On the morning of the second day, I settled into the courtroom with everyone else, and had some time to get oriented. Members of the press sat strung along the back row, scribbling in notepads: no cameras allowed. Our family and some friends of the family, about twenty people in all, sat in three or four rows on the right side of the large room. Gwen was on my left, Ashley on my right. On Gwen’s other side sat Chief Bell of the Bridgton Police, whom I’d last seen in Texas. He had retired two years before but had continued to work the case from home. Every time a document was read or quoted, his lips moved along with the words.
On the left side of the room sat Hutchinson’s father, Brad, his stepmother, and his friend Justin, with some officials and other observers behind them. His mother did not appear. We were split on two sides of an aisle, like a horrible parody of a wedding. We didn’t look at them; they didn’t look at us. Or, rather, each side stole flickering glances at the other. And we kept running into the stepmother in the restroom. I washed my hands next to her once; we met each other’s eyes in the mirror, but neither of us said a word.
One evening, as Ashley and I were sitting on our beds at the Regency, we were talking over the day—there was so little opportunity to react to things and think about them as they happened. After a moment’s visible hesitation, Ashley told me that Justin, Hutchinson’s best friend, his only apparent supporter other than his father and stepmother, had approached her in the hallway during a short break. “I was leaning over the water fountain,” she said, “and I heard this voice in my ear.”
Justin said, in his way, that he found her very attractive and wanted to see if he had a chance to sleep with her. I stared at her in momentary disbelief. But I wasn’t really that surprised. There’s no limit to these guys, I thought. They think we’re always here just for them. By all other outward appearances, Justin seemed sane, even if deluded and possibly malicious. The next day, he asked Susie if Lara, the assistant prosecutor with the beautiful dark hair, was single.
* * *
Justice Thomas Warren presided over the courtroom. He was a thin man with short, dark gray hair and a long face. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, like a nerdy college professor, and his ears stuck out from the sides of his head, but he could be stern. He was particularly impatient with any sort of procedural delay or illogical questioning. He was just a little sarcastic, sometimes, but was notably kind and respectful when speaking to the members of the jury. I liked him right away, in part because he reminded me of Alan Alda in M*A*S*H. And as the days went on, I gained more and more respect for him.
The first person to take the stand on the second day was Bernie King, one of the first policemen on the scene that night, who had taken such pleasure in arresting Hutchinson on his wedding day. Officer King described the general chronology of that night and very early morning, and the basic layout of the crime scene. As he spoke, I tried to remember how he had looked thirteen years earlier, when I had met him in the living room of the Venezia apartment. I could not. I wasn’t even sure I would have recognized him on the street.
Next was Craig Handley, a state forensic expert, who went over the scene in the kind of careful, precise detail I’d been unable and unwilling to see in the dark. Despite his dispassionate thoroughness, Handley had the unexpected habit of referring to my mother not as “the body,” as others might have, but as Crystal, as though he had come to know her by closely studying her home. He took every opportunity to say her name, constantly reminding the jury that we were talking about a real person—not just a body, but someone who had lived.
When I had reviewed the crime scene photos with Susie, she had told me that the police had also taken a video camera and walked through our house. I had been glad to look over the pictures, despite how gruesome they were—facing them was better than remaining in the dark. But to watch that tape would have been to walk through that house again, much more viscerally than in memory. I’ve still never seen it, but I’ve since read a description. The police began filming at 7:15 a.m., when the world was still gray and dark, shrouded in misty rain. They had not yet removed Mom’s body and would not do so for another three hours. They slowly recorded every inch of our house. The bloody kitchen and living room. The pictures on the walls, greeting cards on the dining table. The angle of her leg. The narrow hallway, the bed I left, my desk and all my stuffed animals. Our spare bedroom, crowded with a pink pullout couch and my bookshelf. Mom’s bedroom—her dresser and perfume bottles and her neatly folded-back bedcovers.
That day at the trial, when the bailiff wheeled in the television and turned it away from us, toward the jury, a deep quiet descended on the courtroom. The judge asked for the thick window shades to be pulled down, darkening the room so the jurors could more easily see the screen.
The bailiff pressed PLAY, the button making a loud plastic thunk. The jurors shifted, settled in. A couple of them leaned forward, just slightly.
The room was still, only tiny gray coughs occasionally breaking the dry air. The video was not muted, but all we could hear was the whispery pickup of ambient sound from the house, the cop or cops behind the camera just as quiet as we were. I watched the faces of the jury and was very glad I had chosen not to see this video. They mostly maintained their serious expressions, but I could see revulsion break through—a widening of the eyes, a distracted, open-palm stroke of the chin. They didn’t look at one another or out at us. Their eyes remained fixed on the screen. We watched them watching. It went on and on and on, much longer than I had anticipated. Sixteen minutes of feathered silence that I wanted to break with a scream.
The VHS stopped with a heavy clack. The bailiff bent and pulled the tape from the machine, and the jurors settled back into their seats. Murmurs and sighs spread around the room under the quiet thunder of the bailiff rolling out the TV.
Craig Handley resumed his testimony, explaining, “The reason we process a scene is the theory that when you come to a place, you leave something of yourself there. And when you leave, you take something with you.”