It’s time to hand it over to the people, Black tells them, and it’s true—Seever’s not theirs anymore. He belongs to everyone. Outside the jailhouse where Seever’s awaiting trial there’s a huge crowd, carrying homemade placards and bringing out their folding chairs and cases of bottled water, and it almost seems like a party, except the celebration is more like an orgy of hate, the people smile rabidly, flecks of spittle at the corners of their mouths. Denver has been waiting for the moment when the monster gets pulled out from under the bed and into the light, and that is now; they don’t want to wait for more, they want to see this one brought to justice.
Hoskins leaves through the jail’s side door, pausing to watch the swelling crowd gathering out front. There’s a girl there, wearing a jacket printed with pink bunnies. She can’t be more than five. She’s holding a sheet of poster board, awkwardly, because it’s too big for her small arms, but she doesn’t put it down, doesn’t want to miss out on the fun. There’s a poem written on the board in straggling black letters, and Hoskins hopes she doesn’t know what it says, hopes that she can’t read yet:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Good morning Jacky
We’re gonna
Kill you!
*
Jacky Seever was brought to trial on June 1, 2009, charged with thirty-one counts of first-degree murder. Seever wore a brown tweed suit on that first day, as he was wont to do, and a blue silk tie. No photographers were allowed in the courtroom, but an artist in the audience sketched plenty of images that appeared in the Post alongside Samantha Peterson’s articles. In some of the sketches, Seever is stone-faced, with a sheen of sweat on his brow. In others, Seever looks weary, even remorseful—although it is up for debate whether that’s how he actually felt.
The trial itself lasted less than six weeks, and it was the focus of an entire nation. It had been a long while since the American public had been riveted by one person, and they were hungry for blood and gore, and a good story. They got it. A respected member of the community. Thirty-one victims. Nineteen of those had been identified, and the weeping families would tell anyone who’d listen about their murdered loved ones. Cable news stations had a constant feed on the trial, and every newspaper in the country had sent a journalist to cover the story. Local hotels had no available rooms, and anyone who had nowhere to stay found themselves camping out beside the homeless in Civic Center Park, only to be rooted out by the cops in the middle of the night.
The prosecution asked for the death penalty.
It took only three hours for the jury to make their decision. Fast enough that they were done in time to grab an early prime-rib dinner and shrimp cocktails at the Broker. The American public was relieved—a monster had been condemned, and they could finally get back to their regularly scheduled programming.
Jacky Seever was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
But a crime like this isn’t only about the killer. There are others to consider. The victims. Their families. Detectives Ralph Loren and Paul Hoskins, who were both given a commendation and a goodish raise for Seever’s arrest. Sammie Peterson, who became something of a local celebrity because of her articles covering the case. Gloria Seever, who had to learn how to live in a world without her husband. Those are just a few, because a crime like this has a wide reach, and you can never know how many are actually affected. That’s how things like this are—a drop in still water that starts a ripple, and it spreads in every direction, going on and on, probably into infinity, never flatlining but starting other ripples that head in completely new directions. Sooner or later, the original ripple will slow, it will lose much of its urgency, but it’s still there.
It’ll never be over.
THIS ISN’T OVER
November 27, 2015
After seven years, nearly everyone has forgotten about Jacky Seever. Except Carrie Simms. She’s spent every day of the last seven years thinking of Seever, of what he did over the days he’d kept her tied and gagged in his garage. Those kinds of things aren’t easy to forget, and sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night, her head aching because she’s had her jaw clenched tight, trying to keep from screaming. A dentist gave her a hunk of plastic to stick in her mouth when she sleeps, like something hockey players wear to keep their teeth from shattering, but she doesn’t need a guard for her teeth, she needs one for her brain, to keep it quiet, to keep from dreaming about Seever. A dream-guard, that’s what she needs. Or a lobotomy. Carrie used to be the kind of girl who talked a lot, laughed loudly, but over the last seven years she’s become mostly silent, a woman who doesn’t want to be noticed. She’s only twenty-six, but her roots are mostly gray already, there are deep lines radiating from the corners of her eyes, and her hand sometimes aches, as if longing for the lost finger.