Caught In the Wake

In the unbearably hot and sticky fall of 2007, Diane Diamante's uncontrollable temper ran away from her...and it was her mother Margaret who paid the ultimate price for her daughter's insane rage...

Caught in the Wake: A Story of Murder and Denial begins in summer, 2007, with Diane Diamante sitting in the Borgess Medical Center in Kalamazoo, Michigan, mumbling and blinking next to her mother Margaret's bruised and broken comatose body. Diane shakes her head and whispers "No, no, no." She seldom speaks, and when the doctors and nurses ask what happened, she has nothing to say. Later, the authorities will charge fifty-six year old Diane Diamante with the brutal murder of eighty-seven-year-old Margaret Diamante.

How did the family get to this point?

As their family grew, Dr. Paul and Margaret Diamante maintained the veneer of the perfect Republican-Catholic country club family. But the façade cracked as the father squandered his fortune until what remained was only money sufficient for his children to fly to Michigan to witness the result of his years of mysterious spending. Margaret received only her husband's debt. Diane's dangerous relationship with her mother, of need and abuse, worsened from the time of Paul's death in 1995 to her savage beating on an August night in 2007. Hadn't her sister Marianne and brother Patrick committed Diane four times in the last ten years? Yet each time Margaret released Diane saying that she was fine.

Margaret and Paul's mantra everyone's fine was strictly fantasy, of course. When Diane jumped naked on the hood of the family car in a fit of unholy rage, her mother yelled at Patrick to "run her over!" The Diamante family home declined structurally, emotionally, and physically into a place of domestic violence after the death of the children's father. This downturn and denial proved to be lethal, and shortly after they lowered their mother's casket into the ground the Diamante children were left with anger and confusion for both the living and the dead.