Astrology Bitch

Terrianne Summers was an amazingly brave transgender veteran living in Jacksonville, Florida when she was murdered in her own drive way while checking mail. We may have heard her name, but do we know her story? Tune in with Aura to learn all about it in this week's episode.

Transcript

Aura Van Dank: 0:04

Y'all remember, when we all bought this pallet and flipped it over and it said that it's not safe for use around eyes. That was a while. I'm putting it on my eyes. Tell me you love me, I need someone. I'm Aura Van Dank. And we're back. You're back. I'm back. It's another week. We're all back here. It's nice. There's still an echo in this room. But last week, you couldn't really hear it. So it's only me who's dealing with that. As you can see, I don't have eyebrows on. I mean, I think you guys probably know at this point that I don't have eyebrows. And it's been quite the week. And I didn't feel like putting on eyebrows just to take them back off for this video. Because to be truthful, I haven't gotten ready at all today to go outside and have not Yes, days go together and make weeks and continue on in that succession until we bed. That's how life works. That is not something that I'm going to put in my podcast. Or perhaps I will, how was your week? Answer that rhetorical question to a person that can't hear you. Go on to it. Now. If you're at work, it's going to be really weird, but I vote that you do it because you should reflect on how well your week has gone. Even if you're reflecting to yourself in the middle of the workday. I think that's healthy this week has been kind of rough. Honestly, I get into like this weird headspace or I start comparing my show to like the success of other shows that have existed or have once come to be and it's just not realistic. You know, we're not the same people posts are different shows are different. You can never base your success off of somebody else's success. But none of us can sit here and say that we don't do that sometimes. So I've been actively trying to not do that this week. But that sometimes makes it a little worse. So that headspace could be better. But hey, here I am being transparent with my camera in a garage. So we're healthy. I reach out to a lot of networks and sometimes if you like that's jumping the gun with my show with where we're collectively at as a mad family. But that's just who I am who we are. And I want to sell that brand. That's the brand I want to sell so my sales pitch is ready and we just stop acting like it's not you miss 100% of the poppers you don't sniff and we need to get sniffing ladies, let's do it. My merge is super cute. All of the dumb shit that I say is eventually going to end up on shirts. I have a lot of memorable content here people this is my desperation plea in crying to you all on the internet help me but would you not wear a shirt that says safe enough to poop here or like a little graphic of a baby smoking a blunt that's like dank baby or something like that. That's too far. I'm going to take this opportunity to get the fuck on with my show. So if you skip my bullshit, then Welcome back. You can start listening now. But also fucky you don't get a shirt with a picture of a baby smoking a blunt on it that's not coming to you with this Christmas. This week. As I was scrolling through one of the many social media groups that I'm a part of for true crime and LGBT type things. I came across a list of names for the Transgender Day of Remembrance from this past year. As I looked through that list, I recognized the name of an activist who I'd heard their case have gone cold for a while, but I'd heard a few years back that there might be some possibility of there being a name or somebody getting arrested in the case. So I decided to try to dive into it because as I remembered there was very, very limited information on the internet surprise surprise about this case. And that still seems to be the case today. Miss terian summers, a transgender activist from Jacksonville, Florida displayed one of the largest amounts of courage I've ever seen some to display in her lifetime. And with all of that bravery activism, protesting it was heartbreaking to see so little media coverage and that's regarding the work Terrianne and didn't her life and the details surrounding Terriannes murder. So I essentially will not even essentially I literally ran a background check ontarian so that I could find information about her which even then was difficult because when arrangements were made her family was not supportive at all of her identity and she was buried under her dead name and documents obituaries anything like that was under a dead name that wasn't available on the internet to find thank god so I had to do a lot of digging to do a background check on Terrianne Summers luckily she had legally changed her name so I did find the Terrianne Summers that I was looking for and found a good bit of information through my background check. Thank you internet. Terrianne was born in 1950 in what I assume was Florida. She was a February baby and an Aquarius which explains her very aggressive stance against authority against conformity and honestly her eccentric fashion taste all of that I credit to her being an Aquarius. I am not girl not an Aquarius. I'm a Leo but astrology bitch. Growing up Terrianne had the quintessential nuclear family if that's what you want to call it, mother, father, daughter, that kind of a situation she wasn't raised to embrace and accept who she was and in fact did not come out as transgender until Far, far Later in her life, meaning Terrianne lived her life as a man for 40 plus years Terrianne went through school in Florida, which sounds pretty fucking awful. No offense, Florida, but I think we all know it's probably pretty awful and once she had gotten through that hell of public school, she joined the Navy right out of high school and went to go live on a boat with a bunch of men and a bunch of deck fame funny, considering that little bit of disdain she had for authority being an Aquarius. Tyrion did very very well in the Navy and quickly rose through the ranks and served a total of 22 years in the Navy, where she absolutely picked up a strict sense of discipline. She always worked towards being her best person looking her best presenting where she lived her best keeping everything clean and tidy, including herself, Terrianne made sure to go out of her way every day to make sure that she was meticulously put together prepared and ready to find a bench if she wanted to. And obviously she wouldn't have done any of this without the very again meticulously teased bang sprayed put into place a nice thick frame 90s glasses she was serving and she always carried around a big purse that would contain if you self defense mechanisms, but that's just me getting a bit ahead of myself. Before we get into her purse arsenal. I will discuss what happened after the military and suddenly you're watching 60 seconds with Orban dank being a very structured person. And then she was in the creature of habit that she was Terrianne still living her life as a man at this point, got out of the Navy and quickly found a wife to marry. And by 1985 they were married, living together and working on creating a family Terrianne and the wife that she'd found quickly had children together and started raising that once again quintessential nucular family and I can't imagine how much this hurt Terrianne because she was clearly not the person that wanted to conform, but a person that was stuck and backed into a corner and had no choice but to conform. For a long time, Terrianne had to live her life in the closet and just focus on being a dedicated parent to her children. But alas, not everything is like Keeping Up With The Kardashians. As much as we all grew up to believe it would be just that it's not in the late 90s, Tyrion really started to explore who she was as a person and her identity. She always knew that she was transgender. But this feeling was different. It was a feeling of not being able to stay alive anymore. She came out and attempted to tell her family that she was transgender to which they responded with moral and physical disgust and completely removed cherry and from their lives. And Marianne was by no means an absentee parent. She was in her children's life from conception birth all the way through adulthood. And they could not come to terms with the fact that their parent was transgender. Terrianne's wife set the rule that Terrianne was to come by the house once a week not meet face to face, but drop off her naval pension check and leave not seeing the kids and not seeing the ex this was the arrangement and as unhappy as Terrianne may have been with that there was nothing that she could do without it by 98. That's where Terrianne had landed in life. She did everything right. She had the discipline, work ethic know how education qualifications, and yet still ended up forking over every penny she made to an ungrateful wife and family and left to hunting for jobs as a transgender woman in the 90s. Marianne would even dress and present male to try to get jobs that she deserved that she was qualified for. Because if she showed up and was transgender people wouldn't have it. And sometimes she would get a job presenting as a man but things would get through the grapevine and Terrianne would end up being fired for being transgender at jobs that she was far far overqualified for, after over a year of all that rejection and jobs that she was overqualified for Terrianne decided to go and get even more qualifications and went to the popular Institute at the time, ITT tech, if you remember that mass and got accreditation through that school, which meant something then and was able to kind of broaden her job search at that point, but still wasn't drawing up much luck because she was transgendered with the structure and the discipline that Marianne had instilled in her, it was clear that she could be running a business or at least close to running her own business. And then after a while, she got to realize that and by 1998, started actually making correspondence and moves with a very successful IT consulting company, and from what it looked like she was going to be doing some contracting work for them and join as some level of a partner. But unfortunately, that never came to fruition, but according to what loose dates and what loose of a timeline I have, that seemed to be within a year or few months of the time that Terrianne had come out to her family as transgender life was completely up ended. And I don't think that something like that was exactly an option for Terrianne at that point. She needed to find something realistic that would make her money and put a roof over her head and that's when She narrowed her job search to things that she was obviously overqualified for and then moved into the house at 768 Bay Avenue in Jacksonville, Florida with a roommate to try to normalize the life that had just completely been up ended. The neighborhood that Terrianne was able to move into with her roommate was very rough. And I don't use that term lightly. Upon living at that address, there was over 95 registered violent sex offenders within like three miles of that house. And it's not genuinely a bad area. At that time. At least. I don't know what it's like today. I know I gave you guys the real address. So public information. Now I'm just saying Tyrion was a tough cookie, though. Definitely no pushover, and she did have that purse full of weapons. And that's not exactly true. She had mace and she had a gun. So she was protecting herself. She had, you know, defense mechanisms on her karianne lived in a neighborhood that had a park in it. And her house specifically was right across the street from the park. And that area had some bad activity going on. There was gang violence at the park, there was drug deals going on violent crimes. It was loud, noisy, and Terrianne at this point was a 51 year old transgender military veteran and was not having this shit in her peaceful Florida neighborhood and complained about it all the time. But none of her complaints were ever he did or taken seriously because again, she was a 51 year old transgender military veteran in 1990s and was not being treated well by the Florida authorities Florida authorities, Terrianne even once got a letter in her mailbox, handwritten that was from the teens, youths, Mary wells, whatever you want to call them that hung out in the park across the street. They wrote her and said to meet them there them in quotes being that they didn't identify themselves to which Terrianne obviously declined, because childish again, authorities didn't do anything. I taught them just the smallest bit of slack because there's not much that could have been done at that point. But there should have been better surveillance in the park. I mean, that's what could have been done. I guess I take it back. Fuck you. You could have done more. You always could have done more. That's like always the case. Now, I don't know if you know this, but I'm gonna assume not because Winn Dixie is not a thing anymore. their headquarters were in Jacksonville, Florida where Terrianne lived. That was another reason why she wanted to get so involved was because she applied for jobs at Winn Dixie before overqualified been declined because she's transgender. She personally had felt that workplace discrimination sting and to see that happen to somebody else was more upsetting to Terrianne because she was a strong empath, and hated authority, especially when it was wrong and authority built to force people to conform. That is like an Aquarius his worst nightmare and Terry them was having absolutely none of it. On January 6 2001, a year after Peter was fired from his position. Terrianne along with local transgender activist groups had mobilized to set up a protest at the headquarters in Jacksonville and Terrianne was allegedly pictured holding signs that said transgender people have rights to an all caps but with letters. She apparently headed the protest. She spoke a lot of the protests and it was in the papers, I say allegedly because no newspapers in Florida decided to participate in archiving their news and specifically the Florida Times Union if the paper even exists, but there were references to this newspaper and references to news articles about this case that protest Terrianne's murder. None of it is archived or available. I don't understand why Florida does that because of Winn Dixie. Remember that book or movie when it wasn't a dog? That's the only Winn Dixie that I care about. Okay, this era of the LGBT rights movement, transgender rights movement was sort of a strange one, in a weird juxtaposition, favorite word alert to the Stonewall riots and the sit in at the cafeteria in California and these big movements across the country that happened in the 60s things slow down. It's like when when being gay was decriminalized. People stopped the fight. It's almost like when same sex marriage was legalized and sis hat gays were like, hey, it's done. It's over. The fight is won. We have all the rights that everybody else has. Let's party. It was almost like that. Like they thought that there was no fight to be had. So all that to say, protesting was a lot more following the rules back then today. We're moving back into that unruly, protesting, protesting, basically, in that era, protesting was slowly going downhill to being a lot less aggressive and to really being something that took a long time to get together and organize and permit and it was it was difficult to set up a protest. That took me a long time to explain. I'm going to have to cut that down. That being said it was already a year since Peter was fired. nothing had happened in the court case. I mean, nothing at all had happened. The protests didn't help very much, but get them that brief news coverage that is non existent today. So terian and activist groups went about setting up another protest for the following year. On December 12 2001, Terrianne Wolcott meticulously got ready, teased those bangs individually and then went through her job that she had landed at the US Department of Labor as an IT person. It wasn't her ideal job, but it was putting a good amount of money on the table. And she was working in it, which is what she wanted to do. Still, she was overqualified for the job. And that's just that Marianne went about her day as she normally would. Not the most eventful time, but she was in the midst of organizing a protest for that next month. The next protest for Peter had made its way to January of 2002. So Marianne is anxious, she's excited, and she's working on protests and her job and she's finally coming into her her person, and she's 51 at this point. So it really is never too late to find your passion because tarion had absolutely found it. By 8pm. Marianne was rolling up into her driveway, she got out of her car and grabbed that fabulous purse of hers and made her way to the mailbox to check the mail. She made a habit of doing that since her roommate had surgery that had put them in a wheelchair unable to do things like check the mail and it had fallen upon Terrianne to do these sort of responsibilities, so she had no reason to believe that this night would be like any other but as she's getting the mail one loud pop rings out to the street and Terrianne falls to the driveway dead she's been shot once in the back of the head, the mail is strewn around her she's still holding her car keys tightly in her hand, one shoes fallen off and her purse is next to her. Everything spilled out of the purse, nothing is taken. Obviously that's very concerning when there's been a homicide because that means that it's just a malice homicide. There's no robbery, there was no other reason to kill Terrianne besides hating her as a person or a random shooting from a fucking tree, but we know that's not what happened. It was a hate crime. Neighbors reported hearing the shots fired which led police to the scene where they found Terrianne dead on arrival, they questioned who they could one man said that he saw you this riding down the street on bikes about an hour and 15 minutes later, which is honestly not helpful at all, because that could have been any group of kids riding bikes at nine o'clock and it's not really that late at night. At that point, the case was pretty much immediately cold and it looked a lot like Marianne was assassinated and the popular theory that had been taken on by these transgender activism groups and friends and family of Terrianne that were still around that Tyrion was assassinated because she was making her way up the ranks of activism and becoming a very public political transgender activist being out as a transgender person in Florida and physically being out protesting for transgender rights in Florida in the late 90s and early 2000s. had people like Terrianne and Terrianne specifically targeted for who they were and what they stood for. And I don't mean to rag on him Florida, but I lived in North Carolina for a long time. I know how the South is today. And I can infer on how it was then activists and friends of Terrianne keep her name as relevant as possible as they can in the investigation. But after years the case those cold in 2015, a random blog on the internet that I won't be citing because it's not credible claim that there was information coming to light about Terrianne's murder and that there might be movement in the trial and there may be a suspect I couldn't back any of that up on the internet. And the only thing that exists is a cold case file for the murder of Terrianne Summers. I think about Terrianne his case every time and cold cases brought up because of how frustrating it is to me and every time I see her name on that list on the Transgender Day of Remembrance, I get that frustration all over again because so much more could have been done in this case to prevent her being murdered and to solve her murder in the end. If it's any consolation to how sad the viewers and listeners are feeling now I'd like to add to that the wife that left Ariane after she came out of the closet and shunned her for the rest of her life died in 2009 Wow, that was bad. Okay, I'm going to get canceled one day like full on canceled but it's okay, I'll keep making videos on things until you will rest It's time for transformation. It is okay. Yes ma'am. That's the finished look for this week. I hope you enjoyed the episode I hope you enjoyed this. As always there is much available on murders a drag calm my website. You can follow my Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and everything at murders drag or more personally, or van. Dang. I'm very active on social media as I'm very active on YouTube. My podcast is updated weekly as well as everything else. This is a weekly series after all, I'm getting some new wigs in the mail soon and that'll be fucking fun to record in loan at half I'll just have to put their camera very far away because the wigs are very large and this is like average to medium sized wig and I already have to back up into the My poor little tree just to fit all of this fabulous mess into one frame. Tell your friends tell your mom tell your grandpa, it's murder's a drag with Aura Van Dank, baby and I will see you next week.