Dr. Tilly and Dr. Schultz moved to the cadaver named Martha and positioned her with straps in a similar fashion as they had Damian until the body was sitting upright. When her cohorts were safely out of the way, Dr. Cutty approached again and lifted the oar, careful to rotate the handle so that the sharp edge of the blade was in the striking position. She lifted the oar over her right shoulder, Hank Aaron–style, and cracked it against Martha’s head. The sound again reverberated in the corners of the morgue and gave Sidney a jolt. The autopsy suite was nothing but metal and tile, neither of which did much in the way of absorbing sound. Dr. Tilly again moved in to photograph the damage.
“You can see right away,” Dr. Cutty said, “that using the blade side of the oar produced a scalp laceration. In future demonstrations, we’ll use Synbone models and, with the help of our ballistics team and their contraptions, we’ll vary the speed of the oar to the slowest velocity possible that will still produce a laceration and a skull fracture, just in case I swung harder than the assailant. But for our initial demonstration on the cadaver, you can see the scalp laceration that has been produced. So, if the oar was used to strike Julian, because of the laceration found, the blade of the paddle had to be the part of the oar that made contact with his head. So let’s look at the fracture.”
Dr. Cutty peeled away the scalp from a premade crowning incision.
“As you can see, a very different fracture pattern as compared to Damian’s, where the flat side of the paddle was used. This one is deeper, as the oar penetrated the bone and caused a depressed fracture. This is a classic stellate pattern, with multiple linear fractures radiating from the impact site. But the shape of this fracture is completely unlike the fracture caused by the flat side of the oar. It’s longer, deeper, and more isolated since the source of the trauma—the edge of the oar—is much more compact than the broad side of the oar. And using the thin side of the oar, because the energy is so compacted, doesn’t cause the separation of the suture lines.”
Dr. Cutty went back to Julian Crist’s autopsy photos, handing them to Sidney. In the pictures, Julian’s scalp, too, had been husked away to reveal bare cranium.
“Even an untrained eye can see that neither of the fractures we’ve just produced, either from the flat paddle or the blade, match what was found on the back of Julian Crist’s skull. And since we’ve determined that the flat side could not have caused the laceration, we have to assume the blade caused it. And this assumption can be easily dispelled by simply measuring the length of the fracture,” Dr. Cutty said. “Remember, Julian’s skull fracture was measured to be three centimeters deep and seven centimeters wide. No matter how many times we repeat this experiment, which we’ve done on four different cadavers, as well as multiple times on a Synbone model, the length of the fracture when using the blade of the paddle has never been less than four inches, or, ten centimeters.” Dr. Cutty looked at Sidney as Derrick zoomed in on her face. “Bottom line? There is no oar on this planet that could possibly have caused Julian’s skull fracture.”
Sidney was silent as she stared at the ten-year-old photos from an autopsy that helped convict Grace Sebold.
She looked up from the photos. “If you can say for certain, in your medical opinion, that the paddleboard oar did not cause Julian’s skull fracture, do you have an opinion on what did?”
Dr. Cutty shook her head. “Not on the actual object, but I can make a conclusion about that object. It was much smaller than a boat oar, and it was wrapped in organza.”
“Organza?” Sidney asked.
“It’s a type of nylon.”
Dr. Cutty pulled Julian Crist’s autopsy report from an empty table and flipped through it, then handed the earmarked page to Sidney. She ran her finger down to the middle paragraph. “The pathologist in St. Lucia documented that organza fibers were discovered within the scalp wound. No wood fragments, incidentally, which would be expected if a wooden oar had been used. Instead, nylon fragments.”
Sidney blinked a few times. “So whoever struck Julian did so with an object wrapped in what? A nylon bag?”
“That’s a much stronger conclusion than a wooden oar. Oh, yeah,” Dr. Cutty said, picking up the paddle again. “Grace Sebold is listed as being five feet three inches tall, so to cause a fracture on this part of Julian’s skull, who was listed as six-two, she would have had to grow a few inches or be standing on top of something in order to produce the angle of the fracture.
“And one more thing. Grace is documented to be left-handed.” Dr. Cutty held the oar over her left shoulder. “Since Julian’s skull fracture was on the right side of his head, no matter what she used as a weapon”—Dr. Cutty switched the oar to her right shoulder and made a show of reversing her hands so her right fist was now on top of her left—“Ms. Sebold is a helluva switch hitter.”
CHAPTER 24
Friday, June 16, 2017
SHE FLEW FROM RALEIGH TO HARTSFIELD-JACKSON ATLANTA INTERNATIONAL Airport. Her return to New York had been open-ended, not knowing exactly what Dr. Cutty would reveal during her experiments. The conclusions, however, were a damning condemnation of the boat oar theory that had been used to convict Grace Sebold. Sidney sent Derrick home to New York to compile the footage they had recorded in Raleigh. Leslie would take the amassed recordings and trim the fat. By Monday, when Sidney planned to return, the hours of footage recorded during her time with Dr. Cutty and the ballistics team at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina would be condensed to four hours of useable material. Sidney would then edit those hours down to the most important forty minutes, work with the writers to create her voice-over material, and cut episode four with the tech team in time to screen it to the network executives for their approval to air next Friday. If she were able to present Dr. Cutty’s experiments with enough intrigue, it would be the most explosive installment of the season.
She touched down in Atlanta and rented a car, careful to use her personal card. Today’s travel could not be expensed to the network. In fact, she wanted no one at work to know about her trips to Baldwin State Prison. Least of all Luke Barrington, who would hold her in contempt for the fact that her birth father, with whom Sidney had never had a meaningful relationship—besides during a brief window of her childhood—was serving a life sentence for murder.
She came to the now-familiar setting of low buildings strung out across the open land, contained by a tight perimeter of barbed wire and latticed chain link, a common theme no matter which jail Sidney visited. She spoke with the gate guard and waited while the fencing slowly parted and allowed her to pull into the complex. Prison visits were never fast, but Baldwin was longer than most. The screening was worse than any airport, and the waiting was on par with a bad layover. Eventually, an hour after she arrived, the guard called her name and led her past the thick door and into the visitation booths. There she took a seat and waited another fifteen minutes until her father appeared on the other side of the glass.
She did not know the man sitting across from her. Not well, at any rate. Memories of him came from when she was ten years old and her family life was still somewhat normal. Those still images and short clips of her family, just the three of them, were created before her father killed a man. Before her mother uprooted her from the Atlanta suburb, where every friend Sidney had ever made lived, and replanted her haphazardly in Sarasota, Florida. Sidney never created the same friendships in Sarasota that she had enjoyed her whole life in Atlanta, and the new life her mother attempted to forge in Florida was less new and mostly just different. Can life really be started over? Can you simply turn the page in the notebook of life that has recorded your history and start writing a fresh story? If so, Sidney and her mother did it incorrectly. They either wrote the wrong story, or an unoriginal new story, or one that didn’t properly allow them to forget the pages that had come before. The failure was evidenced by the fact that Sidney sat waiting at a penitentiary to see her father more than two decades after he’d scribbled all over the
ir original notebook—deep, crevice-producing gouges that ruined so much.
It wasn’t until college that Sidney steered her life back on track. Even then, though, the identity of her murderous father, who was locked away in an Atlanta penitentiary, was a well-kept secret. None of her college friends knew about her father; and the further her life progressed from his conviction when she was ten years old and in fifth grade, the less she thought about him. Thirty-six now, Sidney had spent more than two-thirds of her life without her father being part of it. Only the arrival of an unexpected letter had sparked the idea of a reunion. In it, Neil Ryan made a simple request to his daughter: Can I see you?
She still struggled, even after three years of clandestine meetings, to view her father through anything other than the prism of a ten-year-old girl. It was how she remembered him. Ingrained in her mind was the image of her dad taking her to the deli after Sunday church service, and riding on his shoulders as they walked through the amusement park. With just the three of them, roller coasters always left an odd man out. Although Sidney dutifully divided her riding time between her parents, secretly she loved riding the coasters with her dad. She always felt safer with him. Now, as she stared through the glass at the man in an orange jumpsuit, no feelings of safety or comfort came from his presence. No feelings at all, really. Not anger or resentment. To Sidney, Neil Donald Ryan was a stranger much more than he was a father.
He picked up the phone and his voice rang in her head as Sidney pressed the receiver to her ear.
“Hey, kiddo.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“I watched last week. I’ve got most of the guys in here hooked on it. I’m real proud of you.”
Sidney smiled. “Thanks.”
She wondered if she should mention to the network suits that the inmates at Baldwin were fans of The Girl of Sugar Beach. She could use the ratings.
“I know you’re real busy,” he said. “But did you get the chance to look into the DNA?”
Sidney shook her head. “Not yet.”
She gave her father credit. His original letter had requested to see her with no ulterior motive besides a reunion after more than twenty years. She had reluctantly visited, expecting him to ask if she could manage to free him the way she had freed so many others. It was a common plea in the letters she received from inmates. That she had, actually, only gotten three convictions overturned was immaterial to most felons she spoke with. The fact that she’d freed a single man was enough to draw the attention of convicts around the country. So, when Sidney visited Baldwin for the first time, she expected a similar reception. She didn’t get it. Her father simply stared at her for most of the visit. He laughed a lot, too, shaking his head at the sight of his ten-year-old daughter who had blossomed into a beautiful woman with long brown hair, highlighted by faint streaks of auburn. Hazel eyes brightened with radial traces of ice blue. He couldn’t, in fact, stop shaking his head during that first visit. It was two years, and nine visits later, before he breached the subject of his innocence.
“There are new techniques now,” he had said. “That weren’t available back when I was convicted. DNA analysis is much more specific and advanced these days. If I get you a sample of my DNA, then you could use it to show that it doesn’t match any collected at the crime scene.”
Sidney had changed the subject then, veering the conversation back to her mother. It was a common topic between them, and had been enough to distract him from pursuing things further. Then the letter arrived containing her father’s fingernail clippings. Until Sidney had opened that small square of tissue that spilled ten perfect crescent moon fingernails onto her desk, she had been able to explain away her inaction. But since the potential source of DNA had arrived, it gnawed at her and prevented her from dismissing her father’s pleas.
“Nail clippings are a viable source for DNA,” her father said now. “I looked it up. And I put the tissue paper on my tongue, so a good lab should be able to draw a saliva sample as well.”
The tissue and nail clippings sat in Sidney’s desk drawer at home. They had spent the night next to her kitchen trash can, but Sidney had never gotten up the nerve to toss them in. Instead, she stowed the tissue and clippings in her desk and tried not to think about them.
She looked at her father through the glass now. “I haven’t had them tested yet.”
He shrugged. To most, Sidney figured, this would be discouraging. But she had found over the years that inmates, deprived of just about every luxury in life, possessed a great deal of patience. They never expected anything to happen quickly, and took news of delays in much the same fashion as finding the bathroom stall occupied. They simply took a breath and waited.
Too young at the time of the crime to understand fully what had happened, she had briefly researched her father’s conviction in college. Accused of killing a man in the victim’s home, he was sentenced to first-degree murder and was slated to spend his life in prison.
The single bullet fired came from a .22 automatic found at the scene. Neil Ryan’s prints were recovered from the gun. It was a claim he vehemently denied, since, according to his attorney, he’d never held a gun in his life. Fingerprint experts grappled during trial about whether the prints were a definitive match to Neil Ryan’s. Complicating matters was that another, overlying set of prints had also been pulled from the gun. The prosecution argued that the anonymous prints came from a young officer who had mistakenly, and against protocol, picked up the weapon when he arrived on the scene. But testing of the smeared prints could not definitively be matched to the officer. It was still claimed as a certain match by the prosecution’s expert witness, refuted by the defense’s own fingerprint guru, but not convincingly enough to keep Sidney’s father out of jail.
When the fingerprint debate was over, the prosecution presented the blow, which would turn out to be of the knockout variety, that Neil Ryan was having an affair with the dead man’s wife. Fingerprint arguments were quickly forgotten, and the idea of premeditation became a hot topic.
The jury settled on first-degree murder, agreeing with the prosecution’s argument that Neil Ryan had gone to his lover’s home with the intent to kill her husband, who had discovered the affair. Twenty-five years later, Sidney’s father still sat in a prison cell without the possibility of parole. That he refused to admit to the crime, and showed no remorse for it, was a catching point for every parole board that reviewed his case. No board members had ever given a second thought to a man without remorse, or considered stamping Neil Ryan’s case with anything other than Denied.
“You’ve been an exemplary prisoner,” Sidney finally said, regaining eye contact through the glass partition. “If you would just take responsibility, you’d likely come up for parole.”
“I didn’t kill that man,” he said. “Why on earth would I admit it?”
“Because it could get you out of here.”
“It could also seal my fate. You know how many guys in here cop to things they didn’t do because they think it’ll get them outta here? Plenty. You know what happens to most of them? They still get denied. And then they can never take back what they told that board.”
“Fine,” Sidney said. “Don’t admit to the crime, but show them some remorse for your involvement. If you hadn’t been . . .” She almost said cheating on Mom, but it seemed so insignificant this many years later that she was embarrassed it still bothered her. “Sleeping with his wife, the idea of premeditation wouldn’t have come up.”
“I’m a lot of things. A terrible husband is one of them. But cheating on your spouse is not a crime, and it certainly doesn’t prove I killed anyone. I’m not slicing my own throat in front of a parole board just to win their favor.” Her father stared at her through the glass partition. “So, can you help me?”
What her father was asking was for Sidney to somehow pull that. 22 out of a box buried somewhere in an Atlanta Federal Building’s evidence room and prove that her father’s DNA was not on the handle, or anywhere
on the weapon, or at the crime scene. This, he was convinced, would be enough to get him a new trial. He’d done his homework, and the plan held some merit. Sidney had made some casual inquires in the last several months, but finding someone who still remembered the case from twenty-plus years ago was nearly impossible. And attempting to get anyone to pay attention to her request to pull evidence from so long ago had so far been fruitless.
“I’m working on it,” she finally said.
Her father took a deep breath. “I guess that’s all I can ask.”
“Anyway,” Sidney said, her way of letting on that she was ready to leave, “I just stopped on my way back to New York.”
“Okay. We’ll talk soon,” he said.
Her father nodded and hung up the phone. He raised his hand and the guard was by his side a moment later, leading him back to his cell. Sidney sat for a while longer, staring through the glass at the empty chair a stranger had just vacated. Her imagination replaced him with her father from years ago. The man on whose shoulders she had loved to ride. Sidney was sure she owed the stranger nothing, but wondered if the other man deserved something.
* * *
In her car, colliding thoughts of her father and Grace Sebold ran through her mind. Since Dr. Cutty’s revelations, Sidney had tried for the last day to find the arc of her story, imagining the best way to present the impossibility of the boat oar being the weapon used to cause Julian Crist’s skull fracture and that, instead, some other instrument wrapped in nylon had been used to strike Julian Crist. It was an explosive argument that could have real consequences. It was backed by science, not some retroactive opinion offered by someone with thin credentials and labeled an expert, as Sidney had seen many other documentarians try to pull off. This development was legitimate, disproving a critical aspect used in Grace Sebold’s conviction. It needed to be handled correctly.
Don't Believe It Page 15