Suzan Barnes was the daughter of a newspaper executive and a well-heeled country club divorcee with two teenage kids. Jim Carson, my father, was the hippie son of an oil executive; he had a wife and a young daughter. The night they met at a party in 1978, they pushed away from their families, moved in together and became inseparable until their arrest for multiple murders five years later.

My father immediately became a different person with Suzan. He had a new name, a new personality and new life. Abandoning the name James Clifford Carson for the name Michael Bear Carson, he was no longer the attentive and caring stay-at-home father that I remembered. My father had braided my hair and read me books. Michael Bear would barely look at me.