MARY ELIZABETH BAILEY

Sitting in her house in Gastonia, North Carolina, Mary Elizabeth Bailey – who as a child was directed by her mother to shoot her abusive stepfather to death – espouses forgiveness as key to a fulfilled life.

“Forgiveness is the absolute,” says Mary, whose book My Mother’s Soldier describes the darkness of her life when she should have been a carefree schoolchild.

“You cannot move on with your life if you do not forgive the people in your past,” says Mary, whose faith has helped her through the unimaginable terror that occurred when she was 11 and the after-effects that exiled her to a life as a rootless foster child.

“What happened to me, I can’t continue to blame people,” she says. “As I move through life, I try to keep that in mind: Jesus forgave people. I’m not perfect, but I try and offer grace. That’s why I’ve forgiven my mother.”

Her mother — who she refers to as “Veronica” in the book, because she never viewed the woman, who birthed her after an affair with a married man, as “Mom” — put the murder weapon in Mary’s little hands and ordered her to go kill her stepfather.

“Willard” was violent and abusive to Veronica as well as to his small children and especially to his stepdaughter. 

Veronica put the gun in Mary’s hands three times. The first two times, she had forgotten to release the safety before dispatching her daughter to kill Willard, who was passed out.

“I remember every detail,” says Mary, now 44. “I remember the shock because it took three times for the weapon to fire. I remember when the fire came out of the end of it.”

Veronica at first tried to convince authorities her daughter had acted on her own, but that lie didn’t work, and she ended up doing time.  The forgiveness, central to this book and Mary’s life, led this remarkable young woman to speak in Veronica’s support during a parole hearing.

“I had forgiven her for those things,” she says. “It wasn’t that it was changing to a loving mother-daughter relationship.”

This young woman, who earned a nursing degree, hasn’t seen Veronica in 25 years, but “she has texted me a few times, wanting money.”

Mary — who, with her ex-husband of 20 years, co-owns a thriving uniform business for nurses and other professionals — has not let her mother, the killing, or her years bouncing through foster care define her.

Instead of bitterness, she harnesses her experiences and uses that knowledge to advocate for children lost in the system. She is planning a foundation to help these kids navigate life, get college scholarships, and realize their potential. Mary also espouses the value of sports as a healing tool for these young people.

“My whole life, I have used sports to help me get away from everything,” says the 5-foot-6, 175-pound backyard sports enthusiast.  “I played every sport possible and thank goodness for that,” she says, listing rugby, basketball, volleyball, track, softball and karate among the sports in which she competed to be the best while also growing and forgiving. “Everything I did, I tried to excel. I wanted people to see that I wasn’t defined by my tragedy.”

Yes, to the reader, at least up until the time Willard dies, this is the story of tragedy and trauma. Mary says that the process of writing it, using 30 VHS tapes of testimony from her mother’s trial, helped set her free. She was given the videos when she was 15, but she just stored them away until she was 32 and ready.

“It was a part of my life that I struggled so long to deal with,” she says. “I wasn’t sure how people would judge me. But, as you become an adult, you realize that people become supportive. Everybody has a past, even those with ‘Beaver Cleaver’ or ‘Little House on the Prairie’ childhoods.”

Finally watching the videos, she realized her life offers lessons, and “I became very passionate about writing a book” to demonstrate to foster children and others stalled in hopelessness how faith and forgiveness can open the way for brighter futures.

When exploring how to get the book out, her faith led her to Trilogy Christian Publishers in California. It took one day, one reading, for the publishers to go from “don’t get your hopes up” to “we’re going to publish this book.”

As for happy endings: Her life of forgiveness and of praying for “real parents” paid off when Mary was 33 and invited for Thanksgiving by one of her former foster families.

“I went inside their house, and they held my hand and they said: ‘We want to know if we can adopt you. We want to be your parents. We want us to be family.’

 “My whole life I had wanted it. Now I have people I call ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad.’”

June 13, 2022 People Magazine Investigates aired a television documentary titled “Mother’s Orders” which details Mary’s journey to forgiveness.

In the June 20, 2022 issue of People Magazine, pages 80-83, entitled “My Mother Made Me Kill My Father,” the national magazine describes 11-year-old Mary Bailey’s being forced by her mother to shoot her stepfather and the struggles Mary endured through the foster care system and the forgiveness she found in adulthood.

###