FRAGMENTS OF MY DAUGHTER'S LIFE

By Mervyn Osborne Hagger

Of course everyone has a personal history, but the history of Kimberly Anne is both short and exclusive.

Kimberly Anne lived her life in a series of not necessarily related segments. It was more like a tragic anthology of which she was the publisher, and as publisher only Kimberly Anne knew how and why various episodes had taken place. Her life appears to have been scripted by different authors, as if it was composed of a series of short stories randomly stitched together inside a dust jacket of her own flesh and bones. As soon as Kimberly Anne became capable of taking control of her own life, she began to create her own experiences.

The last of her stories was dramatized for us in two segments which both took place on the tenth day of May in 1994. But these segments are not linked; neither do they make any comprehensive sense. They are fragments from a life that is about to end.

THE FIRST FRAGMENT

According to the time clock records, Mark Guglielmo arrived for work on the tenth of May, 1994 at his usual time of 7 AM at the Holiday Inn opposite Florida's Daytona Beach Speedway race track. He arrived in his 1993 Ford Tempo from the ground floor parking lot outside apartment number ten, which he shared with his wife Kimberly Anne on the first floor of the Marcel Garden Apartments in the adjoining city of South Daytona.

From the time that he arrived until noon, nothing out of the ordinary took place. But as the noon hour arrived and Amy Dawn Dixon began to eat her lunch while on duty at the front desk, Mark strolled into the hotel lobby. At that moment Amy's phone began to ring. She picked it up and announced herself to the caller, and then she turned to Mark. She knew him, but she did not know his last name. Amy asked "Is your last name Guglielmo?" Mark affirmed that it was, and then Amy told him that a female was on the phone who wanted to speak with him. So Amy directed Mark to the phone on the wall opposite her desk and transferred the call to the other phone.

Amy was eating and watching as Mark continued the conversation with the caller. Then she observed that he was getting a little frustrated, because he was kicking the wall with his foot and pacing. She heard him say, "I can't, I can't, not now." Amy got the idea that someone was asking him to do something that he did not feel that he could do at that moment in time because he was at work and could not leave immediately. His work day ended at 3 PM and that day he was supposed to go with his wife to pay the initial deposit on a land contract for a new home, because his mother Camilla had just that day sent through a loan to their bank which would enable the couple to make their down payment. Little did Amy know that when Mark hung up the receiver, that they had both just taken a phone call from hell that would send Mark to prison and involve Amy in a murder case.