All That Is Mine I Carry With Me, page 27
No.
And your mom never said anything to suggest that she was afraid of me, did she?
I was a child. If she was afraid, I don’t think she would have said anything to me.
True, you were a child, but you were her child. If your mother thought I was dangerous in any way, don’t you think she would have given you some warning?
Yes.
She would have done everything in her power to protect you?
She would have.
But she never said anything like that, did she?
No.
She never gave you any reason to think she was afraid, did she?
No.
In fact, for many years after her disappearance, you believed I had nothing to do with it, isn’t that true?
Mr. Bailis: Objection.
Judge: Overruled.
I believed you, it’s true.
Miranda, do you think it’s possible that kids sometimes imagine things about their parents? They get wrong ideas about them?
Objection.
Overruled.
I guess so.
Because of course parents don’t tell their kids everything, do they?
No.
Miranda, are you aware that, just a couple of weeks before she disappeared, your mom made a trip to Trout Lake, Vermont, to find a cabin for our family vacation the next summer?
Objection.
Overruled. Mr. Larkin, I presume you will be offering evidence to support that?
Yes, Your Honor, my own testimony.
The witness may answer.
I did not know that. I’ve never heard that before.
No, she never told you. She only told me afterward. It was going to be a surprise.
Objection.
Sustained. Pose a question, Mr. Larkin.
So it’s possible your mom drove herself to that little town again and you would have no idea of it?
I guess it’s possible.
That makes things less suspicious, doesn’t it? That there was an obvious reason for her to have been in the very town where her body was ultimately found? That there is a simple, reasonable explanation for her body being found there? And it has nothing to do with me.
I don’t know.
You don’t know or you’d rather not say?
I don’t know.
Miranda, I’m so sorry you’ve been put in this position.
Objection.
Sustained. The jury will disregard the last statement.
I haven’t been put in this position, Daddy. I chose to be here.
My father pauses, repeats the word back to her: Daddy.
Miranda does not answer.
The point is, there may be facts about your mom and dad that you weren’t aware of, isn’t that so?
There may be.
There may be. You’re not sure, are you?
Miranda’s hands are clasped in front of her, resting on a little shelf in the witness box, like a confession booth in church. Without hurrying but also without warning, Dad puts his hand on top of Miranda’s prayerful hands, and he squeezes them with a reassuring jostle, then he quickly withdraws his hand before Miranda—or Mr. Bailis—can react.
Dad repeats the question: You’re not sure, are you?
About what?
About what happened to Mom. Nobody is sure.
I am sure.
Dad nods. He will leave it there, he will not push his daughter any further. Another glance at the jury is all he needs to communicate his message: doubt, doubt, doubt.
* * *
—
Day three.
Tom Glover and Miranda had essentially the same weakness as witnesses: they were vulnerable people. Because they were unconfident, they seemed to be hedging and tentative, and because neither had the sort of kill-shot evidence that might clinch the case, their testimony felt weak, insubstantial.
Aunt Kate has never been vulnerable, and she has a kill shot.
Kate was always Jane’s confidante. Every day the two sisters chatted, sometimes just to check in, other times sharing intimate details of their marriages. They usually spoke in the morning, after their kids had left for school. My mother would sit in the kitchen, drinking coffee, gabbing on the phone that sat on the counter. Like an old baseball glove, the phone itself showed signs of my mother’s constant talk: it was discolored by her coppery makeup, which rubbed off on the dialer and the mouthpiece.
Now, on the stand, Kate reports what Jane told her.
(An out-of-court statement from a dead person generally is not admissible in court, but a Massachusetts law allows such hearsay in civil suits, provided only that the judge finds the statement was “made in good faith and upon the personal knowledge” of the deceased person who said it. So a pattern develops: my dad objects to Kate repeating something Jane told her—Objection, hearsay. To which the judge responds, I find the statement was made in good faith and upon the personal knowledge of the declarant.)
Jane believed her husband was unhappy in their marriage. She suspected he was fooling around and that he wanted to leave her. But she also thought he would not risk a divorce. In those days, divorce settlements tended to be generous to women, especially those who had been spurned rather than copped to “irreconcilable differences,” and especially those ex-wives—the vast majority, then—whose earning power paled beside their ex-husbands’. Money was Dan’s weakness, Jane said. He was obsessed with it, always scheming for quick cash. His parents were wealthy, it was true, but Dan never seemed to have enough. He spent like a rich kid—watches, clothes, cars, travel, all of which dazzled Jane—but the couple never had the cash to keep up. Dan’s parents hoarded their money. They told Dan that he would inherit nothing until both his parents died, which would probably come too late to help Dan. (The presence of Dan’s mother in court certainly confirmed that.) Jane did not have her husband’s rich-kid nonchalance about money, his assurance that money would always appear when needed. She fretted about it, and told him so. They argued.
Dan’s unhappiness was not primarily about money, though. Kate describes dinners with Dan and Jane when he would insult or berate her over some small thing. He had always been a nasty guy, Kate says, but by 1975 he seemed very obviously to have fallen out of love with Jane. Neither Kate nor Jane had any idea about Sarah Bennett, Dan’s girlfriend, but Kate was not surprised when Sarah showed up, either.
Led along by Mr. Bailis’s questioning, Aunt Kate describes a dinner, about a year before Jane’s disappearance, when Dan said: I think all married men are a little unhappy, secretly, at least the ones who marry young. He had a theory about marriage: Young men are like rising stocks whose value peaks around age forty or fifty. Therefore a man who marries young is bound to feel he sold too low on his own stock and is now stuck with a depreciating asset—his wife.
To this point, Aunt Kate’s testimony is unflattering but not fatal. The man she is describing is a jerk but not necessarily a murderer.
But the kill shot I mentioned is not my dad’s unhappiness. It is his capacity for violence. This was always going to be a difficult hurdle for us to clear. Is it believable that a man who had never been violent before would suddenly murder his wife? Could we convince the jury to accept that possibility?
In her unwavering, reportorial tone, Aunt Kate repeats Jane’s description of the night Dan raped her.
Dad does not object. He filed a motion before trial to exclude this evidence, which the judge denied. Now he does not want to underscore the incident by trying, and failing, to keep it from the jurors’ ears.
It takes Aunt Kate only a few minutes to describe the facts of the rape, but the impact in the courtroom is immediate. Even our skeptical juror—back row, far left—sits up, his face screwed tight with concern.
When Dad stands up to cross-examine Kate, he positions himself dead center in the middle of the courtroom floor, equidistant from the witness, jury, and Mr. Bailis. I am fascinated by the little tactical decisions he makes, the stagecraft. Now he is like a boxer dominating the center of the ring: his position forces Aunt Kate into the ropes.
She looks unfazed. Even in a corner, she could knock him out.
Kate, he says, pointedly using her first name, do you remember when we first met?
Not offhand, no.
Would it refresh your memory to hear that it was in high school? We worked together on the school newspaper. Do you remember now?
Not really. That was a long time ago.
You would agree, though, that you’ve known me even longer than Jane did.
Since you murdered her, yes.
He smiles, forbearing. What I mean is, you met me before she did, isn’t that right?
Yes.
And you never liked me, did you?
Until Janie started dating you, I never thought about you at all.
And since then?
I never liked the way you treated people, my sister included. That’s true.
And your sister knew this about you, that you did not get along with her husband?
I certainly didn’t make any secret of it.
And yet we continued to socialize, we continued to see each other as couples, didn’t we?
Yes.
You never refused my company?
That would have meant not seeing my sister.
You never saw me act violently?
No.
Toward your sister or anyone else.
Personally, no, I never saw it myself.
In your testimony, you described how, as a young man fifteen years or so into my marriage, I seemed unhappy to you.
Yes.
Do you think that’s uncommon, for a man to feel less…enthusiasm for his marriage as time goes on?
Uncommon? I would have no way of knowing.
Really? No way of knowing? Are you familiar with the common statistic that more than half of marriages in this country end in divorce?
Yes.
Then you would agree, at least, that it is not uncommon for married couples to become unhappy, disenchanted, bored?
Apparently.
Men and women both? Husbands and wives?
Apparently.
So if, as a younger man, I did not find my marriage as…compelling as I once had, that would not be so unusual either, would it?
If you say so.
It’s a yes-or-no question, Kate.
No.
Unhappy marriages are common, divorces are common, wouldn’t you agree?
Yes.
But wife-murder is very, very uncommon. You would agree with that, too, wouldn’t you?
Yes.
Therefore a lot of couples lose their passion for each other without it leading to murder?
I suppose.
And yet in my case, and only in my case, you suggest to this jury that feeling disillusioned with your marriage is sufficient cause to murder your wife?
I didn’t say it was sufficient cause.
So it’s not sufficient cause?
Dan, nothing could ever be sufficient cause to murder your wife.
But you’re suggesting it was enough for me, aren’t you?
It’s impossible for me to say what you would find sufficient, Dan. Janie would have been better able to answer that question.
Objection.
The judge: Sustained. The jury is instructed to disregard the witness’s last answer.
About this so-called rape—that’s the word you used to describe this incident, isn’t it?
That’s the word I used because that’s what it was.
Did you tell your sister the same thing, that she’d been raped?
Yes.
So you must have encouraged her to report it to the police?
Yes.
But she didn’t, did she?
No.
So she disagreed with you?
About reporting it? Yes, she did.
Did you tell her to report it once or more than once?
More than once.
And yet you never convinced her, you never changed her mind. Doesn’t that suggest that she thought you were exaggerating what happened? That she didn’t believe she’d been raped at all?
No. It suggests she didn’t want to destroy her family by turning in her own husband for a violent crime.
Violent? Was she injured in some way?
You don’t have to be injured to prove you’ve been raped.
Was she injured?
Not as far as I know.
Well, did she ever tell you she was injured?
No.
So she was not injured, she did not think she’d been raped, and she did not want to file charges. Isn’t that all true?
Yes, but lots of women—
Lots of women but not Jane, isn’t that right? Not your sister, not my wife.
She did not want to do anything about it, it’s true. That doesn’t prove anything.
So the only one who did want to do something about it was you.
Yes, I did.
Did you ever tell Jane to leave me, to divorce me?
Yes, I did.
But she did not do that either, did she?
No.
She did not hate me as much as you did.
No.
No further questions.
Dad has turned his back and is making his way to the defense table when Aunt Kate says, If she’d left you like I told her to, she’d be here today.
Dad turns to look at her, weighing his response.
Mr. Bailis has explained to me the basics of cross: If it’s done right, only the questions matter, because the questions contain the answers. And don’t be greedy. Make your points and sit down. This isn’t a TV show, witnesses do not crumble, even if they are flat wrong, even if they are lying through their teeth.
I am guessing that Dad will sit down. His cross has been effective enough to blunt Aunt Kate’s testimony, or at least to complicate it. He landed a few jabs. It’s enough.
But Aunt Kate has always known how to bait this man. Something about this stiff-necked woman he cannot abide.
He says, If she’d left me, like you told her to, you would still hate me.
Objection!
Sustained.
And you would still say anything—
Mr. Larkin!
—to hurt me.
Mr. Larkin. The objection is sustained. The jury is instructed to disregard the last statements by defense counsel and by the witness. You are not to consider them. You are to give them no weight. You are to erase them from your minds. Mr. Larkin, are you done?
Yes, Your Honor.
* * *
—
After a break, a chance for tempers to cool, Sarah Bennett takes the stand. Her serene manner is a welcome relief from Aunt Kate’s intensity. She wears very light makeup, a dove-gray dress, no jewelry but a watch on a brown leather band.
Jamie is in court, too, to support her mother. She says nothing either to me or Miranda; I guess none of us know what to say.
Technically Sarah is a plaintiff’s witness, but her testimony is so neutral—in content and tone—that one suspects if Mr. Bailis had not subpoenaed her, Dad would have. Her story is all aftermath, denouement, cleaning up details. Yes, her affair with Dan began when Jane was still alive, and yes, she knew from the start that Dan was married. She knew the affair was wrong but did not feel like she had a choice in the matter; the heart wants what it wants. No, Dan never said anything especially negative about Jane. He never told Sarah that he would divorce his wife, let alone harm her. Nor, she says, did the fact that she ultimately left Dan have anything to do with this case or with any fear of Dan.
Why did you leave him, then? Mr. Bailis asks.
The relationship had just run its course. He just wasn’t the man I wanted to spend my life with.
That’s it?
That’s it.
I can’t help looking across at Jamie. What must she be thinking? What would the jury think if they knew about my dad pawing a teenage girl, less than an hour after hearing that he also raped his own wife? But Sarah is right to protect her daughter. I would, too, for the simple reason that Jamie is alive and my mom is not, and enough damage has been done already. (Jamie will not testify at the trial. Mr. Bailis has chosen not to call her.)
The highlight of Sarah’s testimony—the Moment, as I have been calling it—comes during her description of the blissful vacation in Bermuda that she took with my dad only a year after Mom disappeared.
Mr. Bailis patiently reviews the details of the trip, all of which my mother had planned for herself and Dad—the flights, the hotel, the restaurants and activities. The fact that they waited for the one-year anniversary of Mom’s vanishing before they took their trip to Bermuda. Sarah readily agreed to all of it.
You were the stand-in, weren’t you? You were the woman who took Jane’s place on that vacation?
That’s not how I thought of it.
Did Dan seem upset at all, to be on this vacation that he’d intended to take with his wife?
No.
Did he express any grief or anger, any feelings at all, over his wife not being there for this trip that they’d planned together?
No.
No. He was happy.
He was.
He was in love.
I think so, yes.
One year later, he’d gotten exactly what he wanted, didn’t he?
Sarah pauses. This is the Moment.
Objection.
Sustained.
Sarah is not allowed to answer, but her answer doesn’t matter. As Mr. Bailis likes to say, the question contains the answer.
* * *
—
The medical examiner’s testimony is inconclusive. After eighteen years underground, the body is too decomposed to reveal much about the crime. What he adds are details.
