by Sarah Perry
I ran a lot that year, sometimes outside, but mostly on the treadmill at the gym. A row of televisions faced the cardio machines, and when they weren’t taunting everyone with cooking shows, they were playing Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Every episode featured a woman’s splayed corpse, lengthy discussion of her rape and murder. I tried not to look, but I always caught a pale limb extending from under a tarp, or tangled hair cast over a face. It seemed it was always raining.
I resented having these bodies paraded before me while I was trying to gather the strength to face down a real murder; it felt like an absurdity that no one else could see, like O.J. all over again. My fellow runners, lined up next to me and going nowhere, seemed to watch with impassive eyes. They couldn’t know how my breath caught in my throat, how I wanted to take the remote and hurl it through the nearest screen.
But maybe some of them did feel the same choking anger. I looked to the left, to the right, taking in girls with long strides and bouncing ponytails, and other women marching along, faces tense with what looked like desire. Twenty percent of American women are victims of rape. In Bridgton, that would make about five hundred women, twice the high school’s population of girls. I was then living in a town four times the size of Bridgton, and so I wondered which of the women around me might also be struggling to breathe, keeping their faces neutral and stoic. But we were an invisible club, estranged by the need to cope. To pretend all day, every day, that everything was fine. To imagine that society and law enforcement and the courts would behave exactly the same way if something so terrible happened to one in five men, that conviction rates would be the same, that the world would find those crimes just as entertaining as it found these, that we weren’t being further subjugated by having to be still and take it, pretend outward calm and enjoy the show.
So I did nothing—even to change the channel would have been to admit weakness. Instead I tried to enjoy the plot lines, the well-written dialogue. Be a normal person. I thought about what I would eat when I got home, whether it was time for that week’s weigh-in. Time to see how close I was to scaring him.
When I ran, I also thought about the night of the murder, the journey from my house to the Venezia. The distance was just under a mile, but I didn’t run the whole way. I ran from house to house at first, but then in that final long stretch, weakness crept upon me like strong arms wrapping around my chest, pulling me back. I would run a few steps, but then the air would slice my lungs, my heart would threaten to leap out, and I’d stumble down into a thump-heeled walk. I’d try to catch my breath, try to run again. Then I’d break down and walk again. I felt like a failure every single time. I felt like crying every single time. I should have run the whole way, but the truth was that I didn’t have the strength.
Running continuously would not have made a difference. If I’d arrived at the Venezia thirty seconds or one minute or five or ten minutes earlier, I do not think Mom could have been saved. If I’d popped out my window screen and run the second I heard her screaming, I do not think Mom could have been saved. But I still felt shame; I still wished that little girl had been able to sprint heroically.
This time, I would do everything I could. I would run several hundred miles, gather my strength and whittle myself down until I resembled Mom as much as possible. As I slimmed down, I couldn’t help but be pleased with my appearance, a happy bonus. When I ate, I limited my portions, thinking of Hutchinson at every meal: a strangely intimate connection. If it was true, as Walt guessed, that Hutchinson had targeted Mom because he had seen her walking along our road and around town, then it was Mom’s beauty, ultimately, that had gotten her killed. I refused to hide mine. Instead, I polished it like armor.
* * *
It was important not only to resemble Mom, to be thin and strong and able to run, but to be mentally strong, psychologically prepared, so that when I took the stand, there wouldn’t be another 991 slip, some moment when I thought I was saying or doing one thing but was really doing another.
I wanted to be a good witness—the best. It didn’t matter how I felt about any of it; I had to be powerful, persuasive, correct. I continued to take notes during Walt’s calls, and occasionally I would pull out those notes to fix the details in my mind. As with all important stories, I first had to tell this one to myself.
The attorney general’s office sent me tapes of my Texas interviews so I could study them and make sure I wouldn’t contradict anything the defense had on record. I arranged them in a neat stack of ten cassettes, at perfect right angles to the edges of my unused writing desk, then spent weeks looking at them sidelong. When I finally got the courage to sit down and listen, they were full of unintelligible murmurs and white noise. I sat and listened as the scribble filled my head and felt like a fool for having asked my roommate to make himself scarce.
The next day, I called and asked for new tapes, but I never received them. The tapes would magically work years later, but in that time when I felt I truly needed them, they were a sonic mess I could not untangle. So instead I rehearsed my testimony, staring into the video camera on my laptop, trying to feel something in advance of the real event. I’ve never watched that recording. It was more a test than a rehearsal. I needed to know which parts of the story made me the most nervous, the most upset, to figure out where the weak spots were so they wouldn’t take me by surprise. It was very important that I not break down on the stand. I wanted the jury to see me as strong and therefore eminently credible, and I wanted Michael to see that he hadn’t broken me, that it was impossible, that I would be the one to break him.
When I thought about Michael Hutchinson or wrote about him in my journal or took notes during phone calls with Walt, I had a lot of trouble with his name. Most of the time, it seemed best—safest—to refer to him as “Hutchinson” only. I could thus hold him at an icy distance; “Hutchinson” is more of a legal entity than a person, and this underlined the fact that I had never known him, was sure Mom hadn’t. Our family had never even heard of Hutchinsons living in the area.
But at other times, this distance seemed like a cop-out, for him and for me. A way to avoid reality. People in Bridgton didn’t call him “Hutchinson,” they called him “Michael” or “Mike.” A specific person, known to many, had committed this crime. He wasn’t some abstraction; he was a human who had made the decision to rape and kill my mother. If anyone had the right to refer to him informally, personally, it was me. There is power in naming, as there is power in knowing.
I received more material to review, and I was glad, because each additional item pulled me away from daily concerns, allowed me to settle further into the state of mind I needed to be in to think about the murder and the upcoming trial. I watched videotapes from the Dr. Brown sessions in Boston, and I felt disoriented. I could see myself there on the couch; it was my round face, framed by hair that flowed down past my elbows. But I had no memory of sitting there; I couldn’t see or feel anything outside the frame.
At times the girl on the tape was almost too quiet to hear; at others her voice had a harsh, loud, stripped-down quality that I didn’t like at all. When she sounded like that, her eyes were unfocused, looking inward. She said some things that scared me, things that I didn’t think were true—like when she said that after running to Mom’s room, she thought a man might be “hiding in the closet, looking at me” through the louvered doors. Dr. Brown had determined that these apparently recovered thoughts and details probably weren’t true, were just collateral of the process, but it was surreal to look back on all those afternoons meant to recover my memory and not remember the afternoons themselves. Still, it makes some sense. I don’t remember those afternoons on the couch because I didn’t spend them there. I spent them in my old house, walking through that night, over and over. Now I would have to do so again, in front of a much larger audience.
* * *
That November, it was announced that O.J. Simpson had written a book and that he would soon appear in an interview on Fox N
ews to promote it. The book was called If I Did It, and it was touted as a “hypothetical confession”: if he had killed Nicole, here’s how he would have done it. The timing felt personal; it underlined that mystic sense I’d always had that O.J. and I were connected, that I would never get away from him. Again people were excited to talk about the case, about the murder, about O.J.’s arrogance. And each time O.J. came up, I was reminded that it was possible to have all the evidence in the world and still not get a criminal conviction. That I couldn’t count on it.
But in the end, the book did provide some unexpected hope. As its release date and the date of O.J.’s television appearance approached, public outcry grew louder and louder. No matter how fascinating the book might be, it was simply too much, too distasteful. Denise Brown, Nicole’s sister, loudly demanded that Fox pull the project. I was surprised and relieved and gratified to see so many people agree with her. By the end of the month, both the book and the TV special had been canceled. So O.J. had not won this time, and maybe Hutchinson wouldn’t win, either.
* * *
Finally, I flew to Portland for the trial, arriving on a sunny Sunday in April. That day I met Susie, from the attorney general’s office, the victim witness advocate who would be in my life from that point on. Our first task was to sit down together and look at all of the crime scene and autopsy photos, so that when they were projected onto a huge white screen at the front of the courtroom, I would be prepared.
My college friend Ashley, who now lived in DC, had insisted on flying to Portland to be with me during the trial, even though I said I’d be fine on my own. She sat with me as Susie showed us the pictures one by one, describing the content of each before handing us the glossy three-by-five. Susie would say, “This is of her body, on the floor in the kitchen. You can see her leg, but not her head . . .” She knew from experience that having the words first made the images easier to handle: imagination will often surpass even the worst reality. We handed the pictures around, and as Ashley looked closely at each one, I was deeply grateful and deeply sad. Like my mother, we were pretty young women. I felt like I was showing her what could really be done to us, if a man decided to.
40
* * *
The first morning of the trial was shrouded in a thin gray mist, a perfect echo of the morning after the murder. Ashley woke first, bringing in the wooden tray of coffee things from the hall; the hotel the attorney general’s office usually used was under construction, so we were staying at the Regency, a historic inn in downtown Portland. It was uncannily pleasant—each night we had mints on our pillows, along with letterpress cards predicting the next day’s weather. Small, merciful extravagances.
For that first day, I made sure to wear a suit. It had been made clear to me that having a “classy” appearance could enhance the credibility of my testimony. I tried to look my best but didn’t wear too much makeup, and I buttoned my shirt one button higher than I normally would. I wanted to wear a tie, as I sometimes did at work, but left it at home—I didn’t want the jury to find me unfamiliar or strange. I knew I should look feminine but not aware of my own attractiveness. I was my mother’s representative, and if I was seen as good, as normal, I could help keep the defense from slandering her. I hated all of this and did all of this.
Ashley and I walked the few short blocks to the courthouse, a classic building with columns on its upper stories and large bricks on its lower, made of several shades of limestone—a gray-on-gray fortress in the clinging rain. I had no memory of having visited when my father gave Carol temporary custody, didn’t give it a thought. I hadn’t heard from Tom since that day, and I knew he wouldn’t dare attend the trial. As we approached, we saw a crowd of reporters and cameramen. For years I’d thought of reporters as scavengers, but now I found their presence gratifying. The public would bear witness along with me.
As we climbed the steps to go inside, Ashley held a large umbrella over us, though she mostly used it to cover me; she would be the mysterious woman with the cascade of blond hair, shielding me from the cameras. As the days went on, observers took her to be a cousin; she fit right in.
Susie found us as we stepped off the elevator and ushered us to a conference room for last-minute preparations. She handed me a notebook with photocopies of interviews I had done with the police, and I read through it quickly to make sure my story had no major discrepancies. Everything I’d ever said to a police officer had been given to Hutchinson and his lawyer for review, which was standard procedure. I tried not to think too hard about Hutchinson reading my words, tried not to hope that it destroyed him to read them.
The notebook also contained xeroxes of several pages of my diary from the year following Mom’s death. I didn’t mind the invasion of privacy as much as the fact that people had read my feverish and flowery adolescent prose. Seeing those pages, I realized that while I was being polygraphed by Dale Keegan, Tootsie must have sifted through my room to hand my diaries and journals over to the police, then slid them back onto my shelves so carefully that I hadn’t even noticed. I shook my head and laughed. It was so like her. She could have just asked me.
When Ashley and I emerged from the conference room, Gwen and Dave were already waiting in the third-floor hallway with Carol and Carroll and a few others. Carroll gave me a tight hug; he seemed happy to see me, regardless of the circumstances. We were all friendly, as though meeting up for a holiday, but quieter than usual. There was no precedent for how to behave. Several people pointed out how thin I was, but no one told me I looked like Mom. Our resemblance has remained impossible for me to evaluate—it’s like trying to see the back of my own head. Still, throughout that week, people would sometimes slip and call me Crystal.
After a round of hellos, Susie took me and Ashley into a small, white room just off the main hallway—a refuge where the family would huddle during breaks, a place to be while the bailiff marched Hutchinson down the hall at the beginning and end of each day. It was strange to think of him using the same hallways we did, walking in the open under those fluorescent lights. Somehow I’d expected him to be smuggled in through a subterranean tunnel, like a minotaur.
I was sequestered until I gave my testimony, unable to enter the courtroom until after I had taken the stand. The defense attorney, Robert Andrews, had agreed to let me be the first witness so that I would miss only the opening statements. It was important to me to see everything I could, to bear witness in all ways possible. Our prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese, reviewed the content of her opening statement with me. She agreed with Walt’s interpretation of the likely sequence of events that had led Hutchinson to our door. She would tell the jury that Hutchinson’s parents’ respective houses bracketed ours, and that Crystal Perry, this gorgeous redhead, had often walked along that corridor with her young daughter, had played and sunbathed in her exposed front yard. Hutchinson had plenty of opportunity to see her, either when she walked past his house or when he drove past hers. He’d had plenty of opportunity to become obsessed. Then finally he’d come to our house late one night, determined. Years later, Lisa would tell me, “I still believe your mother was targeted because of her beauty.”
No one else in the family would be called to testify, so they went into the courtroom while Ashley and I waited. We had an hour or two before it was time for me to go on. The waiting was difficult; I was ready to take the stand, and each passing moment made me feel more tense. Stronger than this feeling, though, was the desire to get in that room and take a good look at Michael Hutchinson. I had seen a photocopy of his mug shot from the kidnapping arrest five years earlier, and there had been more recent pictures of him in the paper, side views taken as he walked into his arraignment. I knew he was stocky, had brown hair. He wore ill-fitting sport coats, clearly purchased for court. But I wanted to know what it was like to be in a room with him, to see how his body displaced air, to watch what he did with his hands, at what angle he tilted his head. I wanted to see who this person was. And I could fe
el him waiting for me, too.
Susie kept dipping into our room to keep us updated, and at one point she came to tell us she had a surprise for me.
“Oh?” I said, anxious.
Susie kept smiling as she went into the hallway for a moment, then came back and pulled the door open with a flourish to let in, of all people, Dennis Lorrain.
Dennis stepped in with a huge smile on his face, filling the room with muscles I didn’t remember. I’d known him as a lanky nineteen-year-old boy with a tiny gold hoop in his ear, and here he was, broad, buzz-cut, with fine lines around his eyes. But he had the same snaggly eyeteeth, the same dimples.
Somehow, our natural response was to hug hello. He pulled back and said, “You’re all grown up!” I let out a short laugh and said, “So are you!” I had this strange sensation of being older than him, of being my mother’s age. He still emanated that unmistakable current of twitchy energy; I was relatively composed. Really, the procession of years had shrunk our effective age difference; I was twenty-five, he was thirty-three.
I turned to Ashley: “This is Dennis . . .” I could see her face go still, an attempt to hide surprise. She knew who Dennis was, and what he meant. She knew how long it had been since I’d spoken to him, that I’d last seen him that night, in the hospital.