Wilson, Clive, and an investigator rush to his side and try to calm him.
“If that’s not molestation, I don’t know what is.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Gray has come back in the room just as Ricky, who is now shaking violently, begins to shout.
“Unfortunately, what’s happened is that Ricky can’t deal with it,” Clive says.
Of everything Ricky has heard in this trial, the semen is what finally sets him off. This evidence of who he is.
Thirty-Seven
After Killingsworth finishes, the trial ends.
The jury never hears about Ricky’s prior convictions, as they did in the first trial. They never hear about the diary in which he described taking children into the woods. Were those stories dreams, or memories? They never hear about the classes he took in the Georgia prison; his struggles to understand religion and reconcile it with his life; that two social workers from the sex offender program paused the woman who came to interview them and said, their voices hesitant and nervous, “Remember us to Ricky. He touched our hearts, that boy.” The jury never hears that it was Ricky who got himself into that sex offender program, that he asked again and again before he was eligible. They never hear that in those years, he pleaded never to be released.
They never hear that once he was released, and he killed Jeremy, he bragged to Jackson in that holding cell. They never hear him say he enjoyed killing Jeremy. Because they never hear about the seminar Clive held, they never hear about Ricky’s belief in the three kinds of pedophiles. They never hear him say that Jeremy was his true love. So much is cast out and slips away nearly unrecorded, consigned to dusty cardboard banker’s boxes kept in archive rooms out of view. It becomes the hidden thirty-thousand-page narrative of this case, the shadow narrative.
And so much is left unresolved. After the lawyers found Pearl Lawson and made her come back for the trial, they never asked where her husband and son were. No one asks her why, if a child was found dead in her house, and that child was her son’s best friend, she is so tight-lipped on the stand. Whose pubic hair was on Jeremy’s lip is never solved. What happened in that house will never be known.
*
Judge Gray sends the jury out to deliberate. After three and a half hours, they return. Lorilei is not there. “We the jury find the defendant Ricky Langley guilty of second-degree murder.”
The death penalty is reserved for first-degree murder. Ricky receives a life sentence.
But Clive appeals. Not the prosecution trying again for a death sentence, but Clive. He wants Ricky declared not guilty by reason of insanity. Citing Gray’s absence from the courtroom, he wins a new trial. The prosecutors do file for the death penalty again, but a higher court rules that because with this verdict Ricky has already escaped first-degree murder and a death sentence, they can charge him with only second-degree. The trial takes place in front of a judge, not a jury. Lorilei doesn’t testify. Again, Ricky is found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life. He is not found insane.
*
But none of that is what made me go to Iowa. None of that is what made me chase down the records of Ricky’s life, or try to understand how I’d read my own into it. Instead it’s what the jury foreman at the 2003 trial, the eighth-grade teacher, said later. After the verdict.
Ever since, in 2003, I first watched Ricky’s confession and felt, in that moment, that I wanted him to die, I have always believed that it was Lorilei’s words that had made the jury spare Ricky’s life. That’s how the media told it: The story of Ricky is the story of the power of a mother’s forgiveness.
In the records, I’ve found that the truth is more complicated: She doesn’t forgive him, but she doesn’t want him to die.
But it’s even more complicated than that. Because in talking about the decision to spare Ricky’s life, the foreman never mentioned Lorilei. Instead he said: “I knew as soon as I saw him I wasn’t gonna let them kill that boy.”
“That boy”—Ricky. “As soon as I saw him”—voir dire, which Ricky was present for. Meaning before the trial. Before the evidence, before the witnesses, before the facts, and before the story-spinning by the lawyers, too. Before the foreman heard Lorilei say anything at all.
The foreman’s brother-in-law was schizophrenic. The brother-in-law died well before the trial, but he lived with the foreman and the foreman’s wife for years. They took care of him, and the foreman saw how much his brother-in-law struggled. He saw the pain that struggle caused his wife. He looked at Ricky. He saw his brother-in-law.
*
A few weeks after I see the photographs of Jeremy, I come back to Louisiana, because the archives division has found missing file boxes. Each day I look through more records, looking for answers. Each night I drive. I tell myself I’m driving to see the landscape: how the road stretches flat and faded in the sun, how the trees erupt in emerald profusions. But really I know I’m searching for the house.
Three hours before my plane back to Massachusetts, with the airport a two-hour drive away, I’m still driving back and forth on Ardoin Road in Iowa, looking. The house isn’t here. I know that. I drove this road yesterday and the day before. It isn’t here, and yet nowhere else makes sense. I have to leave. But leaving means accepting that I never will find the house. That this story will always remain unfinished inside me.
I pull my car to the side of the road, get out, and start to photograph the trees. Because I don’t know what else to do. Because at least then I’ll have that evidence of here. It’s an unusually clear day for this time of the year, no clouds threatening rain, just the bright blue sky and the flat green grass for miles. The road is empty. The fields are, too. There’s not a car I can see, not a person in sight. Not a bird in the sky. Before me, the blanketed fields; behind me, a thick wall of trees that abut a ravine, swallowing the horizon line. I lift the camera to my eyes and frame my shot: the long road that stretches the length of the viewfinder, the fields that stretch behind it like a memory. Maybe I never was meant to find the house.