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Over the last few months, I've been going through old Ticket entertainment sections, saving a few things but mostly recycling.
More times than I care to admit, I've found a movie review or maybe an interview from 25 years ago and thought, "I have no memory of seeing this/doing this?"
Other memories remain vivid, none more so than sitting in a kitchen on Warren's west side on a cold January day 40 years ago while a mother tried to make sure that her son would be remembered for something more than the horrific things done to him.
That mother was Miriam Fife, who died Saturday at age 86. Her son, Raymond, was beaten, raped and set on fire on Sept. 10, 1985, and died two days later. A few days before what would have been Raymond's 13th birthday, Miriam Fife and her husband, Isaac, allowed me into their home and showed me their son's room, still filled with the toys and Boy Scout items that were there when he left on his bicycle four months before.
Isaac Fife mostly was silent, probably too filled with sadness, rage and a myriad of other emotions to verbalize those feelings, but Miriam talked lovingly about her child and made a young reporter feel like his questions weren't a horrific intrusion.
I was only a decade older than Raymond would have been when I covered the trials of Danny Lee Hill and Timothy Combs, the two teenagers convicted of his murder. I came back from a vacation to find out I was the new Warren cops and courts reporter at the Tribune Chronicle. Raymond was killed while I was away.
I got through those trials thanks to the arrogance and ignorance of youth, focusing on the challenges and responsibilities of the job and compartmentalizing everything else. It was 6 years before I would become a parent, and I can't fathom covering those trials as a father.
I've never talked to anyone who had any tangential connection to that case -- lawyers, judges, police officers, hospital employees, fellow journalists -- who didn't consider it one of the most traumatic experiences of their careers. And we were spectators.
Miriam Fife sat in the courtroom for weeks listening to graphic details about what her son endured. If it was me, I would drive blocks out of my way to never see the Trumbull County Courthouse again.
Instead, she made it her life's work to help other victims' families navigate the criminal justice system. From 1989 until she retired in 2014, Miriam Fife worked as a victim advocate through the Trumbull County Prosecutor's Office. No doubt that job meant sharing her experiences over and over and over again.
She took the worst thing that could happen to any parent and turned it into a way to make other victims' burden a little less cumbersome. Miriam Fife could be motherly and comforting, but she also was relentless in seeking justice for the victims she advocated for and for her son's death.
Hill, 18 at the time of the murder, was sentenced to death shortly after Raymond's 13th birthday. Combs, who was six months younger, was ineligible for the death penalty but received three consecutive life sentences.
Combs died in prison in 2018 at age 50. Isaac Fife died in 2006. All three judges who sentenced Hill to death also are deceased. Now Miriam Fife has joined them.
Danny Lee Hill outlived all of them. He remains on death row.
My views on the death penalty and how it is practiced in this country are complicated, but I always understood Miriam Fife's desire to see the verdict carried out that was rendered in 1986.
That desire wasn't fulfilled in her lifetime, which was out of her control. But Miriam Fife took a life cut short and turned it into a life's purpose.
Andy Gray is the entertainment editor of Ticket. Write to him at agray@tribtoday.com.