Rest in Peace Teresa
2003-06-27 | 12:37 p.m.

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- The phone rang by Teresa O'Leary's hospital bed with a cryptic, terrifying message from the father whose beating had put her there.

"I want you to have your mother's jewelry," he told her. Then he hung up.

The next day, the panicked 15-year-old left the hospital against doctor's orders, pushed through the unlocked front door and stepped into a horror that never left her. Her father had murdered her mother and five siblings with gunshots to the head, then killed himself.

O'Leary spent the next three decades in state hospitals to deal with her lingering shock. Meanwhile, the psychiatric drugs she took likely contributed to a worsening kidney problem that required hours of dialysis treatments weekly.

On June 9, a day before the 30th anniversary of her discovery, the 45-year-old O'Leary decided she'd had enough and ended the dialysis. She died last Thursday.

On Wednesday, friends of O'Leary gathered in a small chapel at Boston's Lemuel Shattuck Hospital, where she'd lived the last several years. They remembered a life that, though marked by tragedy, was full of small pleasures, like her beloved cigarettes and Pepsi, and the larger joys of abundant friends and love.

O'Leary was buried later Wednesday in a quiet corner of St. Joseph's cemetery in West Roxbury, in the plot right next to the father who took so much away.

"Teresa is a person who taught me what forgiveness is," said Betty Dew, an attorney and O'Leary's legal guardian for 12 years. The murders, Dew said, "did not consume her any longer."

Friends said that as she faced death, serenity seemed to overtake her. Her goodbyes came with more smiles than tears and she talked about meeting her friends and family at the "pearly gates." Her casket would be the color of lilacs, she instructed, and filled with flowers and stuffed animals in memory of the family dogs her father also killed.

O'Leary's last moments were spent outside at the Brookfarm nursing home in West Roxbury, where she'd been transferred so she wouldn't die behind locked doors at Shattuck. She took a few drags of her cigarette, a few sips of Pepsi, and quietly passed, according to Dr. Mary Ellen Foti, who was with her.

"I think she came to a place where she was no longer filled with distress and angst and was able to go on," Foti said.

Her father, George O'Leary, was an abusive Korean War veteran who worked as a security guard at a Boston dental school. At the time of his death, he was facing a fourth operation for a stomach ulcer, according to a Boston Globe report the day after the murders. The only explanation he left for the killings was a short note found in his house.

"I love my wife," it read. "I love my children. I can't live without them. So I'm going to take them with me."

O'Leary talked little about the murders until the last few years, when she opened up to close friends, including Dew. She remembered the house was unnaturally quiet when she entered. She remembered cradling her mother's cold body after finding her dead on her bed. She remembered screaming.

The anniversary of the killings was always tough. O'Leary became unusually irritable, friends said, and would drift into the easy drawl of her mother, who was born in the South. Even in normal times, O'Leary had the wild mood swings of a teenager.

"She was stuck at when it all happened. She was stuck at 15," said Mary Keohane, a nurse practitioner who administered O'Leary's dialysis treatments.

Keohane saw O'Leary at her worst as she bitterly protested her dialysis treatments, which took four hours a day, three times a week. But Keohane remembers the difficult times with a smile, recalling how she bribed O'Leary to behave with doughnut holes and dollar bills.

"She got upset and angry," said Trish Cahill, O'Leary's social worker for several years. "But she was sweet at her core."

Speakers at the wake recalled O'Leary as loving and generous, giving away some of the piles of jewelry she wore if she thought something might go with an outfit a friend was wearing. Dew is hoping to match O'Leary's generosity after her death by raising money for a gravestone.

O'Leary was also mischievous, they said, sneaking cigarette lighters and matches into the hospital in her bra and raising a pet mouse with food she left in her shoe nightly.

But even as she enjoyed her friends, O'Leary's kidney problems took their toll. The thin, six-foot tall woman with fine brown hair began to look years older than her age.

At a "going-away" party at J.P. Licks ice cream parlor the week before her death, so many friends came that O'Leary didn't have time to eat the hot fudge sundae she ordered before a friend's dog tackled it.

Dew recalled the girl working the ice cream shop counter asked O'Leary where she was going away. Someplace beautiful, O'Leary answered, where she could rest and be at peace.

"Have a nice trip," the girl offered.

"Thank you," O'Leary said. "I will."

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