Guest blogger: Angela Dove, author of No Room for Doubt: A True Story of the Reverberations of Murder (Berkley/Penguin 2009).
Before Jacquelyn MacDonald’s daughter was killed, she led a fairly normal life. She was a retired nurse, a grandmother, a small British woman with an even smaller voice. But when her older daughter, Debi Whitlock, was killed in a brutal and baffling murder in 1988, Jacque says, “I became the mouth that learned to roar.”
Debi Whitlock was killed in her Modesto, California home with a knife from the kitchen while her 3-year-old daughter slept undisturbed only a few feet away. There was no sign of forced entry, no sign of struggle, and the investigation soon stalled. But Jacque needed answers. She launched a one-woman crusade to find Debi’s killer—and succeeded. Nine years after the murder, Jacque’s efforts resulted in the capture and conviction of her daughter’s killer. Meanwhile, she started helping other survivors through her local television and radio show, “The Victim’s Voice,” which is now broadcast to millions of homes throughout California’s Central Valley. In 2007 Jacque received the National Crime Victims’ Service Award, and next month she’ll be recognized by Arnold Schwarzenegger with the California Governor’s Award for Advocacy.
I was honored when Jacque asked me to write her story, but I had some reservations. Debi Whitlock had been married to my father when she was murdered. She was my stepmother and the mom of my younger half-sister, and I was the last person to see her alive.
Now an award-winning columnist in NC, I began researching the homicide investigation and how Jacque had supplemented those efforts. It was during that process that I discovered the many solid reasons my father had been the top suspect to his wife’s murder. Dad had died in 2001, but for years before his untimely end I had sensed his anger and sadness. And secrecy. Now I had the missing pieces of the puzzle: when Jacque MacDonald, the avenging mother and hero of these events, finally found justice for her daughter, she had also cleared my father’s name.
My book, No Room for Doubt: A True Story of the Reverberations of Murder, is a daughter’s account of how one act of violence shattered lives, made heroes, and continues to affect change in the world.
No Room for Doubt is available at bookstores nationwide and on Amazon:
For more information, visit www.AngelaDove.com
Angela Dove
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