He had threatened her, locked her up and absconded with one of their daughters. Palmer knew she and her girls needed to escape – but it would involve huge risk and total reinvention
I
n the summer of 1989, Karen Palmer bought a used car for cash, filled it with belongings – some clothes, toys, one pot, one pan and a shoebox of photos – and “disappeared” with her new husband and two young daughters. She didn’t tell her mother, her friends or her neighbours where she was going. She gave no notice to her employers and landlord, leaving items out on her apartment balcony as a sign she still lived there.
“I have such a clear memory of the day we left Los Angeles,” says Palmer. “It was this weird combination of fear and exhilaration, heart pounding, driving into the unknown.” Palmer was fleeing her ex-husband, Gil, the man she feared, and the father of her two daughters, Erin and Amy, then seven and three.
They headed east, and eventually stopped at Boulder, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rocky mountains, partly because Gil would never think to look for them there. “I’ve always lived on the coast as I liked to be near the ocean,” she says. “He would not expect me to go inland.” They had no ID, no references, no papers linking them to who they were. In the weeks that followed, they changed their names, faked documents, found jobs, a home and a school for the girls. Palmer terms it “do-it-yourself witness protection”: she was “one person one day, and the next someone else”.
