By Kalen Johnson

If you’ve ever wished your life was more like a movie, you were probably thinking of an action-adventure flick, or maybe a romantic comedy. Most probably wouldn’t want to have an Unsolved Mystery episode or crime drama about abuse, abduction and attempted murder made about their life, but for Teresa, a long-time resident of Rutherford County, that’s exactly what happened.

A paragon of resilience and survival, Teresa Ringer (formerly Teresa Stamper) has had to overcome the unthinkable since early childhood in order to live her life. I met with Teresa at Overflow Brews and Bakes over a slice of coffee cake to get to know her and hear her story. She brightened the room with her smile and positive energy, and I was struck when she immediately dove into stories of what she’s overcome.

Her story is one that many of us can only imagine.

Teresa claims to be one of the original women living in the woods of Murfreesboro. Having lived here for around 26 years, she feels she has watched the homeless community transform. She spoke very fondly of the early days in the area, with her friends Ponytail and Margarita, when there was some peace to sleeping outside.

As more and more homeless people moved into the area, however, Teresa found herself surrounded by strangers out in the woods and felt less and less safe. As a woman, she had to set booby-traps, often involving barbed-wire, to keep the men away from her tent at night. When potential attackers approached in the night, they would stumble over the booby traps, making sound, and alerting Teresa to be on her guard.

“Everybody knew not to be messing around Mama T’s campsite,” she said.

Teresa comes from a financially comfortable background, but there was nothing comfortable about the way she was raised. From the age of 2, Teresa was sexually abused by an uncle, and later abused by her grandmother. Her father physically abused her and her siblings, causing permanent developmental delays in her brother, with whom she maintained contact until his death.

After a whirlwind romance in her 20s, she married Paul Stamper, and again, life was not the fairy tale she hoped for. Paul began to abuse her soon after they married, but Teresa, then pregnant, found herself unable to divorce him, as Oklahoma law prevented expectant couples from divorcing. When her daughter was less than a year old, Paul’s violence towards them finally drove Teresa to escape, moving back in with her parents, and that’s when the nightmare featured in the Lifetime movie Crimes of Passion: Escape from Terror—The Teresa Stamper Story began.

After Teresa left Paul, she got a restraining order against him, but that did not stop him. He kidnapped her, shot her boyfriend, hired someone to kill her, and was eventually apprehended and sentenced to jail time. Not long after, he escaped and remained at large for years, leading to a feature about these events on an Unsolved Mysteries episode. Shortly after it was aired, however, several people called to turn in her estranged husband, who had been living under an alias. He did not escape prison a second time.

Around the time of these events, Teresa began to use drugs to deal with all the trauma she endured. Though she is clean now, the drugs she began to use at 25 maintained a grip over her life for years, leading her to sell the royalty rights to the movie based on her story.

The senseless death of one of her daughters during a carjacking led her to decide to get clean.

“I got really sad, and decided I was gonna get clean, for her. It don’t matter who you do it for, as long as you do it, and stick to it,” she said.

Her son, living in New York, helped Teresa get into a treatment center, where she got clean. She also received mental health counseling, and she enthusiastically talked about being able to connect to her upbringing as a child, and process now what she couldn’t process then. With gratitude, she talked about finally being able to heal from some of the trauma she’s experienced and credited a lot of her survival to her Christian faith.

“If I didn’t have Jesus I wouldn’t have made it in them woods,” Teresa said.

Douglass Berg, the owner of Overflow Brews and Bakes, has a heart for the homeless in the area, and has built that into how he conducts business with the Pay It Forward campaign. The campaign allows customers to purchase cinnamon rolls that directly go to local people struggling with homelessness. Its location on the Murfreesboro Public Square makes Overflow accessible for many of those struggling to come in and grab a muffin or a cup of coffee. Berg also supports the The Journey Home, a local nonprofit committed to caring for those without homes and helping them get back on their feet.

The Journey Home has worked with Teresa for years, and this year they were able to place her in an apartment. For the first time in a long time, she can sleep without setting booby traps, and she can bathe without fear of strangers watching. She has hope that she will continue to heal and grow in the coming years. She wants people to know that “most all homeless people have been done so wrong that they don’t wanna do nobody wrong.” She is no stranger to need or desperation and seems compassionate to those experiencing it.

She says what she wants next in life is to meet a great guy to do life with, a desire that probably resonates with many single people. Despite all she has endured and overcome, Teresa says she is confident that her next years will be good, and that the best is yet to come.

“I want people to know I’m a survivor!”