Cammy Wilberger speaks candidly about the past and the future

Cammy Wilberger’s 15-minute commute from her Veneta home to the elementary school in west Eugene where she teaches third grade takes her by the spot where she first heard her daughter Brooke was missing almost two years ago. Each time, it brings an unsettling feeling.

“It was a nice, warm spring day — like this,” she said a week ago, looking out the window in her classroom at Fairfield School. She had just finished a series of parent-teacher conferences and was looking forward to a quiet evening at home.

“Conferences are kind of hard for me. Everybody’s so kind. They ask how I’m doing, which is really nice,” she said, a moist glimmer spreading across her eyes. But each expression of concern unleashes the memories of May 24, 2004, all over again.

“I was driving home from school and called Brooke on her cell phone like I always did,” Cammy said.

Her son Spencer, however, answered.

When she asked to speak to Brooke, he said Brooke was gone.

The 19-year-old who had recently finished her freshman year at Brigham Young University was cleaning lampposts in front of a Corvallis apartment complex managed by her sister and brother-in-law, Stephani and Zak Hansen. But when Stephani went to check on her around noon, all she found were Brooke’s flip-flop sandals and a cleaning bucket.

Spencer told Cammy the police had arrived and that she ought to come, too.

Trying not to panic, she immediately called home to ask her youngest daughter, 13-year-old Jessica, to start packing their bags for a possible overnight trip to Corvallis.

The next few days and weeks were a chaotic blur of meetings with police, the FBI, hundreds of volunteer searchers and the media. She and her husband Greg, both Oregon State University graduates, soon became a familiar sight on television broadcasts, and Corvallis quickly claimed them as their own.

Fellow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout the region organized an army of volunteers, brought meals to the family and did all they could to support search efforts. The rest of the community also sprang into action.

“The entire town came together in a very unique and powerful way,” she continued. “I really have tender feelings toward the people of Corvallis. People did things I’m not even aware of. It really was overwhelming.”

As the two-year anniversary of Brooke’s disappearance approaches, Cammy is eager to express her gratitude to the community for all that was done to try to find Brooke — an opportunity that will come Tuesday night in a presentation at Oregon State University’s LaSells Stewart Center. She spoke with the Gazette-Times about coping with the loss of her daughter, her expectations for justice and how this ordeal has deepened her faith.

Positive attitudes

Anyone who’s seen the fliers, billboards and buses with Brooke’s picture on them would recognize the same warm smile that frequently flashes across her mother’s face. A genuine expression of Cammy’s love for life, her smile is also a reflection of the deep faith she’s developed during two years of wrestling with the pain of losing a child.

“To say that we’ve gone smoothly through this would not be true,” Cammy said. “It’s been a struggle. And yet we’ve tried to stay positive for ourselves and for our family.

“You can’t keep asking why bad things happen to good people because you’ll never get the answer.”

Citing her favorite Bible passage in Proverbs 3:5-6, which says “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding …” and another in Isaiah 55:9 that describes God’s ways as “higher” than man’s ways, she has tried to understand the divine purpose behind Brooke being taken.

“I haven’t really been angry at God, but I have asked why this had to happen. I have asked ‘How does this fit into the big picture?’”

Cammy believes God has given man free will — the result being evil occurs and God does not always intervene. She doesn’t know why Brooke, the fifth of her six children, was the victim of such a horrible crime.

As tears welled up again, she said, “I know I could never wish that this would have happened to someone else.”

She continues to believe God is a loving God.

“I believe God did not leave Brooke while she was going through what she went through. She would have been praying the whole time and he gave her grace too.”

Hope and justice

After months of hoping for a break in the case, a Benton County grand jury finally issued an indictment in August 2005 against 39-year-old Joel Patrick Courtney of Rio Rancho, N.M., on suspicion of kidnapping and murdering Brooke.

Once Courtney stands trial for the kidnapping and rape of a University of Mexico foreign exchange student, he will be brought to Oregon to begin a new trial here.

Cammy said she and her husband thought they were prepared for an arrest, but when it was announced it was like “a rug had been pulled out from under us — it hit us very hard.

“As a parent, until there was hard evidence otherwise, I didn’t want to accept that Brooke was dead,” she said.

Before the indictment was made public, they knew what was going on behind the scenes from their constant communication with the district attorney’s office. Still, they felt buoyed by the positive atmosphere they felt within the community.

“We knew ourselves there was no more hope, but to see other people lose hope …” Cammy said. “The absence of hope was very noticeable after that. We didn’t know how much the public’s hope had supported us until it was gone.”

No trial date has been set, but the family has begun to prepare. Cammy wants to be in the courtroom every day.

“Brooke doesn’t have a voice,” she said with a firm, but not angry, voice. “I need to be her voice (at the trial).”

She’s not wasted any energy on hating her daughter’s suspected killer. She believes he will be held accountable and that justice will be served, if not through the legal system, then in the afterlife.

“It’s a comfort to me that that’s not my responsibility,” she said, adding that on a certain level she can even forgive Brooke’s assailant because of that sense of spiritual justice.

“I’ll never be able to say it’s OK what he did, but I can see myself looking him in the eye and saying, ‘I feel sorry for you,’” she said.

Even though it will be hard to sit through trial testimony, Cammy said she will focus on the fact Brooke’s ordeal is over, and she’s not suffering.

“I feel really strongly I know where Brooke is and that she’s in a better place now.”

Asked how important it was to find Brooke’s body so they can finally lay her to rest, Cammy said she would rather see justice served than to “play a game with the accused” to find out where she is.

“It would be comforting,” she said. “We would like to bring her home and finish that as a family, but that’s just the fleshly body. I still feel strongly that I know where Brooke is.”

The role of faith

Dealing with the aftermath of what happened to Brooke has been both physically and emotionally draining. Cammy compared it to taking on another full-time job, considering the many hours they spend attending crime victims meetings, responding to well-wishers’ correspondence and speaking requests, setting up a scholarship in Brooke’s memory and monitoring legal details.

“I find my thought process of even dealing with the normal, little things of life is slower than usual. A part of yourself just isn’t there — it’s somewhere else, distracted,” she explained.

For her, the key to coping is reading the Scriptures and praying every day.

Even though the family’s prayers for Brooke to come home safely were not answered the way they wanted, she said, “We’ve still been blessed.

“When I get frustrated about waiting for the trial or whatever … I see that there have been answers to prayer, and I just have to be patient.”

The Wilbergers understand their faith in God might not make sense to some people and might even offend others.

“It’s everybody’s right to question the role of faith,” Cammy said, “but that’s what has sustained us. I don’t know how, without it, we would have gotten through this.”

Brooke is still a very real part of the Wilberger family.

Her room looks the same as when she first came home from BYU two summers ago, though Cammy has placed unopened letters in the room that arrived from her boyfriend, Justin, who was on a two-year mission trip in Venezuela when she disappeared. When he returned, he also left gifts he bought for her in South America, hoping someday she would be able to open them.

Someday, Cammy says, she’ll be able to launder the dirty clothes Brooke left behind. But not yet.

In the meantime, life goes on and according to Mormons’ beliefs about heaven the family expects to be reunited in eternity.

“Sometimes we’re dealt things that are difficult,” Cammy said, “but life is good. We are much stronger than we think we are. You can get through things with the comfort and grace that comes from God.”