If I Am Missing or Dead

Janine Latus’s memoir, If I Am Missing or Dead (2006), centers on Latus's younger sister Amy, who was murdered by her live-in boyfriend when she was thirty-seven. Latus also explores her own relationships with men, and the sisters shared history growing up with an abusive father.

Latus begins by telling about her and Amy's childhood and upbringing. They grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, two of five children born to insurance salesman, Pete, and nurse Marilyn. A conventional, cowed woman, their mother left her nursing job to stay at home and be a full-time mother. Pete was an emotionally and sexually abusive father. Frequently criticizing his daughters' weight and attractiveness to humiliate them, even in public, he also hit on his own daughters. Janine mentions, for example, how at her wedding, her father commented on the sexiness of her legs while she danced with her new husband. In this way, Latus provides useful context for the stories that follow, by establishing the predatory and emotionally callous environment in which she and her sister Amy (and their siblings) were raised.

One day in 2002, Amy fails to show up for work at Kimberly-Clark in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she works as a cost analyst. Her coworkers, searching her desk, find a small envelope addressed to the Sheriff taped to the inside of one of her drawers. It reads, in part, “Today Ron Ball and I are romantically involved but I fear I have placed myself at risk in a variety of ways. Based on his criminal past, writing this out just seems like the smart thing to do. If I am missing or dead this obviously has not protected me…”  Latus took the title of her book from this. The letter also lists the debts her boyfriend, Ron Ball, had accrued; Ron was a convicted criminal, and Amy was afraid that he might one day try to murder her to cash in and pay off his debts. Within a few weeks, she is, indeed, found dead – strangled to death, wrapped in a tarp, and dropped in a shallow grave by the roadside. At her funeral, her father makes an inappropriate joke about his dead daughter.



Ron is arrested and taken to court; two years later, in 2004, he finally confesses to second-degree murder and abuse of a corpse. He is sentenced to twenty years in prison. Janine is upset because Ball's sentence is light enough for him to start his life over after serving his sentence. Although he would be in his fifties, he would still be young enough to potentially entrap and murder someone else. Janine protests the light sentence, but the prosecutors on the case tell her that it would have been nearly impossible to convict Ball of a more serious crime.

Amy and Ron had met online. Their romance had become serious quickly, and before long, Ron was living with Amy and making free use of her money. Amy seemed okay with this, providing him the resources necessary to set up a house painting business. Their relationship was not sexual however; Ball was chasing after other women. Latus makes it clear he was only using Amy for money, despite telling Amy that he loved her. Amy – with a desperation that her relationship with her father helps explain – believed him nonetheless. She even cut off all contact with one friend who openly suspected Ron's motives.

Latus talks about her own abusive marriage, describing, for instance, how once on a ski vacation, her own husband, Kurt, beat her severely, breaking her nose and multiple ribs. Later, he has sex with her, almost as a form of penance. Latus emphasizes her mixed feelings about the experience. Many of Latus's stories about her own life uncomfortably recall her experiences of abuse at the hands of her father, Amy's experiences of abuse with Ron, or both. Through telling these stories, she means to emphasize the emotional continuity between the different story strands. Towards the end of the book, Latus excerpts several passages from her sister's journal. Coming to see that Ron would never be the person she wanted him to be, Amy had begun to feel trapped in the relationship.



If I Am Missing or Dead is both a biography and an autobiography, whose central topic is, ultimately, the internal dynamics of abuse victims. Rather than try to explain these dynamics, Latus finds value in simply bringing them into the light. Her telling foregrounds the ambivalence of the sisters towards their various abusers; her tone is straightforward, factual, and unflinching. She shows their struggles to reconcile their knowledge that they are in abusive relationships with their very real affection for their abusers in a way that is not melodramatic or one-sided.