Marie Teresa Rios Versace was born November 9, 1917, in Brooklyn, New York. Using the pen name Tere Rios, she wrote numerous short stories and novels, such as An Angel Grows Up (1957), Brother Angel (1963); and The Fifteenth Pelican (1965), which was better known as The Flying Nun and upon which the television series of the same name was based. In 1936 she married Humbert Versace, a graduate of West Point who retired from the service in 1963 as a full colonel. The Versaces had five children: Humbert Roque (Rocky), Stephen Vincent, Richard Patrick, John Michael, and Teresa Dominique.
Their oldest child, Rocky, graduated from West Point in June 1959. During the course of duty as a military advisor in South Vietnam in October 1963 he was captured by the Viet Cong. Rocky's capture changed the course of life for the entire Versace family, and for the next ten years they strove fruitlessly first for his return and then for some definite information about his status.
In 1965 the Viet Cong announced that they had executed Rocky, but the family refused to accept this statement. Unexpected obstruction of their investigative efforts by the American government gradually eroded their faith in the U.S. government and influenced Tere Versace to write several fiction and non-fiction accounts of the POW problem, none of which were ever published. In addition, she continued to pursue other writing projects during the 1960s, including uncompleted biographies of Father Bartholomew Kestell, a Capuchin missionary working in the Near East, and of Sister Mary Aquinas, a Green Bay, Wisconsin, science teacher better known as the “flying nun.” During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mrs. Versace also became an active member of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.
After a prolonged illness aggravated by the loss of his son, Colonel Versace died in the early 1970s. Then, in 1973, Mrs. Versace's long wait for definite word about Rocky finally ended when the Defense Department confirmed that his execution by the Viet Cong had taken place in 1965, an apparent reprisal for the execution of some Viet Cong. Following that, Mrs. Versace worked for Off Duty Magazine in [West] Germany and was a free-lance writer based in Black Earth, Wisconsin. Rios Versace returned to Puerto Rico in 1990. In 1999, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Marie Teresa Rios Versace died on October 17, 1999.
