Reclaiming a name: An interview with Sharon Ingram
Editor’s note: Sharon Ingram is an everyday badass — single mother, immigrant, defier of odds. She’s also a survivor in every sense of the word. In this first installment of a multi-part interview, Sharon shares with us what it was like growing up the child of both a murder victim and accused murderer.
“My parents should have said no because that was the beginning of the end. That’s when the priest started to hatch the plan to murder my dad.”
I first met Auntie Sharon as a fresh transplant to Southern California. Like the beginning of a rom com, I found myself in the land of endless highways because of a boy. A coast away from my parents, I was young and starved for a sense of community.
Auntie Sharon, the wife of the best friend of my boyfriend’s uncle, welcomed us like family. Sri Lankans are masters of connection: there is no degree of separation they cannot untangle. And I was a grateful beneficiary of this friend-of-a-friend style camaraderie.
She cooked for us heaping plates of traditional fare like potato curry, parippu, and string hoppers. She haggled ferociously in the flower district of DTLA when we planned our wedding. And best of all, she told amazing stories of her life as a flight attendant, the Sri Lankan Civil War, and everything in between.
That was the only version of Auntie Sharon I knew for the next ten years: generous, beautiful, and a wicked sense of humor. But I didn’t know her as Sharon Ingram, or the history and notoriety that comes with her name.
Before the murder
On a recent afternoon, Sharon painted a childhood on the Teardrop Island that’s worlds away from what I had seen through my now-husband’s family. Theirs was one of palatial family homes, servants, and surnames that carried influence. Sharon’s Sri Lanka was one of devastating poverty, familial abuse, murder, and a surname that hung around her neck like an albatross.
Before her father was murdered, she remembers the poverty. Broken sneakers protecting their feet from snakes as they shuffled through rubber tree forests, looking for seeds to later sell at the market. Her parents fought frequently and heatedly, the stress of alleged infidelities and frequent unemployment straining the household.
It was then that Sharon, less than ten years old, was introduced to the Rasputin-esque figure who would change their lives for the worse.
Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Kynsey Road, Colombo
Father Mathew
Some could describe Father Mathew Peiris as an influential and charismatic Anglican priest. He would happily offer up his credentials as a (self-proclaimed) exorcist, bearer of stigmata, and direct recipient of the thoughts of St. Michael the Archangel. Others might not be so magnanimous in their accolades.
This writer will go with sinister motherfucker of the highest order for the sake of brevity.
Initially, Father Mathew offered employment to the Ingrams, with Sharon’s mother, Delrine, working closely with him as his personal secretary — a welcome opportunity for a previously impoverished family. When Father Mathew and his wife Eunice (Editor’s note: Anglican priests are allowed to marry) asked the Ingrams to house sit while they went on a world tour, the family felt that things were finally looking up for them.
“My parents should have said no because that was the beginning of the end. That’s when the priest started to hatch the plan to murder my dad,” Sharon explained.
Father Mathew, deploying his well-oiled bullshittery, started spouting prophecies overseas. “Eunice is going to fall ill shortly.” Sharon’s father would “become ill with a form of pancreatic cancer”. Upon Father Mathew’s return, Sharon’s previously-healthy father did suddenly start to get sick.
Father Mathew, using his love of cooking as a ruse, was preparing meals laced with diabetes medication for Sharon’s non-diabetic father. The drugs rapidly dropped his blood sugar levels to dangerous lows.
“In July of 1978, I turned eight,” Sharon starts, her voice breaking almost imperceptibly, “and a few weeks later, August 10th, he never regained consciousness.”
It became a cycle: her father would fall into unconsciousness, be taken by ambulance to the hospital, fall into a coma, recover, return home. Only to do it all over again as he continued to eat the poisoned food. The dark pattern continued until Sharon’s father went into a coma for the last time.
“In July of 1978, I turned eight,” Sharon starts, her voice breaking almost imperceptibly, “and a few weeks later, August 10th, he never regained consciousness.”
People start to talk — but not about the murder
“There were whispers then in the hospital. They didn’t like the behavior of my mother and the priest,” Sharon starts, choosing her words carefully. “They thought they were too friendly towards each other. My dad’s mother had gone to the police and made a report that she suspected foul play. The police basically laughed in her face: do you know who you’re talking about? This priest you’re making these claims about is known by everybody, and you’re a nobody.”
Like her grandmother, Sharon would be on the receiving end of those words again and again in the years that followed. Her name was a byproduct of her Burgher roots (a subgroup of those with mixed Sri Lankan and European blood) and unique enough that she couldn’t escape the infamy of the murder itself and her mother’s perceived promiscuity. Sadly, it became: like mother, like daughter.
I never really understood where Auntie Sharon’s deep sense of advocacy for herself came from before our conversation. It seemed like a well she was always drawing from. I knew she eventually left her abusive marriage, young child in tow, and asked no one for help. Her very existence was a battle and one she’s been fighting her whole life.
This innate persistence makes sense — her dad’s murder was so sensationalized it spawned a major motion picture (limited release in the States) and focused on the closeness between Sharon’s mother and Father Mathew. Sharon has been fighting her whole life to be seen, with her family fighting with her to get the authorities to investigate the murder itself.
Father Mathew Peiris with his secretary, Dalrene Ingram — Sharon’s mother.
Another suspicious death changes everything
It took Eunice’s death less than a year later, from eerily similar circumstances to Sharon’s father, to shift attention back to Father Mathew.
Even his own children now suspected an affair between the priest and Delrine, and turned him into the police.The ensuing investigation was lengthy and, in the meantime, Sharon’s mother was furious with her in-laws for filing that police report accusing Father Mathew. She withheld from them the only link they had left of their dead son — his children.
To Sharon, just eight years old at the time, it was all her fault. She remembers praying, saying “God please take my dad away, please take my dad... I thought I was praying please take my dad away from the devil of the comas. But I wonder if accidentally I prayed for my dad to die.”
In July of 1979, Father Mathew and Delrine were arrested for murder. It was Sharon’s ninth birthday.
