat, having disabled the dome light. His plan might have been to assault her when she got into the car to go home. But when he saw the two couples go inside the house, he decided to wait. Eventually he got out of the car, which is when the dogs barked, and hid in the front yard behind a bush. The police found smoked cigarettes to substantiate that. Since the front door was open but the screen door closed, Jeff could have seen when Art and Kathy went to bed and then finally burst through the screen door (hence the crash), surprising Renee and Trevor.

While the police continued to process the scene later that night, the hospital called to report that Renee had died from her wounds. This hit Art hard because he thought he’d saved her. Unfortunately, one of the stab wounds had nicked a blood vessel in her neck so that she bled internally and drowned in her own blood. Trevor, who had stood paralyzed and helpless much of the time, finally spoke up and mentioned that when they took Renee away, he knew she was dying because he’d worked in an animal shelter and seen enough animals euthanized to know what death looked like.

The police left at about three in the morning. Neither Art nor Kathy could sleep, so they stayed up, hashing and rehashing everything. It wasn’t until the next morning, when they left for a 6 a.m. appointment with the police, that Art realized he had broken his toe. He’d been barefoot through the whole thing and thought Jeff must have stepped on it. He also realized he had multiple minor cuts on his hand from holding the knife. Apparently the style of knife and the angle at which he held it prevented it from slicing through his fingers.

Art says he doesn’t remember much about the police interview other than it was held in a gray and dingy room and that his toe hurt the entire time. Afterwards, he went to Kaiser to have them evaluate his foot.

When they finally got home later that day, the living room looked normal despite the terror from the night before. Not so, however, with the kitchen. There was a river of congealed blood covering the middle part of the kitchen floor. And since the floor wasn’t level, blood had run towards the back of the house. Art noticed two car keys embedded in the edge of the blood. They weren’t his or Kathy’s, so they must have been Jeff’s, and everyone had just missed them. Art called the police, and they sent an officer out to pick them up.

People rarely talk about the aftermath of such a horrendous crime, how it affects the bystanders and/or family, and how they are forced to navigate through the shock and pain left behind. But even cleaning up after something like this is more than a mere task.

In this case, Art and Kathy discussed how to clean up the kitchen and decided they just couldn’t hire someone to do it. How do you explain something like that? So, my brother decided to do it himself. He said the blood was like gelatin at that point, and he had to mop it up, wring the mop out into a bucket, and then take the blood red water outside to dump. Then come back and do it again, over and over.

It was grim work, but he set about it with a kind of determination, even creating it as a personal challenge. He thought that if he could master the floor, he could master the event that had caused this mess. And somehow, mopping up Renee’s coagulated, gelatinous blood was a way of taking it all in, of acknowledging the reality of it, and assimilating all the implications of what her death meant.

The rest of that day was lost to both of them. They went out to eat, feeling they just couldn’t face cooking in the kitchen. Later, Kathy’s brother and a couple of friends came over. The group talked about everything they remembered about Jeff and Renee. They dissected Jeff’s character, wondering how much of what had happened had to do with his radical political ideology. Someone commented on the fact that Jeff had defended some pretty violent revolutionary movements across the globe, and how he seemed to be a generally discontented person who had never found his place in life.

They also talked about Renee. Over and over, Art marveled at the change in her personality once she had gotten away from Jeff, and how she had transformed from distant and cold to warm and open. It wasn’t lost on anyone the heartbreak that now she was gone.

By the time the others left, Art was pretty strung out. The extreme emotion of the event caught up to him, and he kind of lost it, engulfed by terror. He said he could vividly feel all the vulnerabilities in their house, as if the house became him and he became the house. He began to visualize how easy it would be to sneak into their backyard and break into the house when he and Kathy were in bed. In fact, he told me that he could almost feel in his bones how easy it would be to break through the flimsy back door. And though Art kept telling himself that Jeff was in jail and wasn't getting out, it didn’t stop him from obsessing over all the ways Jeff might escape and come back to extract vengeance.

Finally, he felt so vulnerable that he took Kathy outside and the two of them sat in his car that night with the engine and lights on, ready to escape at a moment's notice. Eventually, they decided that instead of sleeping at home, they would go to Kathy’s brother’s house. But fear is a funny thing. Despite being safe in a different house, Art’s fear was pervasive, and he built a barricade of furniture around the bed in case Jeff somehow got out and tracked them down.

He also placed a heavy iron bar next to him to serve as a weapon, thinking that if he’d had that bar the night before, Renee would still be alive. And because the monstrosity of fear cannot be vanquished so easily, he kept that bar next to his bed for the next thirty years.

From any perspective, the act of murder is horrendous. But even if the perpetrator is caught, that isn’t where it ends. Typically, there is a drawn out and often frustrating dance that takes place among law enforcement, the judicial system, and the media that tends to imprint the pain and loss even more indelibly on those left behind.

Thus, it was true in the case of Renee Ceder’s death.

Shortly after the murder, my brother Art and his live-in girlfriend Kathy visited Renee’s parents in Ontario, which he said was a tremendously sad experience. Renee's parents shared how much they had disliked Jeff, lamenting on how it had created tension with their daughter when the two were dating. When Renee married Jeff, her parents felt as if they’d lost her. They were thrilled, then, when she moved home after the breakup. Now, she was gone forever.

Art said the entire house seemed to sag under the pain the family felt. Because Renee had loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian, she’d brought her animals with her when she moved back home. Renee's father took Art into the backyard that day to see her rabbits, along with a couple of Renee’s dogs and cats. Her mother reminisced that Renee not only loved taking care of the animals, but that she also had a creative streak. She was embroidering a huge shawl with a peace symbol on it that now lay unfinished over a chair in their living room. There were tables piled with food that friends and neighbors had brought over, and Renee’s older sister hovered in the background like a lost and purposeless soul.

Prior to Jeff’s arraignment, a female acquaintance of Art’s contacted him. She just happened to be dating Jeff’s notable public defender, Tony Todd, who had a reputation as the ‘friend of the oppressed.’ After wishing Art her condolences, she said, "Don't worry about poor Jeff, Art. Tony is going to defend him. He’ll get him a light sentence."

Don't worry about poor Jeff? Art thought. 

He didn’t care what happened to Jeff. Jeff wasn't dead. Renee was. At the time, Art was opposed to the death penalty. But Renee’s murder forced him to realize how invisible the victim can become in cases like this. It happens partially because the media tends to focus on the murderer, their motivation, and the trial. And if the trials are long, stories about the perpetrators seem to go on forever, while the victim disappears into the background. In this case, Renee’s story faded from sight and people focused their sympathy instead on ‘poor Jeff.’

Now, suddenly, Art was on the other side of the debate. It wasn’t that he hated Jeff, he told me. He just didn’t care whether Jeff got the death penalty or not. He knew firsthand the horror of Renee’s death. He had held Jeff down while she drowned in her own blood. And Jeff’s actions were intentional. He had parked two blocks away to hide the fact he was there. After the police towed the car, they found that Jeff had hidden a gun inside it. He’d taken a knife from Art’s kitchen, unscrewed the dome light from Renee’s car, and laid in wait for hours until the two couples returned. Then, he’d hidden in the front yard, finally bursting through the screen door only after Art and Kathy had gone to bed. This was all evidence of premeditation, so why should anyone feel sympathy for poor Jeff?

As the arraignment approached, Tony Todd requested a meeting with Art, most likely because Tony believed that he would support Jeff. Instead, my brother declined the meeting because he had no desire to help the defense, nor was he required to go. And yet, at a pretrial hearing called after the arraignment, Todd accused Art of bias against the defendant because he had ‘refused’ attending that meeting. Whether he was trying to get Art disqualified as a witness or not, Art didn’t know. But when the prosecutor took over and asked Art to recount his story, he related it in detail and recalls how the judge gasped when he mentioned grabbing the knife blade in his hand. The prosecutor also stressed the significance of what Jeff kept repeating while Art held Jeff down: “Why’d you make me do this?” When the hearing ended, Jeff was charged with first-degree murder.

The trial was set for mid-September. By that time, however, Tony Todd had bowed out as Jeff’s public defender. Art believes it’s because there wasn’t much to defend and not worth Todd’s time. A junior public defender took over Jeff’s case.

On the first day of the trial, Art waited to testify while Trevor, the guy who watched in shock as his innocent blind date became a horror show, testified first. After Trevor's testimony, the trial was suddenly halted. Apparently, Trevor’s testimony was so damning, the defense opted to settle, and Jeff pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder. Art expressed how relieved and angry he was at the same time by this. He was happy he didn’t have to testify, but Jeff had gotten off with a lighter sentence, which he didn’t deserve.

Renee’s father took it the hardest and came out of the courtroom devastated. He was so upset that Kathy and Art had to help him to his car while he kept ruminating on the fact that his daughter was gone and yet “this son of a bitch” would only be sentenced for second degree murder.

The next step was Jeff’s sentencing, scheduled for a few weeks later. Jeff’s defenders began spinning countless theories about his motivation for the crime. They speculated it was because of his childhood, or the fact that he’d been influenced by our culture’s oppression of women, our commodity culture, or our traditional sex roles. They would paint him as much a victim as Renee and then argue for forgiveness because capital punishment never cures anything and would make the State no better than Jeff.

Art said something that has stuck with me. He said that all of that rhetoric makes sense in your head, but it doesn’t always make sense in your heart, and that the heart sometimes cries out for its own meaning. Wow.

Art and Kathy stayed in touch with Renee’s parents during this time, and her father's level of distress seemed to only escalate, until Art felt the man had reached a danger point. Everyone knew that for second degree murder, Jeff would neither get the death penalty nor life in prison, and Renee’s father was outraged at the injustice of it and just couldn’t let it go.

As a liberal, Art could spout common rhetoric about the death penalty with the best of them: “Revenge never solves anything.” But after listening to Renee’s father, he began to understand the brute emotion behind the ‘eye for an eye’ concept, making the idea that Jeff should be put to death more palatable on a gut level. 

Art explained to me that this newfound understanding wasn't some blind emotional reaction on his part but instead came from observing the pain Renee’s parents and their extended family felt. And their pain would go on forever, while Jeff would eventually get to return to society and build a new life. How do we ask any family to live with that?

Although Art didn’t need to be at the sentencing hearing, he went because Renee’s mother had called that morning, telling him that her husband had a gun and was talking about shooting Jeff. When Art got to the courthouse, he alerted the lawyers and the bailiff. Then, he remained outside watching for Renee’s father while the sentencing took place. He just couldn’t see any more tragedy visited upon that family.

It wasn’t until the sentencing was over, and they took Jeff away, that Renee’s father arrived. He'd gotten the time wrong. Art never asked him if he had a gun, but he kept his hand in his pocket. At that point, Art tried to gently suggest to him that it was over, and that now his responsibility was to take care of his family.

Jeff received a ten-year sentence for his second-degree murder plea, and because life isn’t fair—it just is—he was released after five years for good behavior. One has to ask, where was the good behavior when he was stabbing Renee to death?

Jeff moved to Arizona to live with his parents. Art doesn’t know what happened to him after that, but said he hopes that Jeff rebuilt his life and somehow contributed to society. After all, Art said, he would rather see (in his words) ‘life lead to life.’

In the end, there is no closure for a murder victim’s family and friends. That’s a fallacy. All that remains are the pain, memories, and thoughts of what could have been. And, in my brother’s case, a now muddled sense of the death penalty and the justice system, how it balances right and wrong, and often fails miserably in the process.

Especially for female victims such as Renee.

Did you know that a study showed among 25 populous high-income countries, 70% of female homicide cases occurred in the U.S.? And over 55% of all female homicide victims here are killed by current or former intimate partners. If that doesn't startle you, this will. Approximately 3 women are killed every day in this country by a current or former intimate partner. Think of that. What does that mean for us as a country? 

In fact, Sanctuary For Families, a nonprofit advocating for victims of gender-based violence, says that “These staggering statistics demonstrate the misogyny behind these violent deaths — In the United States, like in so many countries across the world, women are being murdered because they are women.” It's called femicide.

Renee Ceder was just one of these women. And don't forget what her husband said as she lay dying on the floor in front of him -- “Why did you make me do this?” He blamed her for his actions and only served five years in prison as a result.

Ultimately, I suppose there is no real justice for the victims of murder. The perpetrator may be put to death or spend years (even life) in prison. But no sentence, death penalty or otherwise, brings the victim back. And for those left behind, that’s the only thing that could really make a difference.

Note: My heartfelt thanks to my brother for sharing such a personal story. I only wish it was an atypical story and not one we painfully see so often.