Can Nate Ybanez Ever Be Forgiven?

"There's not a doubt in my mind that Bernie killed her," says a law-enforcement officer who worked on the case. "She was buried a long time and we couldn't make the charge stick, but I know in my bones he did the crime." Bernie died of early-onset dementia, accused but never tried for his daughter's murder; still, the effect of his cruelty outlived him. "I knew him and the horrible way he treated his family, which had a negative effect on Roger," said Frank Benisch, who married Kathryn after she split with Bernie, in an affidavit supplied to Nate's appeals lawyer, Terrence Johnson. "It may have influenced his parenting of Nate, who had to endure incidents that I considered abusive. I believe the cycle repeated itself."

Roger, who grew up a brawler himself, wasted no time fleeing his father. He joined the Army right out of high school and took his longtime sweetheart, Julie, a pretty Davenport blonde, overseas. When his hitch was up, the pair came back to Iowa but never stayed put for long. From the start of their strange and embattled marriage, they established a pattern of suddenly pulling up stakes with little notice to family members or neighbors. A search by an investigator hired by Nate's lawyer found thirty-five addresses for Roger and Julie over a period of sixteen years, and further revealed that he'd used four different aliases in his business dealings. Money was always tight -- he sold insurance to soldiers before going bankrupt as a baker -- but it was far from the only rub between he and Julie. She was a devout Christian who gave him endless grief for listening to rock music and playing cards, and he was a cold and controlling ex-grunt who ran his house like a rear detachment. Everything had to be done to his code: the dinner dishes washed and dried just so; the thermostat locked on the setting he chose and never raised or lowered a notch. Failure to comply met with fierce reprisals: a smack, a punch, a chokehold.

They had a number of problems even before Nate's birth, said Roger's step- father, Benisch. Nate's arrival in 1981 only aggravated the strain on his deeply unhappy parents. They moved eight times in Davenport alone before heading to Illinois and points eastward. As far back as Nate remembers, there was constant strife: "They had all kinds of arguments, and he'd hit [me] with his hands or storm around and break stuff, punch holes in the wall. It just depended where he was in the house." (Roger Ybanez declined to be interviewed for this story and has denied all allegations of abuse.)

Even before he was old enough to grasp the rules, Nate was battered by his father for infractions both explained and otherwise. "My father was strong, but it wasn't his build that scared me -- he was incredibly unpredictable," says Nate. "I remember him beating me when I was a little kid for mowing my grandma's back yard crooked, just yanking me off the mower and pummeling me." Later, when he was eight, Roger knocked him senseless "for mopping the floor wrong, like he was training a dog. . . . He [always] cursed me horribly, saying I was worthless and stupid and a pathetic motherfucker all the time. Usually I tried to stay out of his way."

Roger and Julie were fiercely controlling of their son's time and contacts. They forbade him from seeing even his Christian school classmates, warned him sternly not to confide in teachers, and tried to limit his social encounters to youth-group outings at church. Aside from the women Julie met at Bible studies, nobody ever stopped by or called the house. It was, says Nate, like being raised in a root cellar -- kept in the dark with no one to talk to and only his mother for human connection.

Where Roger ran cold, a mirthless enforcer, Julie was an emotional geyser. She was deeply affected by charismatic preaching, and despite having to pack and move every six months, she always managed to forge close ties to a local church where the worshippers wailed and spoke in tongues. Stuck in a dead marriage, as well as friendless and broke, Julie leaned on Nate for her unmet needs. "She was real stressed out and would start crying and sobbing and say she couldn't go on anymore," he recalls. "I just wanted to be a kid, but she always made it sound like it was the two of us against the world, and if I didn't fill that role she went to pieces."

These "freak-outs," as he calls them, took various forms. She whipped him viciously as a little boy, whacking him with wooden ladles till he hurt too much to sit. Later, she delegated his beatings to Roger and bullied Nate in psychic ways. She told him over and over that he'd ruined her life and that she regretted giving birth to him. By the time he reached middle school, she was threatening to kill herself by driving head-on into traffic. Once, while arguing in the car with Roger, she grabbed the wheel from him going seventy miles an hour and tried to plunge the three of them off a bridge. Another time, on the rush-hour Loop in Chicago, she screeched to a halt in the center lane and screamed and sobbed as trucks swerved past or pulled up short behind them. Only fast thinking from Nate, who soothed her with Scripture, spared them a fatal rear-ender.

And so it went with this run-away brood, a danse macabre of seclusion and sadness interrupted by sudden eruptions of full-scale terror. Nate had no friends, never stayed long enough to make one, and rarely saw his grandparents in Davenport. With no one to talk to, he hid in his room, teaching himself guitar on a cheap acoustic. "I felt like crying all the time and couldn't see how it was going to change," he says. "They made me feel like this horrible kid who was causing all these problems when I wasn't. I had real good grades and never talked back -- but yet I never, not once, felt safe."