No one can give you the motivation
Susan met David's father, Sam Orr, in 1959 at Oberlin College in Ohio. They were married in 1962 at her parent's home in New Rochelle, N.Y. and that same year their first child, Katie -- now a Sacramento art dealer -- was born. Sam enlisted in the Army and they were stationed in Nuremberg, Germany, where their second child David was born in 1964. The coupled divorced in 1972 and Susan lived in Reno for 17 years until moving to Sacramento in 1989, the year after David went missing.
Susan, who now works as an art therapist and teacher at CSUS, is an artist herself. She's an accomplished photographer but now works primarily as a painter in oil pastels. Her Sacramento home has a warm, natural, peaceful feel and is full of all manner of original art and photos of her family. Describing her son's early years, she recounts some incidents from an otherwise normal adolescence that seemed to indicate a pattern of unsettling behavior.
"The summer after his junior year in high school, I got a letter saying that he had flunked all of his courses," said Susan. "It turns out that he had been skipping school and smoking dope, partying with his friends. David had presented this whole other experience to me and there was such a big discrepancy between the two since he had presented that he was having such a good experience."
His poor grades would eventually become inconsequential.
"His senior year in high school he seemed pretty depressed," continued Susan. "We tried working with the school to make things better for him and all the teachers and his coach really cared about him. We all got together one afternoon and asked, 'What can we do to help you?' One of the teachers said that he had what it takes to do well, but he had to be motivated and no one can give you the motivation. That seemed to be a serious issue with David, at least as far as school was concerned."
In the spring, David went out to eat with some friends, and what might have been a prankish dine-and-dash episode had a darker resonance for Susan. "They realized at the end of a meal that nobody had any money, so the two other guys said they would go get their money and they left. David was there sitting at the table for as long as he could until it felt to him like nobody was coming back. He got up to leave and the security went after him and he ran, so it became a foot race. He then jumped into the Truckee River and swam for a while. Later he got out, figuring he had won the challenge, and went and sat on the cop car, waiting for the police to come back. What I didn't understand at the time was the slipping of judgment. I was so frightened in the aftermath that he could have gotten shot in the back. Eventually all the charges were dropped because the kids showed up with the money. But at that point he started therapy."
Susan had then just finished graduate school and begun working in the mental health field. "I have worked in psychiatric hospitals, community mental health centers, with different cultures. I have worked with drug and alcohol abusers, group homes, foster kids and also with children's behavioral services. Just about every population there is to work with."
But her son had a curious aversion to his mother's new vocation. "David asked me never to talk to him about the work I did.
But her son had a curious aversion to his mother's new vocation. "David asked me never to talk to him about the work I did.
"I was telling him about an experience I had in school with guided visualization and he asked me what it was like, so I did one with him. I led him visually on a story of going through the woods and he meets an old man who gives him a gift of a box. When I asked him what was in the box he said, 'It's a box with nothing inside.' He was disturbed by that and so I got disturbed with him."
For Susan, that situation was mirrored by another time when she and David were walking on the beach of Washoe Lake near their home. At one point, she says, David looked over at her and asked, "Mom? What do I like?"
"I think I was frightened by what I perceived happening in him." What she 'perceived' was an individual who had significant inner turmoil that he was trying to manage on his own. Susan says, "There was this discomfort with himself. Feeling that there was an impenetrable barrier between himself and other people, and discomfort in emotional situations.
"I think also I was in some denial. I spent a lot of time trying to talk him into looking at life in different ways, while not letting myself acknowledge that he didn't have the capacity or was losing the capacity to do that."