All this framing, all this setup. By the time the jurors take their seats they have been given clues about what this man seated at the defense table between his lawyers did, clues doled out in bits and pieces by Gray and the lawyers over the past two weeks.
But today, Killingsworth tells them, “the speculation ends.” She is the first to tell the story of the murder in this space. The first to tell here this story that has been told so many times. “Jeremy lived in a very remote area of Calcasieu Parish,” she says. “There aren’t that many houses out near where Jeremy lived, but there are some.” In one of them lived Jeremy’s playmates, Joey and June. On the afternoon of February 7, 1992, Jeremy knocked on the door of the white Lawson house, but June and Joey were gone. Ricky invited Jeremy in. “And you will learn in this case that the fatal error Jeremy made that day was going into the home where the defendant, Ricky Langley, was.” Jeremy walked up the stairs. He sat down on the floor and began to play.
Then, Killingsworth says, Ricky came up to him, inserted his penis into Jeremy’s mouth, and ejaculated.
It is a bold move to begin the trial this way. Picture the courthouse on this morning. The jurors spent the night in a motel, hours from their homes. They were all assigned their own rooms—a splurge for the parish, but Gray made sure of it, he’d promised them during voir dire—and they bedded down away from their spouses and loved ones, knowing that in the morning a murder trial would begin. When their alarms went off, far too early, they tossed back the weak motel coffee, boarded the shuttle bus, and there they made awkward small talk with the strangers with whom, they began to realize, they would make the gravest decision of their lives. They noticed who among them was pushy. They noticed who among them was shy. They began to get a sense of where alliances would lie. Once in the courtroom, they noticed the man at the defense table, with his jug ears and thick glasses and pale blue shirt and mismatched red tie. This was the man whose fate they would decide.
Now they are being told that he ejaculated into the mouth of a child. Killingsworth has begun her story with the element that will be most difficult for the state to prove.
But likely that is not what the jurors are thinking, that she must still prove this. They have just been told a story. They are thinking, Poor child. Ricky was referred to as a pedophile many times during voir dire. They are thinking, So that’s what happened. They are thinking of the murder as sexual. That poor, poor child. The white clock with the black hand on the wall ticks slowly. Killingsworth pauses dramatically.
Then she finishes the tale. Ricky killed Jeremy. First his hands, then a wire around Jeremy’s neck, then a dirty sock in his throat. He carried the child’s body to the closet and propped it up against the wall, fixed a white trash bag around Jeremy’s head and shoulders, and piled blankets on top of him. Lorilei at the door; the long, fruitless search; Ricky’s blurted-out confession; the arrest; Jeremy’s body. “I’m sure that the defense is going to tell you that nobody in their right mind, nobody who could tell the difference between right and wrong would do this to a child. But listen carefully. Listen carefully to everything this person did. And listen to how he told police he took that child’s life on February 7, 1992. And at the end of the trial we will come back again and ask you to use your common sense and find the defendant guilty as charged.” She sits back down, leaving her words to linger. Common sense. Yes. That is what it must seem like now.
Phyllis Mann, the defense attorney, gets up and paces. Then she stops in front of the jury box. “The things you’ve heard from the prosecutor this morning are a small part of the whole story. Clive and I have represented Ricky for a while now. And today, with the beginning of this trial, we hand him over to you.” She looks searchingly down the row of seated jurors. Some of them must meet her eyes. Some must look away. “So if I seem a little nervous, it’s because I am. A terrible, unimaginable tragedy happened on February 7, 1992, when Jeremy Guillory died. We have never from the very beginning ever suggested that Ricky was not the cause of Jeremy’s death. But what we will show you during this trial is that Ricky Langley did not, could not, intend to kill Jeremy Guillory.” Ricky’s life is in their hands now, she reminds them. She asks them to spare it.
On television screens all over town, KPLC-TV, the local news station, is airing coverage of this trial. The lawyers talking to the cameras. Lorilei and her son Cole huddling together, Lorilei looking pained and Cole slightly stunned by the camera light. Then one clip that repeats over and over: Ricky Langley, twenty-six and scrawny, his floppy brown hair as wild as a current’s shock, sits in the police station in an orange jumpsuit and tells Lucky and Dixon the story of the murder. “And then I got a wire and”—he jerks his hands up to his neck. He pinches his fingers together. He draws the imaginary wire across his neck and pulls his hands to tighten it. Like he tightened the wire around Jeremy’s. “I made sure he couldn’t breathe.”
Two seconds of tape, if that. When the news anchor returns to end the segment, a small photographic still from this moment hangs in the upper right corner of the screen. Ricky, his hands at his throat. Killing Jeremy.
“This is Jeremy Guillory,” Mann continues. They’ve enlarged Jeremy’s last school portrait and mounted it on cardboard. He wears a checked shirt, his hair parted neatly. He smiles, missing one tooth. “Can y’all see? As we talk about Ricky’s mental illness I want you to know that we are doing that so we can learn why Jeremy Guillory died. He was an innocent six-year-old boy. He made no mistakes. Back in 1992, his mother, Lorilei, was pregnant with another son she’d name Cole, and she and Jeremy were living in Iowa, Louisiana. Iowa is about ten miles east from here. And just down the road from Iowa is another little town called Hecker, Louisiana. And that’s where Ricky grew up with his mother, Bessie, and his father, Alcide, and his older sisters, Darlene, Judy, and Francis, and his younger brother, Jamie. But what happened in this case was first set in motion several years before Ricky was born.”
Now Mann tells the story of the murder. She doesn’t begin with Jeremy’s grabbing his BB gun and running out the door. She begins before Ricky was born, and tells the story of his birth: the crash, Bessie in the cast, all the drugs, Ricky. “The bottom line,” Mann says, “is that Ricky was destined to be psychotic, and the only question is what form that psychosis was going to take.”
(“Destined.” That first taped confession, when Lucky interrogated Ricky:
Q: Now, you’ve had problems with kids in the past.
A: Yeah.
Q: You want to tell me about those?