I wanted to be a good witness—the best. It didn’t matter how I felt about any of it; I had to be powerful, persuasive, correct. I continued to take notes during Walt’s calls, and occasionally I would pull out those notes to fix the details in my mind. As with all important stories, I first had to tell this one to myself.
The attorney general’s office sent me tapes of my Texas interviews so I could study them and make sure I wouldn’t contradict anything the defense had on record. I arranged them in a neat stack of ten cassettes, at perfect right angles to the edges of my unused writing desk, then spent weeks looking at them sidelong. When I finally got the courage to sit down and listen, they were full of unintelligible murmurs and white noise. I sat and listened as the scribble filled my head and felt like a fool for having asked my roommate to make himself scarce.
The next day, I called and asked for new tapes, but I never received them. The tapes would magically work years later, but in that time when I felt I truly needed them, they were a sonic mess I could not untangle. So instead I rehearsed my testimony, staring into the video camera on my laptop, trying to feel something in advance of the real event. I’ve never watched that recording. It was more a test than a rehearsal. I needed to know which parts of the story made me the most nervous, the most upset, to figure out where the weak spots were so they wouldn’t take me by surprise. It was very important that I not break down on the stand. I wanted the jury to see me as strong and therefore eminently credible, and I wanted Michael to see that he hadn’t broken me, that it was impossible, that I would be the one to break him.
When I thought about Michael Hutchinson or wrote about him in my journal or took notes during phone calls with Walt, I had a lot of trouble with his name. Most of the time, it seemed best—safest—to refer to him as “Hutchinson” only. I could thus hold him at an icy distance; “Hutchinson” is more of a legal entity than a person, and this underlined the fact that I had never known him, was sure Mom hadn’t. Our family had never even heard of Hutchinsons living in the area.
But at other times, this distance seemed like a cop-out, for him and for me. A way to avoid reality. People in Bridgton didn’t call him “Hutchinson,” they called him “Michael” or “Mike.” A specific person, known to many, had committed this crime. He wasn’t some abstraction; he was a human who had made the decision to rape and kill my mother. If anyone had the right to refer to him informally, personally, it was me. There is power in naming, as there is power in knowing.
I received more material to review, and I was glad, because each additional item pulled me away from daily concerns, allowed me to settle further into the state of mind I needed to be in to think about the murder and the upcoming trial. I watched videotapes from the Dr. Brown sessions in Boston, and I felt disoriented. I could see myself there on the couch; it was my round face, framed by hair that flowed down past my elbows. But I had no memory of sitting there; I couldn’t see or feel anything outside the frame.
At times the girl on the tape was almost too quiet to hear; at others her voice had a harsh, loud, stripped-down quality that I didn’t like at all. When she sounded like that, her eyes were unfocused, looking inward. She said some things that scared me, things that I didn’t think were true—like when she said that after running to Mom’s room, she thought a man might be “hiding in the closet, looking at me” through the louvered doors. Dr. Brown had determined that these apparently recovered thoughts and details probably weren’t true, were just collateral of the process, but it was surreal to look back on all those afternoons meant to recover my memory and not remember the afternoons themselves. Still, it makes some sense. I don’t remember those afternoons on the couch because I didn’t spend them there. I spent them in my old house, walking through that night, over and over. Now I would have to do so again, in front of a much larger audience.
* * *
That November, it was announced that O.J. Simpson had written a book and that he would soon appear in an interview on Fox News to promote it. The book was called If I Did It, and it was touted as a “hypothetical confession”: if he had killed Nicole, here’s how he would have done it. The timing felt personal; it underlined that mystic sense I’d always had that O.J. and I were connected, that I would never get away from him. Again people were excited to talk about the case, about the murder, about O.J.’s arrogance. And each time O.J. came up, I was reminded that it was possible to have all the evidence in the world and still not get a criminal conviction. That I couldn’t count on it.
But in the end, the book did provide some unexpected hope. As its release date and the date of O.J.’s television appearance approached, public outcry grew louder and louder. No matter how fascinating the book might be, it was simply too much, too distasteful. Denise Brown, Nicole’s sister, loudly demanded that Fox pull the project. I was surprised and relieved and gratified to see so many people agree with her. By the end of the month, both the book and the TV special had been canceled. So O.J. had not won this time, and maybe Hutchinson wouldn’t win, either.
* * *
Finally, I flew to Portland for the trial, arriving on a sunny Sunday in April. That day I met Susie, from the attorney general’s office, the victim witness advocate who would be in my life from that point on. Our first task was to sit down together and look at all of the crime scene and autopsy photos, so that when they were projected onto a huge white screen at the front of the courtroom, I would be prepared.
My college friend Ashley, who now lived in DC, had insisted on flying to Portland to be with me during the trial, even though I said I’d be fine on my own. She sat with me as Susie showed us the pictures one by one, describing the content of each before handing us the glossy three-by-five. Susie would say, “This is of her body, on the floor in the kitchen. You can see her leg, but not her head . . .” She knew from experience that having the words first made the images easier to handle: imagination will often surpass even the worst reality. We handed the pictures around, and as Ashley looked closely at each one, I was deeply grateful and deeply sad. Like my mother, we were pretty young women. I felt like I was showing her what could really be done to us, if a man decided to.
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