2 Mothers Tell of Murder, Loss

The day after the guilty verdict in a case of murder and motherhood, two mothers spoke of what they had lost.

An impassive female sheriff’s deputy brought Belita Fox into a conference room at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women Friday morning. The jail uniform with its capital letter “W” looked big on the weary blonde in handcuffs, who during her Lancaster murder trial wore a white dress when she described how she held her revolver with both hands and shot Jean Harmon’s son, Kevin Furman, four times in his bed.

“I feel we were all victims,” Belita Fox said. “I know Kevin’s mother lost her child totally . . . I have lost my daughter again.”

About the same time Friday, Jean Harmon left work at a Los Angeles law office and headed home to the San Fernando Valley to pack for a weekend in Arizona. It would be her first vacation since her 23-year-old son’s death in August, since she started her crusade to clear him of Fox’s unproven accusations that he was giving Fox’s 17-year-old daughter drugs.

“She has no conscience,” said Harmon. Her voice on the phone throbbed with pure hatred. “She is not capable of remorse for anyone other than herself.”

Harmon has been relentless. She led a contingent of relatives and friends at each court appearance. She had buttons made bearing her son’s picture. She clipped newspaper articles, wrote letters and jotted down images and memories of her son.

One of the anecdotes reads in part: “He was about nine. I had taught him to open the door for women and girls. We were first in line to enter the store when it opened that morning. There was a woman next in line. He opened the door for her, and about 40 people, men, boys, women and girls allowed him to hold the door open while they entered the store.”

Thursday’s first-degree murder conviction carries a sentence of 27 years to life in prison. The jury flatly rejected Fox’s numerous defenses: that she was drunk, that she only wanted to protect her daughter against drugs, that she shot Furman in self-defense.

Fox plans to appeal. But her defiance alternated with apparent remorse Friday. The woman who the defense painted as a distraught mother waging righteous battle against drug dealers acknowledged she deserves to go to prison.

“I deserve to spend time for the simple fact that I should not have gone down there” to Furman’s house, Fox said. She said yes, “possibly” the truth may lie somewhere between her version of the shooting, that she opened fire in self-defense, and the much different picture painted by evidence and a witness, that she pumped four bullets into a man lying helpless in bed.

Her version was closer, she said, but “some things may not have happened exactly as I remember them.”

Fox also professed grief for her victim. She said she had told her daughter, “there’s not a day I don’t wake up seeing Kevin, seeing you and seeing the destruction for all of us.”

Fox cried at the conference room table, as she did frequently during the trial. They could have been tears of sincerity, self-pity, deceit--or some combination of the three. They reappeared when she talked about her daughter, Cheryl Wilson, now 18.

Fox recalled a school banquet in April which she attended with her daughter while out on bail; Cheryl was honored for academic achievement. It was like being in a normal happy family, she said, not a family that was plagued by drugs and strife long before Fox ever heard of Kevin Furman.

“She was given a trophy,” she said. “She was named the most talented. Everything was great.”

But Cheryl, a frequent runaway, left Fox’s home again. And in a strange aspect of a strange case, Cheryl has developed a close relationship with Harmon. Both mothers say Cheryl, who has been staying with friends and relatives and did not attend the trial, was infatuated with Furman.

Fox likened the relationship to brainwashing, accusing Furman’s friends and relatives of turning her daughter against her. Nonetheless she said: “I know my daughter loves me . . . Cheryl will come home. She will always come home in the end.”

Harmon, on the other hand, said she gives Cheryl the guidance that Fox did not.

“I don’t blame her,” Harmon said of Cheryl. “I have told her over and over again that I forgive her. I am her sanity . . . I am telling her the kind of things her mother should have told her.”

Harmon said she hopes her last visit to Lancaster Superior Court will be June 28, when Fox is sentenced. Fox hopes for a new trial, perhaps with added emphasis on her claim that she was drunk beyond control when she put a .38-caliber revolver in her purse and headed for the small house on a dirt road in Lancaster.

She said the finding of first-degree murder goes too far.

“To me, first-degree is when you plot and plan,” she said. “I have lost my home. I have lost my freedom . . . It doesn’t make sense.”

That’s one point on which the two woman agreed. As she ended a conversation from a phone booth on the road to Arizona Friday, Jean Harmon said, “My son had his weaknesses.

“But he was growing out of that. He had his dreams. She didn’t give him a chance to fulfill his dreams.”

Despite occasional tears and her grim future, Fox was gracious and relatively poised throughout the interview.

As she rose to go, she asked her attorney for a cigarette. As he handed her one, it dropped to the floor.

Fox hesitated for a moment. She crouched quickly and scooped the cigarette into a pocket of her jail uniform.

Then she turned and put her arms behind her back for the handcuffs.