Susan Clements

[marydell]

15 years ago today, my friend Susan Clements died in a campus shooting at IU, Bloomington Indiana. There's not a lot of info about her on the web--it happened back when you had to look in a newspaper to get any information about that kind of thing. But plenty of us remember her.

Susan came from a great family, who lived on the other end of my street when we were growing up. She and her fraternal twin sister N. were good at everything. They did their homework every day and practiced for their music lessons. Her older sister had a very dry sense of humor and was always cracking wise, and her younger sister I mainly remember from those days as sweet, and a bit of a tomboy. She had brothers too, but they were older and so they hung around with their own friends--maybe with my own older brothers, I don't remember.

Sus and N. went to a different school than me, but one summer we were all at school together. I was taking Math because I was terrible at it, and figured summer school would give me a better chance of passing, because the classes were designed for people who'd already flunked. They were taking extra classes to get ahead on their college prep credits. And their dad was teaching, so he drove every day and I rode along. I rarely had fun at school but that was a fun summer. Sus and N. were the valedictorian and salutatorian of their high school class...I don't remember which was which but it was the subject of friendly rivalry between them.

They went to Notre Dame and I went to IU, but I worked at ND during the summers and N. and I would hang out at lunch, because she was working there too. Sus worked at Martin's grocery during the summers so I would see her and say hi to her there. Both Susan and N. were the kind of friends where you could go a couple of years without running into each other, and then pick up right where you left off.

After college we all went to grad school - N. went to a Chicago school for a PhD in a math-related discipline and Susan came to IU for a PhD in English. I was pursuing an English Lit PhD as well, but I was taking out student loans while she had some sort of fellowship. She was probably the best student in our class of 75 people--certainly, she was one of the top 10. But she was never stuck-up about it--she was literally one of the sweetest, most down-to-earth people I've ever known, at the same time as being brilliantly gifted. We weren't in most of the same classes and didn't live near each other--I'd been living off-campus near downtown since my junior year, while she was in the graduate student dorm on the other end of campus. I would hang out up there, though, and once a week we would get together at a bar called Bear's Place for cheesecake and gossip. She was developing a specialty in women's studies and wrote a terrific paper on Virginia Woolf; I remember it because one of her classmates read it at her memorial.

Susan had a steady boyfriend for about 4 years, but he wasn't nice to her and didn't make her happy. I didn't know anything more specific than that. At one point she had broken up with him, but he hassled her until she changed her mind and took him back. After a year or so at IU--he was in school in California--she broke it off again, hoping that he would move on. Around thanksgiving of 1991, he showed up for a surprise visit, staying for a few days, accompanying her to a class or two, and introducing himself to her professors as her boyfriend. She didn't push back because she didn't want to make him angry, and she still cared about him and wanted to let him down as easy as possible. When he went back to California she figured he'd gotten the message and it would be ok from then on.

She started dating Steven Molen in the spring semester, I think -- I got to know him then, anyway. He was a year or two younger than her, cute, super nice, and also gifted. A short story of his appeared in a Norton book that year called Flash Fiction--it was a good story, published in an important collection, back when the short-short was a new trend. I was envious but proud to have a real published author among my friends. And Susan's friends were excited that she had found a boyfriend who seemed right for her.

Her ex, (whose name I remember, but don't generally invoke) continued to call and hassle her, however. One day I dropped by her room in the dorm to find her and Steven very upset, because she had just gotten a phone call from her ex. Susan had told him that it was really over, that she had a new boyfriend. And he had told her that he was going to kill her. He had gone on about it, telling her never to get married, never to have children, because she was going to die.

Susan wanted to think that he was just trying to upset her, and that he didn't mean it, but deep down she knew better, and she told her family, and she told the police. Nobody knew what to do. There was no witness to what he had said, and stalking wasn't illegal at the time. He kept calling her, but he didn't repeat his threats; he was pleasant and acted like nothing had happened. She worried, but she didn't talk about it; she cut her hair short so she would be harder to recognize, but she continued on with her life.

Unfortunately, he did mean it. He drove from California to Indiana and on April 23, 1992 he shot Susan, and Steven, and eventually himself.
After that it was exactly what you would expect; all of her classmates and professors got together in the faculty lounge and cried for hours, and tried to think of ways this could have been prevented. But there's really no way to prevent someone from killing you, if they're willing to die in the process. Indiana did pass a stalking law the next year, though; one of the first states to do so, as I recall.

I wish memories faded consistently. I don't remember most of the hundreds of conversations Susan and I had over the years, just the ones when we talked about him. I remember that she was a wonderful person, and that everyone felt that way about her, but the specifics get fuzzy as the years go by. She didn't do anything crazy or stupid or outrageous, to make herself the subject of the kind of funny stories that stay fresh in everyone's minds forever. And since she was the helpful girl who'd say "give me the camera, I'll take pictures," at a party, I have a couple of dozen pictures taken by her, but only three of her.

This is one of them, taken about three months before she died. It was at a party for me and my friend Angie, who sort of share a birthday. Susan was 23 years old here; she was in her second year of graduate studies and was starting to make a name for herself in the department. Professors were getting interested in her as a scholar, not just as another face in the crowd. Looking at her you would never know the strain she was under, and that's how she wanted it...she strove to be happy, and largely succeeded.