A Bad Trip

Rebecca Beach had bad taste in men -- and Jose Arevalo was no exception. Sweet-talking, brown-eyed and slender, he had a nice smile and he paid attention to her, which was something she craved. In the spring of 2000, 22-year-old Beach was feeling even more vulnerable than usual. Her brother had died a few months earlier, she was having money problems and she had two small children to feed.

Arevalo, who was a little younger than Beach, started telling her he loved her. He didn't tell her, though, about the time he'd spent in prison on robbery and drug charges. And she didn't take a hint from his nickname, "Rascal." Later, in court, Arevalo's friends would testify that he had used her, lied to her and then dumped her.

But that wasn't the worst of it. Arevalo was a really, really bad boyfriend. According to Beach's later testimony, he plotted a murder and left Beach to take the blame for it.

Now Beach, who had never been in trouble with the law, is sitting in the Topeka Correctional Facility doing life with a hard 20 -- no chance of parole until she's in her early 40s.

Unless a clemency petition filed in May by the University of Kansas Law School is successful, Beach will have decades to wish she had never met Arevalo.

Beach's life had started to go bad months before, on January 15, 2000, when police visited the Raytown home that Beach and her two young children shared with Beach's mother, Carla Simpson. It was about 3 a.m. Beach didn't hear the knocking, but she woke up to the sound of her mother screaming. Officers had just informed Simpson that her son, Beach's 20-year-old brother, Joseph Beach, known as "Bo," had been shot and killed at a house in Kansas City, Kansas.

The killing appeared to be drug-related, and police later arrested two men in connection with the shooting. A brief in The Kansas City Star with the headline "Man Slain" said Joseph Beach Jr. had been the city's third homicide of the year. The family buried Rebecca Beach's brother a few days after she turned 22.

Beach and her younger brother had always been close. They'd navigated a rough childhood that left Beach seeking love and attention from any man who'd give it to her. As grade schoolers growing up in the Argentine neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas, they'd watched their alcoholic father yell at and hit their mother, then rip the phone out of the wall so she couldn't call the police. After the family moved to Roeland Park when Beach was in fifth grade, the other girls made fun of her clothes and stuck gum in her hair on the bus. When an older boy offered her a ride home from Taco Bell one afternoon when she was 13, she let him take her to his house to watch a movie and ended up fighting him off when he tried to rape her, she says.

By the time she was 15, she wasn't doing well in school anymore. Soon, she met a guy at the mall, a 19-year-old who drove a convertible. She got pregnant and dropped out of school but broke up with him when he grew possessive and started fights over her. Then, before her son was born, she started dating a guy named Joey Burke, whom she'd known from Argentine. He treated her decently, and when Dylan was born he acted like a father -- as much as a teenage boy could. She got pregnant again, and by 16 she had a daughter, Maranda. She and Burke didn't have much money, and they constantly moved in and out of friends' and relatives' homes with their kids. In the mid-'90s, they split up, and Beach lived with Burke's parents for a while.

"My kids forced me to grow up," Beach says. Though she couldn't provide them with the most stable home, she spent almost all of her spare time with them and tried to make sure they didn't have to go through the same sort of childhood she'd had. Family photos show Beach in the backyard on Easter, smiling as her kids collect colored eggs in baskets. And on New Year's Eve 2000, all three of them are dancing around the living room in their pajamas. "They had to wake me up at midnight," Simpson recalls.

After Bo's death, Beach's mother fell apart. She temporarily quit the waitressing job she'd held for four years, because she couldn't handle breaking down in tears every time regular customers asked how she was doing. She started doing meth, and she would take the family's only vehicle -- Bo's car -- and drive to North Kansas City to hang out at Harrah's, Argosy Casino and the Isle of Capri, leaving Beach unable to get to her job at Wal-Mart. "I didn't have any money, but you can sometimes find money in the machines, so I'd do that and just wander around there so I didn't have to go home," Simpson says. "I hated going home. I hated thinking about it."

"I was the one that had to be strong and keep everything together," Beach recalls. But with no car and no one to care for her own children and her brother's daughter, Beach lost her job. The bank started threatening to foreclose on the family's Raytown house.