Lisa, the prosecutor, was a short, blond, direct woman—kind to the family, satisfyingly sharp and bullheaded in the courtroom. With her fair coloring, tough attitude, and dark humor, she fit right in with us. The lawyer assisting her was Lara Nomani, a quieter woman with sleek, dark hair. I loved that they were both women; it was an unexpected bit of poetic justice.
I was sworn in at two thirty on the afternoon of Monday, April 2, 2007. Lisa began her questioning by asking me simple things, verifying my identity and current residence, that I was from Bridgton, that I was Crystal Perry’s daughter. Nothing was true until entered into the court record, and anything not entered did not officially exist, so what the jury knew and what everyone else knew were sometimes miles apart. The jurors were instructed to listen to the facts only and do their best not to draw inferences. But emotions lay under the facts like shadows. The pain of loss. The cold grip of fear.
The jury sat across from me, in two elevated rows perhaps fifteen feet away. I addressed my answers to them, but my eyes often wandered to Hutchinson, who sat just to their left, next to Andrews, angled toward me. Every time I looked at him, his eyes were already on mine, as though waiting for my glance. Over the next two hours, I sometimes held his gaze for a few moments, and he never backed down or looked away. His face did not move or change. His expression was unreadable, and I hoped mine was, too.
I’d been advised to keep my answers short so Lisa could direct the conversation according to the argument she was building. But I did occasionally stray from simple facts. When called upon to describe Mom, I couldn’t resist adding, “I have all my life wanted to be as pretty as she was.”
At some point, I was speaking too quietly, and Lisa had to move the microphone a little closer to me. I briefly had an opportunity, then, to speak directly to the jury: “Can you hear me? Is this all right?” It was a moment of sudden intimacy, watching them nod back at me. For those few seconds, I saw them as twelve individuals, people with lawns and apartments and spouses and friends. People I could have met under a hundred different circumstances.
From there, Lisa and I continued our call-and-response until just after Mom’s screaming stopped, when I prepared to walk out of my room. At this point, she yielded the floor to me, and I told the story of the rest of that night, minute by minute, my voice going on and on in the perfectly silent courtroom.
Looking at the trial transcript now, I am most drawn to the part where I say that while I listened to the murder happening, I could do nothing but sit on my bed, “entirely still, absolutely frozen, hearing all of this so loud in my head.” I read this from a distance of years—many from that night, a few from the trial—and suddenly I pan out and up, free from that loud place within my mind. I see my house, so small, like a cardboard model. The place vibrates with the sound of terror. Dark figures struggle near the kitchen; they are hard to see, because what’s happening between them is so awful. But just as scary is the girl there, on the other side of that wall. She sits immobile, not reacting, like a doll, a body the soul has left. It amazes me that she was ever reanimated.
* * *
Hutchinson’s lawyer, Robert Andrews, was smart enough not to bully me too much in his cross-examination; it would win him no favor with the jury. But we were still opposed, lightly sparring. At one point, I corrected a date for him and felt a rush of petty satisfaction. At another, he was unsatisfied with an answer I gave, and he slapped an interview transcript down in front of me and asked, “Does this refresh your memory?”
A pervasive difficulty during the cross-examination was distinguishing between my memory of that night at that moment, in 2007, and the way I remembered having described it in interviews at earlier dates. It was difficult to hew closely to what I actually remembered on that first day of the trial—the only way, as I saw it, to avoid perjury—without looking evasive about slightly different things I’d said previously, small inconsistencies that Andrews tried to exploit. So many years had passed, and I’d been interviewed so many times, that these layers had become interwoven. The whole afternoon was a complicated dance between delivering information from my live memory and perspective—re-inhabiting long-ago events in real time—and trying to understand and interpret several earlier versions of myself: at twelve, at fourteen, at eighteen.
At one point, Andrews mentioned the interviews in Texas and asked, “Were you aware that you were being treated as a suspect?” At that moment, all my earlier suspicions were confirmed. But if Andrews had wanted me to get angry or upset on my own behalf while on the stand, he failed; I just felt sad for that skinny, polygraphed thirteen-year-old from so long ago.
* * *
When Andrews and Lisa had finished their questioning, I was dismissed, and court recessed for the day. Gwen and Glenice went back to their hotel in town, everyone else went home, and Ashley and I went to the Regency. Before the trial, when she had announced that she was coming with me, I had protested: I didn’t need hand-holding, I said; it was ridiculous for her to take time off. But after that first day, I was glad that she hadn’t listened to me. For the rest of that week, she was at my side: she would run out to get me coffee or sandwiches during breaks in the proceedings, when I needed energy but couldn’t risk leaving the building because we might be resuming any minute. She held my hand at the most intense moments. My family was there, too, and I could have leaned on them more than I did. But Ashley was someone from my new life, from the previously murderless present. She was a bridge.
In the evenings, we would briefly talk through the day, then try to unwind. That first night, we went out for a nice meal, drank a glass of wine in our room, and watched some TV. The day was important, but it had been difficult, and, left alone, I would have run through every detail until I was exhausted. With Ashley there encouraging me to take a break, I could admit that I needed one. And in the night, I had the comfort of her quietly breathing in the second bed, between me and the window to the cold outside.
* * *