No healing for Dede's mom
| • | TV show prompted tip in 1975 murder case |
| • | DNA evidence not likely in case against suspect |
By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer
Maureen Bustamante knows the look of a grieving mother.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser
She has recognized it in women she has met at the store, and she has seen it in her own reflection for 26 years.
Maureen Bustamante of Kailua recalls happier times in a family portrait taken in the 1970s when her slain daughter, Dawn, was still alive. In the photo, Maureen is surrounded, left to right, by her daughters Dawn, Christy and Sheri.
The first decade after her daughter was killed, Bustamante used to catch the bus every day and stare at a picture of a missing woman named Diane Suzuki, 19, an 'Aiea dance teacher who vanished in 1985 and whose case remains unsolved. Bustamante's heart ached for Suzuki and her family.
The second decade brought Bustamante days too painful to watch the television news and better days when she discovered the joy of grandchildren.
The 26th year has brought her back to the past, as she has waited for her daughter's suspected killer to be arrested.
Delmar Edmonds, 46, is charged with murder in the March 14, 1975, abduction, rape and shooting of Dawn "Dede" Bustamante. Police arrested the former Kane'ohe Marine in Indiana this week, and his extradition hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.
Maureen Bustamante, 57, nicknamed "Dede" herself, wants Edmonds brought back to Hawai'i to face trial, but she cannot bear to even look at his picture.
She does not want to put a face to the crime that has haunted her for so long.
Instead, she wants to remember her first-born daughter as the child with an engaging personality who once couldn't play an angel in a school play because of a humorous incident that resulted in a black eye.
She played a shepherd instead.
She wants to recall the girl who entered adolescence with new braces and glasses and a personality that delighted those around her.
On the night of the killing, Dede was kidnapped with another 13-year-old girl who escaped death. That woman, who now lives in San Diego, named her daughter Dawn after Dawn Bustamante, Maureen Bustamante said.
Her daughter's early teenage years were not always easy on Maureen Bustamante, but she'll remember those too.
"She was a little bit of a rebel," Bustamante said. "We had some problems. When she passed away, there was guilt as a parent but I've learned to forgive myself."
The news this week is not just about a man who was arrested decades after a crime, she said. It is about a broken family.
Maureen Bustamante is divorced from Dawn's father, Neil, vice president of golf operations at the Mauna Lani Resort on the Big Island.
"What I'm feeling is universal," she said. "What happened to Dede, what happened to our family, is universal. But it's also deeply personal. Mothers who have gone through this know that time does not heal. You don't get over it."
As a way to never forget, Maureen Bustamante's bedroom holds the furniture of her daughter's past.
Dede chose the greenish-gold desk, dresser and bedside table when she was old enough to have her own room.
Maureen Bustamante lines the bookshelf with pictures of her grown daughters and one photograph that is familiar from newspaper clippings, that of her bespectacled Dede gazing at candles on cake during a family birthday party.
In a home filled with antiques and artwork, the furniture doesn't look out of place. It's something tangible to fill a hole that never seems to disappear.
In the next room, Maureen Bustamante pulls out a book by local artist Pegge Hopper.
She opens it to a page with a piece called, "Aloha, Aloha."
The painting depicts a Polynesian woman, symbolic of Hawai'i, with pink anthurium on the left side and dead flowers on the right.
The woman's lap holds a lei, and each flower is formed in the image of a girl's face until the flowers turn into skulls.
One girl's face is the image from the bespectacled portrait of Dede Bustamante.
"It was the way I felt about Hawai'i before the crimes and after," said Hopper, who had daughters about that age at a time when tragic stories of young women were in the news. "I called it, 'Aloha, Aloha' — goodbye, aloha."
The artist has invited the mother to her home to see the original.
"I think soon I may be able to go sit with her," Maureen Bustamante said.
Dede Bustamante would turn 40 in November, if she were still alive. Her mother still remembers the young girl in the painting.
"Sometimes on the street, I see a 13-year-old with brown hair," she said. "And it's Dede."
For a long time, Maureen Bustamante never felt totally good inside.
One of her daughters, Sheri MacArthur, who was a year apart from Dede, never gave up pushing for a police investigation.
And by chance, her youngest daughter, Christy Yohn, met and married a former Navy criminal services investigator who helped them recharge an investigation in the case.
Today, Maureen Bustamante looks forward to waking up.
She has happy memories of her oldest daughter and tells funny stories about the good times.
She says the worst thing that can happen to a person in life is to be tested by grief.
"I think only someone who has lost a child knows the despair," she said.
Maureen Bustamante finds strength from her sister, Leo Nora Ho, who lives with her in Kailua.
Maureen Bustamante was there for her sister when Ho lost a 10-month-old daughter to congenital heart failure.
Ho was also there for her sister in tragedy.
Ho was the one who identified Dede's body.
"I'm saying this for all mothers today, that there is a resolve: There is a hope, and you just go on living," she said. "My life is ordinary. I have no titles. But I am a mother. I am Dede's mother."
Correction: The woman who was kidnapped at the same time as Dawn Bustamante, when the two girls were both 13, named her daughter Dawn, after Dawn Bustamante. A previous version of this story was incorrect.
You can reach Tanya Bricking at tbricking@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8026.
