Amy’s Legacy

NEWPORT BEACH —  Finally, Linda and Peter Biehl thought they could slip into South Africa unnoticed.

Finally, they could quietly carry on the work of their daughter, a Fulbright scholar who was stabbed and stoned to death by a mob in 1993.

But in July, at a Cape Town checkpoint, a young guard squinted at their passports.

“Amy’s parents?” he asked. And word was out.

Throughout their trip, hundreds of people emerged from cardboard shacks, from beat-up schoolrooms to offer the Biehls warm hugs and hand-clapping songs. They still adore Amy Elizabeth Biehl, 26, who was killed three years ago today by a crowd of young black men chanting anti-white slogans in a poor settlement near Cape Town. Her death became an international symbol of the bloody unrest in South Africa before the country’s first all-race elections.

Since then, her family and volunteers have been working to get the fledgling Amy Biehl Foundation off the ground. It’s slow going, from a home office, with no paid staff or major sponsors.

But the foundation has had two major hits--it arranged a scholarship for one of Amy Biehl’s Mowbray roommates to a Palos Verdes Estates prep school and backed a new training program in Cape Town called Mosaic that turns promising women from squatter camp dwellers into community leaders.

“Everyone has tremendous respect for the Biehl family for coming back into this country and [carrying on], even though their daughter was killed here,” Mosaic director Rolene Miller said by telephone from South Africa. “Amy’s spirit is still alive here.”

For Peter and Linda Biehl, both 53, the foundation has turned into their life’s work. In August 1994, Peter Biehl quit a marketing job that required weekly trips to Salem, Ore., and now works from home as a business consultant. Four months later, Linda Biehl quit a job as a Neiman Marcus couture manager to devote more time to the foundation.

The couple pored over Amy Biehl’s journals, notebooks and laptop computer files to try to figure out how to carry on her legacy in South Africa and elsewhere. For 10 months, the Stanford honors graduate had worked in South Africa on voter education projects and human rights issues.

“We have lots of Amy to be guided by,” her father said, “[including] this simple notion of the power of one--what a single person can achieve on a shoestring.”

Amy Biehl was killed in Guguletu township, two days before she was to return home to Newport Beach. She was driving three black friends home in a Mazda when a mob of about 40 pelted the car with stones and pulled her into the street near a busy gas station. The crowd chanted, “One settler, one bullet” (Settler is a derogatory term for whites).

She was hit in the face with a brick and then stabbed in the head.

Four young men are serving 18-year sentences for her slaying, part of a spate of violence before Nelson Mandela’s election to the presidency. Tuesday, in a plea before a government commission, the radical Pan Africanist Congress recommended amnesty for the four men, prompting another round of press calls to the Biehls.

From Day One, the family decided to face the press and fight to keep Amy Biehl’s memory alive.

Peter Biehl got word of the tragedy when he was waved out of a meeting in Oregon to take a phone call from a family friend.

He returned home in the early evening to photographers and satellite trucks in his driveway. His son, Zach, then 16, tried to deal with the grief by fielding press calls. Zach booked his mother for a 3 a.m. interview with Katie Couric on NBC’s “Today Show” the next day.

“The very first night when we all got back to Newport Beach, and we were surrounded by media, we made a conscious decision as a family,” Peter Biehl said.

“Amy’s a story, and what she stood for is a story. . . . So we decided, all right, we’ll use the media to the extent we can to make sure the [South African] elections happen, to make sure Amy’s story gets out.”

Since then, the Biehls and their children--Kim, 30; Molly, 26; and Zach, 19--have never backed away from the media, even in their most private moments.

On their first trip to South Africa, in October 1993, news cameras moved in to record the scene as family members knelt, cried and placed red and pink carnations against the white fence where Amy Biehl died.

The news coverage prompted an onslaught of letters and gifts to the family. Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones sent a sketch of a weeping Bugs Bunny. Family members pressed their cause before President Clinton, Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu, and Amy Biehl’s idol, President Mandela.

In February 1994, the Biehls started the foundation to respond to the outpouring and coordinate activities in their daughter’s name. The foundation has raised about $50,000 for anti-poverty programs in South Africa and other projects.

The Biehls are upbeat about the foundation.

They burst with pride when they talk about the foundation’s support of Solange Jacobs, 16. Amy Biehl shared a flat in Mowbray with Solange and her mother. Together, Amy and Solange fretted over homework, danced the traditional pantsula and spoke Xhosa (a Bantu language characterized by the use of clicks).

The foundation arranged for a scholarship and air fare so Solange could attend Rolling Hills Preparatory School in Palos Verdes Estates. Solange, who graduated with honors in June, will attend Stanford University this fall on a scholarship and will receive foundation grants.

In South Africa, the foundation is helping to finance the community-based, nonprofit Mosaic center.

In June, the first 10 women graduated from Mosaic’s 10-month training and fieldwork program for community workers. They have reached more than 50,000 impoverished people through workshops, support groups and counseling sessions on topics including sexual abuse and women’s rights.

“In South Africa,” one of the graduates wrote in an essay, “all the women are abused in different ways and raped. Women have many hardships, so I want to help them.

“We are living in a new South Africa, and everything must change. Women must express their feelings, and their voices must be heard.”

The Biehl family has made several trips to South Africa to check up on Mosaic and other programs. They pay their own travel expenses.

Back home, strangers still write to the family or offer help. Anxious parents ask whether they should let their college-age children go to troubled areas overseas the way Amy Biehl did. The Biehls say yes--just make sure they know the area the way their daughter did.

“We’re constantly amazed,” Linda Biehl said. “We get faxes or letters out of the blue. How do they [still] know us?”

Today, the family will mark Amy Biehl’s death with a quiet dinner in Newport Beach. Linda and Peter Biehl spend part of their time in Newport Beach with family but moved from the city last year to the Palm Springs area.

Amy Biehl would feel “both proud and chagrined” over her parents’ efforts, said Linda Biehl.

She remembers the sixth-grade essay her daughter wrote about how she wanted to be the first female president of the United States.

Amy Biehl wanted to make a difference. But not this way.

“How many times did she tell us that every time there was a black township death, there was a number [reported]--that’s where the 16,000 [black victims in the civil unrest] comes in,” Linda Biehl said.

“But [Amy said] if there was a white person killed, there was an obituary.”

Information on the Amy Biehl Foundation: P.O. Box 14, La Quinta, CA 92253.

Also contributing to this report was Times staff writer Mark Platte.