They didn’t say yet what my text was, didn’t talk until the second episode about how Britt got her AP chemistry class involved in making their own luminol, which was surprisingly easy to do—and how there had been enough blood on the bottom of the inside of the equipment room door, and especially in the cracks of the cement floor, that it showed up even twenty-three years later. Blood sticks.
It was only because construction on the new seven-million-dollar field house had been delayed that the structure was still standing. The door was metal, a rusted brown—and while the handle and lock had been replaced, my God, it was the same door we used to jimmy open. It was far from the oldest thing at Granby, but it was the oldest ugly thing.
It would have made a better story to say, as the press sometimes implied, that the chemistry class waltzed in there and discovered everything at once, but in fact once they saw the spatter glowing dim blue, the chemistry teacher had the sense to get the kids out of there as fast as possible, reminding them that other things besides blood could make luminol glow. Certain paints, for example. The flesh of turnips, unlikely as that might be. She had the further good sense to turn things over to the headmaster, who in turn contacted the police, who in turn spent the time and money they should have spent in 1995 to seal the place off, to go in with higher-quality luminol and lights and cameras and—because the cinder-block walls had been repainted in 1996 and again in 2004, and because there was graffiti beneath both those layers—with chemical paint strippers and fine-grit sandpaper and razor blades. Not all the samples were testable, but enough were: This was Thalia Keith’s blood.
The inside of the door offered up not only blood spatter but also the long-invisible print, low down, of a bloody sneaker toe, one that perhaps kicked the door open. But even more than on the door itself, there was blood on the wall to the left of the door. Something I hadn’t known: The first impact of a head on a wall would cause no radiating spatter. The second one would—a bleeding wound, a pooled blood source, hitting something hard. So what the pros could figure out was where Thalia’s head hit the wall a second or third time. She was still standing, or more likely being held up. Maybe by the neck. Facing her attacker.
Much of that blood had been scrubbed, not long afterward—obliterated into circles the naked eye couldn’t see, especially not in a dark equipment room with only one lightbulb. Maybe fresh graffiti had been added right away, a quick perfunctory round of spray paint meant to blend in with the other spray paint and Sharpie and chalk. And even if someone did spot a faint brownish circle on the wall, at about head height, in the middle of a room filled with infinite stains and cobwebs and rodent droppings—why would they assume it had anything to do with the girl who’d drowned in the pool?
The discovery was significant for several reasons. “A-number-1,” as Fran would say, it made a strong case that Omar’s original defense team had not done their own proper investigation. This might not have been grounds to argue ineffective assistance of counsel again if the new evidence didn’t suggest that the verdict might well have been different. And indeed the verdict might have been different, had (number 2) the prosecution not relied on the argument that it was impossible for someone to be murdered in the pool without Omar hearing or seeing something. But it was clear now that Thalia hadn’t been attacked inside the athletic complex at all. And the proximity of the shed to the pool’s emergency exit (plus the trace blood on that doorframe, earlier dismissed as the messiness of Campus Security) strongly implied that this was the way Thalia had been brought into the pool—not via the hallway outside Omar’s office. Add to all that (number 3) the fact that the methodology that had matched Omar’s DNA to Thalia’s swimsuit and the hair in her mouth was now laughably outdated. And number 4: Several classmates were now willing to testify that Thalia had been drinking backstage at the end of the show, suggesting an earlier time of death. And number 5, a further demerit to the original defense: They had failed to follow up with those same witnesses—and they’d never talked to me, a person who could have decoded Thalia’s planner.
In any case, that’s how the public podcast began, in 2019—with my text and its fallout. This was why people were willing to listen to a show hosted by two teenagers: They were teenagers who, in the aftermath of the equipment shed discovery, had been featured in People magazine, teenagers who’d already been invited onto other podcasts, teenagers who’d been interviewed by Savannah Guthrie under flattering television lights. I coproduced and appeared as an occasional guest, but it was important to keep the show theirs. Partly to preserve my integrity as a potential witness; partly because I was worried that the squickiness that still followed me and Jerome around could taint the project; and partly, yes, because of my lingering, irrational, adolescent fear that classmates would wonder why I, of all people, was getting involved.
Still, I was the one drawing the most heat online. There were notes of accusation (I was a fame whore, I was tampering, I knew more than I was saying) and there were personal notes (a message asking who the hell I was—from someone with only ten Facebook friends, one of whom was Beth Docherty; make of that what you will). Some people pointed out that I hadn’t believed and supported Jasmine Wilde, and here I was believing Omar, who was a man, and wasn’t that interesting. But I could handle it. I was a human shield between the kids and the public, absorbing some of what came their way. I ignored almost everything. I plugged away at my book about female screenwriters and, when the Jerome mess mostly abated, found an agent based on the proposal and two sample chapters.
My friend Elise, who loves astrology, told me I’d probably experienced my Uranus opposition. It happens to everyone in their early forties, she said—a huge shake-up, a burn-it-all-down time, voluntary or involuntary, that rearranges your life. “Some people have an affair and buy a sports car,” she said. “But you, you go vigilante. I love it. And you’ve never been so . . . energetic. It’s like you’re turbocharged now.”
It was true that my life, which had lost all shape in those two weeks back at Granby, had reconfigured around these two projects. And of course there were my kids; they’d never gone anywhere. Jerome and I had officially divorced. Not because of what happened online, but because we’d been heading in that direction all along. He still lived next door.
So my life had purpose, but here’s one thing that churned my gut at night: Thalia’s family, aside from Vanessa, didn’t want any of this. Her half brother was speaking on behalf of her parents, her cousins, all of them, against what we’d done to the family, to their grieving process. They needed to believe the case was settled in 1997. They already had their closure, and even entertaining the idea that the wrong man was behind bars would shatter that. The fact that we were right, the fact that on the balance scale of misery their strife was utterly outweighed by Omar’s past twenty-five years, rendered this concern irrelevant—but they didn’t see it that way. “It’s like we’re losing her again,” Thalia’s brother had told the Union Leader, in an interview that seemed aimed right at me. I was the one reinflicting this pain. Plus Vanessa was estranged now from the rest of the family. I couldn’t help but feel the weight of it all.
By the time their podcast wrapped up a year later—Britt then a sophomore at Smith, Alder a freshman at Columbia, both finishing their school years online in lockdown—the New England Innocence Project was involved, and cash was pouring into Omar’s legal defense fund. The Spider-Man actress was suddenly interested again, contributing less money than you’d think but talking about it a great deal.