WRIC Richmond News and Weather - Interview With Janet Pelasara
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One of the most visible people throughout the last few months has been Taylor Behl's mother. 8News anchor Joanna Massee sat down with Janet Pelasara for a special one-on-one interview.
"I never dreamed I would lose her to death..."
Shortly before Taylor's September 5th disappearance, Janet Pelasara experienced the empty nest syndrome for the first time.
"I was physically sick, migraines," Pelasara said.
Taylor drove home from VCU to Vienna, Virginia for Labor Day weekend. That Monday, Janet watched Taylor leave to head back to Richmond.
"She walked away, got in her car, and it felt like somebody kicked me in my stomach," she told us.
Janet never saw her daughter again but in Pelasara's Northern Virginia townhouse, Taylor is everywhere you look.
"Nothing has changed. That picture has always been there. It's not like I've set out things or made some sort of shrine for her."
Janet tells us she devoted her life to her daughter, and Taylor went out of her way to show her mother she was loved.
"She's given me notes, thank you cards for the graduation parties that I threw for her..."
Taylor even left a post-it note on her mother's computer at work. Janet tells us she also has one on her medicine cabinet. Janet describes her daughter as a caretaker. When the time came to move to college, Taylor worried about her mother.
"She even brought over her friend Lisa and said why don't you have Lisa with you so your not lonely."
Janet tells us Taylor always wanted to help people in need.
"I think she almost searched for the ones that needed a little help."
A search that Pelasara believes may have lead Taylor to Ben Fawley. But she suspects when Taylor got to school, she began to back away.
"She realized he was way beyond anything she had ever experienced and pulled away," Pelasara told us.
The month long search for her daughter has been over for months but Pelasara still has so much uncertainty.
"The trial? What am I going to have to do? When is it going to be? What is the outcome going to be?"
Pelasara says she's been told it probably won't be until after the trial that reality settles in. Right now, she tells us she is still numb.
"How can you talk about your dead child with not breaking down? because she was my life. Everything I did was for her, because of her. And I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. She was a delight."
