The Telegraph
This article appeared in The Telegraph on Wednesday the 30th of June, 2004.
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I wanted to tell her how sorry I was
By Judith WoodsThere is a shocking passage in Kelly Connor’s autobiography, in which a woman is telling a therapy group about the trauma of being mown down by a car as she stood on a pedestrian crossing. Connor, who is also a member of the group, is incensed and rounds on her in fury.
“You selfish bitch!” she screams. “Don’t you realise that your presence on that crossing has probably destroyed that man [the driver of the car]! You’re the one who should be begging for forgiveness, you stupid cow!”
It is an unflinching, unflattering account, from which Connor emerges badly. But, despite her apparent rage, she insists her outburst was motivated by frustration, rather than a reflection of genuine anger at the woman.
“I wanted to convey to her the fact that the driver had sustained an injury, too,” she says. “I wanted them all to realise that, in these cases, there’s more than one person who needs help and support and understanding.”
Manchester-born Connor’s new book is called To Cause a Death. It tells the story of how, at the age of 17, she knocked down and killed an elderly woman on a pedestrian crossing near Perth in Australia. She escaped conviction, but the effect on her life could not have been more profound had she been imprisoned.
Unable to come to terms with what she had done, Connor, now 50, grew estranged from family and friends, drifting from job to job and place to place.
“I felt a desperate need to express the immense guilt and shame I felt, but no one wanted to listen,” she says. “I was expected to put it behind me, but I felt I had no right to be happy, no right even to be alive, because of what I had done.”
As she became increasingly detached from the world around her, Connor was voluntarily admitted into psychiatric care and tried to commit suicide by taking a drug overdose, in a distorted attempt to expiate her crime.
“I reached the point where it seemed to me that the only person I could speak to was the woman I killed. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was and if giving up my life was what it took to redeem the situation, then that was what I would do.”
Connor survived and, after her eventual discharge from hospital, went on to marry, at the age of 22. But when her husband’s parents died in quick succession, leaving the couple to bring up his three grief-stricken, much younger siblings, the marriage began to disintegrate.
Connor, by now pregnant, and still battling with her own inner demons, didn’t have the strength to keep the relationship together, and it fell apart.
But, left to bring up her daughter, Meegan, alone, she gradually discovered that the fulfilment of motherhood was powerful enough to start supplanting the self-loathing she had carried for so long. Nevertheless, Meegan was 14 years old before Connor confessed the terrible secret that had haunted her life.
“Meegan said she had always known there was something dreadful, something unspoken at the heart of the family,” she says. “Her relief that finally it was out, and in some ways, her acceptance of it, made it easier for me to accept myself more and to reach the point where I could write this book.”
Connor is a small, bird-like woman, softly spoken, yet no less emphatic for that. She admits she is keenly aware that victims of road accidents and their families may be dismayed by To Cause a Death.
She is at pains not to describe herself as a victim, but she clearly feels that an injustice has been done. During the 30-year period since her accident, she calculates that a further 51,709 British pedestrians have died in road accidents.
“Thousands of drivers have experienced the trauma of knowing they were directly involved in the death of another human being. Many will be completely innocent of legal or criminal liability, yet they will be left with an indelible mark on their psyche,” she says.
“I didn’t want sympathy, I just wanted the chance to talk about the burning shame, the sorrow I felt. But I was met with a wall of silence. If I’d suffered a physical injury, the standard of medical care would have been the same, whether I was the victim or the perpetrator. But the injury to my soul was left untreated.”
In truth, what makes Connor’s book so fascinating is the “There but for the grace of God” factor. Can there be many drivers who haven’t had a narrow escape from Connor’s fate? Who haven’t been left, shaken, head buzzing with “what ifs” when a parent pulls back a running child from the edge of a pavement, or a slow pedestrian scrambles to safety?
Yet it is difficult to believe that those thousands of drivers who do cause road deaths are all so traumatised that their worlds are in danger of falling apart.
Perhaps Connor was simply unfortunate and not psychologically robust enough to deal with events. Perhaps, at some level, she was already predisposed to a breakdown. She vigorously denies this was the case. “I wasn’t religious, and if I’d been asked to speculate on how I might respond to this situation, I would have said: `What would be the point of upsetting myself over the death of somebody I didn’t know?’,” she says.
“But the fact is that it did matter, that a total stranger was dead. It mattered enormously and it took me a long time to realise why: it’s because life is sacred. All lives are sacred.”
Connor lives in Britain now, but her parents emigrated to Australia when she was 11, and the family lived first in Sydney, then Perth. She was christened Brenda, but changed her name to Kelly some years after the accident, in an attempt to escape from her past.
On the day she killed Margaret Healy, she had borrowed her father’s car to drive to the Perth General Post Office where she worked as a telephonist. The road was clear as she turned her head to adjust the rear-view mirror. When she glanced back, a woman was walking across the pedestrian crossing in front of her.
“Afterwards, people would try to comfort me by saying the woman was old and had had a good life, and I should feel no guilt,” she says. “But when Margaret Healy saw me bearing down on her, she ran for her life. She wanted to live.”
Connor describes, in detail, the long, terrible moments that followed. Afterwards, she told police that she had probably been doing around 45 mph in a 35 mph zone. “It was a split second between seeing her and feeling the impact and then, when the car stopped, there was no sign of her,” she says.
“She just wasn’t there and I would probably have convinced myself it hadn’t happened and would have driven away, had not a taxi driver seen it and told me he was radioing for an ambulance.”
There was no blood on the woman, and Connor recalls going through the motions of placing a blanket over her, as though in a dream. “I felt a huge sense of shock, coupled with a vague realisation that nothing was ever going to be the same again.”
Later, the police broke the news that the woman was dead. When Connor confessed she had been speeding, the officer taking her statement gently guided her to claim that she had been doing 35 miles an hour. Possibly he saw no reason why two lives should be destroyed by the accident.
Looking back, Connor suspects that if she’d stood up in court and answered for her deeds, she might have assuaged her guilt sooner. It is, perhaps, a reflection of the depth of her suffering that she gives the impression a manslaughter charge would have been preferable to her self-imposed life sentence of misery.
Even when Margaret Healy’s brother came to her home, telling her the dead woman’s family bore her no ill will, and urging her not to dwell on the accident, Connor felt only temporary relief.
Given the implicit sympathy shown to her by so many, it seems extraordinary that Connor could not forgive herself. After all, she was little more than a child when the accident happened and her actions had been careless, rather than evil.
Yet she continued to punish herself until, by her mid-thirties, she at last felt able to confide in close friends. She found herself drawn both to conventional Christianity and to the spiritual teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, from which she derived comfort and inspiration.
“I started to accept myself more and feel I was a valuable person, and could say that the accident was an intrinsic part of my life and had helped make me who I was. If I could have turned the clock back in order to save Margaret Healy’s life, I would have, but not to save mine.”
Connor currently lives in Stroud and works in special needs education, as does her daughter. In To Cause A Death, there is a dedication: “For my daughter Meegan, who taught me how to embrace life: and for Margaret Healy, who taught me how to embrace death.”
She is apprehensive about the reaction to her book, but other people’s opprobrium no longer holds any fears. After 33 years, she has made peace with herself and displays a quiet certainty that the time has come to speak out.
“Margaret Healy has accompanied me through my life, although I’ve never consciously had a conversation with her. I’ve been in a relationship with her for the past 33 years. I don’t see her, but I feel her very close.”
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