Bob Collins
Jay Dehmalo, 58, the son who wrote a flame-throwing obituary about his mother that was published — then deleted — in southwestern Minnesota’s Redwood Falls Gazette, has uncloaked, telling the London Daily Mail he did it because he and his sister wanted the last word.
“You can’t believe the dysfunction of the family,” said Dehmalo, who lives near Cleveland now. “They’ll never know what we went through but it helped us. We wanted to finally get the last word.”
Although he wrote the obit, he said it was his older sister Gina’s idea.
He said: ‘I’ve got calls from buddies who’ve said, “We didn’t know she’d left you. We thought she’d died in a car crash or something.'”
Dehmalo, a father of one, admitted that he and his sister Gina had had ‘reservations’ about going through with the obituary — conscious that it could stir up the ill feeling that has clearly stalked this family through the decades.
Kathleen’s surviving sister, Judy, has told DailyMail.com that her nephew’s obituary was ‘nasty’ and had ‘hurt the family tremendously’.
‘Why do people want to talk about it?’ she asked. ‘It’s not important.’
But for Dehmalo and his sister, who now lives in Florida, it was, he said, very important that some portion of the truth should emerge after being hidden for years.
He said: ‘Not important? Sure. They have no idea what we went through and back then, in the ’50s and ’60s, nobody talked about anything.’
Dehmalo, a former professional wrestler who changed his name to distance himself from his mother and who was raised by his grandparents, said he and his sister were hurt when they were left out of the obituary for his grandfather when he died in 1981. Apparently, he said, it was because he never paid back the $200 he borrowed from him.
Why did the siblings leave Minnesota?
He said when his mother returned from California, she showed pictures of her other children to people, never acknowledging they existed.
“How can you do that to your own children? That’s when we knew we had to get the hell out of Minnesota,” he said.
His sister now lives in Florida.
Dehmalo said if he were faced with writing the obituary again, he’d do it the same way.
The Daily Mail said its interview with the son was exclusive; it doesn’t indicate whether it paid him for it.
