I can only wait to see what the telling of this tale stirs up, but I refuse to fear her response.
# # #
The Second Shot
By Elizabeth Heiter
FRIDAY:
REGAN ADDERLY
“Guilty.”
The courtroom erupts, a cacophony of noise all around me I can’t quite decipher. Through it all, I can hear my mother’s wail, my little brother’s shout of denial.
Bruce has his hand on my shoulder, whispering something about an appeal, but suddenly, he’s not “Call me Bruce. I work for you,” but Mr. Lotte, someone who battled my father in the courtroom once and lost.
Strangely, the verdict doesn’t make me wonder, should I have done it? It only proves that my father was right: there was never going to be another way out.
Sentencing will come later, but I already know my life is over. I’m seventeen, and the judge allowed me to be tried as an adult. I’m going to jail. Maybe for the rest of my life. Maybe just long enough for everyone I know to move on without me.
My heart rate crescendos, my breathing keeping pace with it. The walls of the courtroom seem to close in on me until I can’t see the faces of the jury, with the range of emotions playing across their faces: triumph, anger, sadness, pity. My palms and the soles of my feet start to sweat as black spots form on the edges of my vision, but I get control of myself before I pass out.
A numbness comes over me. It’s like I’m watching all of this happen to someone else, the way I learned to do when I was six years old after the first time he slammed me into the wall. I try not to think about tomorrow’s headlines, but I can already see them in my mind:
High School Senior Found Guilty of Murdering Her Father
The bang of the judge’s gavel startles me, and I swivel to face my mother and brother. What’s going to happen to them now? Worry forces its way past the numbness, and I try to believe that with him gone, they’ll be okay. My mother will wean herself off the sleeping pills she takes all the time to keep her emotions at bay. My little brother will go back to being a kid, stop acting out like he’s trying to get someone to notice, someone to believe, someone to care.
But the truth is, I don’t know. I’m the one who packs Noah’s lunch, gets him on the bus in the morning, tucks him in at night. I’m the one who helps my mom up the stairs when she’s too unsteady to do it herself. Then again, I’m the one who tried to fade into the walls when my father came home, angry and looking to wail on someone. Maybe if I’d acted a long time ago, my mom never would have started with the pills and Noah never would have started coming home in the back of a squad car.
I flash back to three years ago, standing in the kitchen, my hands wrapped awkwardly around the handle of a butcher knife, my heart pounding harder than it is now. Trying to get up the courage to do the one thing I knew could stop my father before he finally went too far and killed one of us. Kill him first.
Back then, my hands had begun to tremble, until I almost dropped the knife. It had felt unnaturally heavy, hard to hang onto, and the idea of plunging it into anyone made nausea rise up my throat. Chances were, he would have wrestled that knife away from me anyway, then locked me in the closet for two days. But if I had been able to take action then, things might be so different now.
The bailiff comes over and re-cuffs my hands, snapping the cold metal over my already-raw wrists. Even knowing it’s coming, I panic, other memories of being restrained making me fight instinctively to get free. He’s used to it too and flattens my head on the table as he locks the cuffs in place.
I breathe through my need for fight or flight, squeezing my eyes shut so I can’t see my baby brother from my peripheral view, his little lips trembling even as his chin snaps up. Defiant when he should be submissive. Noah’s always been that way. It’s why he bears more scars than I do, even though most of them are inside, where no one can use them as evidence.
Forcing my eyes open, I give him a wobbly smile and a nod. It’s okay, I tell him without words, trying to believe that what I’ve done will save him.
The truth is, I never thought I’d be convicted. I honestly believed that once a jury heard what had happened behind closed doors, in the so-called sanctity of my home, they’d understand. Then again, I never thought I’d get away with it, either, but I did.
Now I just have to live with that choice.
***
THURSDAY:
CAITLIN O’CONNELL
The trial is coming to an end and I think they’re going to convict. As the police officer who arrested Regan Adderly in the first place, I should be happy. But I can’t seem to raise that emotion. Maybe it’s because I have two kids of my own just a few years younger than her. Or maybe it’s because I’m not a hundred percent convinced of her guilt. And even if I was, I’m not sure the bastard didn’t get exactly what was coming to him.
If I’m being totally honest with myself, I’m pissed that I couldn’t lock Maxwell Adderly up years ago. I tried.
Sometimes, you get to the scene of a domestic violence call and you just aren’t sure what’s happening. The first time I went to the Adderly house, back when I was a rookie, was like that. The second time, years later, I damn well knew, and I also knew the charges wouldn’t stick, especially against a lawyer. I was right. He was out of that cell thirty minutes after I slammed the door.
Domestic abuse is surprisingly hard to make stick. It’s the whole “he said, she said” problem, and even when everyone in the house is telling the same story except one, kids don’t make the greatest witnesses. It’s easier to throw someone in jail for punching a stranger on the street one night than for beating the shit out of his wife on a regular basis.
“Officer O’Connell?”
Bruce Lotte’s voice is questioning, like he’s been repeating my name, and I straighten up on the stand. “Yes?”
“I asked how you can be sure my client wasn’t framed.” Before I can answer, he rushes on. “Did you test the mother’s hands for gunshot residue?”
“No. She was asleep when we arrived.”
“Could she have been faking?”
My gaze flickers to Regan’s mom, who’s a jittery mess in the back of the courtroom. I suspect it’s because she’s trying to wean herself off whatever she’s addicted to. My guess is pain pills, but housewives have surprised me before when it comes to street drugs. “She was barely coherent even after we woke her, so I doubt it.”
Lotte makes a face, as if it sounds like good acting to him, but I doubt he really believes the mother did it. He’s trying his damndest to plant uncertainty in the minds of the jurors. I don’t think it’s going to work.
Lotte moves on. “Did you test the brother’s hands?”
“The kid?” I gape a little bit, because yes, I’ve seen twelve-year-olds capable of murder. But little Noah Adderly? He’s spent the last year taking too many rides in the back of my squad car for every petty crime you can think of, but he’s always docile as can be when I tell him to climb in. Just a scared kid pissed at the world for the unfair hand he’s been dealt, looking for attention any way he can get it. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because when we arrived, Regan Adderly was the one standing in her father’s office, holding the gun that killed him.”
Lotte continues smoothly, evenly. “Didn’t she tell you she didn’t remember killing him?”
“She did, but she also said she must have, since she was standing over his dead body with a weapon.”
The jurors gasp and Bruce’s lips quiver just a little, like he didn’t expect me to go there. But no matter how sympathetic I am to the honor roll student who’d never been in trouble until the day she shot her father in his own home, I’m still an officer of the law. And I arrested her for a reason. “Plus, Regan’s hands did test positive.”
Instead of getting into how Regan could have possibly forgotten killing her own father in the fifteen minutes between the time Noah’s call came in to 911 and we arriv
ed on the scene, Lotte moves on. Probably because they’ve already gone over it repeatedly with psychologists hired by both sides.
That was back when Lotte was trying to create a scenario where the father attacked Regan and she killed him in self-defense but was so traumatized she’d already forgotten doing it. The lack of any evidence of a fight in the office stalled that tactic pretty quickly, so now he’s onto this.
“What about the boyfriend? Did you test him for gunshot residue?”
“No. We didn’t even know she had a boyfriend at that point. He certainly wasn’t on the scene.”
Lotte pounces on this—and he should. If there’s anyone I could believe Regan might be covering for, it’s the too-old boyfriend who lives down the street and should damn well know better than to court an underage girl. “And by the time you discovered his relationship with her, a GSR test would be useless?”
“That’s right.”
“What do you think of Dane Schilling?”
The prosecutor jumps to his feet, objecting loudly. But after a brief argument, the judge sides with Lotte, and tells me to answer the question.
What I think is that anytime someone asks you to hide a relationship, you should probably get the hell out of it. It’s a lesson I learned myself when I started at the police academy and fell for one of my instructors. At the time, I had no idea he was married.
I try to be diplomatic and professional about my answer. “As a police officer, I’m always concerned when I see a twenty-two-year-old dating a minor.” Fact is, I would have loved to snap cuffs on him too, but even if I had any evidence of statutory rape, Regan is seventeen, and on trial for murder. It would never stick.
“Did he lie to you about his relationship with my seventeen-year-old client?” Lotte asks, putting extra emphasis on Regan’s age. I’m not sure the jury cares.
“Yes. More than once.”
“Just like he tried to lie to us?” Lotte presses, throwing an arm wide to indicate the courtroom.
The prosecutor is on his feet again, and this time the judge agrees with him. I stay silent.
“All right,” Lotte says, not at all fazed. “Please tell me what you found when you showed up at the Adderly household.”
I nod, ready to relay all the facts, and skip over my emotions. As a police officer, being on the stand is part of my job. For the sake of my future arrests, it’s important that I be as factual and impartial as possible. Juries—and my boss—don’t care how I feel about it. All they care is that the evidence lines up to support the arrest.
“I was on patrol with my partner. Dispatch radioed us, advising that a 911 call had come in about a gunshot heard inside the Adderly house. When we arrived, we knocked on the door and announced ourselves. No one answered, so we used the ram to get inside. We cleared most of the first floor before proceeding to the office, which was at the back of the house. There we found Maxwell Adderly slumped in his office chair, with blood pooled over his chest and the seat. Regan Adderly was standing nearby, holding a gun.”
Regan had looked dazed, but I’m pretty sure she’d heard us in the house. “When I asked her to put the gun down, she complied immediately. I arrested her.”
“What did you discover when you checked the victim?”
“Maxwell Adderly had been shot twice—once in the chest and once in the arm. He appeared to be deceased. The EMTs who arrived on scene after us confirmed that.” Not that I hadn’t already known, but technically, I can’t pronounce someone dead. An EMT has to do it.
“Two gunshots?” Lotte asks, sounding surprised, though of course, he isn’t.
“That’s right.”
“Did you have a theory about why he was shot twice?”
The lawyers do their legal dance with the judge again and then I’m allowed to respond.
“The Medical Examiner couldn’t determine which shot was fired first, which means they happened relatively close together. So, in my opinion, there are two possibilities. Could have been that the first shot—to the arm—didn’t kill him. Or if the first shot was to the chest, maybe the perpetrator didn’t realize that was enough and fired again.” I don’t say Regan’s name because even though I think she did it, technically she’s still innocent until a jury decides otherwise.
Lotte makes a disbelieving face. “If he was shot in the arm first, wouldn’t we see some kind of blood pattern indicating he tried to get up and run away before the second shot?”
“Depends how quickly the weapon was fired again.”
“From a seventeen-year-old with no experience shooting?” He doesn’t let me answer, before he rushes on. “Her mother said she had never fired her father’s gun, right? And your own investigation confirmed she’d never been to the firing range with him?”
“That’s what we found. But the mother also said Regan didn’t know the combination to her father’s gun safe.”
Lotte smiles at that, and I’m not sure why, until he asks, “So perhaps the father opened it? Maybe it was suicide? The first shot went wide and he got his arm, and the second one was successful? Regan walked in, was shocked at what she saw and picked up the gun? It would explain the memory loss, wouldn’t it?”
The prosecutor is on his feet again, but I answer anyway. “We’ve verified that the gunshot was fired at too far a distance to be self-inflicted.”
This time the flicker of surprise on Lotte’s face isn’t feigned, and I frown. He got a copy of our report. He already knew this. Then, I understand. He wanted the prosecutor to object, wanted the judge to order me not to answer, which is why he strung all those questions together—including the bit on memory loss, which isn’t my area. He wanted the jury to wonder, to put doubt in their minds. Even if it was thrown out on cross-examination, he’s trying to toss out as many alternate possibilities as he can, hoping like hell one will stick.
Suddenly, I’m sorry I jumped to respond. Because although the possibility is small that Regan didn’t do it, if she is innocent, it’s because she’s covering for someone. It’s sure as hell not suicide by her asshole father, but it very well could be her abused, addicted mother or the opportunistic boyfriend.
My gaze jumps to each of them in turn. Laura Adderly must have lost twenty pounds since I arrested her daughter a year ago. Back then, she was well put-together, so well-functioning that I never would have guessed she was on anything if I hadn’t seen her myself that night. Now, she looks a bit like the kidnapping victim I rescued nine years ago, physically broken-down and easily spooked.
Dane Schilling must have an image consultant on retainer. His family certainly has the money to afford it. He’s wearing khakis and a button-down shirt, the pieces appropriate for court, but styled to make him look younger than he really is. I wonder briefly how long it will be before he targets another high schooler to date.
Would Regan Adderly risk spending the rest of her life in jail for one of them? I stare at her intently, wondering.
“Have you ever been called out to the Adderly house because of a crime in progress on a different occasion?” Lotte asks.
The prosecutor jumps up, arguing fiercely that it’s irrelevant, and I know why he doesn’t want Lotte to go there. Because it will establish a pattern of abuse. But the judge sides with Lotte, so I answer truthfully.
“Yes. Twice.”
“Tell us about it,” Lotte requests, crossing his arms over his chest and nodding at the jury, like they’d better pay attention.
“The first time, the 911 call was from Regan. It was eight years ago, when I was new to the police force. Dispatch relayed that the father was apparently pinning the wife against the wall and threatening to kill her. When we arrived, the kids were telling us one thing and the parents another. I was inexperienced back then. I wasn’t sure what to believe. We didn’t make an arrest.”
“What were the kids saying?”
“The same thing we’d heard from Dispatch: that their father had their mother pinned against the wall in the kitchen, holding a knife to t
he back of her neck, threatening to kill her.”
“And the parents?”
“The kids were just nine and four back then. The parents said they had a wild imagination.”
Lotte’s eyebrows shot up. “That would be quite a story. With more experience, what do you think?”
“I think the mother was too afraid to tell us what had really happened.”
The prosecutor doesn’t like my answer and shoots to his feet, but the jury has already heard it. Even when they have been advised not to consider my response, it’s out there. Still, they seem more pensive than convinced.
“What about the second time you were called out to the house for a crime in progress?” Lotte asks.
I know he’s wording the question this way so I don’t talk about all the times in the past year I’ve gone there with Noah in the back of my squad car. But maybe he should ask about those, because each time, the fury in the father’s eyes made me fear we’d return to find Noah’s father had punished him far worse than the law would.
“The second time was two years ago, and the call was from Noah. He said his father had knocked his sister down the stairs. When I arrived, she was still there with a broken ankle. She confirmed her father had pushed her, so I arrested him.”
“And what happened next? Did he do time for hurting his daughter?”
“No. He posted bail and we couldn’t get anyone to cooperate.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, no one in that house was willing to talk to us about that incident or any other.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“They were scared.”
The prosecutor leaps up, and I talk fast because I know what he’ll say: I can’t testify to their state of mind. But no matter what happened back then, no matter what happened last year that led to Regan Adderly being on trial for murder, it got this far because we couldn’t protect her. And that pisses me off.
“If we couldn’t even keep him out of that house for an hour for breaking her ankle, why would she feel safe enough to trust the law to protect her from worse harm?
Betrayed: Powerful Stories of Kick-Ass Crime Survivors Page 35