Broken Pieces Exposed In The Light

By Patricia G. Godfrey

"From only a few feet away, my attacker fired her large caliber handgun directly at me. Round after

round struck my body as I began praying even more fervently than I already had been. She had broken into my home and laid in wait for Glenn and me to return home from a family outing. She had already delivered two rounds into Glenn downstairs before rushing upstairs to kill me. But as I prayed, God's strength welled-up inside me and I walked away from her as she yelled at me to stop. I grabbed the phone and called 911. Turning to see where she was, I saw her look in my direction...but not at me. She saw something behind me. The look on her face suggested she saw a manifestation of a mighty angel that God had sent to protect me. She retreated from the room and returned downstairs to kill Glenn with one final shot before ending her own life. I was safe, but my battle was just beginning.

As the wife of a 32-year Alaska State Trooper, and the mother of four children, I had always served our household in a support role during Glenn's long and illustrious career. But his position and frequent travels exposed this small-town boy to temptations greater than he could resist. Soon infidelity plagued our relationship for many years, culminating in that fateful August morning.

This survival story is not a testament to anything other than God's goodness and faithfulness. Through my own suffering God can speak to others who have experienced physical or psychological trauma. I pray that this story brings you comfort and draws you closer to our Father, who loves you and has plans to prosper your soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9798887939995

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Broken Pieces Exposed In The Light

Patricia G. Godfrey

Copyright © 2023 Patricia G. Godfrey

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-88793-997-1 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88793-999-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter 1

Waves of Change

Chapter 2

Married to the Troopers

Chapter 3

So This Is Paris?

Chapter 4

Drifting

Chapter 5

An Approaching Tempest

Chapter 6

Consequences

Chapter 7

What About Patti?

Chapter 8

Blade Song

Conclusion

About the Writer

About the Author

Introduction

Patti Godfrey's granddaughter sits on her lap, and her small fingers trace suture trails on her grandmother's arm. Most of Meemaw's twenty grandchildren have asked about her scars, and she does too.

Patti was shot by her husband's enraged former mistress and then was left to die. Patti clung to life as rescuers battered down her door. Police officers found her husband, Glenn, and his killer lying side by side—dead. Patti lay in a hallway bleeding from thirteen open wounds.

Glenn Godfrey had risen from rookie patrolman to become director of the Alaska State Troopers. Governor Tony Knowles appointed him to his cabinet as Alaska commissioner of public safety, and Glenn had aspired to high political office until secret obsessions laid waste his ambitions.

Bullet fragments still wander near Patti's vital organs after a dozen years. Old wounds from the .44 hollow points trouble her strides, but Patti refuses to live as a victim. As an icon of God's mercy, she has completed her second 26.2-mile Rollerblade marathon since the shooting. With vulnerability and courage, Patti Godfrey recounts her turbulent life and love for Alaska's Native son—a man scarred by childhood abuse but destined to shape law enforcement on the Last Frontier.

Patti reveals the untold story behind the headline Woman Kills Ex-Top Cop, Shoots Wife and explains what anchored her soul during the worst tragedy that a wife, mother, and grandmother can imagine.

Her story echoes with power. Through any personal apocalypse, one can know healing and peace by forgiving all.

Prologue

My brother killed the outboard motor on our skiff a shouting distance away from our fishing boat, and I grabbed the oars. I rowed through the shallows transfixed, as a stubby gray snout appeared above the blue ripples in Danger Bay.

Nancy whispered reverently, "What is it?"

Father's fishing net bobbed frantically while a glistening creature, nearly the size of our skiff, twisted and writhed in the webbing. My twelve-year-old brother, Jerry Jr.; my eight-year-old sister, Nancy; and I gaped at the commotion, while Mom and Dad cupped hands against the sun's glare. Our parents watched us from the deck of our twenty-seven-foot fishing boat, the MV Betts.

A porpoise! I glanced at Jerry Jr. for confirmation, and he nodded seriously.

The two figures in rubber boots stood motionless aboard the Betts, smiling at an unfolding drama that our family would never forget.

My father and mother had built a home on Spruce Island, and Ouzinkie was the name of our fishing village. The Grimes Packing Company supplied our community with jobs, and its busy dock and wooden boardwalks stood upon oily black pilings reaching deep into the Ouzinkie Harbor.

In 1940, Dad and an adventurous friend, Carly, answered the call of the wild while living in Menomonie, Wisconsin, and decided to move to Alaska. The Grimes Packing Company had been soliciting workers, and Dad and Carly traveled to Seattle and caught the SS Alaska, a steamship bound for Seward. From Seward, the two young men boarded the Lackinaw, a boat heading for a peculiar-sounding flyspeck on the Alaska map called Ouzinkie (pronounced Yoo-zink-ee).

My father, Gerold Jerry Sebastian Gugel, was a lean, dark-haired, blue-eyed German, who dived into Ouzinkie's cultural pool among Filipinos, Scandinavians, Native Alutiiq (Aleut), and Russians.

Dad had been mixing ointments and prescriptions at a pharmacy in Menomonie before sailing to Alaska, and somewhere on the Inside Passage on his way north, the sea captured his heart. Arriving in Ouzinkie, my father and Carly were employed by Old Man Grimes as jack-of-all-tradesmen—repairing pilings, caulking skiffs, and repairing seine nets—but Dad had other plans. He and Carly bought a weathered fishing boat from Old Man Grimes for $1,500.

It wasn't long before my father made a name for himself among the fishing crews, showing an uncanny ability to locate schools of salmon. Grimes furnished Dad with net and gear in exchange for a promise: "Jerry, every fish you catch, you haul to my cannery." Dad and Grimes shook hands on the deal, and in his first season as skipper of the GPC-18, my father, with Carly as first mate, delivered more salmon to the tenders than any boat in the cannery fleet.

At the beginning of World War II, industrious Jerry Gugel waved farewell to Carly, as his friend boarded a cargo boat bound for the States. Carly joined the Army, but Uncle Sam left my father on the high seas to supply salmon for the troops. Every year, the captain of the GPC-18 continued to pilot the most productive fishing boat in the fleet.

Seven years after dropping his first seine within the Kodiak Archipelago, my father married my mother, eighteen-year-old Betty Anderson, at the Nativity of Our Lord Russian Orthodox Church. Mom and Dad vowed to be faithful to each other through all the storms of life—including the one brewing in the vestibule after their wedding. My father was twelve years older than my mother and a Lutheran, so Mom's Russian Orthodox family and friends objected to the Gugel-Anderson union.

My mother had been attending the local Baptist Mission too, drawn by the music and simple gospel message there. Following their uneasy wedding, my parents became regulars at the Mission, and Mom's Russian Orthodox friends and relatives felt betrayed. My parents never enjoyed true acceptance in the community after that, though it couldn't be denied that their enduring marriage was a landmark to set a course by.

I haven't always lived in Alaska. Churning among my earliest childhood memories are pastures, cow's milk, feisty cousins, and my father's red Woody station wagon. After their marriage, Dad settled my mother with his kinfolk in Menomonie, Wisconsin, while he saved up money to build her a home in Ouzinkie. When Mom and Dad settled in Ouzinkie again, they had three children in tow!

I was a precocious five-year-old when Dad drove us across the Rockies, away from his family's farm in Menomonie. Dad had been seining around the salmon-rich Chignik Bay, Alaska, and finally cached enough money to purchase materials to build a house for Mom and us three kids.

On the way to Alaska, we caught the thrill in Dad's dreams as he sketched plans for our bedrooms and Mom's kitchen. We boarded a flying tin can with screaming propellers and jounced from Seattle to Anchorage. From Anchorage, we traveled by boat to Kodiak, then to Ouzinkie.

Mom was finally home! She boldly ventured into the rough waters dominated by seine fishermen and learned from my father how to maneuver a fishing boat and to handle nets with skill and confidence. Over the years, she helped my father log the safest ocean channels and prime fishing sites around Kodiak, and Dad's journal is still cherished by fishermen in the Gugel family.

Grandpa (William Anderson) and Grandma (Sonia Pestrikoff Anderson), Teahtka (Anesia Pestrikoff), Patti and sister at grandparents 50th anniversary dinner.

Betty (Anderson) Gugel's far-flung heritage marched through historic battles and marriages between Native Alutiiq people and Russian fur traders. Her mother, Grandma Sonya, was a regal, dark-eyed Russian Alutiiq woman who married William Anderson, my short, red-haired, green-eyed Danish grandfather. Grandma Sonya's ancestors hunted and fished the bays around Spruce Island for centuries.

In his preteens, my mother's dad, Grandpa Anderson, worked as a cabin boy aboard Italian steamships, and as a young man, he traveled Alaska until settling down with Grandma Sonya, who traced one branch of her Russian family tree to nobility. Some say that her heritage colored her opinion of herself, and her neighbors judged her as prickly and unapproachable. Only William, her jovial, ruddy fisherman, knew the pathways to her smile.

My mother's first few years back in Ouzinkie after Dad brought us from Wisconsin were full of hardships. For weeks at a time, Mom tucked Jerry Jr., Nancy, and me into bed each night while my father and his fishing crew slept in lonely coves miles away. Dad loved his fishing life and challenged the sea to feed his craving for adventure. But he also missed his family and renamed his fishing boat the MV Betts to remind him of the woman who waited for him back home.

*****

I heard Nancy suck in a loud, emotional breath as the porpoise's silvery back breached the ocean surface. It writhed against the coarse webbing, and blood trickled from a tear in its dorsal fin and side.

Jerry Jr. yanked the pull rope on the outboard. It sputtered to life, hurrying us back to the Betts, and Jerry Jr. hopped aboard the boat, where Dad handed him a razor-sharp knife. It's a Harbor porpoise. Cut the net, just enough to work'im loose. You girls help. If you take too long, now, the stress'll kill him! Be quick though, and he might make it.

He's bleeding pretty bad.

Dad smiled at me. If he stays out of deep water where sharks and orcas hunt, he'll likely be fine, hon.

Nancy and I exchanged worried looks, and Mom hollered after us as Jerry Jr. shoved our skiff away from the Betts.

You be careful, Jerry! You hear? Mom gave Dad a perturbed sideways glance as we putted toward the porpoise.

I had often perched atop the Betts's flying bridge—my face windburned and eyes watering—watching porpoises surf beside us as we traveled between fishing sites. But to touch this majestic creature (even with fingers numbed by icy seawater) inspired me with a fresh appreciation of God's creation.

Jerry Jr. shouted orders and cut webbing while Nancy and I stretched over the side of the skiff, untangling the net from the porpoise's fins. Praying and shivering, we pushed on the porpoise's back until our catch slowly rolled like a giant sausage and expelled a joyful spurt from his blowhole. Suddenly free of the twining encumbrance, the creature plunged beneath the waves like a polished gray stone. Nancy and I screeched, hugging each other with misty eyes. Jerry Jr. grinned and hollered triumphantly to Dad and Mom, who waved back.

But that was seven years ago…

Now I was seventeen and had been fishing and living aboard Dad's boat every summer with the family since 1956. Jerry Jr. was nineteen, broad-shouldered, and strong. Mom and Dad had adopted my baby sister, Audrey (now a toddler), and Nancy and I worked on our fishing vessel as deckhands—as competent as any men hired in the cannery fleets.

On this evening in May, after a hard day's fishing, Mom, Jerry Jr., Nancy, little Audrey, and I sat at the supper table in our cozy boat, listening for Dad's skiff to bump the side of the Betts. He was scouting out a fishing site, and a pot of bean soup simmered on the galley stove. Any minute, Dad would burst into the cabin with a grin and a story. He'd pray a blessing over the food, and we'd josh and banter, wolfing down hunks of homemade bread dipped soft in bean juice. In fact, the banter already began.

No one noticed me, eyes downcast, drifting an ocean away. Unlike God's sleek and beautiful porpoise that Jerry Jr., Nancy, and I cut free, I felt too unworthy to be rescued.

Jerry Jr. threw a friendly barb at my direction, and suddenly, I couldn't hold back my tears anymore.

Honey, what's wrong? Mom asked.

My hands strayed to my tummy, and I sobbed. Mama, I think I'm going to have a baby…

An ominous hush fell across our anchorage, except for the burbling of an outboard motor drawing near. No one asked me who the father was. They knew.

Please don't tell Dad tonight, please…

Chapter 1

Waves of Change

Salmon return to the mountain streams where they hatch, and memories of my childhood often find their way back to me too. Some recollections are as unwelcome as a lightning storm. Others gently embrace me like a grandfather's bear hug. Some are wavy and translucent, like jellyfish. Others are chiseled from granite—like my memories of Old Man Grimes, the owner of the cannery in Ouzinkie.

Dad's first boat, the GPC 18, bought from the Grimes Packing Co. later renamed the Betts.

He sold my father his first boat, the GPC-18. His coveralls stretched over his barrel chest, and with thumbs strumming his suspenders, he stomped through town like a duke in his castle. Health inspectors irritated Old Man Grimes, and sometimes he flavored sockeye salmon meat on his cannery conveyers with a stream of masticated tobacco, just to annoy them.

Our retort can sterilize anything! He'd brag, wiping black bull from his lips. I could stuff cow manure in these cans, and they'd come out pure and tasty!

Grimes lived with his family in a two-story manse overlooking the cannery operation, where employees ate in his chow hall, bought goods in his store, and rented or purchased his boats. Painted white with bright-green trim outside, his mercantile was stocked with dozens of varieties of canned foods, and his butcher shop offered cuts of beef and pork to families who couldn't face another meal of fish.

Some fishermen in Ouzinkie burrowed in to hibernate for the long, dark winter; others left for Kodiak. But the most enterprising fishermen launched their boats even in dangerous weather to fish for crab. While Nancy, Jerry Jr., and I attended the local school, our father hired a crew and loaded up his boat with crab pots to fish for the deadliest catch of the sea.

Dad paid cash for his boat, and Mom (our family bookkeeper) squirreled away his fishing money after each season. A freight boat delivered our mail-order supplies via Kodiak, from stores like the Sears, Roebuck, and Company in Seattle. We usually bypassed Grimes's overpriced items, though sometimes us kids followed behind Mom like ducklings to the company store for ingredients to bake a birthday cake. My mother almost always paid cash on the barrelhead; it was a Gugel law that we lived by.

At the store in winter, most fishermen and cannery workers signed their names on carbon-copy invoices, promising to repay their mounting debts during or after fishing season. Their unpaid debts to Old Man Grimes ensured him a full roster of cooks, slimers, butchers, deckhands, and boat skippers to run the cannery each spring. When a fisherman broke even at the end of the summer, he celebrated before winter hit and debts piled up again.

Villagers thought that the cash-and-carry Gugels must be well-off, but in reality, we worked hard during fishing season and spent Dad's salmon and crabbing earnings frugally. From Kodiak, Dad ferried caseloads of our groceries that we purchased from E&E Meat Market and other mail-order houses to Ouzinkie. At the dock, we Gugels marched like a pack train, each of us laden with boxes and bags commensurate with our limbs. At home, Mom sang like a songbird, restocking our pantry with cans of corned beef hash, cornflakes, canned milk, flour, sugar, and of course, hundreds of pounds of beans.

In Ouzinkie, my little-girl heart beat a steady cadence to the seasons. I walked confidently on the bedrock of my future—unaware that the world was shifting deep within my island home.

*****

During the first month when our family arrived in Ouzinkie from Menomonie, Grandpa and Grandma Anderson's home burned to the ground! So before Dad framed up the first wall of our house, he joined the community in building a new house for Grandpa and Grandma. A lake that we called Gugel Pond separated Grandpa and Grandma Anderson's new house and our empty home site.

After helping construct my grandparents' home, my father and mother laid the foundation for our house to overlook the bay too. With axe and chainsaw, they cleared the heavy timber from the top of Gugel Hill, and in a few months, we could holler from our new front porch to Dad, as he returned home from fishing. Well, beyond the tide line, he anchored his fishing boat and rowed a skiff to shore unless he tied up at the Ouzinkie dock.

Sitka spruce, some four feet in diameter, forested my new playground. In the spring, cookarookas (blue lupine) blanketed the shores of our acre-sized lake. In summer, water lilies turned Gugel Pond's surface a bright green, and in winter, it froze solid for children to skate on its grainy glaze.

While weeding Grandma Anderson's garden, planted several hundred feet from the beach, we often heard gray whales singing from the bay. Curious seals and otters floated along the strand, and waterfowl by the thousands beat the sky over our heads. Spruce Island lay twelve miles north of the city of Kodiak, and we had few visitors to Ouzinkie unless they had business with Old Man Grimes and his cannery.

Villagers with deep roots groused about the invasion of the cultures Old Man Grimes invited to their island. When Dad was a newcomer, he had weathered a smoldering prejudice, and only by mooring for years among hard-bitten seiners did he land respect. My mother shared the same blood with the indigenous Alutiiq and Russians on Spruce Island, and my father treasured her insights when dealing with people in Ouzinkie.

During holidays like the Fourth of July or Easter, brawls capped off nights of heavy drinking at some gatherings in Ouzinkie. Dad and Mom never joined in the parties, but sometimes neighbors called on them to help calm the waters between inebriated friends or relatives.

Jerry Jr. and Betty Gugel built a lifestyle suited to an independent seafaring family. And though we lived in a village that meant rather narrow in the Russian language (uzen kii), my parents shaped us to be anything but narrow in the way we viewed the world. We ordered our daily lives on Gugel Hill with the same diligence that we exercised as fishermen aboard the Betts, and our routines kept us safe.

Patti as an Angel for Ouzinkie's Baptist Mission's Christmas Program

Bible principles that my father lived by helped us navigate life, and each week, we sang meaningful hymns and absorbed great teaching from Pastor Smith at the Baptist Mission. Dad never missed a Sunday service or a Sunday evening or midweek gathering either if his boat was tied up at the Ouzinkie dock or anchored near home. Often, we were the only family in the pews, singing to Mrs. Smith's piano accompaniment.

Before my father was able to finish building our nest on Gugel Hill, crab season arrived. Dad joined the fishing fleet while we moved into a painted shell for the winter. Mom endured months of primitive living—without bathroom or electricity.

Jerry, grab the buckets. I need to get in the water.

Oh! Can we go, Mama?

Mom glanced at Nancy and me, who bounced up and down, like we were going to a candy store.

Mom looked out the window. It was the end of the day, and the sky threatened us with snow. Mom relented wearily.

Help Nancy on with her coat. Hurry up. It's getting dark!

Jerry Jr. was already out the door, and Mom tossed a log on the fire sending orange fireflies up the chimney. Dad built his fireplace with stones that the family gathered along beaches. His masterpiece warmed the bottom story of our home to a flannel-shirt temperature on below-zero nights. The upper story, where Jerry Jr. slept, sometimes felt more like an oven. To feed our fireplace, we had ferried logs and driftwood to the beach with our boat, where Dad and Jerry Jr. cut the wood to a manageable woodburning size.

On the way to the well, Nancy and I trotted behind Mom, and Jerry Jr. clowned around with the empty buckets. Chimney smoke drifted low, stinging my nose as we tread a worn, icy path to a water well shared by the community. It was nearly a quarter-mile from our warm house.

At the well, Mom's mouth set in a tight line as she let down the empty wooden bucket on a rope. It sank beneath the surface of the well water, and she hauled it up, full and overflowing. She filled each of our two galvanized buckets on the ground beside Jerry Jr.

Can I?

Jerry Jr. huffed clouds of excited fog as he grabbed one, sloshing water on the ground and