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Kim Pack always believed her mother’s killer was her mother's husband.
But the details that came out as James Kauffman and seven others were charged in connection with the May 10, 2012 killing of April Kauffman were a surprise.
“A year?” she said in disbelief of the plan to kill her mother that allegedly began in 2011.
“It feels surreal,” she told BreakingAC in a private interview. “Like it’s the worst Lifetime movie ever. But this is my life.”
Speculation has surrounded the former Dr. James Kauffman since his wife was found fatally shot inside the master bedroom of the Linwood home they shared.
“If something happens to me, it was him,” April Kauffman had told close friends and Pack in different conversations.
“But she would always brush it off,” Pack said. “She just gave a few breadcrumbs, and then would turn it back to something to help you.”
That’s how she was, said friend Lee Darby, who stayed by Pack’s side through the day.
The staunch veterans advocate was known to fight hard for others. Her daughter, a self-described wallflower, pushed herself to keep pushing for her mother. Because she knew it was what her mom would have done for her.
Pack addressed the media twice Tuesday from the vestibule of her lawyers’ office at D’Arcy Johnson Day in Egg Harbor Township.
Almost exactly three years earlier, she stood in the same spot for a press conference in which she told those gathered she believed her stepfather had killed her mother.
But news of arrests didn’t bring the feelings she thought.
“It doesn’t bring her back,” she said. “It’s not what you think it’s going to be.”
Pack was thankful to the Prosecutor’s Office team that brought the case to this point.
“I decided a long time ago I wasn’t going to have vindication or hatred in my heart,” she said. “This is just the beginning. I think it gives a lot of people a place to start the closure process.”
Prosecutor Damon Tyner announced the arrests at a press conference from his office, surrounded by investigators in the case.
“I think he’s a man of the people,” Pack said of Tyner. “I’m just lucky to be in his path of a case that he got behind.”
She said she watched the press conference with her sons, 11 and 7.
“You know what, Mom? Mimi’s happy,” her older son said, giving her a big squeeze.
Just a toddler when Kauffman was killed, Pack’s younger son didn’t know her as well. But he has seen his mother’s sadness.
Recently, he gave her a picture of an angel. It was his Mimi, he told her.
She said she believes her mother likely is feeling her own vindication.
As for her former stepfather: “I think I pity him in so many different ways,” Pack said.
“I just want peace in my life,” she said. “I want to pick the pieces up.”
