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w?age 22
CAMILLE: 20 Years Later
“Just because you are crazy does not mean you are legally insane.”
Miss. Supreme Court Ruling upholding Gerlach’s conviction and life sentence.
JOHN FITZHUGH/SUN HERALD PHOTOGRAPHER
Gerlach, an inmate at Rankin County Correctional Facility, tells how Camille affected her life.
Gerlach
Continued from Page 21
brother.
Looking for love ...
During her trial, Necaise, referring to Gerlach’s 13 marriages and
11	husbands — she married two men twice — suggested that she “had been looking for love in all the’ wrong places.”
Gerlach said she resented his remark at the time.
Her first eight husbands, she said, were all very good to her.
But, she said, after a strict upbringing —, “I’d never been around anyone drinking; I didn’t know what pep pills were” — she started drinking when she was 20.
“I loved it — the bright lights, the dancing. Everything was so gay.”
She met the men she married in bars, she said.
“It seemed like when you got married, they wanted you to settle down and sit home!” she said. “It seems like . . . none of them were real stable. I couldn’t find the perfect one I wanted to.”
She first became a wife at 15. Her longest marriage lasted several years, her shortest, seven days. Two ex-husbands committed suicide after she divorced them.
She has married twice more since she entered prison in 1982, both times to other inmates.
Her 14th marriage lasted about a year, she said. Last year, she mar-
ried Troy James, 46, of Gulfport, now serving a sentence for aggravated assault of a former wife.
But, Gerlach said, “He says it was an accident. He also was drinking.”
Mellowing out
A confirmed Catholic, Gerlach goes to Mass every Sunday, and she and James are active in prison alcohol treatment programs, she said.
“Neither of us plan on ever drinking again. A lot of my drink-
ing, I would be lonely. My friends all owned bars or worked in bars, and I’d sit and talk with them, ” she said.
Joe Cooke, superintendent at the Rankin County prison, said that Gerlach has “mellowed” since she entered prison.
“Mary Ann was a pistol,” he said. “We have had several close encounters where you’re staring each other eyeball to eyeball and you’re waiting for someone to blink. Fortunately, Mary Ann
blinked. ”
But Cooke predicts that soon Gerlach will be ready for a prerelease halfway-house assignment.
During the time she’s been in prison, Cooke said, “I think she’s just about decided that she wants to spend the rest of her life taking it easy. She’s been in fights. She’s been in lock-down. She’s had her share of having to wait.” — “I just want to try to dedicate the rest of my life to doing good and making up for the harm I have caused,” Gerlach said.
Camille’s mental scars live on
By DAVID MONEY
THE SUN HERALD
Camille left more than broken boards and busted windows behind when she finished her tear along the Coast.
She left some people with emotional scars that, in some cases, would take more than time to heal.
Dr. Susannah H.A. Smith, a psychotherapist in Gulfport, has worked with people who endured the terror of Camille and were not able on their own to come to grips with what they had gone through.
They were suffering from Post Traumatic Syndrome.
Symptoms include anxiety, numbing and flashbacks.
“It was first identified after Vietnam. With all the combat vets coming back and having a variety of problems,” Smith said.
“Any massive trauma is going to have an effect on a person.”
The key to getting past the event is fitting the experience into one’s philosophy of life.
“Until you assimilate it, you haven’t dealt with it.”
The problem with assimilation, however, is that defense mechanisms sometimes get in the way.
Defense mechanisms are used to protect the body and soul. Everybody has them.
“The body develops defenses. They distance us from our feelings, but we are not processing those feelings.”
In cases where severe trauma or abuse is concerned, the mechanisms can hinder the person’s ability to cope in life.
“Repression is the most primitive of all defense mechanisms.”
It tells the conscious mind that the pain just doesn’t exist anymore. The person learns to channel the memory from consciousness, but later it can express itself in the physical form of an anxiety attack.
Other survivors of the storm turned to the mechanism called intellectualizing.
For example, a person might say to himself, “I’ll study storms. I’ll know everything there is to know about them.”
He is not dealing with his anxiety, she said. “It’s stress they are feeling.”
Still others used reporting — putting themselves out of the picture and viewing from a distance.
Smith pointed out that feeling a stress response to reports of another hurricane heading this way is normal.
“Still getting nervous is appropriate. Just as long as it is not dysfunctional.”
Kinsey Stewart, who helped found The Counseling Center in Biloxi in 1970, said once the center got going on the Coast he too saw people suffering from delayed stress.
“Months later we saw people feeling ill at ease,” he said.
They would not directly relate their feelings to the storm, but in talking with them
they would date things back to losses they had in the storm, he said.
Both Smith and Stewart said Camille also brought out another part of the human character.
“The stress of a disaster brings out basic characteristics,” Stewart said. “There was a tremendous feeling that people had to assist one another. Camaraderie.”
Smith calls it the positive part of a disaster.
“Through pain, if we process it, we grow stronger. In a crisis, people band together,” she said.
Smith, a Coast native, was at Vassar in New York when the ungracious Camille called on her home state.
Mississippi was not popular up there, she said. “But watching TV and seeing what had happened. . . Seeing the blacks and whites, rich and poor working together . . . The people still had their humanity.
“Everybody worked together. I think one of the purposes of a disaster is to remind us who we are and where we came from,” she said.
“It cuts through the superficial and gets down to the basics. What’s really important like food, caring and shelter.”
People have to be shaken to be reminded of what’s important, she said.
“Sometimes we have to be hit by a two-by-four to get it. That’s what a hurricane is. ”