Wife struggles to cope with husband's torturous death

WITH EVERY PEN stroke, Geraldine Campbell's obsession with her husband's killers intensifies.

Each day, on food-stained napkins, crumpled envelopes of unpaid bills and blank pages of her husband's dialysis book, she sketches dozens of pictures of one of the killer's squinty eyes, large ears, cropped beard and jagged scar across his right cheek.

The face of a killer.

Fueled by her compulsion, she ignores her family's pleas to stop.

"He's [always] on my mind," she said, clutching one of the tattered drawings. "This man changed my whole life. He took the most important thing to me."

Like hundreds of murder victims' relatives, 60-year-old Geraldine Campbell is haunted. Haunted by the memory of witnessing the murder of her husband in their Mantua home in January, and haunted by the knowledge that the killers walk free.

The murder of Eugene Campbell was particularly brutal and senseless. He was a sickly 50-year-old man with a pacemaker and kidney disease when two sadistic assailants tortured him with boiling water, hot oil, a telephone cord and a hammer before one of them shot him in the back.

His wife helplessly watched the ordeal in what started as a robbery inside their home on Melon Street near 38th while she and her 9-year-old granddaughter were held hostage in the next room. Since then, her life has been in tatters.

Campbell can't live in her home anymore because she's terrified. She has no money because the bank accounts she shared with her husband have been frozen, and she hasn't received her Social Security check since her husband's death. She relies mostly on handouts from relatives and friends.

She and her granddaughter, Makiyah, now live with a relative in Delaware County - paying more than $40 a day in cab fare to get Makiyah to and from elementary school here in the city.

Even so, she constantly looks over her shoulder, for fear that her husband's killers will slink up behind her when she least expects it.

Geraldine Campbell said that she's seen one of her husband's killers in the neighborhood three times and remains convinced he'll murder her.

Police say Geraldine is probably misidentifying the killer.

About two weeks ago, Campbell thought she came face-to-face with her husband's murderer at her therapist's office. She alerted detectives, but police do not consider the man a suspect because she failed to identify him in a photo line-up.

But she can't shake the uneasiness she feels when she's around him, she said.

"He enjoyed the torture," she said of the assailant who tortured her husband. "You could see it on his face, you could hear it in his voice.

"I can't understand how anybody can hurt my husband."

'If this world were mine. . .'

Eugene Campbell caught the eye of his future wife, Geraldine Brown, after his cousin and her sister got married in the '70s. But she was 10 years older and didn't notice him until years later.

She knew him as the go-to guy in his family, the one who helped everyone. He always made it known he was smitten with her.

Whenever he saw her, he sang, "If This World Were Mine," by Marvin Gaye. It was his favorite song.

"I never took him seriously," she said, smiling as tears streamed down her face one recent afternoon. "But the first time he touched me, I knew that was it."

They married in 1981 - it was her second marriage; his first.

After they moved into their home in 1988, they spent steamy summer evenings lounging on the front porch near the garden where they planted strawberries.

She laughed when he talked in his sleep, but kicked him under the covers when his snoring grew too loud. They hated being apart. Even as a truck driver who worked long days, he called his wife every night and they talked for hours.

"People didn't believe we were married because we were too affectionate," she said. "But we were best friends."

They had no children together, but he treated her three kids from her previous marriage like his own.

When tragedy struck, they clung to each other.

Geraldine's daughter, Sheila, died of cancer in 1987 and her son, Craig, Makiyah's father, died from a bowel obstruction in 2006.

Devastated, they adopted Makiyah, who became her grandfather's "little angel."

After hurting his back and knee in a truck accident in the late '80s, his health declined. Among other ailments, he suffered from high blood pressure and high cholesterol. He took more than 20 kinds of medication and his wife kept a journal of doctor appointments.

Even when he wasn't feeling well, they took afternoon excursions with Makiyah.

"He liked cheeseburgers," Makiyah said softly, as she stood next to her grandmother, holding a picture of her grandfather. "He liked taking me out to McDonald's after school."

His wife's health is no better. After battling drug addiction and colon cancer in the mid '90s, she now has high blood pressure, congestive heart failure and needs a knee replacement.

She remembers the good times, and tries not to replay the torturous end to their life together.

A cigarette dangling from her lips, she closed her eyes as she turned towards the kitchen - the spot where her husband took his last breath.

An ungodly scene

It was about 3 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 26. A bitter wind swirled outside. The Campbells, Makiyah and a family friend huddled around a kerosene heater.

They sipped coffee, ate pancakes and bantered while Makiyah drew in a coloring book. "King Kong" played in the background. Their Chihuahua, Taco, slept under the table.

In the kitchen, oil was cooling in a frying pan on the stove next to a boiling pot of water.

Makiyah went upstairs to watch cartoons when the doorbell rang.

Seconds after her husband cracked open the front door, a tall man in a knit cap and a shorter man wearing a yellow vest barged through the door. They slammed it shut.

"My husband chuckled in disbelief and asked them, 'What's going on?' " she said.

"You know what's up," the tall man said. "This is a stick-up." The other intruder had a large shotgun.

"You must have the wrong house," she said.

"We don't have anything," her husband said.

The taller man shook his head, and said: "We have the info, we got the data."

His accomplice, who had the shotgun, told the women to sit in the living room.

Makiyah walked back down the steps and sat on the couch near her grandmother.

The taller robber stuck a knife blade against the back of her husband's neck and shoved him upstairs, while his accomplice held the others at gunpoint in the living room.

Campbell heard sounds of the bed frame breaking and wood splintering from the bedroom above. She heard dresser drawers yanked out.

The assailant rummaged through a safe inside the bedroom and stole their wedding rings. He ripped their marriage license. He tore her children's death certificates and yanked the legs off Makiyah's dolls.

He hit her husband twice with a hammer as he shoved him down the steps. Blood gushed down the side of his face. The attacker pushed her husband past them on the couch, toward the kitchen, as he pulled the telephone cord out of its socket. He pushed him to his knees on the tile floor and choked him with the cord.

Sobbing uncontrollably, Campbell begged the gunman in the living room to let her husband go. He lowered the hood on his sweatshirt over his face and told her to be quiet. She sat, looking into the kitchen, and hugged her crying granddaughter, who held Taco in her lap, and listened to her husband's blood-curdling screams.

She watched her friend walk nervously toward the kitchen after the thug called her. He kicked her friend repeatedly and demanded money. Eugene Campbell insisted that the friend wasn't his wife and Geraldine was summoned.

Geraldine Campbell grabbed the kitchen counter to keep from slipping on the wet kitchen floor. She was horrified by what she saw.

A heated wall scraper the torturer had used to burn her husband's hands, back and chest was on the stove. Her husband was lying facedown in a pool of blood, his hands burned to bare flesh.

There were holes in his shirt where the wall scraper burned through cotton. The killer stabbed a deep hole near his shoulder and purple welts bubbled where the cord cut into his neck.

Her husband tried to sit up but fell to the floor. His wife bent over and he managed to reach up and hold her hand.

She stood in the kitchen and begged. "I said [to the torturer], 'Please let me take some of that pain. Don't make him suffer like that. He suffers enough.' "

"So, you a brave bitch," the torturer said.

"No. I'm not brave," she said. "This is my family. This is all I have."

The thug poured hot oil and boiling water onto her hands and forced her to let go of Eugene's hands. He kicked her left leg and stomped her right toe with his boot.

She cried out. Makiyah ran into the kitchen. The robber told her to leave before he would "cook that fat baby" in the oven. Campbell begged him to leave her alone.

She told Makiyah to leave the kitchen.

The torturer tossed food around, broke dishes and flipped the table over.

"I want that money," he yelled. "This is my job. I got kids to feed."

His fellow torturer moved Makiyah and the female friend to the dining room. Then he walked down to the basement.

Campbell told her friend to escape.

"I wanted her to get [Makiyah] out of there, so I could help my husband, but she wouldn't run," Campbell said.

Suddenly, she heard a crash. She whirled around. The torturer had kicked over the television onto her husband's head.

When the other intruder returned from the basement, his partner told him to take the others down there. Her husband was on the kitchen floor unconscious.

She pleaded with them again. The gunman shoved her down the stairs and slammed the door.

She heard a loud gunshot. She ran upstairs and burst through the locked door.

The intruders were gone. Campbell stumbled into the kitchen and her husband was on the floor, with a gunshot wound in his back.

Blood, water and oil was splattered across cupboards and appliances. She bent over him and held his cold hand.

"Go get help. Don't just stand there!" she screamed to her friend, who stood frozen in the dining room.

Makiyah ran from the house and screamed for help.

Campbell knelt by her husband and tried to move his head. His limp body was too heavy to move. She stayed there until police officers pried her away.

In the end, the robbers swiped about $60, the couple's wedding rings, prescription pills, Geraldine's eyeglasses, the family's cell phones and Eugene's watch.

Police say Eugene Campbell wasn't known to his killers. They suspect the robbers targeted him and his wife because they believed they had money. Police have shown Campbell several pictures of different suspects, but to no avail, said Homicide Sgt. Bob Wilkins.

"We haven't stopped looking," he said, "but we'll get him. Everything in due time."

Plans have changed

Almost two months after that frightful afternoon, Campbell returned to the house, where she packed boxes in the dining room.

She plans to move to an apartment with Makiyah, but she's afraid it will cripple her financially because she doesn't want to sell the house. She doesn't think her husband would have wanted her to.

As her husband's cousin, Gregory Young, swept the kitchen floor, she sat at the dining room table to catch her breath.

The furniture has been rearranged, just like all her plans - a trip to Disney World with Makiyah during Easter weekend and a romantic evening with her husband for his birthday, which was on Saturday.

"Everything at this moment seems strange and out of sorts and hard to believe," she said, lighting another cigarette. "I try to go over it in my head and it still seems so unreal.

"It's like being placed in the middle of a nightmare, except you never wake up from it."

Some days are good; some bad, she said, so she takes it a day at a time. Daily visits to her therapist help.

"If it were not for [Makiyah], I probably wouldn't even be here," she said. "There's nothing else for me."

She fears more people will die before the killers are captured. "He needs to be punished," she cried. "There is no telling how many people he's killed or how many more people he will kill. He needs to be stopped."

She paused for a few moments. She slumped down in her seat and rested her head against the wall behind her. Then, between sobs, she sang the words to her husband's favorite song:

"If this world were mine . . ." *