About four months before she was killed last week in Castleton, Honoree Fleming published an article on cell differentiation in the open-access journal Advances in Bioscience and Biotechnology. It was the culmination of a lifetime of work in research and academia, according to friends and family, and an important milestone in a rich, if difficult, life.
Fleming, 77, had retired in 2012 as dean of education at what was then called Castleton State College. In the years since, she returned to her work in cellular biology, which began when she was a research associate at New York City’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai during the 1970s and ’80s.
“One of the first things she did was to dig out her research and begin working on it again,” said Joe Mark, a former academic dean at Castleton — now part of Vermont State University — who hired Fleming as an associate academic dean in 2002. “She was always a very dedicated scientist and always cared deeply about rigorous scientific research,” he said.
Fleming’s 40-year investigation into cell growth and movement has implications for understanding cancer, her husband, author Ron Powers, wrote in a 2019 magazine piece.
Powers did not respond to an interview request since his wife’s death, but he has written voluminously on Facebook. On Tuesday, he recalled the time she spent after retiring “organizing her cell photographs and lab notes into papers” at their home in Castleton.
She “composed and finished her decades-long cycle of lab investigations at our kitchen table,” Powers wrote. “I grew fondly accustomed to walking into the kitchen in the mornings (I was the late riser) to find Honoree in her red bathrobe, a neglected [cup] of coffee at her elbow, typing away.”
Fleming, who grew up in New York City, was the youngest of four children. Her mother came from an impoverished family in Ireland and her father died of alcoholism, according to Powers’ 2017 book “No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America.”
Despite growing up poor, Fleming and her brothers went on to earn degrees in higher education, Powers wrote. In 1975, a year before meeting him on a flight from New York to Chicago, Fleming earned a doctorate in biophysics from the University of Chicago.
In 1988, the couple and their two young sons moved to Vermont, where Fleming started a career in academia. She first taught biochemistry at Middlebury College, before moving to the now-defunct Trinity College in Burlington.
Anne Slonaker, a Castleton professor who was hired by Fleming, said Fleming served as a model to first-generation college students and women who sometimes questioned whether they could establish a career in higher education.
“We talked about imposter syndrome in higher ed,” Slonaker said, “but I think Honoree helped them to understand what they could do with their lives.”
Mark echoed this, saying Fleming had a particular interest in supporting students who weren’t given a lot of privilege in life. “Her intelligence coupled with her empathy and caring were sort of what made her remarkable,” said Mark, who became good friends with Fleming and Powers.
A few days before she was fatally shot, Mark said, they’d exchanged emails about a podcast series he’d recommended, on the various approaches to teaching children literacy.
Fleming’s killing on Thursday has made headlines across the country and left the town of Castleton on edge. Police said Fleming was shot in the head around 4:30 p.m. as she was walking along the D&H Rail Trail. Investigators are still seeking to name a suspect and a motive.
On Tuesday, Vermont State Police said numerous detectives were working the case and that uniformed troopers were conducting patrols in Castleton “ensuring high visibility” around the state university campus. Police have repeatedly requested that anyone who may have been in the vicinity of the rail trail Thursday afternoon contact authorities.
Fleming’s death is the latest tragedy to strike the family. In “No One Cares About Crazy People,” Powers wrote that, in 2005, their younger son Kevin died by suicide in their basement after struggling with schizophrenia for three years. Their surviving son, Dean, was also diagnosed with schizophrenia and has been undergoing treatment.
After teaching at Middlebury College for seven years, Fleming was denied tenure despite her achievements as an educator and researcher, her husband said Tuesday on Facebook. Powers said he resigned his adjunct teaching appointment in creative writing at the college, leaving the family with no income.
“We and our two young sons endured a couple of bare-bones years,” he wrote, until Fleming was hired at Castleton.
Powers also said Fleming had faced sexism throughout her career. She was “a consummate and visionary ‘lady scientist’ in a world that still does not recognize the worth and achievements of lady scientists,” he wrote. (He also took the news media to task for identifying her in headlines and captions since her death as the “the wife of Pulitzer prizewinner Ron Powers.”)
Their son, Dean, wrote in separate Facebook posts Tuesday that he missed his mother’s home-cooked meals, her counsel and her laughter. He said she’d made numerous sacrifices for the family, such as hours driving him and Kevin to their activities, as well as buying recycled clothing to save money.
He also spoke about how she advocated for his continuing education after he got into a car accident at 16 and was placed under probationary conditions. “Mom moved heaven and earth to help me keep up with my education, which she so firmly believed in, instead of spending a year on house arrest,” he wrote.
Powers, who said in the book that he fell in love with Fleming upon seeing her coming down the airplane aisle in 1976, said her death “has taken far more than half my own heart and soul with her.”
On Facebook, he reminded the public and members of the media of his wife’s accomplishments and legacy. He said her “goodness and spiritual beauty and achievements in the world of science far exceed all the words I have written in my life.”
