“I thought you said…” Veronica Ramira turned her back on me a moment to rustle around with her notes on the counsel table. The Defendant pushed a few pages forward, and I could tell by the way his eyes flicked upward and the smile that appeared on his face that Veronica Ramira had smiled at him first. “Thank you, counsel,” she said to him before turning back around with her memory refreshed and the gloves off. “You made an early statement to Sheriff Cruso that there had been a bit of a strain between you and Denise at the time she died.”
A sickly bead of sweat escaped the band of my bra, rolled with a bowler’s aim down the knobby lane of my spine. It could not have been more than sixty-six man-made degrees in the courtroom, and I was freezing. “I did say that,” I admitted. “But that had to do with me being president. Sometimes she thought I was bossy.”
“And I’m sure kissing her boyfriend didn’t help matters.”
“She didn’t see it like that, because that’s not what happened.”
One of the male jurors was smiling in this small, nauseating way. Two women pecking at each other. That’s how he heard us. I wanted a shower. I wanted to get off that stand and take my cold, sweaty dress straight to the dry cleaner.
“And a few weeks later, you think you see her boyfriend, whom you kissed, at the front door, and then your story changes to protect him. Is that what happened?”
Before I could tell her that she had inserted her own interpretation into the question, Mr. Pearl objected on those very grounds. “Argumentative, Your Honor.”
“Sustained,” Judge Lambert drawled.
Veronica Ramira shrugged as though she’d been prepared to take the hit. “Thank you, Pamela. I have nothing further.”
“Adjourn until one p.m. for lunch,” Judge Lambert said, and struck the sound block cleanly with the gavel.
There was that churchlike congregational rising, the swishing of pants legs, the popping of sedentary bones, while Judge Lambert gathered up the hem of his robe and descended the bench from the back with stiff knees, disappearing into his private, secure corridor. Courtrooms are always designed so the judge does not cross public areas to access the bench, but rarely with that consideration in mind for witnesses. This meant that the insect-like shuttering of the cameras captured the ill-timed moment when I nearly intersected with The Defendant as he stood for the lunch hour. The press had spilled so much ink over his tactical brilliance that I was bordering on indoctrination myself, and I gritted my back molars in anticipation of him smiling at me in that courtly way of his, bowing to open the partition’s gate with a sweeping curve to his arm—“After you, ma’am.” Handsome attorney displays chivalry for the homely coed who accused him of murder, Carl could have captioned the image.
Instead, The Defendant, realizing we were on a collision course, did something I’d seen boys do a thousand times before. I say boys, not men, because it was with the bumbling awkwardness of a pimpled teenager that he suddenly did not know what to do with his hands, where to look with his small, piggy eyes. This was the man characterized by the press as a deadly Casanova, the likes of which women had never before encountered, and he was flustered by the mere presence of someone of the opposite sex. He turned his back to me and set his hands on top of the wooden partition separating counsel from the public, saying something to his mother, who had a rough graying bob and often dressed like a fifties housewife in a full poodle skirt and shrunken cardigan. She was looking right at me, and while her son had shown his rather mundane hand, hers was the face I would continue to see long after the trial ended, the one that would derail my life, briefly, then set me on course.
PAMELA
Issaquah, 2021
Day 15,858
In 1996, when the Freedom of Information Act was amended to include audio and video files as documents the public could access, I requested the recording of The Defendant’s rumored Lake Sammamish confession, the one Carl had told me about from the carpet of my sorority house. It took months for me to hear back that the request could not be completed because no such file existed. As proof, or maybe a consolation prize, government officials sent copies of The Defendant’s meandering conversations with the Seattle detectives who came to Aspen to question him in the days following his first escape.
I listened until the tape ran out, just to be sure. Indeed, there was no confession, but there was another admission that proved meaningful to me involving the identity of The Defendant’s father.
The story had long gone that The Defendant’s mother had gotten pregnant at sixteen, the consequence of a short-lived love affair with the heir to a department store in Philadelphia who died in a car crash. With no husband in the picture, his mother was forced to remain under her parents’ roof. For the first few years of his life, The Defendant enjoyed a bucolic upbringing in his grandparents’ Philadelphia home before moving across the country to live with relatives in Seattle.
But a darker telling emerged on the tape I listened to in 1996. One in which The Defendant railed against his mother, a weak woman who failed to protect him from the brutal beatings at the belt of his grandfather, who didn’t even bother to lock her bedroom door at night, which is when he forced depravity on his adolescent daughter. When pressed to say more, The Defendant refused.
There is little that can be done to substantiate the rumor that The Defendant was a product of incest, but there are enough links in the logic chain for me to believe it to my marrow. In 1996, this was the push I needed to leave the family law firm I’d worked at for a decade and a half to start my own practice, dedicated exclusively to mediation. Mediation may be a near-ubiquitous option now, but in the eighties and early nineties it was an experimental alternative to divorce litigation that child welfare experts were hoping would not only increase satisfaction around dispute resolution but also reduce the workload of the court system. Columbia, my alma mater, offered a pilot training program that I enrolled in out of curiosity, then ended up taking to with an evangelist’s fervor. It was the first time I’d heard anyone propose an approach to the law that centered the well-being of women and children. Mediation aimed to keep families out of the courts, preserve civility, and promote their ability to work together in the future, families with women who wore the same disquieting expression as The Defendant’s mother did on the day I testified in court. I even notice echoes of my past life as the president of the southernmost chapter of my sorority house in what I do, the challenges and rewards of presiding over thirty-eight brilliant, bullheaded women who were supposed to support one another like blood. But mostly, I continue to be drawn to mediation because I know better than anyone that All-American Sex Killers are not born, that they come from broken and battered homes, human systems that fail them well before they reach the penal ones, and then they go out into a world that tells them that women are deserving depositories for their impotence and rage.
Kids who are raised in hostile environments are seven times more likely to become violent perpetrators as adults, and I’ve been given the unique opportunity to disrupt that pattern. For the small curve in the road where I get to stand, holding my traffic sign that indicates a better way, I have no choice but to feel belligerent gratitude.
I remind myself of this, all these years later, when the response from an old law school friend at the Justice Department who fast-tracked my FOIA request lands like a coldcock. The reason the original request could not be completed back in 1996 was not because the file didn’t exist; it was because the file didn’t exist where I’d told them to look—in the records taken by the Seattle detectives who visited The Defendant in his Aspen jail cell after his first escape. I had no idea at the time about the second confession Carl had obtained, that in the midnineties, the recording was still part of an active investigation into the Lake Sammamish case and not eligible for public release. Nor did I know that when they closed the case and the file should have become available, someone else got their hands on it and requested all copies be destroyed—a woman by the name of Rebecca Wachowsky from Issaquah, Washington.
* * *