Photo:Courtesy Semander family
Courtesy Semander family
Elena Semander, 20, was free-spirited and fiercely independent, and also very protective of her younger siblings, Maria, 18, JoAnna, 15 and John, 12. She was a natural athlete and an artist, who helped with homework, or gave advice to JoAnna about boys, and wrote letters to John from college telling him that all the girls would love him one day.
In January of 1982, the three girls and their friends had even gone to see a Diana Ross concert — but JoAnna and Maria didn’t know at the time it would be one of their last memories of Elena.
On the morning of February 7, 1982, when the close-knit family of five were heading to the Greek Orthodox Church they attended, Elena was not in her room. She had been living with her parents, Zack, then 52, a math teacher, and Harriet, 48, a registrar at The Kincaid school, after attending the University of Denver her freshman year on a field hockey scholarship. Now she was back home again and going to the University of Houston for her sophomore year — except that morning, she wasn’t in her bed, and her parents were annoyed that she was missing church.
“I was thinking, ‘OK, I’m going to have to cover for her,” says Maria, now 59, “I did not think anything bad had happened.”
Elena had gone out to meet friends the night before, even borrowing Maria’s rabbit fur coat. Then the call came from a Houston police officer that no parent ever wants to receive.
“JoAnna and I were there when my dad got the news,” says Maria. “And that vision will be seared in my mind forever. It looked like all his blood completely drained out of his face. He sat down. He just said, ‘We’ve lost her.’”
That morning, a Houston sanitation worker spotted the body of a young woman in the back of a garbage truck — Elena had been strangled to death and her body left in the dumpster at an apartment complex near her home.
Watts, now thought to be one of the deadliest serial killers in U.S. history, confessed to police that he had murdered 12 women in Texas, including Elena Semander. But just as it seemed that justice would be served, the Semanders were horrified to learn that prosecutors had struck a highly unusual deal with Watts: He was guaranteed immunity from further prosecution for pleading guilty to aggravated burglary charges and for helping police to recover the bodies of three women he had killed. As a result, Watts never faced charges for murdering Elena, and he would soon use loopholes in Texas law to have his 60- year sentence reduced to just 24 years for good behavior and qualify for mandatory early release in 2006.
‘She Was Just Obsessed’
Outraged, the Semander family launched a decades-long quest to keep Elena’s killer behind bars, attending parole hearings, protesting outside prisons and meeting with lawmakers in a successful effort to rewrite Texas’s mandatory early release law.
“It was a tremendous help in healing and going through the grief process,” says Harriett, now 90, who led the effort.
Houston Chronicle, Sam C. Pierson/ap
“The research my mom was doing, everything she was learning, the interviews with the press—she was really just obsessed,” says John, 54.
John fictionalized the family’s trauma and struggle to move on in a screenplay he wrote during the last 30 years. That screenplay has been adapted into a short film,The Empty Chair.
“My mom would get on the phone with an investigator and transition from sweet Greek mom to just crusader against the criminal-justice system," says John. “Her crusade began trying to find out who killed Elena. It shifted into the criminal justice system after Watts had confessed. And then her focus became, how did he, this confessed serial killer who was under surveillance and who Michigan authorities had warned the Houston police about, how did this happen? Then the next battle was just keeping him in jail. So it was nonstop.”
Harriett joined Parents of Murdered Children and became an advocate for the rights of victims. In 2002, the 20th anniversary of Watts’s arrest, she organized a “Call to Action” with victims’ families at her church to protest his pending release. The meeting drew national media coverage — and caught the attention of authorities in Michigan, where Watts had lived before moving to Texas in the early 1980s.
In 2004 investigators in Detroit and Kalamazoo reopened a pair of cold cases and soon named Watts as a suspect in the murders of two women. He was tried and convicted with Elena’s family watching in the courtroom, and sentenced to prison for the rest of his life.
‘I Have My Life Back’
Harriett found peace at last when Watts died of cancer in prison in 2007. Says her daughter JoAnna Nicolaou, 57: “Her first words were, ‘I have my life back.’ It wasn’t until I heard her say that I was like, ‘Good God, this has taken over her life.’ She never thought she’d outlive him. She thought she would be on this earth the rest of her life, having to deal with not just him, but the criminal justice system.”
Coral Eugene Watts.Brett Coomer/ap
Brett Coomer/ap
Joanna Nicolaou (left) points to pictures of her sister Elena with Despina (center) and Jenny Bogdanos (right).James Nielsen/Houston Chronicle via Getty
James Nielsen/Houston Chronicle via Getty
Just nine days short of her 21stbirthday when she died, Elena’s legacy will live on through an arts and sports scholarship at The Kincaid School where she graduated from, and the Semander siblings hope the film will be her legacy as well.
“John has focused on our family, breaking that open and letting people into our home back in 1982,” says JoAnna. “So it’s extremely personal, but we feel like it’s going to help other families … because the fact that we have stayed close and stayed together, that’s a miracle, too, right? Things like this usually rip people apart.”
“It also is perfect timing,” Maria says, “because it’s a cautionary tale of well-intended laws that end up having these really bad consequences.”
source: people.com
