But over the years, I have sometimes wondered what my mother’s last thoughts were. I know she loved me very much; there is no doubt of that. And I’m positive that even in the midst of the pain and humiliation and terror that was inflicted on her, she thought about me. But when I try to imagine exactly what she thought, it’s a lot darker and more complicated than well-wishers must think when they smile and tell me, “I’m sure her last thoughts were of you.”
There was never any sign of forced entry into our house, so Mom must have let Michael Hutchinson in. He was either an acquaintance who said he wanted to talk to her, whom she wasn’t expecting but wasn’t afraid of, or a harmless-looking guy with a convincing story—broken-down truck, perhaps. In this case, it might’ve been the rain that killed her. I can imagine her barring entry to someone in the middle of a clear night, but it’s harder to imagine her leaving someone out in bad weather.
As far as anyone has been able to determine, Mom and Hutchinson were not friends; he was not supposed to be there that night. If they knew each other at all, they didn’t know each other well. Maybe they had seen each other in a bar once or twice—he, nineteen, in there thanks to a fake ID or a bartender’s goodwill, Mom laughing and leaning into Linda’s shoulder at a little table in the corner. He would have known enough about her to figure out where she lived, once he wanted to. His parents were recently divorced: he lived with his father on High Street, almost within sight of Linda’s house, and his mother lived about a half mile from us, farther down Route 93. He would have driven past our house about once a week to visit her, on that same trucker route that Gwen had worried about. In warm months, our walks would take us past his father’s house, out to the War Memorial and back. As Walt had told me, Hutchinson had plenty of opportunities to see Mom—her brilliantly red hair marking her like a target—and become fascinated with her. Obsessed.
I had always suspected that she had been raped, but until Chris’s affidavit confirmed it in harrowing, bleak legal language, there was a small, willful part of my brain that hoped she hadn’t been. Looking back at the records, I now see that in Texas, Dale Keegan had told me, “We also know that your . . . your mother had sex, just before she died. Did you—when you looked down the hall, did you see her having sex? Did you know that? We know that she had sex, that night. That’s another reason we think the person must have been someone she knew.” Being raped is not “having sex.” I doubt Keegan thought the act was consensual; I can only think that he chose those words to convince me that the police knew for sure that Mom’s killer was someone she knew, so that if I was protecting someone, I would get scared and give them up. But his choice of words also may have let me believe that Mom wasn’t raped that night.
I had never asked the police for clarification on this point; I assumed that the answer was one of those details that had to be kept secret so as to remain incriminating. This assumption was also a form of self-protection: if I didn’t ask them, I didn’t really have to know. But when I’d allowed myself to think about it, I figured she had been raped, simply because that fit the murder story I was most familiar with from movies and TV: intruder rapes and kills beautiful young woman. No objects had been removed from the house; we owned few things worth stealing. But he must have left with something.
Whatever Mom and Hutchinson said to each other that night, there would have been a moment when he started getting rough, when he kissed her against her will or grabbed her breast or pressed her against the wall, when he made it clear that he was going to get what he wanted. Mom would have seen the violence in him, would have known that he was going to try to rape her; she might even have worried that more abuse would come after that. She would have realized that she had made a terrible mistake letting him in. That she had miscalculated.
I didn’t fully wake up that night until I heard her final screams. Earlier, when I had briefly awoken to the beginnings of an argument, I hadn’t so much heard a disturbance as sensed it, and then drifted back down to unconsciousness. But this was different. When she woke me screaming—really screaming—she was emitting all the sound her body could produce.
So before that, she must have been much quieter. She was raped on the living room floor, I now know, just a few feet and a thin sheetrock wall away from my bed. Our house was very small, barely more than nine hundred square feet. It was almost impossible to do anything in one room without being heard throughout the entire place—I knew because Mom was very sensitive to noise. And so all those years later, as I lay in bed the night the indictment was handed down, I realized: she must have tried to be quiet. Surely she struggled, but she must have struggled quietly, taken her rape quietly, so I wouldn’t wake up, so I wouldn’t be put in danger.
If he had left her alive, if he had only raped her, would she have called the police? Gone to the hospital? Or would she have locked the doors once more, taken a shower, and lain down, shaking and sleepless in her bed, vowing never to tell me about the horrible thing that had happened in our home, a home she could not afford to leave for another? Would she have thought the police would dismiss a story about a random Wednesday night rapist, one she let into the house herself, no less? Would she have known how frequently rape victims are cast as having brought the crime upon themselves?
But Hutchinson did not leave her alive. For some reason, the rape wasn’t enough, and he killed her. I cannot know when she started screaming—after he pulled the knife? After he punctured her chest? But at some point her nervous system overrode her determination to keep quiet. At some point she became a body singing fear.
To the deep wound just above her heart, Hutchinson added knife blows to the head, utterly destroying her beautiful red hair. The medical examiner would find a sliver of the steel tip in the muscle of her temple. At that point, I’m certain thought was drummed out of her. Under a certain amount of terror, the mind bends. More, and it breaks completely.
I have repeatedly relived that moment when the screaming first woke me and I yelled “Mom?!” It is the moment that still brings retroactive fear: he could have heard me and come down the hall to extinguish the witness. Those boot prints that Dale Keegan showed me, which I forgot about for years after that interview, indicate that he might have started to.
But as much as it scares me, that moment also fills me with a terrible, terrible sadness. For if she heard me, she did not answer. Her child called out to her, and she was unable to go down the hall and help her, to smooth the hair back from her forehead, to tell her it was all just a bad dream. All she could do was scream more, and louder, to conceal from this man the sound of another girl in the house. All she could do was scream “No!”—a sound loud enough to contain another message: Sarah, get out—get out now. And then her screams quieted, and then they stopped, and then she died, not knowing if I would make it out of there alive.
39
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