“Do you understand?” asked the judge.
“I think so,” said Amanda. Her voice on speakerphone—breathless, halting—took the room by surprise. We had not realized she was already on the line. This created a feeling of being exposed, as if we’d been Peeping Toms, only to discover someone was watching us.
The judge asked if Amanda needed additional time to understand.
“I think that’s fine,” she said with a hesitation that made it sound as if she had no idea what she was agreeing to.
The judge asked, “Do you need additional time to confer with your attorney?”
There was silence. Then, “I think so. Yes.”
We were instructed to leave the courtroom. People stood more soberly now. Kathy Stott was collapsed in Kim Smith’s arms and sobbing so loudly the sounds rang off the ceiling. No one else in the Smith family acknowledged them. The Stott and Smith families were estranged. The separation had started long before Eldon’s murder. Watching Kim hold up Amanda’s mother to keep her from sinking to the floor might have left people confused, or moved. Mostly, it was heartbreaking.
The rest of the Smith family formed a huddle outside the closed courtroom doors. They spoke a prayer aloud. Schantz stood with them but was looking at me. I approached and handed her my card. She refused it. I apologized for any misunderstanding and reminded her we had previously emailed, to which she said only, “Yes.”
“What was that about?” Hadley asked.
We filed back into court. The judge asked Amanda if “termination” had been sufficiently explained. She said it had.
“Has anyone threatened you or forced you to this resolution of the case?” the judge asked.
“No,” Amanda said.
“Are you currently incarcerated?”
“Yes.”
“Are you taking medication that would impair your ability to make a decision?”
“No.”
“Do you understand what’s happening here today?”
Again there was a pause. Then, “I think so.”
If Amanda had more than these three words to say about having her parental rights to Trinity taken away, we would not hear them. A woman from DHS was sworn in. She said she was assigned to Trinity Smith and that “the mother is unable to care for the child.” Her testimony took less than a minute. The judge said that Jason agreed to participate with DHS. The order of the court was that Trinity would be a ward of the court, placed with Jason for now. The child was to have no contact with Amanda, nor was she allowed contact with Amanda’s family without DHS approval. This second part, whether by design or not, would have an irrevocable effect on many lives. Amanda’s state-appointed attorney agreed to the decision, and court was adjourned.
We exited the courtroom. The Smith family came together again in prayer. I stood with Hadley and his associates. All were courteous and, from what Hadley had told me, excellent at their jobs and making the right connections. I had been critical of the machine in which they worked, did not see how it could capture the vagaries of human behavior. Now I envied them their working within a framework that permitted them to productively move forward, whereas I was fumbling, unintentionally making enemies.
I walked down to the lobby, hoping to intersect with the Smith family on their way out. Kim and Jay Smith came down first. He shook my hand, and she gave me a hug. Next came Jason with his mother and Laura Schantz. There was a light victorious ring to their voices. Schantz left. Jason lingered. He gave me a small wave from the waist and headed for the door. His mother followed, then stopped.
“I’ll be right out,” she told Jason, and came back to me.
“I must respectfully ask that you give me back that paper,” she said, meaning the tract Eldon’s teacher had written. I handed it back. I said I was not sure what I had done to get everyone so angry.
“I’m not either,” she said. “But you have everybody up in arms.”
Nathan, Chelsea, and Gavin had left the courthouse immediately after the papers were signed. Chelsea did not feel the satisfaction of things having gone their way. The best predictor of the future is the past, and their history with Jason, with Amanda, had ranged from frustrating to disastrous. What she had wanted seemed so simple: to ensure that two innocent kids be able to talk on the phone, to see each other every few months. But even with the signed legal documents in hand, Chelsea was apprehensive. She sensed Gavin would never be allowed to see Trinity and that the letters he had been writing to his sister had not reached her. For Trinity to think her big brother had abandoned her added a new misery to what was already the tragedy of these children’s lives. As Nathan drove them back to Portland, where their two-year-old daughter waited, Chelsea had the feeling they had just been outfoxed.
15
May 24, 2009, Gorge Amphitheater, George, Washington
It was eight on Sunday morning, and April Anson was already drinking mimosas. She and her friends were at the second day of the Sasquatch Music Festival, getting ready to watch Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction, when her boyfriend brought over her cell phone and said, you better call Tiffany; she’s texted like a million times. April was in the middle of a field when she reached Tiffany Gray, a long-time best friend, who told her what Amanda, their other best friend from college, had done to her kids; it was all over the news.
April made her way to her car and cried for two hours. She knew those kids; she’d halfway raised Gavin when she and Tiffany and Amanda were in school together. April kept pictures of the children on her laptop: Trinity squealing at the ocean’s edge in Oahu; Eldon sifting sand on the beach; Amanda, with eye shadow the color of pink soda above thick lines of black eyeliner, pressed cheek to cheek with baby Trinity.
That was standard, the MAC eyeliner. Amanda had been wearing it since the girls met at George Fox University. A superconservative Quaker college less than an hour from Portland in the town of Newberg, George Fox was the kind of small school students went to if they were raised Christian and their parents, or the students themselves, felt it a more wholesome environment than the nearby state schools with their tens of thousands of students; the University of Oregon especially had a reputation for raucousness and drug use. George Fox felt safe. It also felt claustrophobic. April and Tiffany and Amanda liked getting out of Newberg, liked going up to Portland, to the U of O campus in Eugene. They were good students but also partiers; they smoked a lot of weed and dated a lot of guys. The dating part had been ridiculously easy—April with titian hair to her waist and the build of a tomboy from snowboarding, and Tiffany with a way of flirting that was like a game of cards; she always had the better play, always liked the spotlight on her. Together with Amanda, with her up-tilt eyes and a breathless singsong voice that sounded like Marilyn Monroe doing Marilyn Monroe, they made the boys stand up, made them say, “My god, you’re killing me.” The girls pushed the campus’s modest dress code, Amanda in miniskirts and platform shoes, April and Tiffany all ’90s grunge, artfully ripped jeans and ratty, baggy sweaters. They joked that the day they graduated, they’d get a six-pack of beer and a pack of cigarettes, sit on the clock-tower lawn, and flip everybody off.
Amanda got pregnant with Gavin the first time she had sex—at least that’s what she told April. April did not know much about Nathan. She had met him a few times, and he seemed like a stand-up guy, serious, quiet, especially compared to Amanda, who was like a bubble machine, superbubbly and fun. And spacey! That voice made April think, the first time they met, that Amanda might be drunk. Tiffany said otherwise, that Amanda was just very la-di-la; she never let anything get under her skin. Amanda had been a good student in high school, but whether she cared much about college was a question: Tiffany rarely saw her study, and she never spoke about what she would do with her degree in communications. When April and Tiffany stressed about their grades, Amanda would say, “Don’t worry, it’s all going to work out.”
And it did, mostly. April thought Amanda handled being a single mom well. She got on food s
tamps to keep Gavin fed and healthy. Though April and Tiffany could have relied on their parents in a similar situation, Amanda did not have a lot of financial resources. But the girls loved helping with Gavin; he was a good baby, a beautiful baby. They would push him around Pioneer Courthouse Square in his stroller, and people would stop them to remark on how gorgeous he was, how much he looked like his mother. The girls scheduled their classes so there was always someone to watch him, and they stayed with him at night when Amanda wanted to go out. Having ready babysitters gave Amanda the freedom she wanted, freedom she did not have with her own strictly religious parents. April had met them a few times and thought their faith veered toward an “Eve is responsible” sort of thing.
Amanda could take advantage of the arrangement. While April and Tiffany liked to decompress by smoking weed and listening to a little Jimi Hendrix, Amanda would make the forty-five-minute drive to Portland and get into techno clubs using a fake ID. Sometimes she didn’t come home, including once when Gavin had an ear infection. April ripped into Amanda the next day, told her it sucked that she had stayed out while April and Tiffany were up all night with a screaming baby. Amanda started in on some cockamamy explanation of how she’d gotten back earlier but did not want to wake them up and so had slept in April’s dorm room. What?
April tried to put this down to Amanda’s being spacey. But she also knew that Amanda liked to see what she could get away with. Amanda would go to the mall, shove things she wanted in Gavin’s stroller, and walk out. She had been caught or warned at least once at Nordstrom’s, and security had told her not to come back. This did not seem like a very big deal—teenagers shoplift—but Amanda had not been a teenager anymore. The girls were juniors in college, and actions were starting to have consequences. Tiffany and April both got in trouble for missing chapel too many times; Tiffany moved to another school. The girls did not wind up sitting on the lawn at graduation. Amanda graduated with barely enough credits for her degree. If she had weathered being a single mother and losing the company and support of her best friends, these two events her senior year seemed, in hindsight, to change an essential piece of Amanda’s psyche.
In the months after Eldon was murdered, April wondered about that change, whether a part of Amanda had been broken or activated. Had Amanda shown signs April had missed, some “evil mother waiting in the wings” thing? April had never seen Amanda treat Gavin or any of her children harshly. To April, Amanda was the twenty-year-old girl she met in 1998: voluptuous, lighthearted, a girl who trusted people. April saw herself, Tiffany, and Amanda taking turns carrying Gavin around the Oregon Country Fair, wearing their Steve Madden platforms and Amanda, a crocheted bikini top.
In 1997, Jason Smith was twenty-two. He had finished a stint in rehab, his third since age sixteen, and was waiting to hear whether he would be admitted to Nugen’s Ranch, an addiction treatment program in Wasilla, Alaska. Jason’s criminal history from 1994 to 1996 included arrests for drug possession, probation violations, and theft in the first and second degrees. He was a Class C felon, according to the legal definition. The theft had taken place in 1994, when Jason was nineteen. He had robbed the home of his mother and stepfather, Christine and Richard Duncan, while they were on vacation. Among the items he stole were his mother’s jewelry, some of which he pawned to buy pot. His mother had him arrested.
“Jason chose to steal from our home to support his drug habit,” she wrote in a letter to the judge. “I was literally sick to my stomach to think he had misused my trust.” If she knew which drugs constituted this habit, she did not elaborate, saying only, via Jason’s attorney, that her son’s latest relapse was due to his decision to “smoke marijuana occasionally.” Christine Duncan nevertheless asked the judge that Jason not be sentenced to jail time. He had not finished high school and was working as an assistant manager at the Italia Roma restaurant but had “a college education waiting for him” and was “a bright person with a great future.”
Jason was given probation, with the conditions that he was to remain employed, break no laws, and report for substance abuse treatment. He failed to meet these conditions, and in August 1994 began a years-long loop of arrests for parole and other violations.
Midway through her junior year, Amanda was pregnant again. This time she was engaged to the father, Shane Cook. The girls had bought pot from him a couple of times. He was a nice guy a few years older than they were. April did not really know him but thought he might have struggled with depression. Midway through Amanda’s pregnancy, he drove into the woods and swallowed a bottle of horse tranquilizers. Or that’s what April heard. Tiffany said it was carbon monoxide poisoning, that Shane had “hooked it up” by running a piece of tubing from the tailpipe and through the cracked window of his car, where, with the engine running, he was overcome and eventually killed by the poison gas.
April saw Amanda soon after Shane’s body was found. She thought Amanda would be destroyed. Amanda was not. Her attitude seemed to be “This is happening, and I am going to handle the situation.”
Immediately after finding out Shane was dead, Amanda handled the situation by paging her mother. Kathy Stott pulled off the road and into a gas station to call Amanda back. Amanda told her Shane had committed suicide and that he died in his car writing a letter to her saying she was a wonderful person and she was not the reason he was taking his life. Jackie Dreiling was in the car with Kathy Stott at the time of the call and would remember Amanda as being devastated. This though shortly before Shane’s death, Amanda had told Jackie that while she really cared for Shane and knew he loved her, he didn’t have any money. Jackie took this to mean Amanda had figured out that with her looks, she could get a guy with money. Jackie did not like this development in her granddaughter, who had been smart and driven in high school, was active at church, and volunteered at a crisis pregnancy hotline. But she’d also always wanted things the family could not afford. At least once Jackie had driven Amanda to Pioneer Courthouse Square to go to the city’s upscale department stores. Amanda was drawn to the ready gleam of the cosmetic counters, where a teenage girl needed only to show her wrist for a saleswoman to spritz it with Yves St. Laurent’s Opium or Calvin Klein’s Eternity, where shell-pink eye shadow and black eyeliner could both accentuate and disguise.
Amanda gave birth on November 2, 1999. She gave the newborn up for adoption. She asked April and Tiffany not to visit her in the hospital. The girls did not. They had been seeing less of Amanda since she started dating Jason Smith. The timing of the new romance seemed more than propitious; Jason appeared in the wake of Shane’s suicide, or maybe just before, like her knight in shining armor. April thought his approach, a sort of “I’ll be there, I’ll be your support, you’re in this awful position,” was fantastic and the godsend Amanda needed, but she wondered where the hell this guy had come from.
She also wondered where Jason’s money was coming from and found it odd that he drove an Audi, dressed like a child of Tommy Bahama, and had all these impressive accoutrements but did not seem to have a job.
Or maybe he did have a job. Jason sold weed; at least, he sold it to them. He and Amanda would drive down to Eugene and bring back a ton of it. This was not the sort of weed the girls were used to seeing, a dime bag here and there; this was quantity. Maybe that was how Jason was making the money to take Amanda shopping. Right after the baby was born, she started dressing up in the Nordstrom’s clothes Jason bought her. She told April and Tiffany how Jason had called Carl Greve Jewelers in Portland and asked them to stay open late, that he and Amanda would be coming in. She would show off a new diamond bracelet, a new diamond pendant. Space cadet that Amanda was, she would sometimes lose or misplace these pieces; she never seemed to know how, but it didn’t matter because another would take its place. April could see it was fun for Amanda to finally be that girl, the one whose boyfriend bought her expensive things, but April had started to dislike Jason. She did not see him treat Amanda with any sweetness. He was good at appearing mature a
nd responsible, but he never seemed like a nice guy.
Then there was the dinner at Couvron. The girls were just out of school, trying to make ends meet, but it was someone’s birthday and Jason said they should all go out to eat. He picked the most expensive place in Portland; every plate was like seventy-five dollars. Tiffany, her boyfriend, April, and her then-fiancé kept looking at each other at the table; there was no way to order frugally, and April was terrified the bill was going to be something like $1,800. The men reached for their wallets, but Jason would not let them pay. April wondered if Jason had planned it this way, if he wanted to make everyone uncomfortable. If so, he succeeded. The dinner no longer felt like a celebration but a setup. Tiffany’s boyfriend later told her he thought Jason was an ass and that he flaunted Amanda in a way that said, this is my prize; this is what my money bought me. April thought Jason and Amanda were acting like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, like the children of celebrities allowed to run wild.
Jason turned twenty-four the year he met Amanda and was given access to a fund set up by his grandparents on his mother’s side. Legal and other documents do not list the value of the assets Jason originally came into in 1999 or 2000—the total value of the inheritance was likely around $240,000—only what was still available in October 2000, when Jason was twenty-five. At that time, Christine Duncan went to court to have her husband appointed conservator of Jason’s remaining accounts, including 800 shares of Cisco (valued at $39,850), 800 shares of Intel ($29,700), 1,000 shares of Qualcomm ($64,375), 444 shares of Globalstar ($2,886), and $7,626 in money market funds, for a total valuation of $144,437. Jason’s other assets included an account at US Bank ($29.15), a 1994 Audi sedan ($8,000), a Merlin bike frame ($6,000), a Nikon camera ($1,050), and miscellaneous personal property, including a tent, an Abercrombie & Fitch jacket, 52 CDs, and a pair of Dr. Martens shoes (estimated total value, $2,081). The recorded total assets were $167,597.15.
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