Everything ground to a halt. Justice Warren sent the jury out. I could see him making an effort to speak to them calmly and neutrally.
As we knew from earlier motions out of the jury’s presence, Andrews was referring, obliquely, to a letter in the case file from Tim to Mom, one of those letters that kept coming in the months of her engagement to Dennis. They were ardent letters, in which they relived nights they’d spent together and shared their fantasies. In this one, Tim had referred to a discussion they’d once had about trying anal sex. Essentially, they had considered it; Crystal was interested in trying it, but they never had. I felt so sad for her. What a travesty, to have your love letters used against you, to have them leveraged as part of the defense of your killer.
Andrews wanted this letter to imply that the act that caused those terrible injuries was consensual. Once again, he was either betting on sexual ignorance or was ignorant himself. But Justice Warren did everything right. The Tim letters, he reminded Andrews, had already been discussed—out of the jury’s hearing—and he had ruled that they were off-limits, inadmissible as hearsay. Andrews apologized, said he’d misunderstood, that he thought he could ask the question if he didn’t mention the letters explicitly. But without them, he couldn’t offer any basis for asking the question. I sat and fumed while I heard him say, several times, “I apologize. I understand that.” He was too calm. He’d already gotten what he wanted by throwing the question out there. It had already escaped from his mouth, like a plume of dark smoke, and could not be retrieved.
Justice Warren was perfectly intelligent; he said everything I could not. “The witness did not say he reached the conclusion of rape just because of anal sex,” he told Andrews. “He said he reached that conclusion after looking at a picture with a lot of—which he thought was just horrendous—a lot of trauma . . . The fact that someone may have discussed some certain kind of sex at some point in their life does not mean that they engaged in it consensually on May 11 or May 12 of 1994.”
This would have been enough, but it was even better to hear Justice Warren make it personal: “I’m pretty annoyed that we went to that place. I will not conceal my annoyment.”
“I understand that.”
“Annoyance,” he added, firmly.
Andrews pursed his lips. “I understand that, Your Honor.” But I remain convinced that he was never confused about procedure, that he was purposely pushing, trying to see what he could get away with.
Warren brought the jury back in. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sustaining the objection. The question was inappropriate. You should entirely disregard the question in this case; it’s not part of this case at all.”
I hoped that it was possible for a person to unhear something. To cast such a salacious detail entirely out of mind. Unfortunately, the prosecution had only one more witness to call, so we didn’t have a lot of material in which to bury this one moment before the defense began.
42
* * *
I had no way of knowing if my attempt to look like my mother bothered Hutchinson, or surprised him. If I’d ever hoped it would shake him up enough to confess, that was not to be. But it turned out that Hutchinson was looking to unbalance me, too.
On the fourth day of the trial, after many hours of testimony from police officers and forensic experts, it was finally the defense’s turn. Their first witness was Michael Hutchinson.
Andrews treated Michael like a lost little brother. I sat and stared at the lawyer, ungenerously focused on the fat rolls at the back of his neck, the straining seams of his suit jacket, his childishly pursed lips. It was almost easier to hate Andrews than Michael—he operated in the known world. Over that long week, I had seen him speak to many people, had seen him defer to some, condescend to others. I had watched him struggle with an overhead projector. I had seen him nervously button and unbutton his jacket when he didn’t think anyone was looking. I knew he shuffled his papers to buy time. He was more real than Michael, who had mostly been still and silent through the long hours. Michael’s testimony was the first, and perhaps only, chance for me to figure out who he was.
Andrews slowly walked us through Michael’s background—his upbringing, his poor grades in school, his masonry work for his father. He prompted Michael to talk about his parents, who fought constantly, often leaving him “stuck in the middle.” His mother was, allegedly, irrationally jealous of other women, and mentally unstable; Michael said she would tear off her clothes in the middle of arguments, even in public. Before the trial and after, people would tell me stories about Michael’s father, Brad; the cruelty in that home seemed widely known.
Andrews made it clear that Michael was raised by a violent man who insisted that his mother was crazy and worthless. He didn’t clarify, of course, whether she was mentally ill or whether she had been driven crazy by abuse. Or why, if she was sick, Brad’s response had been to inflict torment rather than care for her. I wondered how pointing out the misogyny and violent dysfunction in that family could possibly help their defense. I kept waiting for some clever turn to the argument, but none came. It was foolish for the defense to think that from the jury’s perspective, sympathy for the boy and condemnation of the man could not coexist.
Michael and Andrews worked together to tell the court a story: that Michael came to our house that night for consensual sex, and then a mysterious other man appeared and did the killing. To me this sounded like a bad eighties thriller, so unoriginal that it was almost funny.
Michael said the mystery man had suddenly rushed into the house and started arguing with Crystal. He told the jury that he hadn’t seen the man’s face, but he knew that he was tall, that he wore a black motorcycle jacket. When pressed for more details, he said, “It all happened so quick.” When the guy pulled a knife out of his sleeve, Michael lunged at him, receiving a deep slash across his palm. Of course, the jury didn’t know that he had told Walt a different story, about a car wreck. He said he was knocked unconscious for an undetermined amount of time, and woke up to find the stranger “scooched down” on the floor, stabbing Crystal. Michael “body-slammed” the man, he said, then gazed down at the floor to find Crystal “looking up at me, completely covered in blood.” Then he ran out to his truck, drove home, and hid in his bedroom for the rest of the day.
That bedroom was in his father’s house, three doors down from Linda’s. This part of his story, about his hiding out, I did believe. If no one had come to the door at the Venezia, if I had made it all the way into town that night, I could have knocked on his door.
Andrews paused, seeming to think. “You didn’t call the police?” he asked.
“No.”