Tuesday, August 26. 1997
The University Daily Kansan
Section A · Page 7
Former prisoner now free to help battered women
System's failings motivate her to take action
The Associated Press
DENVER — Every morning for five years, Kerry Wintrop would look out across the ocean from a beautiful house in Half Moon Bay, Calif., before getting the children ready for school.
But they weren't her children. It wasn't her house. And Winthrop wasn't her name.
The woman who called herself Kerry Winthrop had left her name behind in Colorado, where she also had skipped out on a prison sentence.
Since 1980, she had called herself Winthrop, living a straight-as-an arrow life — most recently as a nanny — and dying to go back to her own four children. But she knew she couldn't go back.
It was the winter of 1971 in St.
Louis and 19-year-old Karlene
Keyes was in love. The trouble was,
she was in love with a black man.
"My father said, 'If you go with this guy, you are no longer my daughter. You are out of this house. You are not mine.' Keyes recalled. "But I really loved him and I thought he was the one."
She married the man and moved to Colorado. Eventually, her husband started slapping her around. She claims her husband, whom she declined to identify, could never find work — even after she became pregnant.
"He would come home and yell that there was no money, there was no groceries in the house. 'Go and get some groceries in the house.' And I'd tell him we have no money," Keves said.
He insisted she write checks though there was no money in the account; she claims he would tell her that her paycheck would cover the checks but then he would take her money.
Keyes was pregnant again when she was arrested in 1974 for check fraud. Prisons would not take pregnant women then and she was to report to the penitentiary five days after her child was born.
Keyes said her husband refused to let her report. Abuse continued. "By that time — I have a half-moon scar on my forehead, that took 18 stitches — that was, um, a belt buckle," Keyes said.
She said she wanted to leave, but there was nowhere for her to go. There were few battered women's shelters and Keyes said she could not go back to her family. Police were little help.
"Seventeen years ago what they thought of domestic violence is a world away from what we think of it now," said Denver criminal defense attorney Larry Pozner. "Then it was, 'We're not going to arrest him. He'll just go back.'"
Keyes admits she wrote thousands of dollars in bad checks, but says the abuse was its root. She claims she was let out of the house only to write the checks. The husband was never charged in the check-writing scheme.
Keyes ended up in the state penitentiary in Canon City in 1976. Over the next four years, she was in and out of prison. When she was released, she returned to her husband and to writing bogus checks.
Keyes arrived at a Denver halfway house in 1980. She had been there a month when she heard rumors she was being sent back to Canon.
"I knew if I went back to Canon something very, very bad might happen. And if I walked away from the halfway house, my life would never, ever be right," she said, her usually strong voice cracking. "I wouldn't be able to fight for my children — I wouldn't even be able to see them.
"But I knew that if I went back (to Canon City) I might not ever be able to see them. So I walked away."
A family in a book she read on the way to California was named Winthrop, and she took the name. Kerry Winthrop arrived in San Francisco in 1980. In 1985 she became a nanny. She found a place
and a familv.
"Birthdays and Christmas and all of that were really hard," she said through tears. "I would just pray that somebody was looking out for the boys."
In 1990, she took a chance: She returned to St. Louis. By that time, she had mended her relationship with her family, and she contacted her sons, who were raised by their father. She quickly landed a job as a nanny for the son of two doctors.
Then, at 5:30 a.m. on March 8 of this year, the doorbell rang. Kerry Winthrop threw on some sweatpants and slippers and answered the door. An officer said her car had been vandalized — not surprising, since her neighbors had had the same problem a few days earlier.
When she walked out of her house, the St. Charles County sheriff appeared from behind a building and put her in handcuffs. Somebody close to her had given her up, she was told.
Keyes was wanted on a warrant 17 years old. She was back in the Colorado system by April. As she awaited extradition, "I thought, 'It can't be happening.' But it had."
But what seemed to be misfortune turned out to be good luck. She did not rot in prison; in fact, she was paroled in July. And while she sat in the Denver Reception and Diagnostic Center, waiting for her release, Keyes saw something she didn't like.
"They had alcohol groups for women, drug groups but none for battered women," she said. "I went to my parole officer and said. 'If I have to stay here, I want to do something worthwhile.'"
"She opened the doors by corresponding and developing an interest for a battered women's program," said Stephen Rodgers, who was Keyes' parole officer in the 1970s and is now a case manager at the DRDC.
Keyes also has begun writing a book, "Holding on to Kerry" is for all the women who may be suffering as she did, she says.
She is 45 and living alone in St. Louis and is becoming reacquainted with her sons, now ages 20 to 24.
Faculty evaluations not recent endeavor
Continued from page 1A
thought "Feedback" just wasn't helpful.
"I don't think it was that widely used," said Jon Josserand, governmental assistant to Chancellor Robert Hemenway, who was a KU student during the early 70's. "I don't think the information was all that useful. At least that's the impression I got."
Despite this, 2,000 of the 5,000 copies printed sold on the first day they were available in 1971. Other former KU students and current faculty remember the book as being a great help.
Russell Leffel, a student and graduate teaching assistant at the University between 1966 and 1973, said "Feedback" was something he carried around with him.
"Some teachers were fine people but maybe not the best classroom instructors," Leffel said. "What this helped you find were the best classroom instructors."
Leffel also said that "Feedback" helped him even more as a teacher. He competed with his colleagues to see who would get the best evaluations, he said.
"It was received well at the time
by both students and teachers because it was done in a constructive way to help everybody," Leffel said.
Jarak Piekalkiewicz, professor of political science and lecturer in the Western Civilization program, said he used "Feedback" to help him become a more effective teacher.
"I think it really put pressure on the teachers to become better," Piekalkiewicz said.
Faculty evaluation guides did emerge again in the mid-80's, but their budgets and content did not come close to that of the "Feedback" program. The 1987 equivalent of "Feedback," called "Course Source," contained information on about 30 classes and was funded mostly by advertising.
Helpful to some, useless to others,
"Feedback" eventually became too much of a financial burden to be ambiguously effective.
The "Feedback" experiment of the 70's leaves the University of Kansas with the question not of whether a faculty evaluation guide can be done, but whether it can be done effectively and efficiently.
By 1979, "Feedback" was no more.
Plastic bottles create recycling roadblocks
Continued from page 1A
Additionally, unrecycled plastic bottles increase the waste stream and will cost the University more money to remove the trash. The virgin plastic also requires tremendous amounts of petroleum to manufacture. This plastic can't be recycled into plastic of the same grade.
But the benefits and faults of beverage containers are widely different depending on whom you talk to, said Victoria Silvia, environmental specialist for environmental health and safety at the University.
"Every plastic bottle is a new plastic bottle." Yoder said.
"The plastic people think it's absolutely wonderful packaging," she said. "But when they dropped all the virgin resin bottles into the market, they killed the incentive to use bottles containing recycled plastic."
"Plastic has its place," he said, "but if there's a better material for the same use, then we should use it."
Caldwell said Silva warned him last year that many college campuses had agreed to soft drink contracts only to find themselves inundated with plastic bottles.
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