Advocacy becomes life for mother of murdered woman

Daughter's killer caught, but she's still helping others

By EMILIE RAGUSO
eraguso@modbee.com

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March 25, 1988. The day that split Jacque MacDonald's life into pieces.

"I think of my life in two segments," she said this week while sitting in her home in Merced. "The happy one and the one after."

MacDonald was living in Minnesota when she got the call that day. Her husband phoned to say MacDonald's 32-year-old daughter had been found dead in a hallway in her north Modesto home.

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The body of Deborah Ann Whitlock was discovered by her husband, Harold Whitlock, who was at a bachelor party when his wife was stabbed repeatedly and raped. The couple's 3-year-old daughter slept through the attack.

MacDonald flew to Modesto for the funeral and decided to do whatever she could to help solve her daughter's case. And the only way to do that, she determined, was to move to the valley and keep her daughter's face in the public eye.

As soon as she got home from the funeral, she called producers of the television program "Unsolved Mysteries."

Everything became an opportunity to remember "Debi" or a surface on which to plaster her face: billboards, buses, pizza boxes and shopping carts. Talk shows and true-crime programs. Along the way, MacDonald became an advocate for victims' rights and a woman whom law enforcement agents credit with helping solve her daughter's murder, nearly nine years after it occurred.

"I was never like this. I was a little shy, never pushy, quiet," MacDonald said. After Whitlock's death, the grieving mother became a master publicist who wouldn't take no for an answer. "People thought I was a nut. I thought of myself as a dedicated mother."

MacDonald pored over credits of television shows that might air her daughter's case to find out who was in charge of selecting which cases to air. She phoned stations to get to know head producers. One, she found out, drank tea daily. So she sent him a china cup and tea bags.

"A lot of them would tell you, 'We'll call back in a few hours,' " she said. "I would sit there waiting by the phone. But I would never hear back."

Persistence pays off

So she learned just to call. And call. Every few months, she phoned producers trying to get the story out. She was on "every little bitty show in Fresno." Sometimes it took years, but a number of national programs, including NBC's "Dateline," "Unsolved Mysteries" and "America's Most Wanted," picked up Whitlock's story.

The television campaign was just one part of her attack. Noticing billboards while driving down the highway, she realized how many people would see her daughter's face if she could get a sign. It took several years, but she worked with a Marin County group, Citizens Against Homicide, and eventually succeeded.

One night, after getting a pizza delivered, she got the idea to ask Pizza Hut to put fliers of Whitlock on their boxes. The company agreed and paid for the fliers.

"Everywhere I was, all I was thinking about was, where can I put her face?" MacDonald said. "I just needed to keep her face out there. I figured someone would eventually get sick of it and come forward, even if it was just to shut me up."

She even called the Boy Scouts, who agreed to deliver fliers from Modesto to Merced.

"Every time we got publicity, it gave me hope," she said. "I thought, 'Maybe this is the one time somebody will actually come forward.' "

Taking to the airwaves

One day, watching television, MacDonald got the idea to create a local television show for victims, featuring unsolved cases. The program started in 1996 and was co-hosted by Assyriavision's John Kanno. It featured a call-in segment for victims and suggestions about resources. MacDonald ultimately became the sole host. In 2000, the show was picked up as a radio broadcast in the Turlock, Merced, Mariposa and Ma-dera areas.