The trial lasted two weeks. I was allowed to sit with Ryan in the prison docket and we held hands, tight. I wanted to cry when we were first seated together, our eyes roaming each other’s faces, searching out the other’s emotions, saying everything without words. I still love you, I miss you, I’m scared. And the trial was terrifying. I felt helpless, listening to people talk about us, analyzing all of our actions. We were only going before a judge, not a jury—our lawyers didn’t feel we were sympathetic enough for a jury. Angus had tried to get me not to look so angry, made me practice smoothing my face into a neutral mask, showed me how to sit and talk, polite and sweet, told me what clothes to wear, but he said I still looked pissed off at the world, a girl with a bad attitude. And I saw it now on Ryan’s face. Before, he’d looked like he could brush off anything, nothing would get him down, but already his jaw was tighter, his neck corded from clenching. I grabbed his hand, and noticed some small circular red scars. I stared at him, horrified. Ryan quickly turned his hand around, hiding it from view, but I knew what I’d seen. Cigarette burns. I wondered if he’d done them himself, or if his father had been taking his anger out on him for the last year and a half. I didn’t even know if Ryan had been working anywhere or what he’d been doing.
I listened to experts explain about DNA, listened to Doug Hicks and Frank McKinney talk about the night we’d stumbled into the police station. McKinney didn’t look at me once while he was speaking, his voice calm and controlled, sounding like a cop. He only got emotional a couple of times when he described how Nicole had become friends with his daughter, how she’d been at his home often and he knew she was having problems with her sister. Something Shauna was more than happy to back up when it came her time to testify.
Shauna looked beautiful that day. Her auburn hair gleamed against her chic black suit, and her eyes had never looked bluer than when they spilled tears down her face as she talked about Nicole, how close they were, close enough for Nicole to share about the knife I’d been carrying. A knife Shauna said I’d threatened Nicole with on many occasions. The lies went on and on.
Rachel also testified, backing up Shauna’s version of everything, tossing her hair with every declaration. “I mean, like, we knew Toni hated Nicole, but we never knew she’d do that, you know?” And Cathy cried so hard that the lawyers had a hard time getting anything out of her. She just sobbed into her Kleenex, saying over and over again, “I can’t believe she’s dead.”
Kim stumbled over her words when she verified what the other girls had said, that they were out at the lake that night and “clearly” saw me fighting with Nicole, saw Ryan trying to pull us apart. “I keep thinking about that moment,” Kim said, her eyes dead and flat. “If we’d gone to help her … but we didn’t want to interfere. We were all scared of Toni, especially because we knew she carried a knife and she’d already attacked Shauna at school a couple of times.…”
Though Nicole had died of blunt force trauma, presumably from the tire iron still missing from Ryan’s truck, the prosecutor said my carrying a knife showed intent long before the murder, and much was made of the violence of her death. How that kind of rage had to be personal. Her clothes had also never been found and it was assumed we had disposed of them on the way to the station.
Ryan and I had the chance to speak for ourselves, and I tried to explain away each piece of evidence, but the prosecutor kept tripping me up, until all I could do was turn to the judge and say, “Please, Your Honor. You have to believe me. I didn’t kill my sister—I loved her.”
Ryan looked stiff and uncomfortable in his suit on the stand. His face flushed red when the prosecutor kept cutting him off every time he tried to defend me or my actions. Like me, he tried to explain that Shauna and the girls were lying, but the prosecutor said, “What possible motive could those four girls, exemplary students with no criminal records, have for lying about something so serious? One of them is a policeman’s daughter!”
The last day of trial the lawyers made their final summations. I held my breath, listening to them plead our case, studying the judge’s face, trying to read what he was thinking. Our lives were going to be decided by one man. My lawyer had told me that this judge had three daughters of his own. I hoped that meant he understood sisters fight, but that didn’t mean they would kill each other. At the end of summations, the judge said he needed a few days to deliberate.
Finally, we were brought before the judge again. Both my parents were in the courthouse that day. My mom had left the room a couple of times the first week when the coroner testified or whenever there were photos of Nicole’s body. Then she stopped coming altogether when the evidence against me mounted higher and higher. I’d seen her face when Shauna and the girls testified, seen the shock as she looked from them to me and back again. At home she couldn’t meet my eyes.
Ryan and I held hands as the judge said, “The issue in this case is who killed Nicole Murphy…” He droned on while I tried to focus, but my breath was coming fast, my body breaking out in a cold sweat. Then the words: “I have no doubt that you, Toni Murphy, caused the death of Nicole Murphy. You had motive, you showed stealth, and you intended it.…” I let out a gasp, saw Ryan’s body jerk with the blow.