Family, friends of murder victims get help from group

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Everyday activities like watching television have not been the same for Mark Langworthy since his father was murdered more than 30 years ago near St. Louis.

"Somebody's stabbed on a TV show, I think about Dad," Langworthy said. "I think about what that had to feel like that he knew he was dying with this cold, steel, sharp blade in his neck."

Langworthy, director of development for the University of Missouri School of Law, was 14 when his father, Joseph Langworthy Jr., was stabbed to death in 1976 in his Pacific, Mo., law office by two brothers in what was considered a contract killing ordered by a rival lawyer. Since then, he has mostly dealt with the grief personally.

"I forever am haunted, with my imagination creating the situation of what actually happened when these people stabbed my father to death and the suffering that he went through," he said. "That is a permanent memory for me."

Langworthy now is hoping to help other people who have had a loved one die in a homicide. He is working with two other survivors of Columbia homicides who have organized a local branch of a national support group.

Stan Turner and his wife, Nancy Whitmarsh, started the Central Missouri Area Wide Chapter of Parents of Murdered Children in August and have held monthly meetings since. Despite the group's name, it is designed for family and friends of anyone killed in a murder or manslaughter, they said.

"We're still in the organizational stage of our chapter," said Whitmarsh, whose first husband, Philip Whitmarsh, was shot to death during a 1981 service station robbery in downtown Columbia. "What we're trying to do is publicize our chapter so the public and our survivors know we're here."

Twenty-four years after Whitmarsh's husband was murdered, homicide struck her family again when Turner's mother, Zelpha Turner, 77, was found beaten and strangled on the living room floor of her home near Prathersville, Mo. in May 2005. The second tragedy eventually led to the formation of the local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children.

Turner said he did not know what to do after his mother's slaying and started attending counseling. "Unless the counselor really knows about being a survivor of a homicide, they can be a grief counselor, but I don't think they really can understand what it's like to have someone taken from you in a brutal way like that," he said.

Turner and Whitmarsh started driving to Kansas City to attend meetings of the chapter there, which helped. "The meetings are open. You can say what you want," Turner said. "There's many times I went up there on a rampage, and nobody told me to shut up because all these people there are survivors, and they know exactly how they felt."

For loved ones of a homicide victim, that means grief combined with funeral preparations and possible probate filings dealing with an estate, plus a police investigation and legal proceedings.

"There just isn't anything in place to help out the unique circumstances of the survivors of a murder," Langworthy said.

Mark Koch, a victim advocate for the Boone County prosecuting attorney's office, said a group like this one is needed in Mid-Missouri, and the prosecutor's office has started referring family members to it. "For many people, the real crisis is not the crime itself but how the criminal justice system does not meet their expectations," Koch said. "Most people don't realize the criminal justice system is designed to protect the rights of the accused."

Langworthy considers his father's murder also to be the cause of the death of his mother, a recovering alcoholic who started drinking afterward and died three years later. One of his goals for the support group is for it to become a lobbying group in Jefferson City for victims' rights legislation.

"There's a lot of collateral damage with murder a lot of times, and it's a story that isn't told very much," Langworthy said. "When the next murder in Columbia happens, maybe they'll come to us, and maybe we can help them deal with their grief."

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Information from: Columbia Daily Tribune, http://www.columbiatribune.com