'THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING' OR WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?

Mother Of Murder Suspect Talks About Troubled Teen

How many seismic jolts can the human mind endure before it simply shuts
down and ceases to operate? Or, scarier yet, before you go mad?

Alice Pauser wonders about that a lot these days - because frankly, she
says, she and her husband Chuck may be nearing that point.

The first jolt for the Pausers came on Monday afternoon, Feb. 19, when
Alice - a well-known Madison personality and herb connoisseur whose column
"Al's Place" ran in The Capital Times in the late 1980s - was at the
couple' s Fitchburg home and received a call from a friend of their
18-year-old daughter, Genevieve.

Had she heard the news? the youth stammered. Kyle Hachmeister had been
stabbed to death the previous night in the bedroom of his west side home.
Though details were sketchy, the youth said, police suspected that whoever
did it was looking for drugs.

Pauser's body went numb. Her daughter and Kyle Hachmeister had been friends
since their freshman year at West High School in 1996. He'd camped out in
their back yard and horsed around on Genevieve's trampoline and eaten
dinner at their home dozens of times over the years.

Then another thought flashed through her mind. Genevieve had been battling
a drug problem since she was 14 and had hung out in the same crowd as Kyle.
"My God, what if the murderer was now looking for Genevieve?" she wondered.

Hysterical, she called her husband at work "and I just went wild," she
says. "I didn't know what to do."

Then came the second jolt - the one they still haven't recovered from.

The next day, while still frantically trying to contact her daughter - who
had moved out in a huff last October and had been living in an apartment on
the far west side - Alice was informed that Genevieve had been arrested and
was being held in the Dane County Jail. She and three others were key
suspects in Kyle's murder.

Pauser was incredulous. There must be some mistake, she thought. Yes, her
daughter's life had been spinning out of control for some time. She'd been
jailed three times for minor violations of one sort or another. But she and
Kyle had been buddies - though they seemed to have grown apart in the last
year.

The whole thing just didn't seem plausible.

Pauser was too numb to cry, but her body began to shake and she felt a
sharp pain in her stomach. "This isn't happening," she thought. "This can't
be happening."

B

ut it was happening. On March 15, Genevieve Pauser, Corey Ellis, Lindsey
Kopp and Jeremy Greene, the alleged stabber - all 18 - were ordered to
stand trial on first-degree homicide charges.

Both Kopp and Ellis told police that the four had concocted a plan to rob
Hachmeister of money and marijuana. The two men had entered Hachmeister's
home around 1:30 a.m. on Feb. 19 while Pauser and Kopp remained in Pauser's
car.

Hachmeister's bludgeoned body was found a short time later by his mother,
Lorraine, and his stepfather. He'd been stabbed seven times, an autopsy showed.

The case is pending in front of Dane County Circuit Judge Bill Foust.

Today, a month later, the 45-year-old Pauser has finally come to terms with
the situation.

Though still emotionally fragile, Alice has returned to her job as manager
of information services for the Greater Madison Convention and Visitors
Bureau and even manages to laugh now and then, she said in an interview
last week at a downtown coffee shop.

However, "The two most prevalent thoughts in my mind every day are the
sorrow that the Hachmeister family is going through and the fear and grief
that we have over what might happen to our daughter."

She said that, out of respect, she hadn't yet contacted Kyle's mother, but
planned to do so once the trial was over.

She also reflected on how bizarre and unpredictable life can be.

Three years ago this month, I had interviewed Pauser in this same coffee
shop for a column on the difficulties of raising teenagers in today's
permissive society. Genevieve Pauser was 15 at the time and had just gone
through a hellacious 18-month period in which she'd discovered pot, skipped
classes regularly and was seeing a 20-year-old gangbanger from Chicago. In
the column, I used fictitious names to protect her daughter's privacy.

But Alice and Chuck, who have been married 22 years, had somehow survived
that ordeal. They'd gotten counseling, taken the tough love approach and
switched Genevieve - their only child - from West to Edgewood High School.

In a matter of months, both her grades and her behavior had shown marked
improvement - leading Alice and Chuck to believe that the worst was behind him.

But they were merely in the eye of the storm.

Just a few months later, Genevieve and several friends were arrested at a
rave party that had been busted near Lancaster. The Pausers' lives have
been in turmoil ever since.

S

o what went wrong? Why had Genevieve stumbled again after it appeared she'd
turned her life around?

One can only guess, says Pauser, who - after some hesitation - agreed to
cooperate for another column because she felt other parents with rebellious
teens might benefit from it.

If she and Chuck made one mistake, she suggests, it's that they
underestimated the extent of their daughter's psychological addiction to pot.

It was so strong, she says, that even after Genevieve transferred to
Edgewood, she gravitated not to the high achievers, but to the relative few
who dabbled in drugs. (She transferred back to West for her senior year and
managed to graduate on time last June, her mother says.)

Pauser says she's aware some people would scoff at that notion and argue
that pot is not a serious drug.

"Well, maybe for some people it's not an addictive substance, where there's
not a lot of personality change," she says. "But for kids who have a
chemical imbalance and are susceptible to that sort of thing, it destroys
their lives."

Pauser says one of the lowest moment of this whole ordeal was when someone
recently asked her why, if her daughter realized that drugs were messing up
her life, Genevieve just didn't quit taking them.

For a second or two, "I wanted to jump up and down and start screaming,"
Pauser says.

"But rather than get angry, I just thought, 'You don't have a clue as to
what my family has gone through the last five years. You don't know what
it' s like to have a child who can't get past this. She was a good kid but
drugs and alcohol changed everything. It robs you of your soul.' "

And she was a good kid, Pauser emphasizes.

She attended St. James Catholic School through eighth grade, Alice notes,
"and her teachers absolutely loved her. She was a funny, dynamic, little
pup." She was also among the top students in her class - her IQ is in the
140 range, her mother maintains - a superb artist and a talented writer as
well.

"But all those things fell by the wayside when she did drugs," Pauser says.
"Because the motivation was gone. People who have kids who do drugs know
this. When the problem gets really serious, you notice that your child
doesn 't even look the same anymore. There's a physical change as well as
an emotional one. And when we saw those changes in Genevieve, we realized
we were losing her."

P

erhaps not surprisingly, there have been many times in the last five years,
Pauser says, when she and Chuck - who is foreman of grounds and
transportation at the Veterans Administration Hospital - have blamed
themselves for their daughter's behavior.

But now, after talking to counselors, they realize that some kids - for
reasons nobody can explain - get into trouble despite their parents' best
efforts.

Nonetheless, she and her husband are still bewildered by many of the
decisions their daughter made, Pauser says - regardless of whether she
actually had a role in Hachmeister's murder.

Though she's careful not to discuss the case itself, she notes that neither
she nor Chuck had ever heard of Jeremy Greene or Corey Ellis until they saw
their names in newspaper accounts of the murder. (Genevieve and Lindsey
Kopp had been friends for several years.)

Nor were they aware, she says, that their daughter had been working for an
escort service, as a police report indicated.

"We really don't know what that's all about," Pauser says. "I've talked to
her about it, but she's very vague and says she doesn't want to discuss it
with me."

Asked how her daughter is faring, Pauser says she was inconsolable and
suicidal at first. She's recently improved, however, and has apologized
again and again for being such a hellion the last five years, she says.
Unfortunately, her husband is still traumatized by everything that's gone on.

"I mean, this is his pride and joy, his baby girl," she says. "Chuck is, in
my opinion, one of the greatest fathers who ever walked the face of the
Earth. He would lay down his life for this child."

You know, it's funny, Pauser says, "but there are still parts of the day
where there are moments of joy, parts of the day when I think we'll get
past this and she'll come home and ..."

She gazes out the window and smiles through the tears.

"We'll try again."