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CAMILLE: 20 Years Later
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, CHAUNCEY HINMAV
Mary Ann Gerlach was the only person to survive the storm surge that washed away who died in Camille, including Gerlach’s husband, were celebrating at a hurricane the Richelieu Apartments in Pass Christian, left. Many of the 23 Richelieu residents party. The swimming pool was all that remained after the storm, right.
Terror
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“I was so tired. I gave up a couple of times and decided I’d just have to die.”
Once, she said, she spotted a skull lying on nearby debris. She thought it was from a doctor’s office.
“It didn’t even occur to me until I got out of the hospital that it came from the graveyard” of Trinity Episcopal Church, also obliterated by Camille, she said.
The morning after
It was dawn when the receding tidal surge deposited her on the woodpile, and it was raining. She put a piece of wood over her head to protect her.
“It was so cold,” she said: “I’m sure I was in shock, I had lost so much blood.”
Shortly afterward, a man came by, asking if she’d seen his wife. Gerlach asked for help, but “he just turned around and walked on off and left me.”
Apparently she lost consciousness then. When she came to, “it was about 9 o’clock, and real sunshiny.”
Soon afterward, she was rescued by an acquaintance who failed at first to recognize her. She was taken to a nursing home, where her leg was sewn up without benefit of water or alcohol, then to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. She developed a staph infection and was hospitalized for a month after her ordeal.
Today, the 51-year-old woman is an inmate at the Rankin County
Correctional Facility, serving a life sentence for the murder of her 11th husband. She blames the trauma she underwent during Camille and her resulting insanity for her husband’s death.
“Worse-than-migraine headaches” from a fractured neck that healed incorrectly after an earlier car wreck were aggravated by Camille, she said.
During her trial, Gerlach said that massive quantities of prescription medicine failed to cure the headaches, so she combined the drugs with alcohol to make them work faster.
Surgery to sever nerves to relieve the three-, four- and five-day headaches was unsuccessful, she said. But about 18 months ago, just before she was ready to undergo another operation, a neurosurgeon prescribed a new medication that’s
working.
“It’s the first time I’ve been without headaches for so many years,” she said.
ty prison.
James, Gerlach said, rode out Hurricane Camille in a shelter that had its roof blown off by the storm.
A new day
But, ironically, her body tells her when a storm is coming, she said.
“My neck acts like a barometer,” she said.
“It will always upset me when hurricanes or storms come,” Gerlach said. “We have a lot of tornados here. I just get hysterical. We’re supposed to get under the bed. They tried that just once with me.”
Now, during storms, Gerlach is given medication to calm her down and is allowed to sit out in the hall, she said.
Gerlach’s 13th and current husband, Troy James of Gulfport, is also an inmate at the Rankin Coun-
“He can sort of understand whenever I start getting nervous about storms,” she said.
Gerlach’s advice to newcomers or other Coastians who have become complacent about hurricanes: “No material things are worth taking a chance on your life, your children, your family. Board up the house as best you can, get your family and loved ones, get in the car and leave.”
Gerlach said she had been warned about Camille’s 200 mph winds.
“I had no conception of what 200 mph winds were. I talked those people into staying,” she said.
Gerlach
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ities of Coast residents.
Gerlach survived, but her life was twisted, perhaps inalterably.
During her January 1982 murder trial, Gerlach told a packed courtroom that she’d seen “so much die” the night Hurricane Camille struck that she couldn’t even kill the wood spiders floating in the water with her.
But she shot Kietzer — a 36-year-old offshore worker whom she had divorced seven weeks before but continued to live with — five times with a .357-caliber Magnum pistol at their Lorraine Road home in Gulfport on Jan. 7, 1981.
Her attorney, Boyce Holleman, argued during the trial that Gerlach, then 44, was psychotic, paranoid and schizophrenic. He pleaded both insanity and self-defense in her slaying of Kietzer.
He noted that Gerlach was the
sole survivor at Richelieu Apartments in Pass Christian after the Camille’s storm surge took 23 other lives and destroyed the complex. She suffered brain damage from injuries sustained during the storm, he said.
But then-District Attorney Albert Necaise argued that Gerlach had connived to kill her 11th husband for his $50,000 insurance policy.
The many faces of Mary Ann
The eight-day trial, presided over by Circuit Judge Kosta N. Vlahos, was a judge’s nightmare — plagued by a rambunctious audience, bickering between the attorneys and outbursts from the defendant.
Witnesses testified that Gerlach changed after Camille: She became a prostitute; changed her personality when she changed her wigs; and claimed to be “the devil’s child” during full moons.
But the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld her conviction relying
on a legal definition of insanity called the M’Naughton Rule. In layman’s language, the ruling said, this translates to “just because you are crazy does not mean you are legally insane.”
Gerlach maintained then and maintains now that she does not remember details of the shooting.
A sheriffs deputy at the trial said that Gerlach was hysterical afterward and said, “We were having such a good time all day, and then he started to hit me.” Other witnesses testified that Gerlach said Kietzer had threatened to leave her.
Gerlach said her memory about Kietzer’s death “never has come back. Hopefully, it never will. I just don’t think I could bear it, because Larry and I were so close, and I loved him so much. That’s why I’ve tried to tell young people about how drugs and alcohol mixed up can get you in so much trouble.”
But later in the interview, Gerlach said that Kietzer “beat on me real bad. I had broken away from
him when I got the pistol and killed him.”
Gerlach said she was physically abused by several of her husbands.
“You comer a dog, and they take so much and finally they fight back,” she said.
Gerlach said she knows she was crazy when she shot Kietzer.
“I called the police and told them
I	had killed my daughter and my husband,” she said. “But my daughter had killed herself in Texas two years before.”
Gerlach said she felt guilty because she had sent her daughter back to her husband only three days before.
Surviving her sentence
Gerlach is housed now at Rankin County Correctional Facility, a modern 373-bed facility that opened in 1986.
She is involved in a business-office vocational training program and serves as a part-time literacy tutor. Since her incarceration, she has earned an associate degree in
general education and now plans to earn a bachelor’s degree from Jackson State University, “with lots of courses in psychology,” she saii Eventually, she hopes to work in the Jackson area as a drug and alcohol counselor.
Gerlach appears to be stoical about her situation except when she talks about what she perceives as her wrongful murder conviction.
And she loses her self-control when she discusses her three children.
Her youngest son, Jerry Teeples, is 18. She hadn’t heard from him since her sister-in-law kicked him out of her Georgia home three or four months ago.
“I don’t know where he is,” swe said, breaking into tears. “It’s been two years since I saw him.”
She hasn’t seen her other two sons, one in Florida and one in California, for eight years. It’s been nine years since she last saw her
Please see GERLACH, Page 22
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