John Kenneth Henderson
P. O. Box 68274
Oak Grove, Oregon 97268
henderson8445094@gmail.com
503-960-1263
Johns Story (the mother killer)
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I was born in Reno, Nevada on December 1, 1970. My mother Betty Alice Stewart was from Texas and my father Kenneth Olen Henderson is from Missouri. Of my grandparents I know very little, I met my grandmothers but they were never a big part of my life.
I am not sure when we moved out of Reno, but I was told that we lived on Shirttail Creek, next to Burnt Ranch just outside of Albany California. I guess the important aspects of this time were that my father was a gold miner, and I started drinking alcohol by the expedient of my parents keeping my bottle full of alcohol. They told me stories of how we would be driving down a road, I was 2 or 3, and I would be in the back seat, and I would throw my bottle out of the window when it was empty. It didn't matter what window was open or how far, my aim was always perfect, the bottle would be out of the window. I am fairly certain that's when I became an alcoholic. I seriously doubt that there was an A.A. group for toddlers at that time.
I have some memories of that time, looking down into a river canyon, and staring at my reflection in a car bumper which was at my eye level. Eventually we moved back to Reno, and this is where a majority of my memories start. I remember moving into a trailer in Sun Valley, Nevada, a suburb of Reno. I remember having to help clean up the yard, and getting settled into the trailer. I found a red paper mask in the room I was given, I thought that it was really neat. It was something I had never seen before, then my mother took it away because she said she didn't know where it had been. I knew where it had been, it was in the drawer.
Then a couple weeks later they took me a couple blocks down the road to a babysitter and I started going to head start. What is there to say about these times, I was a kid, learning what it was like to see kids my own age. To see what a friend was and how to act in a social manner. My father somehow ended up putting in some monkey-bars, a swing-set, and setting up a playground for that head start. When he was done and left, I broke down and cried. It was one of the few times that I got to see him in a normal manner. There were other times that I saw him, but most of those were when he came home drunk and mistook my room for the bathroom. So he would come in and piss on me, then the next morning he would beat me for pissing the bed.
We lived there during the time that I went to preschool, first grade and a month or two into the second grade. Some of the high points that stand out are that I fell in love with a girl down the road (this tore me up later), and that my first grade teacher was a belly-dancer who used to show us kids what she could do. It was also a time that I learned that I was different from others.
To start out with, I had a speech impediment, I could barely pronounce any letter of the alphabet. When I was in first grade I was sent to a neurologist or whatever they were called back then. They put me through all kinds of tests and hooked me up to a lot of machines. And after all that, their explanation to me was that my brain operated five times faster than a human was able to speak. Of course that didn't help me out a whole lot, they just made me learn how to focus on what I was saying and slow down so others could understand me.
The second major event of that time to me was the discovery that I had a better memory than my parents. It started out simply enough, my sister and I were told that we could eat in the living room as long as we didn't spill any food. This was the greatest thing to me since it was the first few weeks of me seeing a TV. About a month later I spilled food on the coffee table, and it terrified me, I was afraid I wouldn't be allowed to eat in the living room anymore. The family would be in there watching the TV, and I would be by myself in the kitchen. I cried, I was a pretty big baby as a child (probably still am). Anyways, my parents claimed that they didn't remember saying that to me, and that I could still eat in the living room. I thought they were just being nice to get me to stop crying.
O.K., I am a dumb-ass, I had to put it to the test, so I started paying attention to everything they said and did. I was already doing it with my own words, just so people could partially understand me. I didn't know the words for it back then, but what they said and did never matched up. They were inconsistent, they either didn't or couldn't remember things they said. Eventually, I learned that this is a common trait among everyone, but back then I thought it was just them. I didn't have much experience to base comparisons on, no real social context to place their actions into perspective. I just knew that I could out-think them. Of course this was not a good thing, nobody likes being proven wrong or shown that they are less intelligent, especially by a child. Their response was physical, I couldn't win.
Another fact that I didn't know until much later was that my mother had a child that drowned a couple of years before I was born. I still don't know much about him other than he was 5 or 6 years old when he died. I think my mother blamed me for not being like him, and my father blamed me for causing my mother pain. I just wasn't supposed to be there. I wasn't supposed to be smarter than him, I wasn't supposed to do better than him, I wasn't supposed to infringe on his memory or be anything that lessened his accomplishments. I was a kid, I didn't understand any of this, so I did what all children do, I tried to learn and experience life. And I was good at it. Needless to say, my time in Reno left me with a few scars, I got 7 stitches across the top of my head, and a chair to the side of my face left a scar to the edge of my eye.
In 1975, a month or so into second grade, my father thought the world was coming to an end. We moved to California, Trinity County, back on gold-mining claims. The first place we lived was on canyon creek, and that’s where we got our first trailer. We were only there for a couple of months before we moved to Dutch Creek and that’s when we started burying food for the end of the world. At that time my father started to not pay taxes. It only took a couple months before the feds started trying to find us. So at the ripe age of six, I got my first alias name. Then we moved into the back woods where we had to hike seven miles from the end of the dirt road to where our camp was. And that’s where the real fun began.
My father decided that one of his children would survive if the world did end. Since my sister was slower than I was, my father put me through military survival training. The violence I learned was directed at animals, but would have worked on any human. Since he was in the navy as a young man, most of my training came straight from the military. This training lasted for almost two years. At the end of this training my father decided to put me through a test. He pointed in a direction and told me that I had to survive for two weeks by myself. Also, he was going to be tracking and attempting to capture me. He told me that every time he caught me he would break a bone. He caught me twice in the first two days, broke both of my pinkies. He never caught me again, I was nine.
At the time I hated him, I didn’t believe that’s a how a family should be. Looking back on it, I’m grateful for the training that I received because it could have been the only thing that kept me alive for as long as I have been. Also during this time, he was experimenting with E.S.P. and hypnosis. While my sister was highly susceptible to being hypnotized, I wasn’t. But, I had already proven that I could outthink my parents, so I pretended to be hypnotized. The one time I remember was when he hypnotized me and told me that I would not feel any pain in my right hand. Hypnosis is a state of positive suggestions, so when he drove the sewing needle through my hand, I didn’t react. At that time it was more Important to me to impress him with his ability than to allow him to know that I was lying to him.
At the time I didn’t see anything wrong with my life, I thought all families were like this. I did the normal things you do out in the wilderness, I learn to peel, gut, and skin animals. I learned what plants you could eat and what plants you couldn’t. I could look at the land and tell which direction to go, I never got lost. I was a natural survivor, should all children go through this?
By the time I was eleven, we moved back to the city and ended up in Eugene, Oregon. Nothing remarkable about this time, my dad was selling drugs, and I started learning what it was like to be around people again. I don’t know if it was because of my experiences, or just the way I was, but I could never fit in with friends again. This is when I memorized the Constitution. Not out of a noble cause, just because I had a class about American History, and at least the teacher would talk to me about it. We didn’t last in Eugene long, and ended up moving to Portland, Oregon.
We weren’t making it, so my dad started committing crimes and we moved around a little bit. While we were living in southeast Portland, I made a friend who I will say came from a normal family. I was in fifth grade, and he invited me to stay the night at his house. They actually prayed over dinner, and did things together like a family, it was almost like watching television. I didn’t see anybody hit anybody, they didn’t hit on each other.
It was at this time that my father went to prison. He gave me a twenty dollar bill and left it beside my bed when he left. He knew he was going to commit a crime, and probably get caught. I really enjoyed that money, but I didn’t know what it meant until much later. After he was gone, other things happened. I went to see a friend over by Mt. Scott, but he wasn’t home. I was waiting at the bottom of the hill on Southeast Division Street, and I was picked up by a police officer. He said he had some work for me at a park, and asked me if I wanted to make some money. That was the first time I was raped, how do you report that, who do you go to?
Shortly thereafter we moved, again. We were living on 129th and southeast division, in a trailer park where I got my first experience with gangs. It was just a group of kids from the neighborhood, but since my mother and I were alone, and she was dating her boss and a few other guys from her work, there was no one there to protect me. So after a couple of run-ins, and having these kids beat me up, I finally defended myself, and pulled a gun on one of them. Of course I was the one who got in trouble for that, the kids wouldn’t tell the truth.
My mother finally figured out that her boss wasn’t going to divorce his wife. So she moved us in with one of her other guy friends in Milwaukie, Oregon. Eventually they got married, and had it not been for me, they would have been happy. I realized they didn’t need nor want me there, when they took his son and daughter and me out to buy school clothes. First we went to Clackamas Town Center, and got his children all brand new school clothes. Then they took me to Goodwill, and bought mine.
It was this realization that started leading me down a different path. Up until the sixth grade, every school I went to missing a couple of years, I was still a straight ‘A’ student. Seventh grade my grades dropped to straight ‘F’s. The only accomplishment I can claim for that year was that I finally got over my speech impediment, and I could talk normally. People still thought I had an accent, but I could live with that. Eighth grade started out with straight ‘F’s so the school put me through some educational testing, to find out what I was struggling with. The conclusions came back after all the tests that I was bored. My scores on the tests were fourth year college level.
I realized that my mother had always used me for some type of attention, weather it was because I had a speech impediment, or that I was a genius, or in later years that I was uncontrollable. Which probably contributed to my heavy drug usage. Not that the abuse and mistreatment weren’t enough, the psychological damage caused the pain to be unbearable. I started hanging out with my sisters friends who were all about five years older than I was. And I was proud that I could do more drugs and drink more alcohol than they could. They were doing it for the party or for pleasure, I was just burying the pain.
The next ten years of my life was dedicated to extremes, doing more drugs, being more dangerous, having more going on. I was always out to prove something to somebody. My memories at this time are somewhat chaotic, there are a lot of gaps where I have no memory at all. So please forgive me if the rest of my story seems disjointed.
My dad was released from prison, and I thought it would be a fresh start for me, so I moved to California with him. I was off drugs while down there, I held down two jobs, one in a wrecking yard, and the other at a used car dealership. I was also attending school on a special study program, where I only had to be at school for fifteen minutes a week. My dad made me buy a car, it was a fifty dollar Volkswagen bug. I was thirteen, and thought I was cooler than sliced bread. It didn’t run, and my dad told me that the first thing about driving a car, is knowing how to fix it. So, I put everything I had into making that car look and run perfect. Once it was up and going, he took me to a motocross track and made me drive it until I wrecked it so bad it wouldn’t move. Then he told me to rebuild the car. I ended up wrecking and rebuilding it seventeen times that summer. Of course at the end I quit trying to make it look pretty, and just made sure that it ran. At the end of that summer I could make that car do anything I chose. Then I asked my dad if I could go get my driving permit, he told me that he didn’t care as long as I didn’t wreck anyone else’s car.
Also while I was in California, I started an import business. I got the licenses, and basically ran a permanent yard sale. I averaged anywhere from 400 to a thousand dollars in a week. I left it all, and moved back to Oregon. I couldn’t handle my reality, I couldn’t handle the pain, and doing drugs down there wasn’t an option. I left a son down there, his mother was eighteen, and all she wanted from me was to get pregnant. I still haven’t met my son.
Back in Oregon, back with my mother, back to the fun and games of family life. I made it a whole two and a half months in school before the principal informed me that I was being released from compulsorary attendance for the state of Oregon. It was probably due to my actions, I just didn’t care about following the rules. I attempted suicide on almost a monthly basis, all that did was feed my illusions of grandeur. I thought I was immortal for a while, but, life has a way of bringing you back to reality. I was going to go out for a night from my mom’s house, the family had other plans. So, they told me if I walked out the door never to come back, so I ran for my dads. I was only there for a couple of months before he went back to prison, because I had helped him commit a crime. He would have left that crime alone had I not shown him how to break in.
I ended up living under a bridge in West Sacramento, this was the second time I got raped. I eventually got on my feet, even with the drug use, and seemingly the entire world against me. I was working at Painting Cabins in Tahoe, living the high life, I was part of the in-crowd at barely sixteen years old. I guess if I would have known a different way to live, I could have seen more opportunities, but it has always appeared that I’m only making choices between bad and worse. I’ve talked to people about the things that have happened to me, and they claim I have had a hard life. It was the only life I knew, and I was still alive.
Over the next couple of months, I made a short stop in Oregon, and moved to Los Angeles. Because of my history, and my connections with drugs, I stumbled across a deal of transporting cocaine from L.A. to Portland, and weed from Portland back to Los Angeles. Five thousand dollars a week, and all I had to do was pick up and drop off. I guess I was a smuggler, but I wouldn’t call it that since I was riding the greyhound. There is a lot of other things that happened up to this point, I can’t tell you when, I just remember them. I worked as a male hooker, committed a lot of crimes, and beat up old ladies. The best thing that could have happened in society is if someone would have killed me. People talk about hell, I had first class tickets and a players card.
I went back to Oregon, and hooked up with Tanya, not the best thing that I’ve ever done. She cheated on me, used me for everything she could get, and took a special fascination in causing me pain. But, I ended up with a beautiful daughter, I believe that her birth was a turning point in my life. Nineteen years old, and the first time I truly understood love, was holding my daughter after she was born. I attempted to turn my life around, I got a good job, trying to do right. I came home from work one day, Tanya was in the shower, my daughter Tosha was in her crib crying, and my mother was there. I can’t prove that anything happened, I never saw any marks, but something inside of me broke. I made a decision at that time, that my daughter would never go through what I went through. It might have been because of my drug use, or my lack of education, or maybe a pain induced psychosis. I made the decision, right or wrong. I ended up taking my mother to the wilderness and killing her.
I attempted to run, made it for almost three months. Tanya and my crime partner both turned states evidence. When I attempted to call Tanya, from just outside Sacramento, two and a half minutes into the phone conversation, I was surrounded by police with their guns drawn. I didn’t play the victim, I didn’t cry or fall down, it was a relief. It was a hope that they would finally put me to death, but we are talking about my life, there are no easy ways out. So I fought extradition for a month and a half before I was transported back to Oregon.
On the trip back, we were in a van, we pulled off the highway out in the woods. We kept taking smaller and smaller roads, until we ended up in a gravel field, there were four other cop cars there. I just knew they took me out there to kill me, they were going to shoot me while trying to escape. Later, I found out that county to county transport is not allowed to transport inmates across state lines.
Now we’re up to my prison years, they charged me with three counts of aggravated murder, three counts of intentional murder, and one count of felony murder. A normal murder trial takes one to four years, mine was done in four months. I never fought the conviction. I had a public defender, and I took the first plea bargain offered. It was ten years for pleading to one count felony murder. I was convicted, sentenced, transported to county jail, and was waiting on a ride to prison. The judge discovered that he could have given me more time, so in violation of double jeopardy, I was taken back to court. My sentence was vacated, transferred to another judge, and they gave me life without the possibility of parole.
What is there to say about prison, you’re locked in a box, they let you out to play with animals, and everyone’s vicious, violent, and vindictive. It was better than home, I actually found a place where I could feel comfortable, and relaxed without fear. The pain went away, and I didn’t really crave drugs anymore. I used my prison time well, I got a G.E.D., and earned a college associates degree in psychology. I completed all the self-help programs, studied a dozen different religions, became an ordained minister, and overcame the psychological breakdown caused by the crime I committed. When they put me in prison, and changed my sentence, plus all the trauma of walking into prison nineteen years old, five foot three inches, and 120 lbs, I died. Everything that I was up to that point was dead, I had to rebuild my entire personality, and everything I believed in.
I consider a book to be 300 to 500 pages, and I read three to five books a week, for twenty years and ten months. I studied everything I could get my hands on, and became a walking encyclopedia. Because of this overload of information, my mind operates more like a Google search engine than anything else. Anytime somebody says something, or I see something, all these cross connections of information flood into my brain. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I see a wide range of possibilities and opportunities every time I turn around.
Shortly before my release, my daughter reestablished contact with me after twenty years. And since I finally had a release date that I got through appeals, it gave me something to hope for. Even on the day that I was released, sitting inside R and D looking at the front door, I didn’t really believe they were going to let me out. I’ve been out eight and a half months now, and I still wonder if this is a dream.
Life isn’t easy out here, I went through the Bridges program, had a couple jobs, got an apartment, and started rebuilding my relationship with my daughter. We now have our own place to call home. I’m trying to attend full time college, but since my car broke down I may have to let that dream go. There are a lot of places that say they are felony friendly employers, but nobody will hire a murderer. Everything designed to help ex-cons kind of skips over me. So, since I couldn’t get a job, I started my own corporation. It isn’t worth anything, but I thought the idea behind it was good. Basically, it’s designed to assist veterans and help them start business’, so they in turn can hire ex-cons and homeless people. The corporation would support them in housing, counseling, treatment, and any schooling they may need to accomplish their goals.
I can’t do this alone, I’ve been trying. I need help, financial or otherwise. I’m not asking you to believe in me. Just believe in something, anything, for any reason. I believe in the basic goodness of Humanity, I believe that people want to experience better traits, such as honor, respect, honesty, compassion and nobility. If I can’t make my dream come true, if I am unable to convince others that this is a good cause. Then maybe you can make your dream come true and help humanity in some way, leave it a little better off because you were in the world.
