Editor’s note: This is the final column in a three-part series by Stephanie Salter on the June 13, 2006, abduction and killing of 4-year-old Collin Walker and the wounding of 2-year-old Monte Walker, allegedly by their father. The other articles appeared Sept. 2 and Sept. 5.

By Stephanie Salter

Terre Haute Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE — The day after Teresa Walker buried her 4-year-old son, Collin, a letter went out to her home from Hoosier Healthwise, the state’s insurance program for economically disadvantaged families.

Due to a change in the family’s “resources and incomes,” the letter said, medical coverage for Walker’s 2-year-old son, Monte, was being dropped. The letter made no mention of the cause for the change and the sudden omission of Walker’s husband’s name from the family roster: Collin had been stabbed to death, allegedly by Katron Walker, his father.

“Ironies? I have a long, long list of them from this past year,” said Walker, 35.

People in the Wabash Valley were riveted by the horror of the Walker case in June 2006. Parents everywhere identified with Teresa Walker’s anguish and heartbreak as she learned that one son had died and the other had to be airlifted to Indianapolis for surgery on his wounds.

Although news media granted the family’s request to keep cameras and reporters out of Collin’s funeral, photos and TV footage from across the street at St. Ann Catholic Church told a pitiful story. The church’s parish coordinator, Sister Connie Kramer, was authorized by the family to provide an after-the-fact description of the funeral Mass that took the public quietly inside.

No amount of coverage could help people identify with what Teresa Walker was experiencing around the man charged with the stabbings — her husband and the boys’ father, Katron Walker.

Since that time, Teresa Walker has slipped, as most accidental newsmakers do, from public consciousness. In the ensuing 14 months, she has faced one daunting task after another while picking through the shards of an exploded existence. She has continued to work at her job in the career development center at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College as she has wrestled with almost every emotion known to humans. Each day she has struggled to be a good mother to her surviving son.

Last month, Walker spoke out for the first time because she was concerned that law enforcement agents might not appreciate the importance of a modification of Indiana’s guidelines for requesting Amber Alerts. Unlike wording in the 2006 guidelines, the current version allows so-called family abductions at least to be considered for Amber broadcasts.

Walker says she will do almost anything to spare another parent what she experienced June 13, 2006, as she tried for hours to convince local police to ask for an Amber Alert for her boys.

“You can’t just dump all domestic disputes into one big pile,” she said of a long-held police attitude. “You have to treat them like any crime and look at each individual. Just because it’s a husband and wife doesn’t mean he’s not going to kill someone.”

Since Collin’s death, Walker looks at almost nothing the same as she once did. Not God, not the police, not the death penalty, not support networks for victims of domestic abuse, not laws about community property, not the future, not herself.

“People will say, ‘I could never do what you’ve done,’ but you never know until you’re thrown into a situation, you never understand your limits,” she said.

As she ticks off some of the other “ironies” she has faced, Walker sounds like a woman tested to her limits. In addition to the Hoosier Healthwise letter — she has reapplied for coverage and is awaiting an answer — she has had to deal with an ever-evolving financial mess caused by her estranged husband, she said.

Those revelations began the morning of June 12, 2006, the day before her sons were abducted, and they haven’t stopped.

His debts, her responsibility

That day, Walker was late to work because she had to make two stops, at the bank and the Terre Haute Police Department. At the bank, she said, she emptied and changed what was left of her accounts, which had been ravaged by checks her husband had written without her knowledge. At the police station, she said, she tried to file a forgery complaint against Katron Walker because the accounts were only in her name.

“I was told there was no crime because he was my husband and he was entitled to half of my money,” Walker said.

She would hear a similar explanation months later when the Internal Revenue Service notified her that she owed them income taxes, a fine and late fees from 2004 when her husband collected unemployment and didn’t claim it on their joint filing.

Walker didn’t even know her husband had been on unemployment, she said. He’d told her he didn’t qualify.

Asked if she has divorced Katron Walker, who is in jail in Parke County and awaiting a murder trial, Teresa Walker said, “I’ve filed all the papers, but there is so much involved, sorting through the financial disaster, so that a settlement can be drafted. I have to pay for all of it.”

Walker and little Monte, who just celebrated his fourth birthday, both are in therapy. Her insurance coverage pays for some of the cost, but not all. When she asked about help from the state Victim’s Assistance program, she said, she was told that it maxed out at $2,000 and, because she already had received $2,000 worth of therapy coverage from her own insurance, she was ineligible.

The local representative of the Victim’s Assistance program, however, has been empathetic and supportive, Walker said.

The same can’t be said for a person Walker turned to for advice and counseling in the early weeks after Collin’s slaying.

“When we sat down, the very first thing he said to me was, ‘I’ve got to ask you a question: Why did you marry that character anyway?’” she said.

Walker had left her husband two days before the abductions and moved into a women’s shelter operated by the Council On Domestic Abuse. Several months ago, she asked to speak to CODA board members to tell them about her experiences in the shelter so they might reconsider some of their policies.

Chief among her complaints: After 15 hours of waiting for authorities to find her children, the exhausted and nearly hysterical Walker could not get anyone from the shelter to drive her to Terre Haute Regional Hospital when she was summoned by city police. A resident and an off-duty staffer offered, she said, but the house manager would not OK it.

“She told them CODA couldn’t be responsible. It was after midnight. I have no idea how many stoplights I ran or how fast I drove that night,” Walker said.

The morning of the attacks, a judge signed Walker’s request for an emergency protective order against Katron Walker for herself and her children. It was never served. A few weeks later, on July 26, she had to go to court to make the protective order permanent. It was her wedding anniversary.

Sometimes, she said, it all gets so ridiculous, she and her close friends can only laugh.

“Being able to find some humor in the absurdity has helped. It may be dark humor, but it’s humor,” she said.

Community outpouring invaluable

Walker’s large, multigenerational family has helped, too, she said, as have her friends and co-workers at the Woods. The people of St. Ann parish, where she has been a member since childhood, have given her welcome support. Strangers in and outside the area also contributed to a fund at First Financial Bank that was established in the family’s name.

“Without that overwhelming outpouring, we would be in a very different place,” Walker said.

Unlike many victims of violence who begin to doubt their faith, Walker said her relationship to God is deeper.

“I can’t doubt that God’s there. I can’t go through something like this and not think God is there,” she said. “There are days when I don’t feel I’m holding myself up, that some power that is bigger is doing it. It’s been that way from the beginning.”

That faith has extended to her grief for her dead son.

“As tragic and heinous as it was, I have to believe that Collin is someplace else, not just in a hole in the ground at Calvary Cemetery,” she said. “I have to believe He has some greater mission for him — because it’s too awful and too much of a waste to be just what it is.”

As much as she appreciates people’s prayers, Walker said, she bristles when someone offers the shibboleth, “God never gives you more than you can handle.”

Her voice steely, she said, “God didn’t give me this.”

One coping tool that Walker said has proved invaluable came from nurses at Regional Hospital, who tended to Monte before he was flown to Indianapolis for surgery to repair knife wounds to his neck and chest.

“They were very, very good about helping me focus and keep myself there for Monte. They told me to just try and be as calm as I could for him, to concentrate on easing his anxiety level,” she said.

That deliberate focus on her boy has enabled Walker to somehow co-exist with unimaginable pain, rage and fear. Returning him to his routine at daycare was crucial, she said, and she managed it two weeks after the attacks.

When Monte asks questions about that day, or wants to talk about it, his mother is determined to stay calm and open. Recently, as he talked about his new passion for soccer, a sport his big brother adored, Monte has spoken of Collin in the present tense.

Walker said: “I first thought, ‘You don’t have a brother anymore,’ but I didn’t say it. And then I realized, yes, he does, too, have Collin with him. He always will.”

Although she has been “bombarded with books about grieving,” Walker said the truth is, there is no manual for what she is trying to do. Customarily a positive, can-do individual, she said she walks a line between wanting understanding and patience and being perceived first and only as “that lady whose son was murdered by her husband.”

“I don’t want that to be who I am, my identity,” she said. “I’m not a person to live in darkness and gloom. I’ve never wanted to be the kind of person that epitomizes a victim mentality.

“I don’t want Monte to grow up with that mindset. I have to keep him believing that, yes, what happened is a fact of his life, but it is not something that’s going to impede him. I want him to know that life goes on, that you rise above things, even something like this.”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.