“In 1995, Thalia Keith died on the campus of the Granby School in Granby, New Hampshire.”
I did admire the ambition inherent in her framing, the idea that this would reach some national audience in need of orienting.
“Her body was found in the campus pool on the afternoon of Saturday, March fourth. Although the cause of death was drowning, Thalia also had open fracture wounds to the back of her skull plus bruising on her neck and damage to her carotid artery and thyroid cartilage, as if she’d been choked. She was a star in musical theater and tennis, a senior who’d been admitted to Amherst College. Suspicion soon settled on Omar Evans, a twenty-five-year-old Black man who worked as head athletic trainer at the prestigious boarding school. He was the only official suspect in the case. Evans falsely confessed under extraordinary pressure after fifteen hours of interrogation, a confession he recanted the next day. He was a victim of an inexperienced and racist small-town police force and a racist school that wanted to close the case quickly. Omar Evans was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to sixty years. He has now been imprisoned nearly twenty-three years for a murder he did not commit. This is the story of two stolen lives: those of Thalia Keith and Omar Evans.”
Lola whistled. Alder said, with no apparent irony, “Oh, snap.”
Jamila said, “You really just called us prestigious?”
I said, “That was well done, Britt. I have a small correction, which is that the case was handed to the State Police. They might’ve been racist, I don’t know, but they weren’t inexperienced. I like how you’ve laid out not just the subject but a thesis statement, too. One danger with that—” I sipped my coffee, buying time. I felt adrenal, wondered what on earth I’d started. “One danger is that if you lay out your theories at the beginning, and then change your mind as you investigate, you’ll be stuck.”
“I won’t change my mind,” Britt said. “I’ve already done a ton of research. The case was so flaky.” I assumed she meant flimsy. She asked if I’d seen the Diane Sawyer interview with Omar’s mother. I hadn’t; she told me she’d send it. “When you hear her speak you’ll understand,” she said. I was sure his mother believed with every cell of her body that he was innocent. I was sure that came through on camera.
I said, “Maybe there were flaws in the case. But they had his DNA on her swimsuit. One of his hairs was in her mouth. They had him in the building when she died, and they can’t put anyone else there. They had a confession. They had the motive, at least according to her friends. They had that noose he drew in the directory. People get convicted on much less.” I heard myself, a parrot. But Britt was only parroting the Reddit boards. I didn’t want her to swing into obstinacy in either direction. I wanted her to do a good job, to wake all the sleeping tigers and ask all the questions I couldn’t wrap my own head around. Because there were things I could never quite reconcile. In real life, you don’t get the murderer telling you exactly what he did and why he did it. Even Omar’s confession, taken at face value, left major gaps. What I wanted, but could never get, was to go back and see it happen. Not the grisly parts, not the death, but every step leading up to it, every moment when fate could have stepped just an inch to the side and left Thalia intact.
“What does everyone think?” I asked the group. “In general, is it better to go in asking questions, or positing answers?”
“But I listen to your podcast,” Jamila said, “and you’re, like, Everything you know about Judy Garland is wrong. That’s how you hook people, right?”
I said, “Sure, and I did a year of research on Judy Garland before we started. I wasn’t still learning as we produced.”
Alder said to Britt, “Okay, so who did it? Isn’t that the unanswered part? Or do you know?”
She shrugged. “There’s a ton of people it could be, but no one obvious. Like, her boyfriend was this guy Robbie Serenho, but he was at a party in the woods with tons of witnesses, but if the time of her death is wrong that doesn’t matter. And also, it might not have even been murder. There’s a theory that she jumped into the pool from the observation deck, and she hit her head and then she bruised her neck on the lane line. Because for one thing: How do you get someone into a swimsuit against their will? Like, I’ve babysat and I can tell you it’s impossible. So if she put her own suit on, maybe she dove.”
Anyone who knew anything about forensics had dismissed that theory—a lane line couldn’t leave finger marks around your neck—but I didn’t say so.
We moved on. Or the class, at least, moved on.
One of the more provocative pieces of evidence against Omar was the Faces of Granby ’94–’95 they found in his desk. I can’t imagine they still make physical versions of what we used to call “face books,” but you’ll remember them—the little spiral-bound directories with black-and-white headshots of each student.
Omar had written under every picture. He later claimed this was a mnemonic device, to recognize who belonged in the gym—as if local interlopers might try to use the bench press. An article Fran sent me the next year—her parents would mail her extra Union Leaders at Reed and then she’d send the relevant pieces back across the country to me at IU—showed the page Thalia was on. On two of the photos, he’d drawn in details. Glasses on Daphne Kramer. And around Thalia’s neck and extending up to the top of the photo: a noose. Omar claimed he hadn’t drawn it, had never seen it before, but it was in the same ink as the writing, which was provably his.
I was on that same page, our names separated alphabetically only by Hani Kayyali, now a major restaurateur. Wednesday Addams, Omar had written below my photo. It could have been worse; I looked like an angry chipmunk. He’d written kebab breath under Hani. Under Thalia, he wrote jailbait.
Jamila was calling her admissions and financial aid podcast Admit It. Lola’s restaurant worker one was Served. Alyssa’s piece on Arsareth Gage Granby was Founding Mother. Alder couldn’t settle on a name, had seven contenders. Britt had wanted to call the Thalia podcast False Confession, but by the end of class settled on She Is Drowned, a Hamlet reference Alder confirmed on his phone. It seemed melodramatic, but this wasn’t something headed out to the wider world. It was just for us. Two or three episodes, just for us.
14
That afternoon’s film class: Eisenstein’s baby carriage tumbling down the Odessa steps. I had the kids time the average shot length. Three seconds, practically a strobe effect for its time. Then, in color, sixty-two years later, De Palma’s baby carriage descending the steps of Chicago’s Union Station, the mother’s silent scream. Eisenstein again, De Palma again, Eisenstein again, both babies plummeting, both cameras blinking fast, fixated but refusing to focus. I wrote on the board, Montage of Attractions. I wrote, movement → concentrated attention → “moved” emotionally, mentally, politically.
There was one particularly bright bulb in the class, a boy who tilted permanently forward in his desk. He said, “It feels—okay, so scene replicates lived experience? But montage replicates memory, the way memory is fractured.”
A boy and a girl whispered in the back. To stop them, I asked if they had any thoughts. The girl said, “We were wondering what happened to the babies. Like, do we ever get a follow-up?”
After class: Three texts on my phone, all from Jerome. A question about the dog’s flea pill; a picture of Leo headed to school with white hair and a cardigan; and then, Stay away from Twitter. Find a cute teacher to fuck. Hope you’re getting rest.