Terry Supino and her children in December 1982
In a two-page poem she called The Game, a teenage Terri Supino may have foreseen the fate of the man she was later to marry. She says she originally wrote the lines in 1976, long before she married Steven Fisher in 1980, and long before the now infamous murders at the Copper Dollar Ranch.
Did she foresee the brief and explosive marriage and the other events that transpired or did the sub-conscious mind of her older self re-write or craft the lines as a way to cope with the pain? Are they merely the words of an impotent girl venting her anger at anyone who will hear, or do they have deeper meaning?
When Gary Peterson and I traveled to Des Moines recently to visit Terri, she shared her poetry with me. She said she revised the original 1976 lines somewhat in 1983 and again in 2002, and she’s convinced that she may have foreseen certain events.
Though I don’t consider myself a poet, and symbolism can sometimes be elusive to literal minds, The Game obviously points fingers at authority figures. I reprint part of it here, with Supino’s permission. Are they the thoughts of an angry and willful teenage girl railing against perceived injustice, or do they portray something more? Note the references to “your badge” and “your system,” and judge for yourself:
He walked the streets of your corruption,
Taking the blame for a crime you’d done
Leaving his innocence behind the hang,
You destroyed the life inside my son
You tore apart his heart and soul,
And stripped him of his pride
While the silenced scandal behind your badge
Became the safest place that he could hide.
You paved his street of loneliness
Scandal paved your way to fame
Soon he’ll pay the price
For your deceit and lies
Playing the odds against your game
He walked the streets of your corruption
And died for a crime you’d done.
With his bed now made of roses
And your system thinking they have won.
The vengeance will one day belong to me
And the guilty will finally pay.
One by one, you’ll be brought down,
As soon as I have my judgment day.
You paved his street of loneliness
To hold on to the glory of fame.
But soon you’ll pay the price
For your deceit and lies
Playing the odds against my game.
Where do the fingers point? The Game tugs at the ends of consciousness, brings up nagging questions that beg to be answered. The Copper Dollar Ranch murders and the Jodi Huisentruit case happened miles and years apart. Were the sins of the past in Newton, Iowa circa 1983 revisited in Mason City in 1995?
