Betrayal In Blood. Michael Benson
girls. I got over my mad and we talked. She never stopped me from calling the girls or anything else. I always called the girls once a month, on the first Saturday after the first. I could only afford to call them once a month. We would talk for an hour. I also called on their birthday, on Christmas, you know. . . .”
Greenwood, New York, is a tiny village south of Hor-nell, located along a creek. When you come into Greenwood from the north, you cross a little bridge that goes over a small creek, with a pretty waterfall. The town is located at the junction of Route 248, the north-south thoroughfare, and Route 417, which runs east-west, in the western part of Steuben County. Although it was formed back in 1827, it remained so small that there were no restaurants, traffic lights, or gas stations. In 2000, the Greenwood population was 849 residents. That number has not changed much over the years.
Samantha referred to Greenwood as a “tiny little town where there wasn’t much to do.”
Said Tabatha’s aunt Lorraine, “It’s one of those little communities that if you blink as you go through it, you’ll miss it.”
The Bassett home was right on the main road, Route 248, a two-story wooden house on forty acres of land. It was located about halfway between Canisteo and Greenwood, but it was considered both in the Greenwood postal district and the Greenwood school district. It was a big house, but nonetheless it was often crowded.
Asked who lived there, Samantha recalled, “My grandma and grandpa. Tabby and I. My grandma had a couple of foster kids that lived with us for a while. My aunt Linda, my dad’s sister, and her husband and their family. They lived with us off and on a couple of times. They had four kids.”
Using recent statistics, the median household income is around $30,000 a year and the average house goes for $45,000. Like most of the town populations in that region, almost everyone is white. Of those, the heritage was split evenly between Irish, German, and English. Only sixteen residents of Greenwood listed their ethnicity as anything other than Caucasian, and eight of them were of Native American heritage. The remainder listed their race as a mixture of two or more races.
It was not a rich community. Three out of four adults in Greenwood had graduated from high school. Only one out of ten had earned a four-year college degree, well below the state average. Another one out of ten was out of work, about normal.
It was a family town. Although a quarter of the adults had never been married, only 8 percent were separated or divorced. Well over half were married.
The only noteworthy landmark, and it didn’t exactly bring in the tourist trade, was a spot just west of town where the first gas well drilled on state land was located.
Spectacular, no—but pretty, yes. A lovelier spot you won’t find anywhere in New York State’s Southern Tier. About Greenwood, local Robert Huff (pseudonym) said, “I’ve lived here all my life, except when I was in the Air Force. I came back because this is where you raise your kids.” Huff, who was an athletic coach for combined Canisteo-Greenwood sports teams, added, “They can go up to the school at ten o’clock at night and skateboard, and you won’t worry about them.”
The largest building in Greenwood was five miles down the road from the Bassett home. It was Greenwood Central School, which housed all students, from pre-K through seniors in high school. The total enrollment for all twelve grades was usually around three hundred. This was the only school Tabatha Bassett would ever attend.
In 2004, the Greenwood school district and the Canisteo district, to the north, merged for activities, such as sports and clubs—but back when the Bassett girls went there, that was not the case. Because of this, often there were not enough kids for certain activities to continue. That same year, testing results revealed that only 21 percent of Greenwood’s eighth graders were meeting or exceeding grade-level standards in English Language Arts. More encouragingly, 57 percent were meeting or exceeding standards in math.
To get to the highest point in Greenwood, one climbed to the top of the New York State Highway System sign. It wasn’t that the sign itself was so tall, it’s just that it rested atop Greenwood Hill.
Canisteo, the larger town to the north of Greenwood, is best known for its “Living Sign”—an arrangement of pine trees on the side of a hill that spells out “Canisteo.” When you enter Canisteo by car, you pass a road sign that says, “WELCOME TO CANISTEO, HOME OF THE WORLD FAMOUS LIVING SIGN.” The living sign is pretty impressive, and everyone who has seen it remembers it, but to call it world-famous is a bit of a stretch. Most travelers figure it’s truly famous only about as far as Elmira.
After moving in with their grandparents, Samantha and Tabatha didn’t see much of their parents. The girls had switched homes, and visits from parents were infrequent, such as one might expect from a distant aunt.
“We saw my mom once when I was in seventh grade and Tabby was in sixth,” Samantha recalled. “She would call every once in a while. She called once a month for awhile, but then she didn’t.”
Visits from her dad were equally rare.
“We would see my dad about once every two or three years,” said Sam. “He’d visit when he was on leave from the army. One time it was two years without seeing him, and another time it was three years.”
Among the townfolk, Tabby was not known as a shy girl. She was the girl with the funny laugh. When she laughed, everyone laughed. She was effervescent, always on the move. She was the girl who brightened a room.
Greenwood locals remembered Tabatha as a girl who, no matter what she was doing, seemed to be having fun. History was her favorite subject. Her favorite teacher was Mike Bronson, who taught history.
Like many sisters who are close in age, Sam and Tabby did not always get along.
“We didn’t always have the greatest relationship, and I really regret that now,” Sam said in 2005. Samantha and Tabatha were both active in school, but they weren’t drawn to the same activities.
“I was in the yearbook club, taking pictures. And I played a year of basketball, even though I wasn’t very sporty. Tabby did other things. She was a cheerleader, and she played softball, although I don’t remember what position she played.”
These weren’t intramural sports, either. The girls’ basketball and softball teams played games against other schools. Because the talent pool in Greenwood was what it was—that is, tiny—it was not very hard to get on a team.
“There weren’t any such thing as tr youts,” Samantha remembered with a laugh. “If you showed up, you got to play.” There was always a chance, before each game, that not enough would show up to play, so participation by all was highly desirable.
During the summers, Samantha and Tabatha always went to church camp. They spent several weeks each summer attending Community of Christ events held for children and teenagers.
“We would go for one week to a camp for our age group,” Sam said, “and then later in the summer we would go for another week, Reunion Week, for the whole family. The camp was in Pennsylvania.”
That was about a four- or five-hour drive, and those trips were often elongated by extreme tension.
“That’s because Tabby always got car sick,” Samantha remembered. The family learned the solution was in conking Tabby out. “One year they gave her a motion-sickness pill and she slept the whole way. It was better than throwing up.”
Once, the church reunion was at Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa—the same school that the girls’ dad, Leroy Bassett, had attended—which put them within driving distance of their mother. Ginny remembered all of the times she had seen her daughters. Sadly, they were few and far between.
“When the girls went to Graceland, I would go see them or they would come over and visit me. I would go pick them up, we’d visit for a couple of hours, and then I’d take them back to the college. Tabby came here to visit for a week when she graduated. Sammy went to Graceland for a short time, so I had an opportunity to visit her then.”