Time heals imperfectly...
Consider the word 'closure'. It is often tossed around when discussing traumatic events.
For outsiders looking in, it may mean only 'okay, caught the bad guys, all better now. Move on.'
In many ways, my sons and I have moved on. The boys are doing well, healthy, married, and Brenden has a lovely two-year-old daughter. Made's removing herself from their lives was probably the best thing that could have happened.
I have built a new project called Sumer. Somewhere along the way someone advised me that the best way to recover from something bad is to do something good, and I believe I have done that. Sumer gave me something to think about other than what my children and I had gone through. When I woke at 2:00 AM I could turn my thoughts towards Sumer programming issues.
Sean and Brenden have also found some kind of peace, but I know that every time some innocent media truism about "a mother's love for her children" comes on, I see their expressions tense ever so slightly as they try to accept it and let it pass by. No one says anything, but we feel a flash of discomfort.
From the inside of traumatic events 'closure' is different.
The murders related here were solved almost immediately, but this kind of closure did not leave the family and friends feeling 'all better now.' It will continue to hurt through their lives in ways that can never heal, only be accepted as pain to be lived with.
In our case, the bad guys were never caught and probably never will be. No questions about who they are or what they did, but they got away with it.
Made Jati got her precious assets.
Made's Angels helped drive us out of Bali and then went on happily with their own lives. They got rid of a troublemaker who was damaging the lovely image of Bali on which their own tourist businesses depended.
The only price was that keeping us quiet, normalizing Made Jati and her supporters, disparaging my children and me and our experiences, meant that Bob Ellis did not learn before he stepped into his kitchen that he was in exactly the same danger I had experienced years earlier.
For all those Angels who promoted and faked their way through the Bali tourist cliches, what did you think would happen? Morality and law in the real world, no matter what country or culture, including among the Balinese themselves, protects us.
Faking it, lying, covering up are illegal for a reason; it makes us all unsafe, even if you get away with it. Eventually somewhere, sometime, someone else will pay.
A summary...
The next page contains a whirlwind, and probably boring, summary intended to help orient the timing and purpose of events and documents. After that we get back to a more interesting narrative.
The Uluwatu Story (the marketing version)
But to start, let's dispense with the Ni Made Jati story.
The images of Uluwatu Boutiques and Kori Restaurant are marketing inventions. The Uluwatu commercial website at uluwatu.co.id is based upon a Press Release I wrote in 1992. (The complete script is available in Documents : II-42 to II-49.)
It proved so effective that many people began to believe it, and it eventually became an essential part of the Island of the Gods' tourist appeal. Made Jati even adopted it as her own persona.
Writers behind the glossy tourist magazines know the real story, of course—everybody knows. But that story would be terrible marketing.