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v_.nmiLLr.: zu Years Later
“Oh, goody! Let’s party. I went out and got lots of booze and food.”
Mary Ann Gerlach Aug. 17,1969
HUKHCAffi
Hurricane party turned to terror
By NAN PATTON EHRBRIGHT
.THE SUN HERALD
PEARL — The sole survivor of a Hurricane Camille party 20 years ago at the Richelieu Apartments in Pass Christian did not expect to outlive the storm.
“I thought I was out in the Gulf, ” Mary Ann Gerlach said. “I thought they’d be saving people on land. I couldn’t see anything. It was pitch black, and I’ve always been afraid of the dark.”
But Gerlach, who spent some six hours between 11 p.m. and dawn riding out the hurricane’s 12-mile-long tidal wave, was mistaken.
When she was found, she was lying on an 8- to 9-foot high pile of lumber about half a block from railroad tracks.
She had been washed inland an estimated five miles.
She was bruised and battered. Her knee was so badly cut by wood, nails and other debris that she needed surgery, two months in a walking cast and physical therapy to teach her how to walk again.
“I guess God just wasn’t ready for me to go,” Gerlach said in an interview with The Sun Herald. “I told God if he’d let me live, I’d try to be a better person.”
Her husband of two years, Sea-bee Frederick “Fritz” Gerlach, died in the storm. So did the other 22 tenants of the three-story, U-shaped complex overlooking the beachfront about a block from Trinity Episcopal Church.
“I heard him come out, ” Gerlach said. “He was on the raft, yelling ‘Help, help. Save me, baby.’ ”
But by the time she got disentangled from the telephone wires of the apartment complex, he was gone.
Party time
When Coastians were warned to evacuate on Aug. 17, Gerlach said, her response was, “Oh, goody, let’s party! I went out and got a lot of booze and food. ”
Furniture on the first floor was taken to the third floor for safekeeping. Playing cards and hurricane lamps were gathered up.
Then Gerlach, a cocktail waitress at Caesar’s Palace, and her husband lay down in the bedroom of their second-floor, shotgun-style apartment for a nap.
Gerlach roused Fritz at about 10:30 p.m. when she heard bumping downstairs.
“I didn’t realize there was a tidal wave out there,” she said.
BILL ELMORE/THE SUN HERALD
Mary Ann Gerlach enters Harrison County Courthouse for trial in the early 1980s.
Woman says hurricane led to 1981 murder of her husband
By NAN PATTON EHRBRIGHT
THE SUN HERALD
■	PEARL — Mary Ann Gerlach blames Hurricane Camille for inflicting the physical pain and emotional trauma that led her to drug and alcohol abuse, insanity and, eventually, a conviction and life sentence for murder.
She admits shooting her 11th husband, Lawrence A. Kietzer, to death 8V2 years ago, but claims it was not murder but self-defense.
“If I had not been on the pain medicine that I had to be on from Camille, I would not have been in the condition where I could not have remembered, and probably would not have been drinking, and Larry and I would not have been fighting,” she said during an interview with The Sun Herald.
Although she will be eligible for parole consideration in 1992, she has appealed her case to federal court and says she will not quit until she is exonerated.
“I should never have had this sentence,” she said. “I could have accepted manslaughter, but I did not do it intentionally.”
Camille survivor
Gerlach lost her sixth husband, Fritz Gerlach, to the 1969 storm that slammed into the Coast on Aug. 17, 1969. Camille spread debris miles inland and wreaking havoc on the property and personal-
Please see GERLACH, Page 21
When they entered the living room, the window panes were bowing in and the water was almost up to the second floor.
As they raced back to the bedroom, they heard the living room windows break. They slammed the bedroom door and stood with their backs to it, holding the water back.
“Then the water came around the building and pushed in the back windows. That was the only thing that saved my life. The bed was floating halfway up to the ceiling.”
Swimming for her life
Gerlach, an active swimmer and water-skier, said she inflated a pool raft and handed it to Fritz, who
couldn’t swim.,
“I said, ‘We’ve got to get out.’ The walls had big cracks in them. I said, ‘The third floor is fixing to cave in.’ ”
Gerlach got out through the window. A short time later, she saw her husband wash by, then disappear. Then she watched the apartment house go down, with the hurricane lamps of the partiers on the third floor flickering, falling, vanishing.
“It was just like a ship sinking.” In the hours that followed, Gerlach struggled to stay afloat — diving under, fighting back up, clutching first at a sofa pillow, then at other debris that swept by her.
“The wind was so strong, it seemed like it was pulling all the air, like you were in a vacuum and couldn’t breathe.
“Every once in a while, I’d see a light out there somewhere. I could hear people hollering for help. Then I’d see the light going under the water, and then the voices would cease and I’d know they were dead,” she said.
Several times Gerlach clung to trees, learning, after the first one turned over on her, to stay at the edges of the trees and the other debris that collected around them.
Please see TERROR, Page 21