Chapter 6: Jonnie Carter

Okay. I take a slow and deep breath in, and I asked the women sitting before me, this. Are you guys comfortable talking about. You have for me? Yeah? He's ever asked us that, because that. Explains a lot how spawn even ended up in your life? Can see well, because a lot of people, I'm sure like, why were you even in that relationship? Why did you stay? I'm sitting down with Johnny, Bethany's mother, to try to tell her story. Johnny's story has never been publicly told in full. When we talked about the purpose of this podcast and how we approach our Missing and Hushtown series, we told Johnny that we aim to tell the story as honestly and holistically as we can. We wanted the listeners to not just hear about Bethany, but to also know Johnny. Fighting for Bethany has become Johnny's mission, her legacy. But when Johnny was a young girl, nobody appeared to be fighting for her. So we'll share Johnny's life events which led her to become the protector she needed when she was Bethany's age. This is Missing in Hushtown Season two. Let's go. M m h, m hm, m h m hmmmm. I am Johnny Carter, Bethany Markowski's mother. I'm the oldest. I'm the oldest, So you're gonna when your memory of our childhood is way better than mine. You fall a lot more than I did, and you know a lot of things that were going on in the household. But actually, I'm sorry, but I actually think you were trying to protect us from so I won't you travel a bit? Well, I'm the oldest of four girls. Johnny is the oldest of four girls. Johnny, then Ronda, then Aunt Laurie, and then Tommy. Sadly, Ronda passed away a few years ago, but the sisters keep from memory close in their hearts. Our home life was insane, did was it a two pair of household? Sometimes? Yeah? Sometimes most well, yeah, until I was what ten. Nine? I was thirteen? No, I was thirteen fourteen something? So how come about? Anyway? It was? I don't know, It's kind of it was very weird. You never knew what you were going to come home to. You're hearing and Aunt Laurie, and you'll hear them interrupt each other, talk over each other and finish each other's sentences. The sisters have grown immensely close once again throughout the last decade, Little sister Tommy arrives in just a little bit. Either you were going to come home to a party house or you were going to come home to nobody who was parting. Our parents and their friends and alcohol and drugs, thank you, yes, hard dregs, no marijuana. Mostly, I don't know if it was hard driven or not. That it was what we saw and what we were around, and what we and what we help. One of our favorite I know this sounds horrible, one of our favorite memories is one of the you know, favorite memories that we can think of where we you know. We're having a good time. Yeah, yeah, we were doing anything wrong. No. Now, imagine four young girls ages thirteen down to two, sitting around a kitchen table, smiling, chatting away, helping their family without a worry in the world. It was, you know, a bunch of marijuana dumped on the kitchen table, and it was our task to sort out the stams in the seeds and to put it in these little bags in on these little scales. I want to prepare everyone listening, but this is likely the most mild of stories that you'll hear from Johnny's life moving forward. This episode does contain stories of childhood trauma to include sexual abuse, allegations, and mentions of suicide, so please listen responsibly. It was fun, I mean, and. Johnny even when they got to the door and take the money, they were in operation. They were dealing from the house. He was, yeah, your father, my father, Yes, the four girls three days. If you caught that. Johnny and Laurie have different fathers. However, during the following memories, the man her mother is with in their home is Lurie's father. So we would do all of this and then weigh and I don't know, I can't remember how many ounces or I don't know how much was supposed to be in there, put into bags, and then we remember the brown paper lunch bags. We would put him in that, and then we would put them I would or they would go in the second drawer of the dresser. And then if somebody knocked on the door wanted a bag or take the money, give him the bag and put the money in the drawer. Johnny was about ten or eleven years old. Then she recalls how oftentimes the children would get off the bus and walk into their home to find out that their stepfather was in jail, or their mother had just not come home and would be gone for a day or maybe perhaps a few days. It's like if he was in jail or something, then Mama would go wherever she would go, and I would sometimes take the kids with me, but sometimes not going. How old were you girls when you would have days alone at your house? How old so you were? You were probably maybe twelve thirteen, and you had all of us, and we're. All younger than you. Johnny was forced to grow up quickly when her mother would vanish. Chasing after her stepdad, Johnny was responsible for her three younger sisters, feeding them, bathing them, clothing them, getting them to school, and something she may not have known she was also carrying was the emotional weight of being a mother while also needing her own mother. Well, sometimes, like I said, I would take the kids, and sometimes I wouldn't go around and knock on doors to the neighbors and barie bread from this person and cheese from this person so we could have a cheese sandwich for dinner. I didn't know how to do laundry, so I would just fluff our dirty clothes in the dryer so we could re wear them. When Johnny was growing up, the parties in their childhood home were loud, fueled by liquor and drugs, and went on throughout the early morning hours. Young Johnny's bedroom was just off the living room and it had two entry doors, one off the living room and one from the hallway. These parties were full of grown women and grown men, and nobody was monitoring the children except for Johnny. So when it was party mode and there was all kinds of men and people we didn't know in the house smoking dope and drinking and acting crazy, I would get my sisters and bring them in the bed with me and put a dress up against the doors and the ladder. The party got the ladder, I would sing and just you know, trying to make sure that they were safe, because it wasn't a very safe home at all. So growing up feeling unsafe in the home and during those parties, was their sexual abuse in the home. Yes, her memories of being sexually abused began when she was around five years old. And I hopefully, in pray to God, as hard as I tried, I did protect my other sisters from it. So you knew at a young age what evil can do, so you wanted to protect your sisters. Laurie shared more about this with us during her solo interview. When we were kids, Johnny took care of us. She was our caretaker. She protected us, and she protected us from my father, and she kept us safe. And you know, she was the one that made sure we, you know, the best that she could. You know, when there was stuff going on in the house that kids didn't need to be around, she would gather all of us up in her bed and put her dresser up against the door. The air around the table became tense, and not from aggressive tension, but rather as if each women before me was now returned to a place in her mind where she felt unsafe, as if each sister around the table had been slowly clenching their jaws and stiffening their bodies like an unconscious or uncontrollable physical reaction to the emotional distress that their childhood memories was bringing up. I offered to stop and ask them if they want me to take anything out of the interview. Johnny wanted to continue to share her story. It was important that others knew how she grew up. The condition she was raised in and bring people along her journey to better understand how she ended up in a marriage with a man like Larry, and more importantly, how hard she fought to bring Bethany to safety like she desperately needed as a child. Here's Laurie, Johnny did a she did. She did really good job of protecting us, taking care of us. And but I do remember the lettuce I heard you talking about that. I'm trying to make things fun, right, even when it wasn't fun. She's referring to a weekend where the girls's mother was absent and there was no food in the home. Johnny went around knocking on neighbor's doors, and one neighbor handed her a whole head of lettuce. So Johnny walked back home, lettuce clutched under her arms, and made lettuce sandwiches for all four girls that evening. Their neighborhood was full of elderly and retired couples, but one family had young grandchildren about the girls's ages, and they invited them to church. The sisters recalled that as a pivotal time in their lives, when things felt to be getting better and more stable. But then again, Jimmy, Johnny's stepfather, was also in prison at the same time. It was after Jimmy went to prison, because he did finally go to jail because. What he was doing to Jo. It's here that we honor Johnny's requests to remove a section of her interview. Oftentimes, in these interviews, people will begin to talk and take us through their memories, almost in a stream of consciousness narrative, only to at times pause and let it sink in what they've just revealed to the world. They'll not only feel vulnerable, but they'll take into account all those in their lives who they love so deeply. So we respected Johnny's request and removed a few revelations from this chapter. It's a podcast to you listeners, but to the people on the mic behind the mic, this is their life, and everything that they reveal has real consequences for those around them. Did you have to testify against him? I did, in course, so did you? How did it come out? Who did you tell? I told nobody. I put up more of a fight this time, and I was crying because for a very long time, I guess I was probably ten or eleven years old, I did not have a clue. There's Lourie. He wasn't a good person. He actually went to prison, and I haven't seen him since. And I was around nine nine years old then and I'm almost fifty eight, so it's been a long time since I've seen him or talked to him. So it was a broken family when when he was gone, we ended up having to go, you know, of course we had there was four girls having to go and live in government housing in Union City. And when we lived there, Johnny had a baby, and so it was us three girls and Johnny and the baby. You know, there was you know, and mama and so so that was a dysfunctional and you know, mama didn't work and getting food stamps. So it was it was, you know, the typical living off the government family, I guess, you know, the welfare family. Johnny shares that two times in her life has contemplated suicide, once while she was a young teenager battling the scars from her traumatic childhood, and once more about ten years after Bethany went missing. Previously, we shared that Johnny had reached her breaking point with Larry and his mistreatment, and she knew she had to escape with Bethany and she told us how she prayed to God for specific things to happen. Number one let her go to work, and number two let her take Bethany to school, and both happened. I don't know if she's pieced together her stories as a cohesive storyline ever, But on our side, sitting on the other side of the table, we see the patterns in Johnny, and one of the most admirable patterns is her resiliency and her faith. She recalls when she was a young teenager asking God for help during one of her lowest times. I had been praying and telling God and you know, kind of just telling him I'm done, God, I can't do this anymore. You get me out of it, or I'll get me out of it. One either I would die. Were you going to take me out of this? If you ask Johnny, the timing of that prayer, her stepfather going to prison coinciding with the sisters being invited to church was not coincidental. Johnny turns to her sister Laurie. And once was with Larry Markowski. I wanted after Bethany disappeared, you pulled the gun out of my hand. Johnny pauses and recalls how her stepfather treated their mother. So he uh physically abused her in front of you girls. You saw mom. Yeah, he hit her one time she kicked him in the growing. He knocked her completely out. That was when he hit her. Yeah. Hall. She was. Not a loving, caring mother. She was not one to say I love you. If you said I love you, she would say you too, or nothing right. I remember she had a few mental breakdowns. The sister's mother would continue to struggle with her mental health and her journey with substances. As the sisters continued to talk around the table, I decided to let the conversation drive itself. It took many side turns, turn offs, and back roads, but it slowly came back to this. The sisters agreed that their mother did what she could do with what she had, and it was all Johnny Nuke. Growing up, I never thought, oh, poor pitiful Johnny. Look what she's had to deal with her whole entire life. It's not fair. I never thought about that. It never crossed my mind. And then it was kind of like talking about it and getting it out there and seeing people's reactions, and you know, I'm like, oh my god, how did I have to go through all this. On the outside because you didn't know that there's things that could be better. You didn't know of warm loving mother. At just seventeen years old, give birth to her first son, Kyle, and just one year later she would marry her first husband, Tony Barham. Tony adopted Kyle, and the two newly wedded would go on to have their first child together, Emily. Johnny and Tony would later go through hard trials in their marriage, and it's during this time that Johnny would meet Larry. Johnny has never once claimed to be an angel, to be perfect, or to have made great decisions in her past. What she does do is own up to what she's done, and she admits that when she met Larry, she was still legally married to Tony. Tony would find out and that would propel their decision to divorce. Now, at this time, however, Larry tells Johnny that he is going through a divorce as well, and his wife has taken his kids away from him. It's clear that this conversation is tough. It's heavy, it's multilayered, and it's raw. It's invasive. So we take a break from the interview one hour of opening. Such deep wounds can have lasting effects for days. I often tell my interviewees to be prepared to cry or sit in silence afterwards. You know it hits at random and unknown times. This weight of what you've been caring begins to feel real for the first time in years, And all of a sudden, you realize you've been in survival mode for so long, but you forgot how it feels to just set it down. After about ten minutes, we regather around the table grace, comfort, compassion, honesty. That's how I would describe the relationship between Johnny, Laurie, and Tommy, three of the remaining sisters, forever bonded together through tragedy, triumph, love and resiliency SLA. You know, it is hard to believe when you do get a good man in your life and they don't slap you around or cush you or be mean to you. You think something's wrong with them? What's wrong with you? Aren't you know saying that talking about I was thinking about something that you said a while back, Because when Johnny was born, Mama had her and a home front web mothers, and she was going. To give her up for adoption. NNI's mother didn't tell her parents that she was pregnant. This would happen in the early nineteen sixties, and she had signed her rights away to Johnny, but something in her changed. She kept Johnny. Her sisters recalling how that single decision of bravery by their mother protected them throughout the coming years. And so you said that you're glad that she didn't give you because she would have never had you know, she would have been there for us. I'm glad, yeah, us, Yeah, I think I said, you know, everything I've ever had to deal with my whole life was worth it, just to be their sister, to be in their lives. It was all worth it. I would do it again. Just yeah, I can't imagine growing up not knowing them. I think, you know, if. You hadn't have been there, you know, things might have turned out really bad for the rest of us. You know, I mean it was already bad enough, but we might not have survived it. Which out you know, I never you know, it has crossed my mind. I'm not gonna lie that. I have thought in the past, how different would my life had been? Right, But then I wouldn't have my kids, I wouldn't have my sisters. I wouldn't have Bethany. I wouldn't be sitting here right now today. So yeah, it's all worth it to have them and to have my kids, even with Bethany missing. You know, I had eleven years with her, right but I feel like too, it's made me the person that I am, you know, and it all prepared me for what I'm going through right now, for the fight of my life. The stories Johnny share impact her sisters in their own way. She's my sister. It's hard to listen to some of the horrific stuff that she went through. And here we pivot to when Johnny meets Larry. Johnny is unhappy in her marriage with her first husband, Tony. Now recall she had a baby and was married all the age of eighteen, and then soon she would find herself a young mother of two children. So when she meets Larry at the kmart when she was working and he proceeds to pursue her, she makes the decision to allow him to Johnny is first to say that going with Larry when she was still with Tony was wrong and there was no excuse, in fact, not once in all over conversations has Johnny given any excuse for her choices, even when she has had the life that she has had. It was us, the producers asking the questions to try to understand why Johnny walked through the doors which she walked through. I met Larry when I was manager at Kmark in Union City at the shoe department. He was coming in and talking to I think one or two of my female workers. Johnny was staying with her uncle during the workshifts, which scheduled her to be off work after nine pm and back to work by eight am the next morning. Driving home wasn't feasible, and since her uncle had an apartment in Union City, it worked out. One evening after work, Johnny and her girlfriends from work went to a local bar, Maggie Lee's, and Larry shows up, and it's that night that the two become friends. It started coming up to Kymart all the time, I think, before he would go to work and we talk and I just felt so sorry for him. At first. His story was, you know, I don't know where my wife and kids are and I miss him so much. And they she up and took my kids and I don't know where they are. Keep in mind Larry was returning to his then wife, Sheila and his two children, Jenny and Daniel, every night. And it turned into a different story where he knows where they are. They're in Alabama. He filed for divorce, and it was just my heart broke for him that this mean woman over here, for no reason at all, snatched his two kids up. That he would give the world too. And Larry's lie is the emotional manipulation. It was working. So him and I started seeing each other, and. Soon Johnny was staying over at Larry's home instead of her uncle's apartment. When she would go to his home, she would notice the kid's toys were everywhere, rooms were full, it looked like a woman was there, And when questioned about this, Larry would remind Johnny that his wife just up and took their kids away from him, which upon Harry not we couldn't ignore the irony of Larry's lie, unknowingly foreshadowing how Johnny and Bethany would then flee from him in two thousand and one. And Johnny believed him. You know, she didn't have a reason not to. At this point, she felt so bad for him, and he was so charming and charismatic towards her in his pursuit of her. But we were going to town, or we were going somewhere, and we were in his Bronco or whatever, and these two little boy and girl was standing on the side the street, jumping up and down, you know, waving in front of this little tiny, I think, blue house, and I waved it him. I was like, oh my god, they are the cutest kids. He never said a word. Larry looked past the children, never acknowledged them, and kept on driving. They were his kids, Yep. Those kids were Jenny and Daniel Murkowski, excitedly chasing down their daddy's car, only for him to pretend they did not exist in his world. And it's soon after that Johnny would find out the truth that those were his kids and that yes, they were still living there with their mother, Larry's wife, Sheila. I got a phone call one night one day at work and it was a woman and I said, you know, thank you for going hey Martin, She said Johnny, And I said yeah. She said, when Larry leaves your house, house tonight, call his house and see who. Don't give him enough time to get home, Call his house and see who answers his phone and they hung up. So I had my own apartments. Sometimes he would stay. Sometimes he would say he was going to go home. He left. I gave it about fifteen minutes to make sure he didn't come back. I called, and a very sleepy you can tell I just woke her up with Sheila answered the phone. She begged me not to tell Larry. But again, at this point in time in our relationship, he wasn't the monster right that he turned into. And she's like, please don't tell her, Please will tell him. And so the next time, you know, he come up to work, told him. I called his house and a woman answered, Well, then he told me that she just came in her she just came in town for the weekend or for sheever to get to pack up their stuff. Johnny is beginning to see what maybe she just didn't want to see that a man who started off so charming, handsome, charismatic, who was such a good man, whose family was taken from him in the night, could actually be a wolf in sheep's clothing? Could it be that Sheila was his current victim? Was Larry living two lives? A sheep with Johnny and a wolf with Sheila. Next time I'm missing in Hushtown, Sheila and Johnny sit down together for the first time ever to share their stories. And when I worked at Kmart, people in that store saw him physically abuse me. Wouldn't do nothing about it? Can he talking about that? Yeah? He came up to my work. Like I said, I was a manager of her sheet apartment. He came up to my work and he was getting ready to go to work. And I don't know what anyway, Oh I do know what calls it. When he walked up, I was helping a man with some steal toed boots. That's my job. Yeah, anyway, you were doing your job. The guy left, and Larry came up and came up, and he started hollering and cousin and anyway, And he took a pair of those boots by the shoes string and base smacked me right in ahead with them. People saw it. It just I don't know what it was about him that people were scared. He broke my nose. One night he came. I was sleeping in the bed, well, it was on like a cot. My son. We hadn't gotten him a bed yet, and they Jenny was on one side and he was on the other and when we heard him come up, so we were trying to act like we were asleep while he came in and leaned over and grabbed me by the hair of the head and pulled me up out of the bed and like, I said, nothing, I didn't do nothing. He just comes in and it's like he is. I don't know if he's taking something out on me or what. But he hit me in the nose and he broke it and there was blood everywhere. And I told him, I said, he said, he told me. He said, I think I just broke your nose. I said, yeah, I think you did too. And at the time, all I had to drive was his truck. Well, he told me I needed to go to the hospital. He told me to drive his truck. But he said, don't you tell them what happened. And he said, because if you do, when you get back, it'll be worse. And of course the police officer that was up there, well he was actually my nephew's daddy, and I just told him that I got in a fight with a girl and he said, well, what did this other girl look like? And then he said he said he knew he knew I was lying because he knew Larry. But the thing about is they wouldn't have done nothing if I had said something. They wait until they kill you or something like that before they would have done anything. Did he have connections with the local law enforcement as well? No, I mean everybody knew Larry. They all knew him, all of them, the police officers. Everybody knew the Markowski's because they were always in fights, they were always doing something. But the police officer. I had two police officers come to Sidonia. They had me on one side of the house and they had him on the other, and they wanted me to tell them what happened. And I told him, I said, but there's no sense in pressing charges. I said, because he'll be out in the morning and then he'll kill me. And that's that's probably what would have happened. But see, I never did what Johnny did as far as taking up from. Myself Missing in Hushtown. Season two is executive produced in partnership by Fire Eyes Media LLCs Jules Thorpe and Johen Rivera, as well as mom Cast Productions Rachel Holloway and Heather Northcraft. The script is written by Jules Thorpe and edited by Heather Northcraft. Project lead is Rachel Holloway and master Editing and audio production is done by John Rivera Jewels Thorpe is your host Fire Eyes Media mom Haspard, raising voices while raising kids