Jeanne Clery’s Legacy

Years after Jeanne Clery’s murder at Lehigh University in April 1986, a neighbor gave her mother a card that Jeanne had written to the woman’s son in first grade. It was a love letter.

“Dear Brad, I love you, Jeanne,” the card said in a first-grader’s awkward scribble.

“He had to wear leg braces and Jeanne was the only one in the class who never made fun of him,” said Connie Clery. “And he kept that card all those years.”

The neighbor and now friend, Barbara Leve, says that kindness and independence was typical of Jeanne. “It helped [Brad] through a very hard time at a very young age,” she told me.

The fact that Jeanne’s father, Howard, wore a leg brace all his adult life after contracting polio as a teen surely contributed to her ability to empathize. 

I spoke to Mrs. Clery at length last week about her daughter and how her murder drove the Clerys to become national advocates for better security on college campuses and more openness in crime reporting.

And while the crime and the cause made headlines, it’s easy to lose the person behind the story, the one whose death was felt so acutely that her parents moved heaven and earth to make sure fewer families would feel that pain.

Jeanne was a 19-year-old freshman at Lehigh when she was killed in her dorm by a fellow student she didn’t know who entered her room planning to rob it. While her name will forever be synonymous with “crime victim,” that’s the least of what she was. 

Growing up, she was a tomboy who went without a front tooth for a while as a result of a skating accident. “She loved her family with a passion, especially her brothers,” Mrs. Clery said. “She wanted to be just like her brothers.”

Always athletic, Jeanne became a ranked amateur tennis player, which took her away from her private girls high school, Agnes Irwin in Bryn Mawr, from time to time.

But she earned the love and respect of classmates, exhibiting the same kindness and independence she’d shown in first grade. After her death, the school’s headmistress told Connie Clery about an incident in which Jeanne defended a young student who being harassed.

“Jeanne had the courage to ride against the waves of student opinion and protect this young girl,” Mrs. Clery said.

At Lehigh, the day before she was murdered, Jeanne turned in a class essay entitled “Growing Up in an Androgynous Environment.” In the paper, she says she was raised with the same expectations and rules as her two brothers, Benjamin and Howard III, which was why the Clery children didn’t fit into traditional stereotypes.

“Because we were not treated differently, I was neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by being a girl,” she wrote.

“Because my parents also wanted me to experience equal opportunities outside my home, they sent me to an all-girls school where I, along with my peers, had the opportunity to hold positions that a male most likely would have held in a public school, such as school president, president of the athletic association, and head of the newspaper,” Jeanne wrote. 

That reminded me of something former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen said about being asked what it was like to attend a women’s college.

“I said it was a little like learning to swim while holding on to the side of the pool,” Ms. Quindlen wrote. “I didn’t learn the arm movements until after I graduated, but by then I was one terrific kicker.”

At age 19, Jeanne was already a pretty good kicker. The loss of her daughter transformed Connie Clery into a very good kicker, whose nonprofit group, Security on Campus, succeeded in getting state and federal legislation passed to heighten security at colleges and  mandate public access to crime reports on campuses.

After losing a child, simply getting out of bed each day is a heroic act. Connie Clery took all that agony and sadness and channeled it into trying to make sure “that others not suffer the type of nightmare that never goes away,” as she put it.

That little first-grade girl who wrote a love letter to a boy in leg braces would be proud.