by Sarah Perry
Andrews slowly walked us through Michael’s background—his upbringing, his poor grades in school, his masonry work for his father. He prompted Michael to talk about his parents, who fought constantly, often leaving him “stuck in the middle.” His mother was, allegedly, irrationally jealous of other women, and mentally unstable; Michael said she would tear off her clothes in the middle of arguments, even in public. Before the trial and after, people would tell me stories about Michael’s father, Brad; the cruelty in that home seemed widely known.
Andrews made it clear that Michael was raised by a violent man who insisted that his mother was crazy and worthless. He didn’t clarify, of course, whether she was mentally ill or whether she had been driven crazy by abuse. Or why, if she was sick, Brad’s response had been to inflict torment rather than care for her. I wondered how pointing out the misogyny and violent dysfunction in that family could possibly help their defense. I kept waiting for some clever turn to the argument, but none came. It was foolish for the defense to think that from the jury’s perspective, sympathy for the boy and condemnation of the man could not coexist.
Michael and Andrews worked together to tell the court a story: that Michael came to our house that night for consensual sex, and then a mysterious other man appeared and did the killing. To me this sounded like a bad eighties thriller, so unoriginal that it was almost funny.
Michael said the mystery man had suddenly rushed into the house and started arguing with Crystal. He told the jury that he hadn’t seen the man’s face, but he knew that he was tall, that he wore a black motorcycle jacket. When pressed for more details, he said, “It all happened so quick.” When the guy pulled a knife out of his sleeve, Michael lunged at him, receiving a deep slash across his palm. Of course, the jury didn’t know that he had told Walt a different story, about a car wreck. He said he was knocked unconscious for an undetermined amount of time, and woke up to find the stranger “scooched down” on the floor, stabbing Crystal. Michael “body-slammed” the man, he said, then gazed down at the floor to find Crystal “looking up at me, completely covered in blood.” Then he ran out to his truck, drove home, and hid in his bedroom for the rest of the day.
That bedroom was in his father’s house, three doors down from Linda’s. This part of his story, about his hiding out, I did believe. If no one had come to the door at the Venezia, if I had made it all the way into town that night, I could have knocked on his door.
Andrews paused, seeming to think. “You didn’t call the police?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I was ashamed of what I had done.” I could see Michael flush with emotion. The response seemed genuine, but it could easily have come from something other than shame. Fear of imprisonment. Or rage. I took a deep breath. Something clicked into place: I knew exactly what he was about to do.
“Did you kill her?” Andrews asked gently, as though referring to an unfortunate mistake. His tone implied forthcoming forgiveness.
“No.”
“What were you ashamed of, then?”
Michael reached out a thick arm, extended his finger, and pointed at me. I heard the loud whisper of many simultaneous gasps, like fire suddenly eating air.
I held bolt upright, still. My face became very, very hot. I held my neutral expression while desperately hoping I wouldn’t faint. I kept my eyes on Michael. I would not give him the satisfaction of a response.
Andrews stepped back. “I don’t understand what that means, Michael.” Here he indicated the jury with a dramatic sweep of his arm. “You’ve got to tell us.”
“I knew Sarah was there. I did nothing. Am I done? Can I leave?”
He wasn’t done. Andrews had a few more questions to wrap things up. He paused, apparently allowing Michael to recover.
“Michael, did you like Crystal Perry?”
“Yes.”
“Why were you there that night?”
“She invited me over.”
“Did you have sex with her?”
“Yes.”
“Did you force her?”
“No.”
“Was it consensual?”
“Yes.”
“Did she want to?”
“Yes.”
“Your Honor, I have nothing further.”
43
* * *
Lisa destroyed Michael in cross-examination. She handed him a long wooden pointer and made him walk out from behind the witness stand to indicate the position of the three players in his story—him, Mom, and the faceless man—on the diagram of our house. I’d held that pointer, too, indicating to the jury the positions of windows and contents of rooms, and it felt strange to see it in his hand. His choreography was terrible, and Lisa was relentless. He claimed that he had struggled with the other man in the tiny area between the door and the kitchen table. But the police had found only one set of boot prints, and the table had several greeting cards still standing on it, undisturbed. The cards had been from me and Dennis, for Mother’s Day.
While Michael was still standing out in the open, Lisa got close to him and pointed her finger in his face, and in that moment, he became real to me, as though color had suddenly flooded into a black-and-white scene. Oh my God, Lisa, I thought. Oh my God, that man is a killer. Michael is short, but Lisa is even smaller. He had no weapon, and still I thought, He’s a killer. You’re the bravest woman alive.
Our kitchen had consisted of two small areas in an L shape: a longer rectangle containing our dining table, with a wall broken by the external side door, and a narrow aisle with counters on either side. Michael claimed he’d bled droplets on the right side of the kitchen next to the sink, not because he was reaching for a paper towel, but because he was reaching into a drawer for a weapon after he “woke up”—anything to defend himself against the “real killer,” the one with the knife up his sleeve. He must have meant for this to explain the drawer noise I’d heard from my room. Lisa let him finish his story, gave him a big, slow nod, then showed him a photo of that right-side counter: the paper towel holder, the sink, and the cabinets below. She urged him to take a close look. “There’s no drawers there, Mr. Hutchinson.”
She was right; there were no drawers on that side. The drawers with the utensils and all the knives were on the left side of the kitchen, and there was no blood over there—on the counter or the drawer handles or anywhere else—so yet another part of Michael’s story didn’t hold. The only record of there ever having been drawers on the right was one of my old police interviews. Just before the trial, Lisa had asked me which side the knife drawer was on. “On the right,” I’d said, blithely unaware of the mistake. “Next to the sink.” She’d nodded, moved on to her next question, wisely not correcting me. If Andrews had asked me about the drawers during the trial, my answer would have been consistent with the old interviews he’d reviewed with his client. My mistaken memory had helped Lisa lead Hutchinson right into a trap. I nearly laughed out loud. I was so happy to have remembered it wrong.
Lisa continued, detailing more of Hutchinson’s lies, painting a picture of a killer who had stayed close by, deceiving everyone around him.
“You lied to people about how you cut your hand, right?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“You lied to people about where you were that night?”
“Yes.”
“You’re the victim of a crime, according to you, but you never came forward. You knew the police were begging for information about Crystal Perry’s murder, didn’t you? You saw the signs. You live in Bridgton. There were signs all over Bridgton. Did you see them?”
“I believe I saw one, yes.”
“Did you see the ten-thousand-dollar reward?”
“Yes.”
As Lisa continued to push forward, methodically dismantling everything Hutchinson had said, I thought of him driving around town in the months after the murder, Mom’s face following him from telephone pole to telephone pole.
There was o
nly one moment when I felt like Lisa disregarded my feelings and those of my family, when she must have known she’d hurt us and decided it was worth it. When she brought Michael to the point where he ran out of the house, when he claimed the last thing he saw was Mom gazing up at him, covered in blood, she countered, “Are you sure you don’t remember her eyes as you were stabbing her in the head, Mr. Hutchinson?” I felt revolted and heartbroken and exhilarated, and I knew then that we were going to win.
* * *
On day six, the jury went in to deliberate the case. After less than two hours, they came out with a verdict: guilty. Three months later, Michael Hutchinson was sentenced to a term of life with no parole. It was August 2, 2007: thirteen years, two months, and twenty-two days after my mother, Crystal Perry, was killed.
44
* * *
After the trial, my family members and I returned to our respective homes. I flew south, and they went back to the houses they’d lived in for decades, resumed work once again. Friends and neighbors who hadn’t attended the trial or sentencing went on as they had before. Bridgton was still a beautiful little town where a bad thing once happened. My friends in North Carolina talked to me about closure, about relief, but I didn’t feel either of those things. I didn’t even feel safer.
Of course, I was relieved that Michael Hutchinson was finally in jail. I was glad he’d been punished, and more glad that he couldn’t hurt any more women. But each time I heard about another rape, another murder, each time I read another “shocking” news article about the prevalence of these crimes, I felt a kind of paralysis in my limbs, a coldness in my chest. One violent man in jail, out of the thousands, seemed to make hardly any difference at all. I’d stopped fearing Mom’s killer hunting me down long ago; but there were a lot of other dangerous men in the world.
The latter years of my twenties passed. I moved into a nice apartment just a twenty-minute walk from work. I started to buy real furniture—a bed frame, a brand-new couch—and learned to cook a little. Every few months I received an update from Susie, the victim witness advocate: Hutchinson kept appealing both the conviction and the sentencing. He would appeal for a few years, she said, until he was out of options. Standard procedure; no reason to worry.
I wasn’t worried, partially because Susie’s dispatches had a feeling of unreality. They seemed to come from a distant place, one that had little to do with my life of friends and nights out and petty work concerns. Every time I heard from Susie, I was reminded that my mother had become abstract to me. I still sometimes tried to write about Mom, to remember her with clarity, but after an hour or two I would run out of the compulsive energy that had gotten me started. It seemed impossible to do her justice. And I still hadn’t written any stories since I lost her.
Sometimes I conducted cursory research to learn more about new things I’d discovered during the trial. After a few minutes of reading or searching, I would sigh and snap my laptop shut. I would scribble notes—“Call Walt,” “Ask Susie”—but I wasn’t ready to involve anyone else in my search. I was afraid they would ask me why I wanted to know more, and I didn’t have a clear answer.
In the couple of years after the trial, Court TV aired two docudramas about our case—one for a series called Suburban Secrets, one for Forensic Files. I refused to participate in Suburban Secrets. I did watch it when it aired, though. It had been written in a tone of breathy excitement, and the main point was how very shocking it was that this crime had happened in a small town of beautiful lakes and summer camps. It was just another story designed to hold violence at arm’s length, another hollow way for the audience to reassure themselves that this sort of horror could never happen to them.
I was glad I had turned down the Suburban Secrets producers. But a few months later, when the Forensic Files people called, I felt a little different. They insisted that their show wasn’t sensational, that they would focus more on the triumphs of DNA evidence and other technology than on the lurid details of the crime itself. They said the episode would be a testament to the hard work that so many people had put into the case over the years. With some hesitation, I agreed to the interview. I think, when it came down to it, the story felt unfinished. I had a sense of the inadequacy of the trial, of wanting to say more. But when it was time to send me a copy, the producer asked if I wanted the version that would air on television or the “family edit”—the softer, less bloody cut. I opted for neither. I felt like a traitor.
* * *
A few years later, I moved north, closer to the source. I started making a new home in New York City, on the edge of the winter zone. I was angry about those television dramas. Although I had not yet gotten the nerve to do so, strangers had called Walt, strangers had talked to Susie. They had filmed my old town and spoken to my aunts. Two new stories had been added to a long list of newspaper articles and six o’clock news update reels. Two stories that didn’t talk much about Crystal Perry, that just recounted, again and again, the grisly details of her murder. I wanted to do better. Even after the trial, there was so much I still didn’t know. Then I turned thirty, a milestone that felt like a miracle: it looked like I might outlive Mom after all.
Shortly after that resonant birthday, I picked up the phone and called Susie, feeling like a teenager asking permission for something strange and forbidden. Maybe if I read through the police records, I thought, I could make something more meaningful of them. Five years had passed since the trial, but I discovered that I was still welcome to go to the police barracks and see whatever I liked. Susie was perfectly natural on the phone, unsurprised. She had expected me to call someday; she knew the trial hadn’t been enough. “Whenever you’re ready, we can have everything accessible for you in Gray,” she said. “Just let us know when you’re home.”
* * *
During that first record-gathering trip, Susie warned me about more than the pictures that might be hiding in the files. “I know you can handle it,” she said. “But you’re going to learn some things about your mother. Some things you didn’t know before. People have a lot of secrets; you’d be amazed how many secrets people have. There’s some stuff about her friend Linda in there . . . Well. I’m just sayin’. Try hard not to judge your mother. She was a good person, you know that.”
I was reminded then of something that had happened during the trial, a moment that had caused me to question the nature of Mom’s friendship with Linda. Lisa and Walt had told me that they might call Linda as a witness, both to testify to Mom’s character—namely, her devotion to me—and to verify that we had taken all those walks past her house and Hutchinson’s father’s. But later, when they called Linda into the attorney general’s office to ask some preliminary questions, they said, she collapsed. She was extremely upset, shaking and crying and yelling. She was not sober when she arrived.
As soon as I heard this, a strange, clear thought popped into my head. They were lovers, I thought. That’s it. Of course.
And then I immediately pushed this thought away. I had no real reason to think it—no evidence that my mother had been physically intimate with any woman. And anyway, my sudden, illogical conviction was unnecessary, superfluous to more important facts. Linda’s best friend had been violently murdered. She had lived in the same community as the killer for years. It wasn’t so surprising that her sanity had slipped, that stress and fear had addled her mind. Why did I need to make things even more dramatic, make everything about myself? Why had this thought come at me out of nowhere?
That day in the courthouse, I told Walt that I’d considered seeing Linda in the past but that something had stopped me.
“Well, that’s probably good,” Walt said. “She’s . . . she’s not doing well. She’s kinda lost it, honestly.”
“What do you mean, ‘lost it’?” I thought, She must still be so sad. She must be drinking too much or something. I could understand how the trial might be too much for her.
“Just like . . .” Walt looked embarrassed. “Behavior that’
s not good. Bizarre. Like . . . here’s one: Somebody called and Bridgton Police had to go over there, ’cause she was sunbathing totally nude on her front lawn. Right there, just ten, fifteen feet from the road. Uh, faceup. And, y’know. Just not bein’ in her right mind, exactly. I mean, she’ll be okay for a while and then do something strange, out of the blue.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.” As though I were saying, Oh, that sort of thing, now I understand. I didn’t understand, but I didn’t want to embarrass Walt by pressing him with more questions. And I didn’t want my voice to shake as I thought about how horrifying it was, picturing Linda’s aging body lying naked and vulnerable on the upward slope of her lawn, right there on High Street.
Susie had mentioned Linda at the trial, too. “She just hasn’t been the same since your mother died,” she said, shaking her head. “The murder really scared a lot of people . . . but it was worse, her losing her best friend, and living alone, too. And then within a year, she dated Hutchinson’s best friend, there, that Ray King. That guy who shot himself in the head a few years later. Everybody was pretty sure he knew something. And then Linda’s other boyfriend, Mike Douglas, was Hutchinson’s cousin, I’m pretty sure. But who knows what Linda knows. Who can even tell now.”
Ray King has been a whisper in the back of my mind ever since that day. I have this scene in my head: Linda and a wiry, bearded man sitting on a summery, pine-plank deck drinking beers, loosely holding hands from one plastic lawn chair to another. Hutchinson stands over them, leaning on the railing, and next to him is a blurry, indistinct woman; there’s a sort of camera lens flare over her. I don’t want to think about her, what could have happened to her. Michael is excitedly telling a funny story, thick hands gesticulating, and Linda laughs, her eyes locked on his while she tips the cool, dewy bottle to her mouth. She has no idea. The friendlier the scene in my imagination, the more terrifying I find it.