by Sarah Perry
“Hiiiii!” Mom said, clearly embarrassed. The man behind her was fit, with a baby face. Looked no more than twenty. He plodded along behind her. She turned toward him, looked at Gwen and Dave, and told them his name. “This is _____ ,” she said. He mumbled something. They nodded hello. He made a quick exit through the kitchen, out the side door.
After the young man left, everyone pretended nothing had happened.
* * *
“So we don’t know who that was,” Dave said. “We just don’t know. We can’t remember the name.”
Gwen said, “It was a one-syllable name, and I swear to God, the more I think about this and dream about this, over and over and over, I almost swear she said ‘Mike.’ And it scares me to death that it could’ve been him right there. I saw a picture of him when he was like eighteen, and he had a babyish face then. The problem is, we could never go to the police and say, ‘That was him!’ We can’t do it.”
“We can’t. We can’t picture the face from that day.” Dave shook his head.
“But it was a moment,” Gwen said. “We always remembered, we were so embarrassed. She was supposed to be engaged to Dennis at the time.”
“And so then, after the trial, we were thinking, ‘Does Sarah remember that day?’” Dave looked at me.
“No,” I said. “I don’t remember that at all.” I shook my head. “Not at all.”
Gwen sighed. “I didn’t want to make you upset. ’Cause I can’t bring this any clearer to myself. So I was hoping that, if you might have remembered, even if you were pissed at me, or embarrassed that I said it, that you might then recall something about that day. I was going to be like, ‘Oh my God. Maybe we just figured it out.’”
And I sat there and thought about what it would be like in that very moment if I suddenly had a memory of Michael Hutchinson in our house. It would have told a story, sure. But would that story bring any satisfaction? It wouldn’t change anything, ultimately—not her death, not his guilt.
But I also think this: If Gwen’s story had knocked my memory loose, maybe we could have “figured it out” years earlier, maybe long before the DNA match, if not for her worry that I’d be embarrassed about my mother sleeping with one man when she was engaged to another. As though I would value fidelity to a controlling and obsessive fiancé over my mother’s right to pursue joy where she could find it.
I was frustrated that I didn’t remember that afternoon, and I was a little angry that Gwen and Dave hadn’t ever asked me about it before. I’d spent all that time with the police, being interrogated about everything from major facts to tiny details, while they had failed to mention this to anyone at all. Maybe if they’d said something in 1994, they would have still remembered the name. But they didn’t want to embarrass anyone. How dangerous shame is.
But I know that they were more disappointed than I was. They had been thinking about this for years.
And I did realize, sitting there with Gwen and Dave, that if there’s more to know—however ultimately unsatisfying it might end up being—I do want to know it. I try to whisper to the shrouded part of my brain that holds old memories, willing it to pass that long-ago afternoon forward into the light of consciousness. Later today. Later this week. Later this year. I can wait.
Nothing has come. The idea of interviewing Hutchinson has started to press on me. Maybe he’d tell me something, whatever it was that was in his eyes when he looked at me in court. Why not.
Every kind soul I know tells me not to do this, that to sit and talk with Hutchinson is to risk my heart, my mental health. That it’s not worth it. But the thing is, I still feel connected to him. I still feel like there’s something that only we know. Something I just can’t remember.
46
* * *
I keep going back to Bridgton, talking to more and more people, casting a wider net that I fear I’m becoming tangled in. I’m collecting facts, certainly, and theories about “what really happened”: alternatives or supplements to Walt’s educated guesses, to Lisa Marchese’s logical courtroom arguments. And I’m learning more about other people’s experiences of Mom’s death, what her loss has meant to them, what it means that the world no longer includes her. But I have a selfish motivation, too: I want to exist up there, really and fully. I want to be present, no longer an abstract concept—the girl who left, the girl who went down south. There is still a small part of me that misses my original home, that never wanted to leave Bridgton. But I can never live there again. New York is close enough. And just far enough.
My search turns up new information all the time, some of which produces more questions than answers. Miranda White, for instance—the woman who told the police about my father’s explosion at Ray Perry’s party—actually appears in the investigation file a few times. The first is long before that party. It’s May 14, 1994—two days after the murder.
That first time Miranda spoke with the police, she was the one who called them; they weren’t seeking her out. She told Pickett a story about the night Mom was killed. She was working late that night, making sandwiches at Subway. Closed up the shop around one in the morning. While sharing a cigarette in the parking lot after taking out the trash, Miranda and her coworker saw an ambulance leave the municipal garage across the way. She immediately thought of her boyfriend, she said. He was a troublemaker; maybe he had gotten himself into trouble. She jumped into her car and followed the ambulance. But then, she said, she turned around near the Venezia, did not follow all the way to our house. She never said what made her turn around, why she didn’t follow the ambulance until it stopped, but she had already passed her boyfriend’s house by then. When she pulled up to the stop sign at the end of Route 93 to turn back into town, a vehicle came up behind her, fast, blinding her with its lights. She was emphatic that the bright headlights made identifying the vehicle impossible. She turned onto High Street, passing her boyfriend’s house on the way back into town, and, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, continued home to her parents’ house. The vehicle tailing her turned off on a side street, she said. When she got home, she heard on the police scanner that the ambulance was on its way to the Venezia. Her dad told her to go to the police with her story, that since she’d been in the area, she needed to talk to them.
In that interview, Miranda didn’t give her boyfriend’s name, or if she did, Pickett didn’t write it down. When he interviewed her over a year later about Donnie Martin and the night of Ray Perry’s party, he noted that she also repeated “pretty much” the same story about the night of the murder. Pickett ended his summary: “She was dating Michael Hutchinson who lived up on Route 302 at the time.”
More than a decade later, when Hutchinson was finally identified, the police brought Miranda in to the Gray barracks for questioning. When they asked if someone else might have been seen in her car that night, she replied, “I don’t know—maybe.” We’ll never know quite what her answer meant. We’ll never know whether there really was a vehicle driving close behind her that night, blinding her, or whether she made up the bright lights to blind the police to something else. When the police officer began the polygraph examination to which Miranda had agreed, she got uncomfortable. She ripped the equipment off and walked out.
Back in 1994, no one followed up on anything contained in that first interview. If they’d gone to Michael’s house and spoken with him casually for a moment, perhaps asked if he’d seen anything unusual in the vicinity, as they might have done with any neighbor, they would have seen his injured hand. They could have asked him the same questions they asked other men they found to have injured hands around that time. They could have asked for a DNA sample.
When I try to figure out why Pickett and the others didn’t do any of this, I can only think that they must have dismissed Miranda as an emotional young woman. They were so diligent about so many other leads, no matter how flimsy. When a psychic called, claiming to have important details about the killer’s identity, Pickett contacted the new owners of the house and arr
anged a walk-through.
Not long after I read Miranda’s first interview, I found a report of a wreck Michael was in. I figured this must have been the accident that he presented to Walt as the reason for the scar across his hand. In the middle of that summer night, Michael sped along the Naples causeway, one town over from Bridgton, in a black pickup. It was June 26, 1994: forty-five days after the murder. I can see it: the black truck in the black night, flashing clean like a strobe as it passes under the streetlights. On one side, quiet clapboard houses and shops, hours silent. On the other, the deep, close waters of Sebago Lake, a light chop reflecting the shore light like stars.
Michael’s at the wheel, alone, drunk or more, but I can’t see him. Just before the narrow drawbridge, he turns down a smaller road to the right. A few minutes later, he jerks the wheel to the left, pulling a sharp U-turn before careening into a tree.
It’s impossible to know who called 911, but the police and ambulance come just before two in the morning. At first, they find no driver. The truck is towed, and the police call its registered owner, Michael’s father, Brad. He and his wife arrive shortly after and start scouring the woods. After three and a half hours of searching, they find Michael lying under the trees, having drunkenly wandered or run from the scene. The paramedics are called back; by now it’s five thirty. At the hospital, Michael’s chief complaints are listed: femur pain, chest pain, head injury. There is no mention of a large cut across his palm.
Michael had sped directly into a tree, causing almost twenty thousand dollars in damage to a two-year-old vehicle. The steering wheel was bent back, the windshield shattered. It’s the kind of accident that could easily kill a person. It’s the kind of accident that might not be fully accidental. If Michael had died that night, we might never have known who killed Crystal Perry. We would have waited for answers, never knowing they were buried. But also, Michael would not have married and terrorized his first wife, he would never have had children of his own, he would never have had any number of undeserved days of happiness and freedom.
The vehicle he was driving was a black 1992 F-150 pickup. New Hampshire plates, numbered BBX-639. As I finished digesting this report, my brow furrowed and my head moved slowly, mechanically, my ear turned down, as though I’d just heard something very confusing. My fingertips gripped the paper tighter, as though I could force meaning out of it. This number was familiar. A black pickup, license plate BBX-639. New Hampshire.
I flipped back through some other papers, reports I’d read before. Found the one I was thinking of. May 20, 1994, eight days after the murder. In the afternoon, Pickett gets a call from Linda. He scribbles a summary: “She just noticed a newer-model Ford pickup with New Hampshire plates up the street from her. The plate number is BPX-638. Crystal and Sarah use to walk by that residence on occasion when they’d go for walks with Linda or come down to visit Linda.”
One number and one letter off. Parked right across the street. Eight days later. And as far as I can tell, Pickett never even checked it out.
* * *
I can’t bear to contact Pickett. I don’t think real communication between us has ever been possible. I’d probably act like an angry, difficult teen and hate myself for it, and he’d offer a bunch of excuses for what I, with my 20/20 hindsight, see as avoidable errors. And since, at the time of the trial, Pickett still thought Dennis had something to do with Mom’s murder, I really don’t think he’d have anything useful to say.
But conversations with other officials have been surprisingly healing. The two threads of my search—the personal and the forensic—are not as separate as one might expect. When I visited officer Pete Madura, who was one of the first on the scene in the early-morning hours of May 12, at the Bridgton police station, he told me I could consider him a grandfather, if I wanted, that his home would always be open to me. The new chief of police, a man I’d never met, quietly interrupted us, insisting that he had to meet me. It was strange to be known by someone who hadn’t even been on the Bridgton force in the nineties.
But it was Kate Leonard, the cop who picked me up at the Venezia, who sat in the back of that ambulance with me, that I most wanted to see. Still, I was terrified of calling her. I was afraid of casting us both back there. I could immerse myself in the past as much as I wanted, but I couldn’t assume anyone else wanted to join me. I feared that just a phone call from me could drag a person down into fear and sadness once more.
When I finally found myself sitting down with Kate, I realized how curious I was about her life in the years since we’d last seen each other. A few months after the murder, she had left the police force and gone into social work, dealing with at-risk and traumatized kids. It was too hard for her, she said, to go through that night with me and then never see me again. There was so little she could do. Kate is single, with one daughter. When her daughter turned twelve a few years ago, she thought about me and Mom more than ever. Her best friend is Laurie Hakkila, the 911 dispatcher I’d talked to from the Venezia.
Kate, who’s around Mom’s age, was born in a wealthier coastal community, but she’s lived in Bridgton since shortly before the murder. She sees the town from inside and outside, a dual perspective that is strengthened by her experience as both a police officer and a civilian. On the afternoon we met, she said, “I was surprised, the other day, to see Michael Hutchinson’s father, Brad, sitting with a bunch of gentlemen who were on the fire department, and other really entwined Bridgton folk, at our local Dunkin’ Donuts. I thought, ‘That’s interesting.’” Because after the trial, she said, it had seemed like people in town were shunning Brad, especially when he publicly defended his son. You could see people physically avoid him, avert their eyes. Now, it seemed, Brad had been accepted back into the fold.
Kate provides another glimpse of Hutchinson. She talks about his upbringing, about how Brad trained his son to treat women, leading by terrible example. “After it came out that Mike had murdered your mother, I thought back to the interactions I’d had with him. One would assume the murder would be a hugely traumatic event, even for the person who did it. But, y’know, it clearly wasn’t. With all the violence he’d been witness to at a very young age, he had a real high capacity to just shove it off, to just shake it through the next day and move forward.”
When I think about that ability to move forward seamlessly after violence and fear, I’m reminded of Mom fighting with Dennis, crying and screaming and raging, and then, a day or two later, taking me to the planetarium in Portland and smiling up at the synthetic stars while gently holding my hand. I think about hearing her cry herself to sleep and then seeing her appear in my bedroom the next morning, kissing my forehead and tickling me, darting forward and back and laughing until I finally sat up, cranky but smiling begrudgingly. As a kid, Mom learned how to recover quickly from danger and fear. And when she grew older, she was brave enough to maintain the hope that she could make things better; through all her difficulties, she was determined.
But Michael was a coward who visited danger and fear upon others. I imagine a little boy trying to save his mom from a scary dad. I think about how this boy might have felt as he failed, over and over, too powerless and small to make a difference. Eventually it might be less painful to conclude that, as his father said, she got what she deserved. And then when he got bigger, he’d find other women, decide what they deserved. Be powerful.
Kate tells me how shocked people in Bridgton were when they learned that the killer had been living among them all along: “We had assumed whoever had done it had walked away.” Of course, no matter where he’d been, Mike would have been living in some community, somewhere. But it’s worse that it was his own town, that it was ours. That so many people he saw each day were connected to Mom and to me. That Linda saw him at parties and dated his good buddy Ray King. That he bought cookies from Adams Bakery, owned by another childhood friend of Mom’s, and worked on a house construction crew with my father.
My sixth-grade teacher, Ms. Shane, a
lso knew the Hutchinson family. I met her in a little park behind Renys, a new addition to the town, and waited nervously for her to show up, afraid I wouldn’t recognize her. Of course, I did. She had changed so little, was even still teaching in Bridgton, in her thirtieth year. Very early in her career, she’d had Michael Hutchinson as a student. His father was intimidating and demeaning to her in after-school conferences, and Michael was impossible to handle. “Even at that age,” she said, “he was always a problem. A huge discipline problem. He had absolutely no respect.” I thought about this. I wanted to be intelligent about it. I suggested: “Maybe he was so dominated at home that he had to act out at school?” “No,” she replied. “He already had the markings of a sociopath.”
But I don’t want him to be a sociopath. I don’t think sociopaths feel empathy or regret when they harm others. I hope that the emotion he showed on the stand, when he pointed his finger at me and told the court that he hadn’t tried to save me, is proof that he spends every day in anguish.
I also don’t think Michael is insane. There’s no reason to think he wasn’t mentally present that night. I think he raped and killed my mother because he believed he could, because he thought he had the right. And I think it’s worth examining where he might have gotten that idea.
There is nothing that could lessen Michael Hutchinson’s guilt and responsibility: he chose his actions, and they were senseless and vicious. Even in the realm of murder, he stands out: Justice Warren called what he did to my mother “butchery,” and the precedent he applied during sentencing concerns a crime so horrible I can barely read about it. It would be easier to think he was just a monster, an aberration; it would make us all feel a lot safer, now that he’s locked away. But I think it’s a lot more likely that Michael was born with a natural tendency to violence, which worsened in a violent home, and easily found a target in a world where many men are trained to exert power over women. Punishing him should not prevent us from trying to understand how he was made. I’m glad Michael Hutchinson is in jail. But I’ll be more glad when there are no more Michael Hutchinsons.