by Edward Humes
“Didn’t you tell us you had blood all over your clothes or your backpack or something?” one of the other kids asks. “How’d you explain that?”
Ronald’s grin widens a notch. “I said I was walking home that night and I flagged down this van, so I could hitch a ride with this dude I know. And when I got in, there’s blood all over and a sack of money on the floor. And he tells me, ‘I did it. I killed them.’ It’s like, I didn’t know until I got in the van, and by then, all the blood was all over me.”
The other kids are genuinely interested now, intrigued by the notion that you could climb innocently into a van and suddenly be thrust into the middle of a murder. It is not such an outlandish notion to the kids in this room: Three of the six students in the class this night are charged with murder simply for being willingly present when someone else did the shooting or stabbing. Now they wonder if they can learn something from Ronald they might be able to use in court. Enjoying the spotlight, Ronald continues to recap his testimony, slipping into the street slang he has carefully cultivated since entering the hall, hoping it will give him standing.
“So then they ask about the money I’m supposed to have stolen from my bosses, that I supposedly killed them for. And I say no, I got that from this dude’s van. I told them that I just reached down and picked up some of the money sitting there on the floor of the van and said, ‘Break me off.’ ”
The other kids stare at him, then shake their heads, immediately losing interest. Someone mutters the word “Fool,” and Ronald looks confused. “What’s wrong with that? Wouldn’t you want to break off some of the money for yourself, too?”
“Man,” Geri says with disgust, “no wonder they want to fry your ass, talkin’ that kind of shit in court.” Geri, facing his own murder rap, has written a series of eloquent letters to the court, polishing them in class, acutely conscious that he will walk into court presumed to be a monster, and that he will have a tough time combating that perception. “You go into court, you’re not on the street, dummy. You think that judge is going to believe anything you say now? Break me off. He’s gonna break you off, all right. Break you off right into prison.”
Ronald just shakes his head at this piece of wisdom, still smiling his invulnerable, indecipherable smile. “Can’t send me to prison,” he says mildly, and this irks Geri even more. Because, unlike Ronald, Geri can go to prison.
The last student arrives a few moments later and I start the class with a five-minute writing exercise. Ronald declares his intention to write a quick page about a boy wrongly accused of murdering his bosses. “I’ll call it, ‘Innocent Blood,’ ” he says, inscribing the title onto a piece of blue-lined loose-leaf paper with a wobbly flourish.
For the next five minutes, he seems to be concentrating on his work, but when the time comes to read aloud to the class, Ronald is the only boy in the room whose page is still blank.
THE first time Peggy Beckstrand saw him, Ronald Duncan giggled and smiled over his shoulder at his parents sitting in back of the ancient courtroom, a skinny boy with those little kid arms you could wrap your thumb and pinkie around, no problem. It seemed hard to believe he could raise, much less successfully aim and fire, a double-barreled shotgun. The police had thought that right up until he happily showed them how he did it. That was a year ago, though, and since then, Ronald has bulked up in the hall, a product of forced calisthenics and starchy foods and the march of adolescence, new muscles and goatee and a slight paunch aging his five-foot-five frame.
“I didn’t do anything, I swear,” he tells his parents every time they visit, and they, of course, believe him. He is their baby, their youngest son, a kid who has never been in trouble a day in his life, but for the occasional detention at school, a cut class here and there. They dismiss his confession to the police. They have heard of terrible things that can happen to a young black male locked up in a police interrogation room; they know what happened to Rodney King. Ronald’s father, a humble and soft-spoken gentleman with a deeply lined face and the hard calluses of a man who worked a lifetime with his hands, speaks with a quiet passion about his son’s innocence, of how he knows with something that borders on religious faith that his boy, the child who came to him late in life and made him young again, could not possibly be a killer. He and his wife are no longer married, but they are living together again while the case is pending, their Ronald’s future in the balance. The case is now the center of their lives, every hearing, every motion, every casual utterance in court. To them, Peggy Beckstrand is the monster—the humorless face of the state, trying to take their child away.
She feels their stares drilling into the back of her neck at every hearing. Peggy feels sorry for them, for the pain their family must bear, the look of incomprehension on their faces every time they hear the courtroom ring with the words, “Ronald Duncan: two counts, Section 187 of the California Penal Code—murder in the first degree.” She wonders what the Duncan family sees when Ronald comes strutting into the room, grinning and waving like a kid getting off the bus from summer camp. At such moments, when disgust wells up within Peggy, she sometimes watches Ronald’s mother and father rise and extend their hands toward him, reaching out across yards of empty space, the closest thing to an embrace they are allowed in court, where touching the accused is not permitted, the cold reality juvenile and adult systems share. To Peggy, it is as if she and the family are looking at two different children. Will they remain so blinded by love, she wonders, when the trial begins and she hauls out the pictures of what Ronald left behind on the night of the murder? Would she be so blinded if it were her daughter Courtney skipping into the courtroom? Even after all these years in the DA’s office, it is the sort of question that can still haunt this former preschool teacher, this mother and grandmother, whose job is to be a prosecutor of children.
But then, there are the pictures. They haunt her, too, agony and loss captured in the harsh strobe light of a crime-scene photographer’s camera. The last pictures of Chuck and Adelina Rusitanonta.
The image will always be indelible in Peggy’s mind: husband and wife slumped in their old Mercury station wagon, engine still running, back door ajar. Shortly before 11:00 P.M., the car had drifted slowly into a lamppost on a residential street. A man had run out onto his porch at the sound of two loud bangs followed by the sound of a car crashing, just in time to see a shadowy figure run away from the car and toward a van that seemed to have been waiting.
Inside the car, husband and wife were still wearing their matching Baskin Robbins shirts, impossibly huge matching holes blown in their heads by a pair of point-blank shotgun blasts, their blood and brains and bits of bone sprayed like graffiti onto the windshield, dashboard, and seats. Their facial features were wildly distorted, sagging like party balloons that had been overfilled, then deflated, by the volcanic heat and pressure of expanding gases leaving the gun barrel along with the buckshot. (Typical of her sometimes morbid obsession with the gritty details of crime, Peggy had gone to a medical library to study this ballooning phenomenon so she could explain it all in court in clinical detail—even though she knew the judge hearing the case would not be the least bit interested. This was a habit left over from a career of jury trials in adult court, where no detail could be ignored or issue taken for granted. “It’s a matter of being prepared. Of being professional. If this were a real court,” she says with biting contempt, “there would be no question. I’d have to do this.”)
Natural suspicion, then hard evidence and witnesses (a talkative getaway driver, a bloody van), led detectives to young Ronald Duncan, the only other person working that night at the ice cream store. After telling a series of preposterous lies about walking home alone and getting mugged that night—and after police made an unfortunate and ultimately illegal reference to the killer receiving the death penalty that would come back to haunt Peggy—Ronald switched his story and confessed. He calmly explained how he rode home in the backseat of Chuck and Ada’s car after they closed up s
hop for the night, determined to rob them, a sawed-off shotgun in his backpack along with his schoolbooks and unfinished homework.
As he would explain to his interrogators, a few minutes into the ride, having worked up sufficient nerve to carry out his plan, he pulled out his weapon and, without a word, fired at Chuck’s head with the single-shot shotgun, the car still moving. The cops, who had found no murder weapon, had been taken aback by this, asking, Are you sure it was single-shot? Ronald had nodded: There was just one barrel. It wasn’t a double or an over-and-under, he said. The awful implication of this would later stun Peggy as much as it had the police. It meant this fifteen-year-old boy had to shoot Chuck, who had been driving, break open the gun, take out the spent shell, put in another one, close the gun, and shoot Adelina—even as the now driverless car was drifting to the curb and crashing. Not to mention the fact that the vinyl interior of the Mercury station wagon had to have looked and felt like a slaughterhouse after that first shot. This provided clear evidence of premeditation, rather than a spur-of-the-moment act of irrationality. To calmly reload and kill a second time in the face of such carnage took a special sort of commitment.
“What was Ada doing during this time you had to reload?” one of the interrogators had asked. As Peggy later calculated it, the woman must have sat there for a good five to ten seconds wearing part of her husband’s brain before Ronald got around to dispatching her, too.
“She screamed,” a deadpan Ronald recalled. “After I shot her, it wasn’t nothing else said.”
Ronald admitted taking some of the store’s receipts from a bank bag beside Chuck’s body, but all the blood had finally unnerved him, and he only got a portion of the money, though it was a sufficient wad for him to show off like a game hunter’s trophy the next day in school. Robbery might have been only part of the motive anyway. Ronald also said he was peeved at his bosses for criticizing him for being late. As a friend would later recall, “He didn’t like being dissed.”
One of the interrogators couldn’t help but say, “Hey, you must’ve really hated Chuck and Ada to do something like this. And Ronald had smiled, then said, “No, I really loved them.” Every time she reads that in the big blue Murder Book, it gives Peggy chills. Because she believes him.
Now, as the day of the trial approaches, Peggy has become increasingly obsessed with the case. The detectives have moved on to other investigations and seldom return her phone calls; it is now her responsibility alone to pursue Ronald. She takes the files home with her every night, sitting in bed with them, playing tapes and reading transcripts, falling into a fitful sleep with the trappings of murder spread all around her like a scrapbook. She even keeps the numbing crime scene photos in her top desk drawer, pulling them out whenever the place gets to her, a grim salve fortifying her resolve to put the shooter away. Here is a kid who was never abused, never deprived, raised in a solid middle-class family with all the clothes, stereos, color TVs, and opportunities he could want—a kid who, unlike so many of the truly pitiful children Peggy prosecutes daily, has no excuse for his conduct. Ronald’s parents say there is a simple explanation for this: He is innocent. But Peggy sees Ronald as a conscienceless emblem of an era in which unspeakable acts of violence are carried out every day by juvenile delinquents—a legally mandated but quaintly outdated term for the sort of mayhem Ronald and his peers commit.
And it is that quaint designation of a shotgun murderer as a “delinquent” that is the source of Peggy’s obsession with the case, for to her, Ronald Duncan clearly demonstrates everything wrong with the juvenile justice system. It has nothing to do with facts or evidence or law or coerced confessions. The issue is birthdays.
The murders occurred nine days before Ronald turned sixteen.
“Nine days,” Peggy mutters to herself at least once a week. Each time, she examines the calendar again, hoping, somehow, she has miscalculated. She sent away for a true copy of Ronald’s birth certificate, hoping for some discrepancy. It is sitting on her desk back at the office. But the nine days stand. And that inconsequential number of days means Ronald Duncan cannot be tried or imprisoned as an adult.
No matter what Peggy does in court, no matter how compelling the evidence, Ronald Duncan’s punishment will never fit his crime. Through luck or design or simple accident of birth, he would remain swathed in the protections of Juvenile Court, which in California meant he would have to go free by age twenty-five. Period. There could be no appeal, no exception: That was the law in California. Are you sixteen or over at the instant the trigger is pulled? Then go to adult court, face life in prison without parole. Fifteen years, 364 days, 23 hours, and 59 minutes when the crime goes down? You’re a kid, stay in Juvenile Court. Count the days till you’re free.
The arbitrariness of it, the illogic, drove Peggy to distraction, as if there was any cognitive difference between a sixteen-year-old and a kid who was fifteen years, 356 days old. The fact that in forty-two states of the Union outside of California, Ronald would have been tried as an adult, and would be eligible for a life sentence (or, in a growing number of states, a death sentence), only enraged Peggy—and the juvenile system’s growing legion of critics—all the more. Indeed, Ronald’s case already had become a rallying cry, cited in Sacramento and in Washington as an example of needed change.1
“We have to live with this,” Peggy complains at a staff meeting with her attorneys at the end of the day, “simply because someone, somewhere, decided decades ago, based on absolutely no scientific evidence, that only a sixteen-year-old can commit the crimes of an adult. And that someone who falls nine days short of the mark ought to remain in a system designed to reform wayward kids, not control and punish armed robbers and murderers. It makes no sense. It makes me sick.”
Of course, fretting over Ronald getting a relative wrist slap for murder presupposed he would be convicted, something Peggy could no longer afford to count upon. She had at first considered the case a slam dunk: she had one witness who swore a blood-drenched, shotgun-toting Ronald flagged down his van on the night of the murder; there was a friend from school who swore Ronald admitted killing his employers the day after the murders; and then there was the centerpiece of her case, Ronald’s taped confession to the police.
But here was the problem: The same Juvenile Court that could not impose adult penalties on Ronald gave him all the same legal tools an adult enjoys—and imposed on Peggy all the same legal burdens. The case would still have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Ronald’s lawyers were even now brutally attacking the credibility of the school chum and the van driver, who they claimed was no unwitting accomplice, but the actual killer. Worse still for Peggy’s case, thanks to the bumbling police reference to capital punishment, which juveniles cannot receive in California, the defense had a very good shot at preventing her from using Ronald’s confession in court. It could be “suppressed,” to use the legal term—along with Peggy’s entire case.
“We spend millions of dollars to prosecute juveniles with taped confessions,” she rants at her staff meeting, trying to instill some fury in her small cadre of burned-out prosecutors left glassy-eyed at the end of each day by the sheer number of kids they prosecute. “We’re wasting all this money on trials and proceedings and making sure everyone’s rights are observed, even when we know, absolutely, that the kid did it. In fact, we spend more when we know they did it. It makes no sense. We’ve already decided to treat him as a juvenile, God help us. He’s already won. Yet we still spend all this time and money proving the case, defending the case, litigating the case. And then there’s nothing left over for the kids who really need help, who come in here on a car theft or a burglary and who get sent on their way with nothing more than a pat on the back, go on home to your gangs and screwed-up families. And then we’re all so surprised when they come back on another charge. Or when they turn into Ronald Duncan. The system is stupid. Completely stupid.”
Her prosecutors sitting around the file-strewn conference table stare back at their
normally reserved boss with eyes wide, but no one says anything. They know she is nearing her breaking point, ready to quit. Most of them have already concluded that the Juvenile Court system is hopeless anyway, and they, too, are simply counting the days until their one-year tours of duty—their juvenile sentences—end, so they can move up the ladder at the DA’s office.
After their year is up in this least desirable of all prosecutorial assignments, they know they will have served more time in the juvenile system than most kids do.
· · ·
“God, I hate this job,” Peggy mutters to herself after the meeting, an angry mantra spoken as she stands in her file-choked office, her aspirin bottle empty, her cup of tea long gone cold, head spinning with all that she must do. She rubs her pale face with hands so cold she brings gloves to work with her, though the temperatures have been in the seventies this week. She is tired of the green attorneys who work for her, tired of the defense lawyers who delay and confuse, tired of the cops who don’t return her phone calls. Most of all, she hates the chaotic piles of files scattered throughout her office, because no matter how fast she deals with them, no matter how many young predators she puts away, more take their place. She thinks often of quitting. She even wrote the Peace Corps a few years earlier, figuring she could chuck the whole thing for a while in some distant outpost—only to find out she had no qualifications for such volunteer service. All she knows how to do is be a lawyer, the one thing the Peace Corps doesn’t need.
Peggy used to have a simpler, cleaner mission in the DA’s office, one she vastly preferred: She prosecuted sex crimes. Sexual assaults, molestations, rapes. Half the job was putting abusive, terrible people away, all of them adults, something she could do zealously, with a kind of angry joy she never quite mustered prosecuting juveniles. The other half of the job was looking out for the shattered victims of these crimes, shepherding them through the ordeal of testifying in court. In many of her cases, the victims—her star witnesses—were children. Peggy found she became as much a social worker as a prosecutor in this job.