Galina Trefil: Post 14

I am Galina. I'm the daughter of a serial killer and I need your help.

In 1969, my mother, Kande, was on the road to getting famous in the Bay Area. Then she quit suddenly. She's never given much of an explanation why, but she completely went off the public radar. She moved to the Navajo Reservation near Flagstaff and stayed there for the next seven years.

As a little girl, I remember her telling me that she opened her front door one morning and found a human skull on her doorstep. My mother has always had a morbid fascination with death. She did not report this to law enforcement.

She claimed that "a friend" gave her other skulls in the future, presumedly stolen from abandoned hogans on the Res. That's her story, anyway.

The first day that I introduced my father to Athena Bolton, who now works at the DA's office, my mother was there. Though Athena was a complete stranger to her, Kande began enthusiastically speaking to her about her collection of human skulls. I believe that the number of skulls that she claimed to have in her possession was four. She laughed to Athena that she had, back in the 1980s, placed a woman's skull in the Mendocino Freebox outside the Health Food Store. My mother was a massive Freebox fan in those days, and routinely took and deposited things there. Kande found it very mirthful that the police were called to investigate the head. After depositing the head, she said that she drove to work. At the time, I think that she was a kindergarten teacher at Redwood Elementary.

I am asking for those that were my mother's students to wrack their brains here. Do you remember this? When Kande was a teacher at Dana Gray Elementary, I many times saw, and so did hundreds of others, that she had a human skull in her classroom. He had no name, so I called him "Otis." There have been numerous stories about where Otis comes from, but none are consistent. My mother enjoyed "refleshing" Otis--that is, putting clay onto the skull to recreate his features when alive. When I was growing up, one of the many reasons that I didn't dare come forward was because...well...this was a fourth grade teacher keeping a human skull in plain sight. The teachers knew. Students knew. She played it off as perfectly natural that she had it, and I know that there are places to legally obtain body parts...but still...THIS WAS A HUMAN SKULL IN PLAIN SIGHT AND NO ONE DID ANYTHING. I knew that if I created a big problem about it, I might wind up being sent to live in The Tomb, so I just learned to live with it. In the classroom, live with it. Live with Otis' skull sitting inches from where my mother did her makeup every morning.

The DA's Office obviously knows about the skull collection. I say again, why is nothing happening?

Worst case scenario, these are murder victims. Best case scenario, they are Indigenous remains that have been disrespected to an unfathomable degree.

This is not okay.

Below I include a picture of myself in third grade with a plastic skull which I had refleshed under my mother's tutelage. She refleshed Otis in the same way. My mother had hundreds of students over the years. Someone has to remember seeing something similar in her classroom.