As Metra Train 2251 left Union Station for the western suburbs last Oct. 27, a young man and his girlfriend spread out blue-and-white bedsheets along the tracks some 18 miles away–and waited.
Facing each other, they stood on the westbound tracks as the train approached at 60 m.p.h. The engineer dimmed the train’s high beams and suddenly glimpsed what looked like a lone red figure. He slowed the train, but it was too late.
When detectives and area rescue workers arrived near Metra’s Mannheim Road Station on the western edge of Franklin Park, they found a 15-year-old girl, killed instantly, lying in the gravel to the side of the tracks. Her boyfriend was less than 10 feet away. He died before the night was over.
The sheets still lay on the gravel, together with something that panicked the officers: a diaper bag filled with tiny clothes. Police frantically searched the tracks for a baby, surveying the scene from factory rooftops and crawling under train cars.
Inside a red Chevrolet Camaro parked nearby were two notes written in the same hand on plain notebook paper. One read, “Songs to Be Played,” and listed 11 titles, including “Hard to Say Goodbye” from rapper Master P and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” The other was a funeral invitation list.
Officers had taken a report of a missing 15-year-old girl, Georgette Giovenco, and her 20-year-old boyfriend, Jeffrey Cormier, the night before. They assumed this was the couple.
Jeff’s family confirmed that he had written the notes, and that the baby was safe with Georgette’s mother. For some reason, Jeff and Georgette had left behind the infant they adored. Jeff’s suicide note, found later, made no mention of his son and offered few other clues.
“Grandma, words cannot explain how truly sorry I am,” he began his letter. “Don’t worry, Grandpa and I will be waiting for you. Love Always, Jeffrey.”
Georgette left no note.
“Georgette,
“How are you? . . . It really bothers me that I always screw up and get you upset with me. I feel like some kind of a moron who doesn’t even deserve a woman as perfectly astonishing as yourself. . . .You can do a lot better than me and everyone knows it including you. Being away from you is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. . . . You already know that you’re the best thing that has ever happened to me and you and my grandmother and (our baby) are the most important things in my life. . . . I love you.
“Love Always, “Jeff”
After their daughter’s funeral, John and Georgia Giovenco could barely stand to read the intense love letters Jeff had written to their daughter. Still, they read on, beginning a painful search for the explanation of her death. While much of their journey focused on Georgette’s tumultuous relationship with Jeff, the process also forced the Giovencos to turn inward, and to ask whether, as parents, they had done enough.
John and Georgia Giovenco had survived their share of challenges in their 20-year marriage, but their daughter’s behavior was the toughest yet. Without much warning, and despite their best efforts, Georgette had begun slipping away from their grasp.
In many ways, the couple’s struggle to handle their daughter echoes the experience of countless parents who have troubled teenagers. Raising a teenager involves daily tugs of war over issues big and small, from curfews and phone time to questions about whom they date. What the Giovencos couldn’t anticipate was that, in Georgette’s case, this battle would become a fight for their daughter’s life.
For the Giovencos, just voicing their many questions about Georgette’s death is a gut-wrenching process. Like many parents in their situation, they do not believe their daughter took her own life. Even after the Cook County medical examiner’s office listed suicide as the cause on the death certificate, they continue to challenge the ruling and they plan to hire a private investigator, arguing that Georgette must have been trying to save her boyfriend.
The personality changes the Giovencos had noticed in their daughter over the last few years are still hard for them to accept.
As a young girl, Georgette was a dark-haired beauty with big brown eyes and a heart-warming smile. She pleased her parents with good grades and a natural curiosity. She developed an almost sister-like relationship with her mother, and the two shared many of their thoughts and feelings. Georgette regularly wrote sweet notes to Georgia, several of which her mother saved.
“We love each other, don’t we? You are such a wonderful mom,” one said.
Outside her parents’ watch, however, Georgette was undergoing dramatic change. She had delved into alcohol and drugs by the time she finished 8th grade, turned away from her mother’s Jehovah’s Witnesses faith and seemed to be depressed, her 21-year-old sister, Rachel, said. At one point, Georgette carved the initials of the grandfather she adored deep into her belly with a razor blade, attaching the letters “RIP” for “rest in peace.” Months later, she told a psychologist that she cut herself “so she can see the blood, not to cause pain.”
“She didn’t want to listen to anybody,” Rachel said. “And my mom was always working and my dad was always at work. You figure she’s 14 years old and she knows right from wrong and you can leave your child alone at that age, but what happened is she just got into trouble.”
For the Giovencos, much of that trouble came in the form of Jeff Cormier.
In May of 8th grade, Georgette met Jeff in a park outside her junior high school and was immediately attracted to him. For months, the Giovencos heard little about Jeff, but their daughter was slowly developing an intense relationship with him–one she knew her father, in particular, would never approve.
John Giovenco is a tough-talking ex-Marine and airline mechanic who took pride in a strict line with his children. Georgia had a different philosophy. She saw in her daughter a young woman searching for love and acceptance, and she pushed her husband toward a gentler approach. She had long talks with Georgette, sharing her own experience as a teenage mom and the pressures it placed on her marriage to John. She believed this approach was slowly getting through, that Georgette eventually would stop seeing Jeff.
Georgette wasn’t the first younger girl to fall for Jeff. He was 5 foot 9, just 119 pounds, and had protruding green eyes and droopy eyelids. But with his sharp leather jackets and strongly scented cologne, he had a presence and a way with young women. Many of his former girlfriends were obsessed with him, friends said, and he was known for carrying on intense, volatile relationships, at least twice with girls much younger than he.
According to Jeff’s brother, Chris, the only member of his family who agreed to be interviewed, their mother, Luann Cormier, was a young woman when Jeff was born and regularly left the two boys in the care of their grandparents, Theodore and Fran Bish. Growing up in Elmwood Park, Jeff was close to his grandparents, and when his grandfather died before his sophomore year of high school, Jeff was devastated.
“His grandfather was his life,” said Amy Barrera, an ex-girlfriend of Jeff’s. “He was unbelievably sad.”
After his grandfather’s death, Jeff started using drugs, Chris said. The cycle of depression and drugs later led to at least two suicide attempts.
Chris vividly remembers one incident. After hearing music blaring from Jeffs room one night, Chris found him lying on the bed, the covers pulled up to his neck. Hours later, Jeff woke Chris, pointing to arms that were covered with blood. He had spent hours digging a knife or razor blade deep across his forearms, and was later admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
Jeff developed a reputation as a teen rebel in Elmwood Park.
“He was the Peter Pan of his friends. He showed them that the rules were for everybody else and not for him,” said Jim E. Sayrs, an Elmwood Park High School business teacher who was an assistant principal for two years when Jeff attended school there.
Even after Jeff was suspended and later quit school, Sayrs said, he would show up in the school hallways. At least three times, school officials pressed criminal trespass charges against him, and once, Sayrs said, Jeff scuffled on the school’s front lawn with a police officer trying to arrest him.
Jeff’s criminal record included guilty pleas for trespass, possession of alcohol by a minor and aggravated assault/discharge of a firearm for firing two shots at his neighbor’s upstairs window with a 9mm Glock. He had been ordered into drug treatment programs several times, but often refused to go.
The rebel also had a sensitive side, and for many girls, that combination of sensitivity and bad boy was irresistible. Amy, who dated Jeff for three years before Georgette arrived, says she still loved him, even though Jeff often treated her poorly.
“He was bad. Everyone was scared of him and it thrilled me and I was out for a fun ride,” she said.
That fun ride was just as attractive to Georgette. After she met Jeff, she and Amy competed for his affections. Eventually, Georgette carved his initials into her forearm.
By the time Georgia realized her daughter’s ties to Jeff were serious, Georgette’s decline had begun. Early in her freshman year at Elmwood Park High School, Georgette hid a razor blade in her locker, possibly to use as a weapon against Amy, her parents said. When school officials found it, Georgette was forced to enroll in the school’s alternative program, which serves students with academic and discipline problems.
Soon afterward police charged her with assault in a juvenile petition for fighting with a disabled boy, her parents said. Later, Georgette told a psychologist at a treatment center that she could not explain her rage toward the boy. “Mood very sad,” the hospital admission form said. “Talks of trying to kill retarded person without reason.”
The same week, Georgette got into a fight with her father that convinced the family something was seriously wrong.
“You’re not going out anymore, and I mean it,” John Giovenco recalled telling his daughter. Georgette swore at her father, and he slapped her. She ran upstairs, returning with a pocket full of razor blades. After her father and brother dragged her to the floor, Georgette calmed down.
“She was like a mad woman, kicking and fighting,” her mother said. “The only thought in her mind was to talk to Jeff.”
Frantic and desperate for help, Georgia and John admitted her to Glen Oaks Medical Center in Glendale Heights for treatment of depression, self-mutilating behavior and an “explosive, assaultive, out of control” personality.
The hospital asked what type of lifestyle the Giovencos would like to see their child have. “Happy-go-lucky, like she was,” her mother responded. “Help us understand what is going on in her mind.”
Georgette was a reluctant patient at first, but after 21 days at Glen Oaks, she began to open up. According to a psychologists’ report sent to the Giovencos, Georgette said she’d like to put Amy in the hospital: “I want to do to her whatever comes to my mind when I’m in her face.”
Georgette was prescribed medication to control her wild mood swings, but doctors assured the Giovencos that their daughter was not suicidal. After Georgette’s release from Glen Oaks, her parents agreed to continue counseling sessions. They felt their daughter was on the mend.
At that time, Georgia believed she had an agreement with her daughter to break off ties with Jeff, but soon Georgette started sneaking out to see him.
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By winter, the stress forced her parents to separate, and John moved out of the house. Georgette, who already had a strained relationship with her father, happily helped pack his bags.
In the separation papers, John distanced himself from Georgette even more by denying she was his daughter. He claimed that Georgia had had an adulterous affair and that Georgette may not even be his biological child.
It’s unclear if Georgette knew about her father’s claim. No blood tests were conducted because the couple reconciled and John said he was convinced by then that Georgette was his child.
Just as John and Georgia were getting back together several months later, they learned that Georgette was pregnant.
“That was a disaster for me when I found out,” John said. “I felt she was going to destroy her whole life. . . . And I figured when this happened, it was like my whole world was shattered because everything I didn’t want her to do she was doing.”
John was determined to get Jeff arrested for statutory rape. But when Georgia, John and Georgette arrived at the Elmwood Park Police station, Georgette denied Jeff was the father of her child.
“She was protecting this guy all the way,” Georgia said.
Police told the Giovencos that without Georgette’s cooperation, they couldn’t proceed with charges. John left in a rage.
“It’s a father’s worst nightmare for your daughter to meet up with somebody like this,” John said. “If the guy would have been 16 or 17 or the same age group, there might have been something there to work with. But to meet up with somebody who’s on drugs, who was a problem with the law . . .”
At that point, John felt the family needed to do something drastic, and Georgia agreed. As an employee of American Airlines, John could relocate and the family moved to Arlington, Texas. With their daughter 1,000 miles away from Jeff, they figured her feelings would fade.
The move backfired.
Jeff and Georgette’s feelings for each other only deepened with the baby on the way. They started writing passionate letters and racked up phone bills of nearly $2,000 in just a couple of months.
Georgette cried a lot about being away from Jeff. Sometimes she’d lock herself in her room and refuse to eat.
“I looked at her and I knew something was missing in her life. I hated to think it was him, but she was crazy in love and obsessed with this guy,” Georgia said.
Georgette’s and Jeff’s letters reflected a growing angst over their separation. In one letter Georgette wrote, “I love you and please don’t ever leave me.”
Sometimes, Georgette wrote as if she were an adult, referring to Jeff as her soul mate, the father of their son and her future husband; other times the child in her came through. In one missive titled simply Poem 3, she wrote: “Seeing your beautiful eyes and tasting the smoothness of your skin again, would be like tasting the thrill of candy for the first time.”
Jeff wrote of his growing depression: “Being away from you is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, once we’re together again I don’t ever want to have to go through this again.”
On Sept. 2, Georgette gave birth to a healthy boy she named Preston Theodore Cormier. And before long, she insisted on a trip with Preston to visit his father. Georgia finally agreed, on the condition that Georgette would return by Halloween for the start of a program for teen moms.
“There was a big argument in this household over the issue,” Georgia said. “She refused to come back in the house, said she wanted to go back to Chicago, and she said she hated it here. At that point, there was nothing else. She was not going to be happy and I was not going to go to work thinking, `Where is she going to be? What is she going to do with the baby?’ “
John, too, felt they had no choice. Using his airline benefits, he let Georgette use a free stand-by ticket to Chicago.
The couple expected Georgette to stay with Rachel, in Oak Park, but she spent most of her time with Jeff in a motel near O’Hare International Airport. He was living there with his grandmother while she looked for a new home.
Georgette called her mother every day, and Georgia assumed she was phoning from Rachel’s apartment. But within a few weeks, Georgia realized her daughter had been calling from Jeff’s all along. Immediately, she told Georgette she would have to return to Texas two weeks earlier than planned.
Georgette was irate.
“She said she was going to kill her father and cause trouble in the house,” Georgia said. “And I told her it didn’t make a difference. And she said, `I’m so happy and (Jeff and I are) getting along so good.’ “
In the meantime, Jeff’s anxieties over his problems with the law intensified as his next court hearing approached. He started using harder drugs, mixing cocaine and heroin in his system, his brother said.
On Oct. 15, Jeff pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the incident a year earlier, when he fired shots at his neighbor’s upstairs window. He confessed to the crime, telling an Elmwood Park police officer that he wanted to warn his neighbor not to bother him. Jeff received 30 months’ probation and a boot camp sentence for non-violent offenders. He was expected to report to the camp on Oct. 26.
Jeff was terrified of boot camp, and of being away from his grandmother and Georgette.
“He didn’t want to leave Georgette,” his brother said. “He was addicted to her too.”
In the days before he was to appear at boot camp, Jeff and Georgette spent much of their time alone with the baby in the hotel room. On Oct. 26, Georgette called Rachel before 9 a.m. She said Jeff was reporting for boot camp that day, and she wanted to have dinner with her sister afterward. They agreed to meet by early afternoon at the apartment.
Around 12:30 p.m., Georgette called her mother in Texas.
“I’m getting ready to leave now,” Georgette said. “We’re going to take Jeff to drop him off so he can go to jail or boot camp. He wants to say `hi’ to you.”
Georgia cautioned that Georgette’s father was close by and that it wasn’t a good time to talk.
“OK, well, Jeff says hi and he misses you,” Georgette said.
“Tell him I say the same,” Georgia said. “I’ll let you go. I love you. I miss you. I can’t wait to see you.”
After a moment, Georgia decided to send another message of support to Jeff. While she still had her misgivings about him, Georgia wanted to smooth over relations with her daughter.
“You tell Jeff, `Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right,’ ” Georgia said.
The two hung up. It was the last conversation Georgia would have with her daughter.
By 5:30 that night, Rachel still hadn’t heard from her sister. She called the hotel and Jeff’s grandmother answered the phone. In a calm voice, she told Rachel that she would get Georgette. But when she returned, her tone had changed.
“Something tragic has happened,” Fran Bish told Rachel.
“What?”
“Jeff and Georgette took off with my car,” she said. Strangely, they had left the baby behind.
Rachel and a cousin drove to the hotel to pick up the baby. Jeff’s grandmother told them Jeff and Georgette had been acting strange that afternoon, spending nearly three hours in the bathroom. At one point they came out of the bathroom, stared at the baby, kissed him and went back inside.
Later, Jeff’s grandmother found pictures that the couple had spread out in the bathroom. Among them were images of her, the baby, Georgette’s grandfather in his casket and Georgette as a toddler.
Georgia arrived from Texas early the next day. The night before, she and Jeff’s family had filed missing-person reports on Georgette and Jeff. Her first stop was Jeff’s grandmother’s hotel room, and she spent the rest of the day searching the streets.
It wasn’t until 11 p.m. that Georgia learned her daughter’s fate. Franklin Park police called, asking family members to report to Gottlieb Memorial Hospital in Melrose Park.
Georgia’s heart sank as she and Rachel made the drive from Oak Park. As hospital personnel escorted them to a separate room, Jeff’s grandmother approached.
“Fran, what’s going on?” Georgia asked.
“They’re both dead,” his grandmother replied, with a quiver in her voice.
Georgia fell to her knees, screamed and cried. She left the hospital in a daze, clutching the one trace of Georgette’s life that she still had–baby Preston.
The suicide note Jeff wrote to his grandmother hasn’t provided much solace to the family, although it was clearly intended to do so.
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“Grandma, the last thing I wanted to do is hurt you but I would have misbehaved in boot camp and got into more trouble which would have hurt you more. . . . Love always, Jeffrey.”
Cook County pathologist Lawrence Cogan originally ruled that Jeff’s and Georgette’s deaths were suicides, but agreed to reopen the investigation after Georgette’s parents questioned whether she actually killed herself.
Cogan’s final report, though, again ruled Georgette’s death a suicide. Toxicology tests showed that both Jeff and Georgette had taken illegal drugs within 24 hours of their deaths. Cocaine was found in Georgette’s body, and in Jeff’s system pathologists found evidence of a heroin and cocaine mixture, commonly called a “speed ball,” a drug combination that had killed actor John Belushi in 1982.
The Giovencos were surprised to learn their daughter had cocaine in her system. But they still believe she did not commit suicide. Instead, they figure Georgette must have run in front of the train in a last-ditch effort to save Jeff.
“I believe he committed suicide, but I also believe Georgette tried to save him and maybe tried to pull him from the tracks, but it just happened so fast and she just couldn’t get out of the way,” John said. “Either that or he was so obsessed with Georgette that he actually grabbed her and pulled her into the tracks. Either way, he pulled her or she tried to save him.”
Days after Georgette’s and Jeff’s deaths, family members and friends marked the spot with two memorials–rocks fashioned into ovals. Inside one was a card from Georgette’s funeral, dried flowers, candles, candy bars and a 3-by-5-inch plaque that read, “Nothing dries sooner than a tear. In the second memorial, five feet from the tracks, were similar items: dried flowers, candy bars and a baby bonnet.
On a rear wall of a factory near the tracks, someone had spray-painted the outline of a tombstone with the inscription: RIP Jeffrey Cormier 11-21-77 to 10-27-98. Nearby, on the same wall, was a spray-painted cross. For days, members of Jeff’s family came to this site, sometimes to simply kneel on the gravel and cry. Kelly Frey, a friend of both Jeff and Georgette, helped put the shrines together, believing the couple lived out a tragic love story.
“I know she never wanted to live without him,” she said. “She loved him to death.”
A thousand miles away in Texas, the Giovencos created shrines of their own, filling their apartment with photographs of the old Georgette, the “happy-go-lucky” girl they thought she would always be.
They continue to question their decisions as parents, their conflict as a couple and their influence over their daughter. The questions keep coming, but the answers are still elusive as the Giovencos continue trying to make some sense of it all, to be at peace again with the difficult decisions they made as parents. They have no choice, they say, because there’s yet another child to raise, another life to mold in the best way they know how.
“There’s all the but’s and if’s,” Georgia said, taking a break from Preston’s frequent feedings. “I can’t answer all these questions, but I do have to go on.”
`TAKE THEIR PAIN SERIOUSLY’
The Giovencos’ story could serve as a cautionary tale for parents. While most emotionally troubled teens don’t take their own lives, suicide is nonetheless a threat. It is the third leading cause of death for people ages 15 to 24, behind accidents and homicide.
Twenty years ago, Rev. Charles Rubey of Catholic Charities in Chicago started a support group called Loving Outreach to Survivors of Suicide, at the request of three couples whose teens had killed themselves. He found that suicide carries a lesson about the importance of looking out for clues.
“A piece of advice I always give parents is to take the pain of your children seriously,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you have to cart them off to a clinic or a social worker, but so often the idea is that `Oh, well, you’ll get over this.’ It’s important not to downplay but to take their pain seriously and to listen to them.”
Teens can be especially vulnerable if they’re exposed to peers or lovers who manipulate their emotions. Dr. Alan Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, said a double suicide often involves one suicidal person persuading the other to go along.
“In this kind of case, typically the male is suicidal and in effect convinces his female partner to go with him. It’s almost the equivalent of a homicide,” Berman said. “She has no developed ego and they share some romanticized notions, sort of like Romeo and Juliet, of dying together.”