Neighborhood Watch (2 page)

I assumed it was meaningless, sent by one of those mysterious people who write anonymous letters to inmates. I almost threw it away, but something about it struck me, and for a few days I used it, folded up, as a bookmark.

Every time I opened my book to read, I touched it and thought,
What cat?
We’d never had one. Paul loved animals but was allergic to so many things we never dared venture into adopting pets, not even as a replacement for the children we didn’t have. I thought of my older sister, Claire, who worked at an animal rescue center and talked about animals in a way that sometimes seemed dangerously eccentric. I wondered if she was trying to say that my plight was nothing next to some cats she knew. It occurred to me only later, doing sit-ups with my cell mate:
Linda Sue had a cat
.

Or there was a cat in her house the day she died, anyway. I never heard her talk about it. But I saw it once in her upstairs bathroom peeking out from a cabinet underneath the sink. I could picture it perfectly—the yellow-green eyes in the dark, how I bent down to pet it and saw something else. I meant to say something to Linda Sue, but in the blur that followed I didn’t. I couldn’t.

So what happened to it?

There was no mention of any cat at my trial, no inventory of bowls or litter boxes in the files of discovery from the police. After Linda Sue died, no one once mentioned a cat that would need to be adopted. Apparently no one else knew she had one.

What happened to that cat, hiding coyly in that bathroom cabinet eight hours before her owner was murdered? It probably disappeared at some point while a team of strangers wearing gloves and surgical booties swarmed into the house, leaving doors open in their wake. A cat witness to a murder would offer even less than a dog, who might have barked at an outsider or the sight of its master bleeding to death at the bottom of the stairs. A cat would offer fewer clues. Except this one: Someone else saw it, too. Whoever wrote this letter was there that night. And after twelve years of silence that person was getting in touch with me.

With no return address and no readable postmark there was no way to trace the writer of this note. But it activated me again. I got the address of a new Innocence Action office that had opened up in our state. I wrote them a letter saying I had recently received new information regarding my case and would appreciate an opportunity to talk to a lawyer about some overlooked avenues for defense at my trial.

Four months later, Jeremy Bernstein came to see me. The first time we met he looked so young and handsome, even with his tortoiseshell glasses and terrible razor rash. It had been years since a man had tried to shake one of my manacled hands, and I felt a little breathless just sitting across from him. He took all of thirty seconds with the cat letter before folding it up and sticking it back in the envelope. I feared the interview might be over before it began.

But no. He told me he didn’t know what to make of this cat business, but he’d been reading my file. Did I realize a hair had been found in the blood beside the body? Maybe he was nervous, too. He did a lot of paper shuffling. “And skin cells from under the victim’s fingernails. Did you know all this?”

Yes,
I said, laughing.
Of course I did.
They were never tested because our defense strategy—that I was a parasomniac, sleepwalking when I committed the crime—didn’t require it. I never argued that I wasn’t at the scene of the crime. I said I wasn’t conscious when I did it. Jeremy leaned forward. “I’ve applied to have them tested,” he whispered, as if this should be a secret between us. “I’ve been looking over everything—the fingerprints, the weapon—and I think it’s possible you weren’t even
there
.”

He was studying my face, measuring my reaction. On record I have psychologists supporting my claim that I don’t remember what happened that night. For three days after Linda Sue’s death, I watched in disbelief as the murder of our neighbor got played out nightly on the local news. I responded as any neighbor would, making phone calls as the story spread like a virus around the state—
Yes, that’s right,
we had to tell people.
That’s our town, our Juniper Lane. Our dead neighbor
. I moved between the library and home in a frightened daze with a growing sense of unease I couldn’t place until the night I found my nightgown at the bottom of my laundry hamper, stained with a great Frisbee-sized circle of blood.

I washed it, assuming the blood was my own.

Only later did I see that the stain was on the front, spread across the chest, an unlikely placement for a menstrual stain. Realizing this, I moved as if following someone else’s orders. I folded my nightgown, the stain a faint pinkish brown, placed it in a bag, drove first to the library where I worked and then, a few hours after that, to the police station, where I told them I needed to talk to someone. Eight hours later, with a detailed description of my past parasomniac episodes—most, but not all, dating back to my childhood and college days—I signed a confession. While I had no memory of the night, I believed that in all likelihood I was responsible for the murder.

Jeremy has said the whole sleepwalking defense was a ridiculous gamble no right-minded lawyer should have taken. My defense should have pointed out the almost entirely circumstantial evidence against me. Yes, my fingerprints were in Linda Sue’s bedroom, but I had been in her house on the afternoon of her murder. She had given me a tour of the upstairs, taken me into her bedroom. Other than the bloody nightgown stain (untestable because I had washed it so quickly), no physical evidence except the fingerprints directly connected me to the crime.

The weapon had been washed (“with such care for a sleepwalker,” the prosecutor at my trial enjoyed pointing out). I’d also left no footprints anywhere in the blood, showing more foresight than O.J. had, they said. What clinched my innocence in Jeremy’s mind were the photographs of the nightgown and the solid, oval stain of blood. There were no spatter marks at all, which, given the manner of death (head bludgeoned three times), would have been impossible. “How do you bludgeon someone and get a stain like that? I don’t understand what they were
thinking,
frankly. There was spatter on the floor and on the walls and none on your nightgown? It’s ridiculous.”

Jeremy is a sweet man, not young enough to be my son, though now that seems to be the tenor of our relationship. In the three years since he began working on my behalf, he has gotten married and fathered a child. I’ve seen baby pictures, one including his wife, Laura, looking ashen and weary, propped up in bed, a blanketed baby at her side. Beyond that one picture (which, I have to admit, I have a hard time forgetting), I can’t imagine what his home life is like. I don’t know if he’s a hands-on father who changes diapers or a distracted one who eats quick dinners and returns to work. Judging by the amount of time he’s devoted to my case, I’d have to guess the latter.

In the beginning the careful attention Jeremy paid to the details of my trial embarrassed me enough to wish I’d been more present at it. If I’d paid better attention, would things have gone differently? Jeremy has called Franklin Mayhew, my first lawyer, an idiot and has cited incompetent representation as the basis for my habeas corpus appeal. I certainly see his point, but at the time, we honestly thought we had the best lawyer money could buy. My husband, Paul’s, boss had recommended him, saying he’d gotten his son off a third DUI arrest. “Miracle worker,” he said. We dialed the number because we needed a miracle. We liked Franklin’s small and unpretentious office—and the fact that he rode his bike to work. If the helmet sitting on his desk seemed odd, we chalked it up to absentmindedness for unimportant details. That he worked on his own, with an answering machine for a receptionist, might have been a red flag, but he waved away any doubt by saying, “Low overhead is my secret. I take no case just for money.”

Though he took a lot of our money, almost all of it in fact, we still stood by him. After the verdict was announced, I squeezed his hand and told him not to feel bad, he’d done his best.

By that point Paul had developed an edge I hadn’t. It was through thin lips and a stiff handshake that he thanked Franklin, just before I was led away in handcuffs.

As I’ve reminded Jeremy, it wasn’t entirely Franklin’s fault: I confessed, after all. Any defense lawyer would have had a steep hill to climb clearing me. “Who confesses to a murder they didn’t commit?” the handsome DA asked. The jury nodded in unison like a dozen marionettes, woodenly agreeing with their puppeteer. “You’d have to be either crazy or guilty. And since we’ve established the defendant wasn’t the former, that leaves only one possibility.”

After I started working with Jeremy, I understood that there are lots of reasons innocent people make confessions. Developmentally disabled people are more inclined to confess once they understand what the interrogator wants to hear. Juveniles and people with mental illness, ditto. I don’t include myself in these groups, but I can relate to them. I know how it feels to sit alone in a room with detectives who insist on one version of events. In my case, one of the detectives, an older man named Don Fenlon, spoke gently, saying he wanted only to help me. He had a sister named with my name—Betsy—and no children either. I believed him when he said that most people in my situation agree to some part of the charge. “Here’s the trick,” he whispered. “Start showing remorse right away. That always helps. Play your cards right, you might get away with involuntary manslaughter. I can’t promise anything, but I have a feeling these guys like you.”

I
was
an innocent back then, a child when it came to the judicial system. I thought he meant
like
in the social sense. I didn’t know
like
also meant:
They’re pretty sure you did this crime
. I thought being liked would help, that telling the truth—I didn’t know what happened, didn’t remember the night—wouldn’t be a mistake. According to the transcript, I asked twice about speaking with a lawyer and was told both times that it was “a little early for that.” Once, someone said, presumably as a joke, “Do you have any idea what those guys charge?”

Was I naïve to believe for so long that the detectives meant me no harm? That we were all working together to get to the bottom of what happened? Yes, I told them, Linda Sue and I were acquaintances who had been spending more time together. She’d invited me into her house, where she admitted some surprising things to me.

“Like what?” Detective Weaver asked. He was the younger detective and unattractive in the extreme, digging for earwax one minute and propping his dirty shoes up on the table the next. “Sexual stuff? Was that it?”

“No
,
”
I said. He stared at me and waited. “She had recently developed a new friendship with one of our male neighbors. We talked about that.”

He looked down at his notes. “This is Geoff you’re talking about, right?” He folded a piece of paper and used it to dig some dirt out from under his fingernails.

“Geoffrey, that’s right.” No one called him Geoff.

“Friend of yours, too?”

“An old friend of my husband’s. They grew up together.” To my everlasting regret, I kept going when he rolled his hand in a gesture I interpreted as encouragement. “We all like Geoffrey. He’s an author, quite a successful one. Not that his book was still a best seller, but I suppose just writing one seems glamorous.”

He sat up and lowered his filthy shoes to the floor. “To you, you mean.”

Now I understand that those detectives had written their story before they asked me a single question. I was a lovelorn librarian, crazed with jealousy over my neighbor’s good luck. “
Everyone
loved Geoffrey,” I insisted, a quote that got repeated at the trial more times than I can count.

In recent years, the most famous false confessions came from the Harlem Five—the teenagers convicted of the Central Park Jogger assault who served thirteen years in prison until another man confessed to the crime. After DNA confirmed their innocence, all five were exonerated and released from jail along with their sad stories: one had an IQ of 87, and another, 73. None could read above a second-grade level. Though we don’t share these numbers, we share the same mistakes and believed the same lies. We’ve sat across from police officers and told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Without getting my hopes up, I’ve started reading a little more about exonerees freed since that
Phil Donohue Show
. Most of them have been black men, victimized by a mistaken eyewitness, their crime nothing more than walking down the wrong street wearing the same gray sweatshirt or blue baseball cap a victim described to police a few hours earlier. Overeager police have a hard time letting go of wardrobe coincidences, I’ve learned. If anything, these men are more innocent than I. Most were nowhere near the crime, never knew the victim, and had no idea why they were brought to a police station for questioning.

I knew the victim. I had become an unreliable confidante and repository of her secrets. I participated in “neighborly” efforts to help Linda Sue that I see now only isolated her further and sealed her fate. If I didn’t leave my hair in a pool of blood beside her body, I am not without some culpability. Though I still don’t remember what happened that night, I remember all too well what happened in the weeks and days before Linda Sue’s death. And what I
can
remember from that night—what we talked about in her living room, what I saw upstairs—made me wish her, if not dead, then eradicated somehow. Gone from our lives. No, whatever the DNA tests show, I’m not wholly innocent.

I suspect none of us is.

Three weeks ago, Jeremy got the results of the test on the hair found in the blood beside the body. It wasn’t mine or the victim’s. Traditional DNA testing on hair is a fallible science—hair is not composed of living material and therefore has no genetic markers. But as luck would have it, the follicle, still attached, contained enough markers for three out of four experts to conclude it wasn’t mine. Enough evidence for a sympathetic judge to rule in my favor, a judge who is on record as having opposed the death penalty and mandatory sentencing. For once in this whole process I got lucky. The judge wanted to make an example of the flaws in the judicial system he’ll be retiring from soon. “Everyone wants to leave a mark,” Jeremy told me. “You’re his.”