“I can’t move.”
“Marilyn was always on time. She very punctual 7:30 every day. And as soon as I walked in, I heard there’s a problem. Marilyn didn’t come to work today and she didn’t call. Something’s wrong. I just can’t believe this is happening.”
“I kept a belief, you know, in my own innocence. Even if nobody else believed in me, I knew that the truth would come out.”
“I can’t get into mom’s house.”
“So what do you mean you can’t get into mom’s house? Just use your key.”
“My key doesn’t work.”
“Well let me see if Rick knows anything. Hey my sister can’t get in mom’s house. What’s up? You know, we need to go check on mom.”
“Ricky opened the door. Um, we walked in. There was some pictures just as you walk in her house of my sister and I. Um, those were missing off the wall and there was some papers laying all over the counter. I saw this, I saw deposits. I was quite shocked to see. Shocking because they are checks made out to their father, Richard Cananan, who no one has heard from in years.”
“Richard Senior, he had been receiving social security checks, disability checks, and once he disappeared those those checks continued to go into their bank account and they were being cashed and used by, uh, by Maryland.”
“He came back. The monster’s back.”
“He got her. No, no, look, no, she’s been stealing a sense of security. He took her. He came back.”
“Well, I called my sister and said, ‘Mom’s not here. Something’s really wrong. You need to get here.'”
“Dad’s back.”
“What? No.”
“He took her. He took mom.”
“Oh Dad, how do you know this?”
“He came back.”
“How do you know? Officer, you have to do something.”
“We reverted back to our childhood. It was like, ‘Oh my god, oh my god, what are we going to do?’ And my sister actually made the statement that night, ‘He told me when I was a kid that if I ever had any children he would hurt them. What are we going to do?’ Richard Senior was a horrific, bad husband. He was abusive. He was a horrific father. It was just kind of a surreal upbringing that is hard to imagine.”
“Where the hell did you go? Damn it, I said get your butt in the house.”
“Wait, he did things like, uh, dragging, uh, little Ricky out into the woods and chaining him up overnight because he’d done something he didn’t approve of. He beat all of the kids. He had apparently no qualms at all about bloodying somebody just because he, he was kind of mad because the TV wasn’t working or lumps in the potatoes. He was just a horrific, drunk, mean, awful person by all accounts.”
“What can you tell me about your dad’s whereabouts?”
“Uh, I don’t know where he is.”
“Well, where’s your father?”
“Well, he left.”
“When did he leave?”
“1988. September 15th, 1988.”
“When it was brought to our attention, um, that Richard Senior had been missing since 1988 and, uh, there was an allegation that he may have been responsible for Marilyn’s disappearance, certainly one of the first things that we did was, was try, try to locate Richard. Now we had two missing persons, Marilyn Cannonan and Richard Cananan and, um, I, I started to look into his background to find out, um, you know, if he’d been heard from or, and could find nothing on him at all past September the 15th of, uh, of 1988. And what, what is is even more strange about it as I look into this case, I find that nobody wanted to find him, including his family.”
“Right, right. You look great.”
“Oh thank you, happy.”
“If, uh, if she married this guy that, uh, he was going to show up at the wedding and kill them both. And, uh, they were, uh, really trying to keep it quiet about the time and the date and, and where they were going to be married.”
“You look great, and the best thing is dad’s not here.”
“I knew that she didn’t want our father walking her down the aisle which that to me was a no-brainer. I wouldn’t expect her to want him to walk her down the aisle. Couldn’t even stay sober for our high school graduations. He almost got thrown out of mine just cuz he was being so loud.”
“Of all of the people that I talked to in, in during this investigation, I had, I found nobody who had anything good to say about him. I was not able to find anybody who, uh, missed the guy, uh, liked him in any way, shape or form. Richard Cananan vanished. No one called the police and no one filed a missing person report.”
“Every time the town’s people got a hint that something wasn’t right in our house, you know, either they saw bruises or they could tell something was wrong, we moved. We actually moved out of two states in the middle of the night because he, he was too worried he’d get in trouble.”
“Get over here now. You got 10 minutes to pack your bags. We’re moving. Go. Get out of here.”
“You learn really quick don’t make close friends, cuz you never know how long you’re going to be there, where you’re going to end up next. So I’m like, why make friends, you know, I’m just going to move again.”
“Get in the car.”
“When we moved to Florida we lived in a city for the first time ever in my life. We’d always always always lived in the country, so you didn’t have neighbors.”
“Hey, shut that damn dog up. Shut up. Shut the dog up. Hey, I out here, shut up!”
“The neighbors next door said that, uh, he would just come out and unleash a tirade of, uh, of swearing and threats. Uh, they were just terrified of the guy.”
“Shut that damn dog up! Shut up! I said don’t you even look at me!”
“You know your father’s gone.”
“I don’t know if he’s coming back, he just left.”
“I’m not sure what’s going on, but he’s gone.”
“It’s not the first time he’d left. So I was like, ‘Oh good, quiet few weeks, quiet month, whatever, however long he’s gone.’ He did it for two weeks in Arkansas and it was the best two weeks of our lives.”
“I got to know her, just me and her talking across the fence.”
“Marilyn, hey, hey.”
“I’m doing pretty good. But you know what? I don’t know if I told you, but when my father passes away I should commit to a pretty good amount of money.”
“I’m kind of worried though, cuz I’m afraid that Stacy and Ricky might try to take it away from me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out later.”
“She told her co-workers that Stacy and her girlfriend were looking for a house in her neighborhood and she was very concerned about that. She didn’t want them that close to her.”
“I just think she liked her privacy for one thing, and I just think that she was worried what what they might do.”
“If he got up in the morning and he was drinking a cup of coffee, half the day would be a good day. If you got up in the morning and he started with a cup of vodka at 8:00 in the morning, you knew it was going to be a rotten day, the whole day.”
“Probably five, six days a week, most weeks, um, my parents were constantly fighting and of course if us kids were in the house we would get the brunt end of getting beaten.”
“He loved to hit and leave bruises. You expect me to drink that crap?”
“Well she should go to the police.”
“If she did go to the police back in those days where would she have gone? Dad, dad, dad, calm down, calm down, huh?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
“Domestic violence was one of those things in those days that we didn’t get involved in. It was a family problem. You get in the middle of this, I’m going to get that gun and I’m going to shoot you.”
“Ricky, dude, what are you doing living in a place like this?”
“This is where I live now.”
“No, Susan and I were fixing to move into a huge four-bedroom house, and so I said, you know, you want a place to live, you’re welcome to come and live with us.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, your family, come on.”
“If dad was swinging, he was right in between it as much as he could be. He protected my mother more at some times because I remember several times that he would he would get really hurt in between their fights and I remember one fight in particular where my father told my brother, ‘If you get in the middle of this I’m just going to take the gun and shoot you.'”
“Everybody was over. We had for us our first ever really normal family dinner with everybody present.”
“I felt that it was more anger towards things my father had done to him. It was just a variety of different fights that they would have and it was kind, it could go on for hours until I finally be like, you know, we go to bed, I’m, I’m done.”
“I tried to put those things behind my life. I knew what we live through. I didn’t need to keep being reminded.”
“For me nights meant rapes, okay? What night is he coming in? What’s tonight going to be like?”
“The very first time he actually penetrated me was in Arkansas with a loaded pistol in my throat. Um, basically that was my hint to keep my mouth shut and stay still and just take it, cuz he would have pulled the trigger on the gun.”
“I knew he was taking stuff out of the house. I had rented a storage unit for my mother’s belongings because he was saying that the IRS was going to come in and take the house. So sure, if they want a house they can have a house, but they’re not going to get everything she owns.”
“I come home from work one day and he said, ‘I talked to social security, I was downtown, you know, they said mom owes all this money and she needs to produce him.’ And it just kind of evolved. I believe that everything he was telling me was true.”
“What do you guys think happened to mom?”
“What do you mean that would happen? We know what happened to her. Why do you keep on asking these questions? Cuz she’s gone.”
“I don’t. Yeah, she went with him.”
“What happened, Ricky?”
“Stacy, don’t you think she would have, would have, like, stood up to him or have to get it off? Did she stand up whenever he came after you and me, or when he came after Ricky?”
“No, she didn’t. She did not stand up for my children.”
“You should just let it go. She’s gone now, and that’s the end of it.”
“I’m telling the truth, but that was, that was… If dad did come back, I don’t think that she’s… I don’t think he was. I think he hurt her is what I think.”
“Everything for sale.”
“Yeah, they’re for sale. They’re all collectibles. They’re not that cheap.”
“What do you want me to do with all of this?”
“Oh, mom wanted me to sell all that stuff.”
“Susan and I, you know, we worked 8, 9 and 1/2 years for a theme park and we just decided we had way too much stuff and we just decided we’d have a yard sale. We sold off some of our memorabilia and some household things.”
“Hey, what are you doing selling mom’s stuff?”
“We didn’t sell mom stuff.”
“All the time. Yes you did. This is… This is her important stuff that she was leaving for us. Valuable stuff in storage.”
“Calm down. The valuable stuff is in storage.”
“How does Ricky know what’s important? Storage? We know what’s important to her. Why do you think I don’t know my own mom?”
“She called me a liar. I said, ‘Do you want to go see the storage unit? He has the keys.’ She says, ‘I don’t want anything from him.’ And I said, ‘Okay, well I can’t help you. I don’t have the keys to the storage unit. You can go take a look if you want yourself.'”
“Hey Rick, come here.”
“I was able to trace it to Ricky and Stacy’s house. That’s interesting. Let’s call their bluff, okay? Let’s see if someone steps forward and tries to reopen it.”
“I just received a telephone call from a female who identified herself as Marilyn Cannon.”
“Hello.”
“This is the bank calling. Uh, do you have an issue with your account?”
“Yes, my mother needs these funds released so we can pay our bills.”
“Oh, have you talked to your mother?”
“Yes, I’m in contact with her.”
“Well can you have her call me? You know, is she local? Can I talk to her?”
“No, she’s not here locally.”
“They’re, they’re putting concrete down in the garage over there.”
“They ready to go yet?”
“Almost, almost.”
“Police want to talk to us. They have some information about mom and missing persons. They have some credit card hits or something. We’ll be able to handle it.”
“We contacted the IRS. There is no investigation into your mother. We know you’ve been taking money from her bank account and we know there’s something under her garage floor.”
“What’s in there, Ricky?”
“I found this in my mom’s stuff. It’s a receipt from a rental company, uh, from 1989 for a concrete saw.”
“What’s this have to do with anything?”
“That’s what she did. She did that to the, to my dad.”
“Okay, you stay.”
“Where’s your mother’s car, Stacy?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well Ricky says it’s in a storage facility that you rented.”
“They started asking me questions about my brother and I thought this is kind of odd. I thought we were here to talk about my mother.”
“What’s in the garage, Stacy?”
“I have no idea. I said I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. I said I don’t have a clue what you are talking about. I don’t know.”
“What are you talking about? What are you talking about?”
“You don’t look too good. You think I masterminded this?”
“No, they told me I did. No, they told me I did for them.”
“I have to tell you that I did kill mom.”
“And unless you want Susan implicated, you need to commit suicide with me. You’re going to have to commit suicide with me because otherwise they’re going to arrest Susan too, and you both of your lives will be destroyed.”
“Why don’t you do something to get away? It’s impossible to know what your reactions would be without having lived not just the last hour of her life, but the entire the entire history of her life. I don’t think I was thinking at all. I think it was a total revert back to my childhood. Here’s a male figure, here’s somebody older than me, here’s somebody much larger than me saying, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ And it’s just, you just do it. You don’t think about it. You don’t second-guess yourself because here’s your authority figure telling you to go ahead and do it.”
“Hey, are you okay? Wake up. Let’s get you out of here. Come on. Come on. I got you. I got you. Come on.”
“We had something to do with mom leaving.”
“I just couldn’t use the word ‘die.’ I just couldn’t do it. I could not come to terms with it.”
“Dad is under the garage floor. Mom is buried in the rock garden behind Stacy and Susan’s house.”
“This bundle, uh, wrapped up in a tarp, and, uh, it’s pretty sizable bundle because Richard Cannon Senior was a big guy.”
“Stacy told me at some point that his father was in, in bed asleep and she went in and shot him in the back of the head.”
“No, I did not kill my father.”
“I got on top of her. I taped up her hands and he said I taped her mouth and nose shut with, with duct tape and then I sat on her chest and stared into her eyes until she was dead.”
“That was just about as close to a heart attack as I’ve ever come in my entire life. I just can’t believe this is happening. This is just totally just ridiculous. I kept a belief, you know, in my own innocence, even if nobody else believed in me. Um, that I knew I would be okay. I knew that the truth would come out, and I knew that I would be okay.”
“You know, you just don’t know. You don’t know what 12 strangers who don’t know you are going to think.”
“He’s my brother. He’ll always be my brother. I’ll always remember the times he was there when we all needed him. I’ll always love him. But I’ll always have a fear of him.”
“When we start talking about my mother, um, there’s a lot of pain there.”
