“That young reporter, Josh, wrote it, the one who came to the hearings,” Dot interjected.
“That’s right,” Bob said. “Springer retired not long after that. Sandra Blaine was running for reelection this year, and she lost to some up-and-coming DA from her office. I don’t think Howard’s case made all the difference—Wheaton isn’t the kind of place to turn on a DA for occasionally convicting someone who’s innocent. But some of the shine was taken off her record, and people saw her a bit differently.”
He glanced again at the urn. “It’s funny. Kevin and I said we’d go out tomorrow and scatter Howard’s ashes somewhere. But we’re at a loss where. Howard was here, but not here, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded.
“Yeah. There isn’t any place we can think of that meant anything to him, or that you could say was someplace he’d have belonged.”
“What about Sandra Blaine’s lawn?” I joked.
Bob laughed. “I like that.”
“I was just kidding,” I said, in sudden panic.
“No, seriously, I think that’s what we should do. I’ll talk to Kevin, and we’ll go there really late tonight. Come on, Mom, let’s go find Kevin and get you and Ms. Moodie a slice of that tri-tip.”
When I woke the next morning at our favorite hotel in Wheaton, there was a text on my phone from Kevin. It was ten seconds of video of a shadowy, bent figure moving backward while pouring something from a jar. “Did it!” he wrote. “Got out just ahead of the cops.”
I don’t know what Howard would have thought about it.
48
There is sort of an epilogue to Howard’s story. A few months after we notified the state Supreme Court of Howard’s death and filed our motion, the court issued an order. It wasn’t long, but it said:
The Court has considered the record in this case and the findings of the referee on the order to show cause issued on January 11, 2016. Because of the death of the petitioner, there is little to be gained by issuing an opinion in this case. However, because the evidence in the record suggests that the petitioner may have been wrongly convicted, the court is reluctant to declare it moot. Therefore, the petition for writ of habeas corpus is granted, and the judgment in Taft County Superior Court case No. 22976 is vacated. This court having received and filed a certified copy of a certificate evidencing the death of petitioner Howard Henley during the pendency of these proceedings, the superior court is directed to enter an order to the effect that all proceedings in the cause have permanently abated.
What the order meant was that the court had told the superior court to set aside Howard’s conviction and all the proceedings against him. The law requires this when someone dies while he is appealing his conviction; in essence, it is a legal act of compassion that places the deceased defendant, in the eyes of the law, back where he was before he was convicted. It doesn’t necessarily apply to someone like Howard, whose appeal had finished. Had the court simply dismissed Howard’s habeas petition as moot because of his death, he would have died a convicted felon.
By its ruling, the court did at last what the legal system had failed to do while Howard was alive: it gave him back his innocence.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Madman Walking was inspired by a real case; the defendant, like Howard Henley, died on death row some years ago. The problem illustrated in this book, of mentally ill defendants in the criminal justice system, persists into the present; and too many men and women with serious mental illnesses are still unfairly tried and imprisoned.
My thanks to Scott Kauffman and Bicka Barlow, the dedicated and resourceful attorneys for the man in the actual case, for their help in providing me transcripts and other case materials, and to Dr. Christie Davis and Jennifer Friedman for instructing me on the science of forensic DNA typing of aged samples.
My editors, Miranda Jewess and Sam Matthews, not only made the book better than the manuscript I gave them, but were unfailingly encouraging and patient with my anxieties.
Finally, I thank my life partner, Michael Kurland, a wonderful writer himself, for coaxing me into pursuing my dream of writing fiction, mentoring me, reading my efforts, and giving me valuable feedback. It was his faith in me, through all my doubts about myself, that brought about my becoming, rather late in life, a published author.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
L.F. Robertson is a practicing defense attorney who for the last two decades has handled only death penalty appeals. Until recently she worked for the California Appellate Project, which oversees almost all the individual attorneys assigned to capital cases in California. She has written articles for the CACJ (California Attorneys For Criminal Justice) Forum, as well as op-ed pieces and feature articles for the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers. Linda is the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Unsolved Mysteries, and a contributor to the forensic handbooks How to Try a Murder and Irrefutable Evidence, and has had short stories published in the anthologies My Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years and Sherlock Holmes: The American Years. The first Janet Moodie book, Two Lost Boys, was her first novel.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
TWO LOST BOYS
L.F. ROBERTSON
Janet Moodie has spent years as a death row appeals attorney. Overworked and recently widowed, she’s had her fill of hopeless cases, and is determined that this will be her last. Her client is Marion ‘Andy’ Hardy, convicted along with his brother Emory of the rape and murder of two women. But Emory received a life sentence while Andy got the death penalty, labeled the ringleader despite his low IQ and Emory’s dominant personality.
Convinced that Andy’s previous lawyers missed mitigating evidence that would have kept him off death row, Janet investigates Andy’s past. She discovers a sordid and damaged upbringing, a series of errors on the part of his previous counsel, and most worrying of all, the possibility that there is far more to the murders than was first thought. Andy may be guilty, but does he deserve to die?
“This is a must-read”
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COMING SOON FROM TITAN BOOKS
AFTER THE ECLIPSE
FRAN DORRICOTT
Two solar eclipses. Two missing girls. Sixteen years ago a little girl was abducted during the darkness of a solar eclipse while her older sister Cassie was supposed to be watching her. She was never seen again. When a local girl goes missing just before the next big eclipse, Cassie – who has returned to her home town to care for her ailing grandmother – suspects the disappearance is connected to her sister: that whoever took Olive is still out there. But she needs to find a way to prove it, and time is running out.
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