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FORGIVING TROY

THE ART-O-BIOGRAPHY OF THOM BIERDZ

P R E F A C E

O

n July 14, 1989, my youngest brother beat our mother to death with a baseball bat.

This book is a record in words and images of my need to understand why she was killed. The search was debilitating and caused me to doubt my own sanity.  It was also exhilarating and, I believe, miraculous.

Murder, madness, and suicide are my family's legacy to me, but they also taught me love, faith, and forgiveness.

Me, Mom, and Troy (a month before Troy killed Mom.)

All events in this book are true.

Some names have been changed to protect certain identities.

...FROM: C H A P T E R 3

ON THE RUN

JULY 16 TO JULY 18, 1989.

T

roy was still on the loose the next morning. The police called and urged me to leave my house immediately.  My mother's car was spotted last night on the highway, speeding out of Kenosha, after her murder. The driver had stopped, picked up a hitchhiker, then took off again, dumping the contents of Mom's purse out the window.

My mother's credit card was traced to a Kmart near Chicago, where Troy brought spray-paint, probably to disguise our mother's car. We would later learn that Troy and the hitchhiker also switched license plates with another car in the store parking lot.

A couple of hours further south in Illinois, Troy stopped at a phone booth, and called 911. He said, "This is Thom Bierdz, the soap opera star, and I just killed my mother and raped my little brother Troy."

Troy's threats and violence had been escalating for years, and I never took any of them seriously - but this manipulative behavior was something I had never before seen from him. His attempt to frame me proved he was determined to hurt me, in any way possible. When my sister told me this, I was stunned by Troy's audacity thinking that people would believe him.

Growing up, I rarely touched Troy. I never touched him in a sexual way, and I wondered if his charge might reveal his own repressed homosexual feelings - of which I had absolutely no evidence.

Rod and I took cover at several of my friends' homes, including that of Jeanne Cooper, star of The Young and the Restless. She played Katherine Chancellor, the widow of my character's father. Jeanne was maternal to me both onscreen and off, and she had met Troy a couple of times, when I had taken him to the CBS set. She couldn't believe he killed Mom, who many times had relaxed between scenes in Jeanne's dressing room with me.

I didn't want to endanger any of our friends by staying in one place too long, so Rod and I kept moving. Our next stop was the home of actor Jim J. Bullock, who played Monroe on Too Close for Comfort, where my best friend, Bruce Dent, also an actor and comedian, was renting a room.

From there, I called Hope, anxious for news of Troy's whereabouts.  She did have news, but not the kind I wanted.  My head began to ache as she told me the murder was on the front page of the Kenosha News.  This wasn't the type of fame I wanted, but it might have been just the notoriety that Troy craved.

As Hope read the news story to me, I focused on her surprisingly calm voice instead of the words.  Hope had always seemed fragile, and although she stood two inches higher than our five-foot-tall mother, she lacked Mom's fiery spirit.  My sister's small, unblemished face was as pretty as a porcelain doll's, but not a doll that would be the center of attention. Her eyes were hazel-brown instead of deep green, like our brother Gregg's. Her hair was also brown, and usually cut at her neck. Her straight bangs occasionally touched her faint eyebrows. Her mouth was small, and, like Mom, she never wore lipstick, or any make-up. There was nothing showy about her clothes. Though Hope was a natural beauty, nothing about her face was unusual, except how pink her cheeks became when she laughed - it was as if she was embarrassed to laugh - like she didn't have the right. As the oldest child and the only girl, my sister was raised not to have fun, but to be polite, to care for others, and never to cause any problems.  Just like the old-fashioned doll she resembled, Hope was content to exist on a shelf and watch life from a safe distance.

But how does a doll not crack into pieces when the whole shelf crashes to the floor? And when someone like Hope cracked into pieces, how was I supposed to put her back together?

KENOSHA NEWS:

Phyllis Bierdz, 49, was found dead in her home Saturday, apparently bludgeoned in the head by what is believed to be a blunt instrument...

Police are looking for Bierdz's youngest son, Troy, 19, for questioning. Neighbors saw him with his mother at the home Friday evening.

Bierdz's two other sons, Thom, 27, and Gregg, 25, live in California...

Bierdz's 1980 two-door tan Buick Regal is missing and a nationwide alert has been put out for the car...

[Phyllis] Bierdz had worked third shift at The Public Safety Building. She worked in the Joint Services records department, which serves the Police and Sheriff's departments...

Raymond Gramm, director of Joint Services, said she was "an excellent worker. Everybody liked her. She was a genuinely nice person."

Kenosha Police Lt. Robert F. Reschke said Phyllis Bierdz "was very bubbly. You would never know she had problems. She always put on a happy face. All this trouble the kid gave her, she always stood by him."

My sister urged my boyfriend Rod and I into a motel for the night. We figured Troy might be smart enough to find us at a place near my home, so we drove a few miles east, on Sunset Boulevard, to find a less track-able hideaway.

In the humid hotel room, Rod pulled the curtains closed, and sat in the dark, playing with Abu. Rod offered to embrace me, as it was obvious, that in those minutes, I craved warmth. But I didn't crave his warmth. I craved my mother's warmth. I took a bath instead and submerged myself in hot water. Keeping the scalding water dripping steadily intensified the heat in my artificial womb.

I heard a noise outside the room and froze in fear. A child giggled, then I heard her running down the hall, laughing loudly. I relaxed.

Rod sat next to the tub.

We talked about death.

Then we talked about siblings, as Rod did not get along with any of his.

Then we talked about mothers.

Rod said, "The mother is the glue that holds the family together. If my mom doesn't make us get together, we don't. When the glue is removed, the family falls completely apart."

I wondered if that were true.

I wondered about my charismatic, extroverted brother Gregg, who now had his own apartment in Los Angeles, and shy, old-fashioned Hope - and our forecast as siblings. It's not like we would have much in common now that our mother wasn't pulling us together for holidays. Would we even make the effort to see each other, or talk? And would I even care if we became estranged?

FROM: C H A P T E R 5

…As a small boy, I needed an animal confidant because I did not trust people. I thought everyone was a robot, and, that they were out to kill me. I was unsure about why they wanted to kill me, but I reasoned that if I were polite and perfect and caused them no trouble, they might let me live.  I remained on my best behavior, reserved, and on guard, never letting them get too close.

"PARANOID IN BLUE AND RED"

FROM: C H A P T E R 9

TROY REACHES PUBERTY

1983 TO 1985.

A

fter arriving in Hollywood, I found a very cheap apartment in the Silverlake area. Coming from Wisconsin, I had never seen a chain-link fence encircling a reservoir of water. The small excuse for a "lake" looked imprisoned and unattractive to me, but the Californians loved it so much they built million dollar homes around it.

I worked as a busboy in a restaurant. I was "discovered"at this job and introduced to Tim Wood, Rob Lowe's manager. Tim took me on as a client, arranged my headshots and acting classes, and changed my name from "TJ Bierdz" or "Tom Bierdz Jr." to "Thom Bierdz." Thanks to his help, I landed my first commercial audition and got the part. I was a principle in a Dr. Pepper spot that was filmed across from Paramount Studios at Raliegh Studios. A few other small roles came my way over the next year, but I still had to wait tables until my "big break."

Back in Wisconsin, Mom was still working two jobs and barely making ends meet. By 1984, my 23-year-old sister Hope, had finally moved out and into an apartment by Parkside College. She was a devoted student studying business administration, and she appreciated our mother's financial help for tuition. I, too, welcomed the small checks our mother sent for my acting classes. Gregg, 20, was living in upstate Wisconsin at The University of Eau Claire. I imagine my carefree blond brother was not only living, but "living it up." The money our mother sent to Gregg for tuition went for pizza and beer. And Troy was always expensive to raise.

Emotionally expensive.

The onset of puberty, and new raging hormones, had turned Mom's clingy little boy into someone withdrawn, awkward, offbeat, and secretly aggressive, secretly paranoid, and of course, secretly going to Hell for masturbating.

FROM TROY'S DIARY:

THY SHALL NOT COVENITE THY NEIGHBORS WIFE.

I have had evil thoughts and have masterbated to these thought, and thoughts of these womans: woman I have seen on the streets, Vanessa (classmate), CANDY (ex-girlfriend), Lonie Anderson (TV STAR), Eva Torrez, posters of woman...Tracy Heison, Belinda Carliel, Just about every woman I saw.

14-year-old Troy didn't socialize with the girls - or boys - at Lincoln Junior High School, and some, for good reason - as racial tensions divided the whites and blacks into gangs. Longhaired Troy avoided gangs of any sort, and hid his insecurity and fear of groups behind a rough exterior: a scowling face to mask his good looks, and an intimidating walk overcompensating for his thin body type.

He kept to himself and engaged friends one at a time. One assumed he was spacing out in a corner of the back row as he stared at insects on the floor for minutes at a time as though trying to extract some communication from the bug itself. And one might have assumed Troy squashed the bugs slowly, methodically, because he wasn't satisfied with the communication. But he had another agenda.

As the class spied on my brother pulling the legs off insects, he was spying on the class, searching specifically for a reaction of mild indifference. The faces that registered disgust and squeamishness, he kept at a distance. These kids would not make good followers. They wouldn't understand him. They'd question him. Troy didn't want to be questioned.

The loud rebels who applauded and grinned at Troy's insect-squashing were useless to him as well. These dissidents could look him in the eye. And though their stares were supportive, they might later turn against him. Anybody who could lock eyes with him contained some measure of guts. He didn't want to deal with anybody else's guts.

Only the weak indifferent smirkers were those who this quiet anarchist allowed closer, one at a time. Maybe this was because Troy needed just one follower at a time. Or maybe it was because exposing himself was an excruciating ordeal, and there was only one ordeal more excruciating - that of being completely alone.

When he was alone, he had to deal with his destructive fantasies. He engaged them half the time, and resisted them as much.

So, my brother, the quiet bug-crusher, remained out of bounds to everyone but the brain-dead. Possibly, if he had been secure enough to allow into his space someone with a working mind, he could've been steered out of his need to crush. I do not know. For his own reasons, Troy felt separated. He was a loner.

FROM TROY'S DIARY:

I pulled a knife on Richard Heckel - I was prejudist (I spray painted KKK on back of checkers) I have made weaponds, such as nunchucks, tenfas, I have carried knifes intending to do harm to myself as well as others. I have made bats and pounded nails threw them, intending to do harm to others in gangfights. Evil thoughts of Joining cults!

Shortly before Troy turned 15, he was informed he would not be allowed on the wrestling team, because he had been suspended from school too many times. Retaliating, he kicked in several of the school's glass doors.

Later that night, he stole our mother's Buick, and picked up Kevin Patterson, a lanky redheaded burnout, and Troy's current follower of choice. They circled the high school, pumping the accelerator, spinning, making as big of a scene as possible.

Phone in her hand, our mother paced in her kitchen, wondering what to do. Troy had never taken the car before. She didn't even know he could drive. For his safety, she called the police department.

Troy returned forty-five minutes later, before the police arrived. Mom didn't file charges.

Since Troy's first suspension six months earlier, she had taken him to a series of counselors. However, this therapy didn't seem to be reducing his aggression.

With Gregg away at college, and our father out of the picture, our mother thought Troy needed a stabilizing, masculine presence in his life. Partly for his benefit, she began dating Chip Nagel, an easygoing guy with corny jokes who liked kids. Chip was also an unemployed, divorced man, who loved spending his days golfing, and afternoons in taverns.

When Mom wasn't needling Chip to get a job, she enjoyed sunny Sundays with him on the putting green. For the first time since her divorce, a decade before, she was enjoying chemistry with a man. She was allowing herself to fall in love. But she didn't tell Chip that. She wouldn't tell him until she knew for certain that he would be a good influence on Troy.

Because of the damage Troy caused to the school's doors, the education board filed charges for criminal damage and truancy. Against our mother's wishes, Troy was sentenced to live for nine months at Shelter Care, a supervised citywide organization for the placement of troubled teens.

On June 1, Troy kicked a resident of Shelter Care in the stomach during an argument over the remote control. Shelter Care forced him out, for good.

The Department of Health and Social Services pressed my mother to ask my father to take Troy because "Troy has found it difficult to accept directions and limitations from his mother and has attempted to put himself in equal states with her."

Succumbing to the pressure, my mother tried to convince my father to take Troy. Recently remarried with a house full of stepchildren in a neighboring city, our father didn't want to rock the boat by having delinquent Troy live with him, but he took him for a few weeks, then Troy was returned, because Dad didn't want to deal with Troy's anger.

Before Troy was born, Dad had told Mom, when they were in Chicago, and just had Hope and me - when she was strict in disciplining us toddlers - that if she didn't take his more laid-back advice on parenting at that time, he wasn't going to come to her rescue later. And he didn't.

The relief of having her miracle baby back home was apparent in her smile and by the Neil Diamond songs she hummed. Making up for lost time, she bought Troy an electric guitar the minute he asked for one, and she treated herself to earplugs.

Mom bought a moped to ride to work to save gas money, and Troy wanted it, too. She declared he could ride it only with her permission. Instead, he took it whenever he wished.

Though she was nine inches shorter than he, she once tried unsuccessfully to wrestle the bike out of his grasp. When Chip intervened, Troy unleashed all his rage onto him, beating his face until it was bloody. Mom jumped on Troy's back, attempting to pull him off of Chip. She was little more than an annoyance to the teen volcano. Furious about what Troy did to Chip, she called the police to teach Troy a lesson.

Troy admitted to a petition charging him with two counts of battery.

But the authorities did not have a place to house him, or rehabilitate him. They merely threatened him with "supervision" for one year, and suggested our mother call in to authorities regularly. Troy had nowhere to go but Mom's house.

Mom told Hope later that what bothered her most, was, that Troy, did not, appear remorseful.

Troy's verbal abuse of Mom intensified. Mom did not tell me. She didn't want to worry me. She figured I had enough to worry about, being in Hollywood and going on auditions.

Her only defense against Troy's profanity was her look of disapproval. Seeing her haunted eyes lowered broke my heart and usually made me alter my behavior according to her wishes. Even as an adult, I was affected by the look when she visited my Hollywood apartment. It was this look that stopped me from putting my shoe-clad feet up on my own beanbag chairs.

This look, however, only worked on a conscience capable of guilt. Maybe Troy built up immunity to that look, or, maybe, he just did not have a conscience, as my father was beginning to suspect.

C H A P T E R 11

THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS

1986.

I

was now Phillip Chancellor III on The Young and the Restless. Though I was 24, I had a lot in common with my 17-year-old character. Phillip was sensitive and brooding, having been ignored by his mother and put in boarding school all his life. I pictured my father in these "Why did you desert me?" emotional scenes. Phillip was fought over by the maternal characters of Katharine Chancellor and Jill Abbott, as portrayed by Jeanne Cooper and Jess Walton, both experienced professionals who were extremely supportive to this rookie.

Walking into the CBS Artist's Entrance, I would be handed a pass to pin onto my clothes. After the guard cleared me, I walked the long, white hallway, awestruck at the poster-sized photos of all the shows that were filmed in this studio: Let's Make A Deal, I Love Lucy, The Jeffersons, Sonny and Cher, The Carol Burnett Show, The Price Is Right, Capitol, and The Young and the Restless.

At the end of the long corridor was a dark staircase where I would catch my breath, and try to calm my nerves, then stride up a flight of stairs to the stages. I would have loved shots of Peppermint Schnapps from my bartending days to relax me, but I knew drinking alcohol would get me in trouble if someone smelled it.

My character, Phillip, did not have the will power to resist alcohol. Philip sneaked swigs of booze, became an alcoholic, and would eventually die from driving drunk when his shiny red Corvette plunged over a cliff.

The idea of thirty people required to watch each scene - make-up, hair, props, wardrobe, lighting, cameras, sound, grips, etc. - challenged my introvert nature, but I felt "bigger" and "better" each day. My love interest on the show, Lauralee Bell, the producers' daughter, was only 16-years-old. Like me, she was considered

A collage of magazine photos, with co-stars Tricia Cast,

Lauralee Bell, and Jeanne Cooper.

"green" as an actor, and there was much jealousy toward her from other actors on the show, whose roles were being minimized to allow her storyline, and, consequently, mine, to flourish. I prefer to think it was others' jealousy that started the rumor that I was hired because my acting was so bad that it made Lauralee Bell's acting look better.

Lauralee and I were similar although it might not have appeared so. We were both inexperienced, and both from Wisconsin, however, her family had an estate on picturesque Lake Geneva. I was a working class, closeted, gay guy in his 20's, while she was a naïve, sheltered, teenage, Hollywood heiress. Perhaps we were both in our adolescence, as I was just starting to have fun, since my childhood had been so serious. I made her laugh, especially on the road as we did personal appearances. On the way to our hotel rooms, I would knock on strangers' doors, then race away before they answered. She had never before had a friend who made her sprint on high-heels through hallways.

She developed a crush on me. There was a part of me that was very attracted to her. But, unlike some of the other closeted actors, I was not about to use her as an experiment, or, for publicity. Besides, I was naturally drawn to men, and I wanted a boyfriend.

I secretly fell in love with Danny Ellis, the florist on the show, who asked me out by leaving an orchid, with his phone number attached, in my dressing room. Danny had the face of a young Paul Newman.

I understood what my father meant about my mother being smothering because Danny would allow me no space at all. He gave me an ultimatum in the first few months that we were together: if the house for which I was shopping wasn't in both our names, he was history. Against my better judgment, I consented to his pressure. When I fell out of love with Danny six months later, and begged him to sign the house back over to me, he resisted, and became very vengeful. Our secret relationship was discovered when I showed up at work one day with a black eye, and Danny was boasting about giving it to me.

FROM C H A P T E R 2 1

...TRUE CRIME MAGAZINE:

Wisconsin law would require Judge Schroeder to sentence Bierdz to life imprisonment, which ordinarily would mean he must serve 13 years and 9 months before becoming eligible for parole. But under a new statute that went into effect earlier in the year, a judge could require a convicted murderer to serve more time before reaching parole eligibility, in effect making his jail time before parole long enough to keep him behind bars for the rest of his life.

On November 16, 1989, Judge Schroeder followed the letter of the law. He sentenced Bierdz to life in prison, adding the provision that he not become eligible even for parole for fifty years. ‘If he is willing to kill his mother, it seems a far easier thing to kill a brother or a cousin or a stranger,' he said.

Troy was the first person to be sentenced under Wisconsin's new "Life Meaning Life" statute, and he would not be eligible for parole until he was 69-years-old.  Unless Troy escaped, he would probably die in prison.  He was already dead to me as a brother and as a human being. 

I was sure that our mother's soul lived on without a body - and that Troy's body lived on without a soul.

Little did I know that in about four years, in a seemingly miraculous chain of events, I would be brought face to face with Mom's "soulless" killer, the person who had threatened many times to rip out my heart in six seconds so he could show it to me before I died.

When that day arrived, Troy would find a new way to rip out my heart...

The second half of the book is not about violence or abuse – but about schizophrenia, love, forgiveness, and transformation.

FORGIVING TROY has 23 color paintings between 51 chapters because a picture is worth a thousand words.

SOAP OPERA DIGEST says:

FAMILY MATTERS

A different kind of psychic message from a mom figures prominently in Thom Bierdz's inspirational memoir Forgiving Troy.  I love that this book is making the rounds just as the long-dead character Thom played on YOUNG AND RESTLESS, Phillip Chancellor III, is suddenly part of a new plot.  Thom, now a highly respected painter, has survived the unfathomable: His mentally ill brother, Troy, beat their mother to death with a baseball bat.  Then another Bierdz brother killed himself.  "Murder, madness and suicide are my family's legacy to me, but they also taught me love, faith and forgiveness," Thom writes in his preface.  This is fascinating, profoundly moving stuff, and it all takes a metaphysical turn when Thom gets a message from his dead mom through a psychic - a message that ultimately allows him to face his killer brother in jail and begin the process of healing.  You can buy the book via Thom's Web site (www.thombierdz.com).  It is so worth your while.