Everything Changed. And Nothing Changed.
What Sitting Across From My Mother's Murderer Taught Me About Restorative Justice
By Casie Ellison | Filmmaker, What Good May Come
There are moments in life that divide everything into a before and an after.
Sometimes, we recognize them as they're happening.
Other times, we spend nearly forty years trying to understand what happened in a room we were too young to remember.
I was thirteen months old when my mother was murdered.
I was in the bed with her.
For almost four decades, that was the beginning of my story. A tragedy I couldn't remember, a mother I couldn't know, and a lifetime of questions no one could answer.
I grew up in the aftermath of a crime that didn't just take my mother's life. It shaped mine.
It influenced how I loved, how I grieved, how I understood safety, and how I learned to survive in a world where the person who was supposed to protect me was suddenly gone.
And for most of my life, I didn't even know how to explain what was missing.
How do you grieve someone you never had the opportunity to know?
How do you miss a voice you cannot remember?
How do you mourn a relationship that was stolen before it had the chance to become one?
And perhaps the question that haunted me most:
How do you heal from something when you don't even know what happened?
The Confession That Changed Everything
In July 2026, nearly forty years after my mother's murder, the man responsible came forward.
His name is Gary.
For decades, my mother's murder had remained unsolved. And suddenly, the person who held the answers to the questions I had carried my entire life was no longer an unknown figure in the shadows.
He was a person.
A living, breathing human being who remembered a night that had defined my existence.
He remembered my mother.
And he remembered me.
I cannot adequately describe what it feels like to learn that someone else has been carrying the memory of the worst moment of your life while you've spent your entire existence trying to piece it together.
His confession did not bring my mother back.
It did not give me the childhood I should have had.
It did not erase the grief, the abandonment, the confusion, or the countless nights I spent silently mourning someone I desperately wanted to know.
But it gave me something I had never had before.
The possibility of answers.
Sitting Across From the Man Who Murdered My Mother
I was given an opportunity I never imagined I would have.
I could meet Gary.
Not through a courtroom proceeding. Not through an attorney speaking on his behalf. Not through a police report or someone else's interpretation of what happened.
I could sit across from him.
I could look him in the eyes.
And I could ask him anything.
I had an hour.
An hour with the man whose actions had changed the trajectory of my entire life.
I prepared myself for the worst.
I prepared for dishonesty, deflection, excuses, indifference, and the possibility that I would leave with more questions than I brought into the room.
What I had not fully considered was the possibility of the most benevolent outcome.
That he might answer me.
That I might finally understand.
That the conversation could end not because our time had expired, but because I had nothing left to ask.
And that is what happened.
For the first time in nearly forty years, I was no longer standing outside the story of my mother's death, desperately searching for someone to tell me what happened.
I had been allowed to ask.
I had been allowed to hear.
I had been allowed to know.
And something inside me became quiet.
Not because what happened was suddenly acceptable.
Not because my mother's death was any less horrific.
But because the questions that had followed me throughout my life no longer needed to be chased.
I had spent nearly forty years searching for answers. And for the first time, I could stop searching.
I asked Gary everything I wanted to know, and he answered all the questions I had, to the best of his ability, until I had no more questions to ask.
Restorative Justice Is Not the Absence of Accountability
I think this is where conversations about restorative justice become uncomfortable.
We live in a world that often asks us to choose between justice and compassion, as though acknowledging someone's humanity somehow excuses their actions.
But those things are not mutually exclusive.
I can recognize the gravity of what Gary did.
I can believe that he should be held accountable.
I can grieve my mother for the rest of my life.
And I can also recognize the significance of his decision to come forward and confess.
I can be grateful that he answered my questions.
I can acknowledge his humanity without diminishing my mother's.
I do not have to forgive the murder to appreciate the confession.
And I don't have to defend, explain, or even decide what forgiveness means to me.
Restorative justice, in my experience, was not about pretending that something terrible could be made right.
It was about acknowledging that the consequences of a crime extend far beyond the act itself.
They live in families.
In relationships.
In children who grow into adults.
In unanswered questions.
In the quiet places where grief goes when nobody wants to hear it anymore.
Accountability matters. Community safety matters. The legal consequences of violence matter.
But so does the human being left to live with what happened.
And sometimes, what that person needs cannot be delivered by a verdict alone.
Sometimes, they need to be heard.
Sometimes, they need to ask why.
Sometimes, they need to reclaim ownership of a story that has always belonged to someone else.
The Little Girl Who Was Never Allowed to Grieve
One of the most difficult things I've come to understand about my own life is that I didn't just lose my mother.
For much of my childhood, I also lost the freedom to grieve her.
Grief can be inconvenient to people who are trying to survive their own pain.
Families move forward. People rebuild. Life continues.
And sometimes, the child left behind learns that her sadness is too heavy, too uncomfortable, or too disruptive for the people around her.
So she learns to be quiet.
She learns to carry it privately.
She becomes an adult who knows how to function, how to perform, how to take care of everyone else, and how to make it look like she's okay.
But the little girl never stopped wanting her mother.
And the adult woman never stopped carrying her.
I have spent much of my life trying to understand myself through the lens of what happened to me.
But after sitting with Gary, I began to recognize something I hadn't fully understood before.
I am allowed to have a life that is bigger than the worst thing that ever happened to me.
My mother's murder will always be part of my story.
But it does not have to be the only story I know how to tell.
-Watch the WJCT NEWS 89.9 First Coast Connect interview with Ryan Backmann, Founder and Executive Director of Project: Cold Case and Casie Ellison
Bringing My Experience to the University of Florida
On October 30, 2026, I had the distinct honor of participating in the 2026 Restorative Justice Conference at the University of Florida, following a personal invitation from Florida State Attorney Melissa Nelson.
I was invited to speak from the perspective of someone who had lived through the long-term consequences of violent crime and had recently experienced a deeply personal restorative conversation.
Not as a legal scholar.
Not as a prosecutor.
Not as someone who had spent a career studying theories of justice.
But as the little girl who survived that room.
Now an adult woman, a mother, and a storyteller, I had the opportunity to speak about what accountability, understanding, and healing can look like beyond the traditional boundaries of our justice system.
I wanted people to understand that restorative justice is not a replacement for accountability, nor is it a universal solution.
It is an opportunity.
An opportunity for victims and survivors, when they choose and when appropriate safeguards are in place, to have a voice in a process that has so often been defined by what happened to them rather than what they need afterward.
And I wanted people to understand something else.
The most meaningful outcome of my experience was not that I changed Gary. It was that something changed in me.
Everything Changed. And Nothing Changed.
My mother is still dead.
I still cannot call her.
I cannot introduce her to my children.
I cannot ask her what I was like as a baby or whether she would be proud of the woman I've become.
There are birthdays, holidays, ordinary afternoons, and a lifetime of memories we will never share.
None of that changed.
But something else did.
I know more about what happened.
I no longer have to imagine every possible version of that night.
I have answers to questions that once felt impossible to answer.
And perhaps most importantly, I have a new understanding of what it means to move forward.
For years, I thought healing might mean finally making peace with what happened.
But I am beginning to understand that peace doesn't require me to approve of the past.
It doesn't require me to forget.
It doesn't even require forgiveness.
Sometimes, peace is simply reaching a place where the past no longer demands every remaining moment of your future.
Everything changed. And nothing changed.
Both things can be true.
What Good May Come
Long before I knew my mother's case would finally move forward, I began creating a film called What Good May Come.
It is a story about grief, survival, identity, love, loss, and the extraordinary human capacity to keep searching for hope when life has given us every reason to stop.
At the time, I couldn't have known how closely the story I was telling would intersect with the life I was living.
I was trying to understand what good could possibly come from so much pain.
I was trying to make something meaningful out of the things I could not change.
And then, in the middle of telling that story, my own story changed.
I have learned that good does not have to justify the terrible things that came before it.
There is no silver lining that makes my mother's murder worthwhile.
There is no lesson valuable enough to make her death necessary.
I would trade every profound realization, every opportunity, and every accomplishment to have had my mother alive.
But I cannot change what happened.
What I can do is decide what happens next.
I can use my voice.
I can share my experience.
I can advocate for a justice system that recognizes the needs of survivors as human beings, not simply as witnesses to crimes.
I can help create space for conversations about grief, trauma, accountability, and compassion that are too often reduced to simple answers.
And I can tell other survivors that healing does not have to look the way anyone else expects it to.
The Baby Survived
There is something I said while preparing to share my story that has stayed with me.
I was thirteen months old when my mother was murdered.
I was in the bed with her.
For almost forty years, I lived with the consequences of something I couldn't remember and couldn't understand.
There was a little girl inside me who spent her entire life wanting her mother.
And wanting answers.
Today, I have them.
I cannot change what happened.
I cannot bring my mother back.
I cannot give my grandmother the peace of knowing what I know today.
But I can honor my mother's life without spending every remaining day of mine fighting her death.
I can recognize accountability without pretending that justice has made us whole.
And I can begin to understand myself as more than the little girl who survived that room.
Because the baby survived.
I am her.
And now that I have answers, I get to decide who she becomes.
Maybe that is what restorative justice gave me.
Not forgiveness.
Not closure in the tidy, comforting way people like to imagine it.
But something I had been missing for almost forty years.
The freedom to stop searching for the beginning of my story and finally begin writing what comes next.
And perhaps that is what good may come.
With gratitude to State Attorney Melissa Nelson, the individuals who made this restorative conversation possible, and the organizers and participants of the 2026 Restorative Justice Conference at the University of Florida.
For my mother, Melissa “Missy” Taylor Ellison. Your life was more than the way it ended. And mine will be, too.
Casie Ellison
Writer, Director & Creator — What Good May Come
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