The New Yorker:

Decades after her mother was killed, Regina Alexander reached out to the son of the people who did it.

By Ryan Katz

Regina Alexander does not remember anyone telling her how her mother died; she has always known when and where it happened, and who did it. For years, though, a lot of the details remained mysterious to her. They weren’t the sort of details that everyone would want to have, but she wanted them, at least some of the time. “I don’t even know what the truth is,” she told me, during one of our first conversations. “That’s part of why it’s so hard to let go.”

Regina’s mother was born Elizabeth Steffens, in 1945, in Texas. Elizabeth’s father worked as a carpenter, electrician, and plumber, and her mother stayed home, raising the couple’s five children. The family moved to Levelland, a small town outside Lubbock, when Elizabeth was two. As she got older, she became known as the fun one in the family. People told her that she looked like Elizabeth Taylor. (Later, Regina would watch Elizabeth Taylor movies and pretend that it was her mother onscreen.) A relative once saw her without makeup and joked, “You look just like the rest of us,” to which Elizabeth quipped, “When I die, be sure I have on eyeshadow.” Her family says that they never saw her without makeup again. She got married, for the first time, when she was seventeen, to a man from New York. They had a daughter, Tonette, and divorced soon afterward. She married again, but that one didn’t last either. Then a co-worker introduced Elizabeth to her son, Van Perryman, who drove a taxi. Elizabeth and Van married and had a son, Bobby, in 1969, and then Regina, in July, 1971. One night that September, Elizabeth disappeared.

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