NEWS

After agonizing search, Kayla Mueller's parents now look for her in the only way they can

Karina Bland
The Republic | azcentral.com
Kayla Mueller

PRESCOTT — In the bottom of the closet in Kayla Mueller’s bedroom, at the end of the hallway in the house where she once lived, sits a trunk dotted with decals. Inside the lid is a sticker: "War is expensive. Peace is priceless." Below it are her journals, stacked neatly, one on top of the other, for safekeeping.

Her parents don’t know how many there are for certain; she was always writing in one. The most recent ones she left behind on a visit home from Turkey.

She filled their pages with details of her travels — the people she met, the conditions she encountered — and her thoughts on all of it.

None of Kayla’s journals from the days in 2013 leading up to her kidnapping in Syria or the 18 months she was held captive by the Islamic State have been returned to Carl and Marsha Mueller, Kayla's parents.

In the past year, her father has begun to read the journals in the trunk.

He read through one journal and then got halfway through a second before he stopped. It’s difficult. Because as he reads, he can hear his daughter’s voice. He misses her terribly.

“I will have to get back to those,” Carl said. “I will have to read all of those.”

The journals are precious to the Muellers because they were precious to their daughter, who took great care in what she held precious.

Kayla never really cared much about things.

She bought her clothes at the Disabled American Veterans thrift store in Prescott — and then donated clothes back. She didn’t have a cellphone, almost unimaginable for a 26-year-old. She cut her own hair.

Kayla cared more about other things in life. She traveled into some of the most dangerous parts of the world, areas scarred by poverty and violence, to help people in need.

When she came home, her backpack was filled with presents for family and friends. When she left, it was packed with homemade brownies and gifts for the people she would see next.

She kept journals, but not much else.

Now, in the year since ISIS announced that Kayla had been killed in a Jordanian airstrike and U.S. officials confirmed her death, things are all her parents have left of her.

Not things that she bought, nor things that would be of any real value to anyone else. Things like the journals. Letters. The books she read and kept in her bookcase.

Things that will have to do.

'Is she really gone?'

Carl and Marsha Mueller never got the chance to bury their daughter.

“People talk about closure in situations like this," Carl said. "The word is often mentioned but seldom explained.”

Of course the Muellers know what happened.

The early morning phone call the day after Kayla was abducted on Aug. 4, 2013, as she left a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria.

The secret kept for almost 18 agonizing months as they emailed back and forth with their daughter’s captors in hopes of securing her release.

And then with no warning, the militants’ announcement on social media on Feb. 6, 2015, that their daughter was dead, reportedly crushed by rubble of a building targeted in a bombing.

“We are still hopeful that Kayla is alive,” the Muellers had said in a statement that night.

And then the militants sent them an email containing three photographs of their daughter, pale and still.

“You don’t have that body to bury or to cremate, to know that she’s really gone," Carl said. "There’s always those dreams, always those thoughts that ISIS lied to us, that for some reason, they kept her.”

ISIS militants often staged mock executions. Maybe that’s what happened with Kayla.

“Is she really gone?” Marsha said. “We don’t really have any proof that she truly is. I think that’s the hard thing for us.”

Even a year later, it is difficult for her parents to believe.

The things that are left

"Let me show you something," Marsha said, going into Kayla's bedroom at the end of the hall. Books are crammed into the bookcase on one side of the wide bed, a big window on the other. In here are Kayla's things.

Thick letters stuffed in envelopes with foreign stamps.

Printed copies of emails, preserved in a binder.

Birthday cards she made, never store-bought.

Pictures she painted. One of a Hawaiian island on a piece of cardboard. Flip it over and there’s the beginnings of a painting of Gandhi. Another of sunflowers.

And her journals.

In the carefully packed trunk in Kayla’s bedroom closet, they found a lined sheet of notebook paper on which Kayla had written a list of thoughts.

    Living and working with people
    Survival is triumph of the human spirit.
    Risks/adventure
    Seize moment/sip wine
   Transform
    Allure of travel
   Parts of you you didn’t know existed
   Gaze more closely at the wonders around us

There wasn’t an actual thing on the list. For her parents, it confirmed what they knew of their daughter and her plan of what she would do with her life.

In an email just before Kayla was kidnapped, she wrote to her mother of her faith in God, her own idealism and how she had purposely built a life so she could do the things she believed were just.

“Just think of what she could have accomplished,” Marsha said.

A playground takes shape in Prescott to honor slain ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller

Kayla was saving to go back to college to get a master’s degree, either in conflict resolution or peace studies.

“Imagine all the good she would have done,” her mother said.

It’s all there in her things.

'All my everything'

Kayla was close to her parents. Though she was away more often than she was home. Kayla traveled often to places where phone service was spotty and Internet access rare, she kept in close contact with family and friends. She called when she could, her smiling face filling the computer screen.

But mostly Kayla wrote. She was a prolific writer, sending home long letters in envelopes with foreign stamps. She and Marsha emailed back and forth, each filling in the other in the details of their days.

Eric Mueller hugs his mother, Marsha, during a playground groundbreaking at Pioneer Park in Prescott on Jan. 29, 2016, honoring his sister, American hostage Kayla Mueller. Kayla, aid worker,  was confirmed dead almost on year ago.

In one letter to her dad, she tried to explain why she had such a hard time relating to people her own age back in the States. After what she had seen on her travels, their complaints about hard classes or poor cellphone coverage seemed frustratingly trivial.

Kayla wanted to be where the suffering was the worst, so she could help and comfort those who needed it most.

But the Muellers worried about their daughter. During a conversation over Skype when Kayla was in Turkey, working with Syrian refugees on the border, Carl reminded his daughter that the civil war raging there was not hers to fight.

“I had told Kayla that this was not her war, and she didn’t need to die for that war,” he said.

Kayla paused for a moment and responded, “You’re right. I would never lay claim to something as barbaric as war.”

It was not long after that phone call that the Muellers stopped hearing from Kayla. There were no more calls, no more letters and no more emails. Not from Kayla.

The only emails the Muellers received were from her captors. It was this communication back and forth that gave them hope that Kayla would be released.

The militants demanded a ransom, millions of dollars. The Muellers are modest people. Carl had owned an auto body shop before he retired. Marsha was a nurse.

The long-standing U.S. policy was not to pay ransoms for hostages, and the Muellers were cautiously warned against paying a ransom themselves. They could only wait, and worry.

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'No matter how long it takes'

As the Muellers worked with government officials to find their daughter from 7,400 miles away, FBI agents guiding their efforts, Marsha kept writing to Kayla.

In notebooks, she kept careful notes of what happened, of who came to the house and what people said and did, and how much they loved her. Marsha thought her daughter would want to know. She addressed each entry to Kayla.

“When she came home, I was going to give it all to her so she would know everything that happened,” she said.

The Muellers would receive two more letters from Kayla, handwritten on paper smuggled to them by other hostages who had been released.

They are among the most precious things they have of hers now. Her words, the pieces of paper that she had held, now in their hands.

In the first letter, Kayla wrote that she was safe, of her faith in God and her love for her family. She assured them she was strong: “None of us could have known it would be this long but know I am also fighting from my side in the ways I am able + I have a lot of fight left inside of me. I am not breaking down + I will not give in no matter how long it takes.”

In the second letter, she wrote that she dreams of her family every night: “It's warmth enough for me to wake with a smile. Warmth enough to keep me company through the days, and warmth enough to keep my heart near to home and therefore to God …”

Both were signed, “All my everything, Kayla.”

Marsha continued to write, even after her daughter was killed. Now her notebooks are filled with questions and their search for answers. She writes about the people they have met, the places they have gone, and the things they have learned.

Notebooks are stacking up in the closet in Kayla’s old room. In those notebooks, Kayla’s story continues.

Marsha came to the last page in one notebook on Jan. 31 and opened a new one, the 15th in the time since Kayla was taken. In the new notebook, on the first blank page, she wrote the date at the top, Feb. 1, 2016, and then started, “Hey, sweetheart …”

Things from people ...

In the past year, people have sent all sorts of things to the Muellers. Letters and packages from strangers addressed simply, “To the family of Kayla Mueller, Prescott, Arizona” have found their way to their house, even from overseas.

They have received hundreds of cards and letters. People have sent handmade quilts and artwork.

A large painting of Jesus Christ sent from Utah hangs on the wall in the Muellers' living room. A 4-foot-tall cross made from wood from Texas, carved with Kayla’s name, stands by a tree in the backyard.

“We just look out the window, and we see that,” Marsha said. It reminds them of Kayla, whose faith in God was unwavering, even in the depths of her ordeal. Her parents know that from her letters.

“Throughout her captivity, she never questioned her calling or blamed anyone else for her plight,” Marsha said.

Someone sent Marsha a little card that she uses as a bookmark. On it, it says, “Give me the heart of the child and the awesome courage to live it out.”

“That’s how Kayla was,” her mother said. “She just never lost her heart as a little one who just sees the goodness in the world.”

... and things that happen

Now her parents see Kayla in things that happen in their world.

“I think we see signs of Kayla all the time,” Marsha said.

An unexpected knock on the front door.

When relatives on a cross-country trip showed up at the Muellers’ house a couple of weeks ago, Marsha rose up off the couch to hug them. Normally something unexpected like that would make her panic a little, but she said she felt a nudge telling her to relax.

“That’s Kayla telling me to go with the flow,” Marsha said. Her daughter had been like that and had urged her mom to do the same.

“Just go with the flow, mom. Just go with it and make it work,” Kayla would tell her mom. Marsha says she’s getting better at it.

She told Carl she heard weather officials had named a winter storm “Kayla.” A day or two later, it snowed in Prescott.

“There’s Kayla,” Marsha said.

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The owls

And then there are the owls in the backyard behind their ranch house with creamy siding, sitting on an acre along a curvy mountain road.

The trees around the Muellers’ house are filled with birds. But for years, there had been two owls in particular, both great horned owls, which had regularly visited, settling on the top of a wooden power pole out back.

Kayla would watch for them. There was something about the birds, the ease with which they took flight, the way their eyes seemed to take everything in that she liked.

When she was still in high school, Kayla had claimed the owl as her “spirit animal.” Just before she graduated from Northern Arizona University in 2009, she had an owl feather tattooed on her right side.

The owls around their house would come and go, Marsha said, but it seemed almost magical how the owls would turn up on the exact days that Kayla was expected to arrive.

“It seemed like when she was coming home, the owls not only showed up but would fly over us and stick around,” Marsha said.

After Kayla went missing, so did the owls for the most part.

One owl turned up on Sept. 21, 2014 — Marsha remembers the date because she wrote it in her notebook — and then there were two early on the morning of Oct. 10, 2014.

Carl and Marsha kept watch for them, out past a free-standing garage and at the top of a power pole, but never saw them again.

There seemed to be owls everywhere else.

In the year since Kayla's death, a friend hung a small portrait of an owl at Northern Arizona University’s campus ministries center, where Kayla once worshiped.

Students at Holbrook High School made buttons with owls and the phrase, “I will never give up, I will always be strong,” words Kayla wrote to her family in that letter.

At the Heritage Park Zoological Sanctuary in Prescott, there is a plaque on the exhibit of a great horned owl named Mr. Wilson that says, “In memory of Kayla Mueller.”

Someone gave the family a carved wooden sculpture of an owl.

Then in August, on the night before Kayla’s birthday, Carl and Marsha heard a screeching and saw a huge bird atop the pole. Maybe a hawk, Marsha thought. Carl got out the binoculars, and she focused them on the bird.

It was an owl, and as she looked at it, it turned its head and looked right back.

'Kayla should be here'

In the past year, the Muellers have found their daughter in themselves.

Kayla was outspoken, speaking passionately about the causes she believed in. Now her parents have been speaking, mostly to Kiwanis Clubs (of which Carl is a longtime member and past president of the Kiwanis Club of Prescott), but also to a growing number of human-rights groups.

"One person of extreme faith, extreme compassion and extreme courage can make a difference in this world," Carl told members of the American Human Rights Council in Dearborn, Mich., in April.

Marsha accepted the group’s Special Humanitarian Tribute of Honor award for Kayla. “Please, when you think of Kayla,” she said, “think of the good she brought to this world. Help us carry on Kayla's legacy through sowing seeds of compassion, kindness and peace."

The Muellers went to Madrid, Spain, to speak at a conference attended mostly by Catholics. This month, they will attend a meeting of the Syrian American Medical Society in Florida to learn more about the situation that drew their daughter there.

In this May 30, 2013, photo, Kayla Mueller is shown after speaking to a group in Prescott.

“We’re committed to stories about Kayla, who she was and what she wanted to do, and finding the truth about what happened,” Carl said.

“Kayla should be here. With all my heart, I believe that,” Marsha said.

So they will continue her work.

With money raised through Kayla’s foundation, Kayla’s Hands, the Muellers hope to support the causes that were important to their daughter: children, women, veterans, education.

“Whether it’s here or overseas, we want to just do good,” Marsha said. “We want to do what Kayla would want. That’s where Kayla’s heart was.”

So far, most of their efforts have been for a playground to honor Kayla being built not far from their house by the Kiwanis Club of Prescott.

Kiwanis Club members from around the world have contributed, along with individuals and other organizations. They are close to raising the $232,000 needed to finish the project. It could be completed by May.

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Finding Kayla

There will be no more journals to read after the ones in the trunk in the bottom of Kayla’s bedroom closet.

Kayla had continued to write in captivity, according to accounts given to the Muellers, but the journals had been destroyed.

For an agonizing 18 months the Muellers searched for their daughter before learning they may never find her. They have spent this year looking for her all around them, in the things they can touch and hold and in the situations in which they find themselves.

The things — the fundraising, the speeches, the playground — are solid and real.

Marsha drives by the playground site often and sees the purple banner with Kayla’s picture and name, “Kayla’s Hands Playground.” It catches her every time, she said, pressing a hand against her chest.

Carl Mueller and his wife, Marsha, speak during a playground groundbreaking at Pioneer Park in Prescott honoring their daughter, American hostage Kayla Mueller.

In Kayla’s last letter home, she wrote that she couldn’t wait to see her niece, her brother Eric’s 4-year-old daughter. “…we can play, make music together and have so much fun.”

Her niece, who looks a lot like her Aunt Kayla, will play on the playground.

It will be a permanent place where they can go and remember Kayla since they have no marker, no grave. It will be a place alive, with children playing, families together, and laughter.

They will find Kayla there.

Reach Bland at karina.bland@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8614.