by Hope Solo
Things didn’t go exactly as planned. The psychologist told April, who just blurted out the bombshell: “Hope, your father has been accused of murder.”
I gasped. Murder? I knew my father had a criminal past, and that trouble seemed to find him. I knew he presented himself as a tough guy. And I knew he had made strange threats in the past: the bomb scares, the vendetta against Terry. But I was certain the affectionate, caring man I had gotten to know was incapable of committing cold-blooded murder. I believed that with all my heart.
I was frantic. I called my mom and Marcus, tried to make sense of the whole thing. Was my father in custody? Had anyone seen him? Nobody knew where he was.
Back in my room, I huddled in front of a computer in my hotel in China, and read the lead of the story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
He admits to a troubled past—to a life of street hustling and petty crime. And he acknowledges that he set up bogus meetings with female real estate agents as part of a shameful con game to meet women.
But he insists he’s not a killer.
Nonetheless, authorities investigating the slaying of Eastside Realtor Mike Emert are now focusing on Jeffrey John Solo—the mysterious man with a limp whom they consider a “person of interest” in the case.
Jeffrey John Solo. The man I knew as Gerry. His picture was on the paper’s front page. The story said my father had come to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer building to tell his side of the story. Days earlier he had been taken into custody, had been given a polygraph test, had hair and blood samples taken, and then had been released. But he remained a “person of interest.”
He matched the description of the suspect in a few key ways: he walked with a limp, carried a cane, had a thick New York accent, and admitted to hustling female real estate agents. He told the reporter that he would meet the agents in houses, get to talking, and then ask them out on dates. He said it was a con to get their money and confessed, “Like I said, I used women and did some bad things.”
My father’s criminal history was laid out for everyone to see: two years in Walla Walla State Penitentiary, several convictions in the Richland area—including for forgery and the bomb threats. My father told the newspaper things I’d never known: that he had been charged in a robbery conspiracy when he lived in Boston years earlier and had also been convicted of being in possession of stolen property in King County, Washington.
A quote from an unnamed source made my father sound like he was capable of anything, including murder. The reporter had called our home in Richland, and whoever answered said my dad was “the best con man I ever met.” The person added, “He’s lied to his kids for 12 years. It’s a shame, because they deserve better than that.”
Was that Glenn, answering the phone and spewing venom about my father? Was it someone else in my family? I was furious. But it was the final lines of the story that broke my heart. My father said he had only come forward to protect the reputation of his daughter.
“I don’t care about myself or what happens to me. I should have died a long time ago,” he said. “But my daughter, I don’t want her to get hurt. That’s why I’m telling my story. I didn’t do this.”
Alone in China, I stared at the computer screen and wept.
II.
We still had four days left on our trip, and I was getting another chance in goal. Because of Bri’s ongoing weight and fitness issues and Siri’s struggles in the Olympic gold medal game, I felt there was an opportunity for me to make an impression and start working toward the next World Cup, two years away. But it was hard to focus on soccer with all the drama swirling around me. Where was my father? Was he safe?
Yet I played well. As a young player, I had learned to shut out the many crises in my personal life whenever I stepped on the soccer field. That ability served me well in China. I got my chance against the Chinese national team in Hangzhou, where thirty thousand fans showed up to see us inaugurate a brand-new stadium that was built for the next World Cup, which China was scheduled to host. The crowd roared, and it seemed like they were right on top of us. They were still angry about the U.S. victory over China in the previous World Cup, and even though I wasn’t Bri, they taunted me as if I had been the one who had saved the overtime penalty kick in 1999.
It was freezing when we walked onto the pitch. We took an early lead, but China tied us, 1–1, on a free kick that bent over our line and into the upper left corner of the goal. Overall, I had an excellent game. In the second half, I made a few diving saves. The ball got through our back line several times, but I didn’t give up another goal. The game ended in a draw.
When we left China the next day, I didn’t know what would greet me at the airport when we landed. Would I be ambushed by reporters and photographers? The sensational story continued to make headlines—gruesome murders in well-to-do neighborhoods were not an everyday occurrence in Seattle. All the reports noted that Jeffrey John Solo had a nineteen-year-old daughter in Seattle. Though none identified me by name, it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure that the nineteen-year-old daughter from Richland with the same memorable last name, sometimes described as a “star athlete,” was UW’s goalkeeper.
Fortunately, Lesle had been doing damage control the entire time I’d been gone. She enlisted our sports information director to control the story on the UW end. She called our team together and warned that if anyone spoke to the media, they would be suspended. Lesle and Amy protected me. Their support during this family nightmare made me even more loyal to them and prouder that I had chosen UW.
Cheryl picked me up at the airport, and my fears of being ambushed went unrealized. There were no cameras or reporters. But my main concern wasn’t bad publicity. It was my father.
“Let’s go find your dad,” Cheryl said.
The stories I had read said he’d been staying at a friend’s apartment, but the friend had become upset by police harassment and had kicked him out. I went to his old spot in the woods off the freeway, but he wasn’t there. I walked through parks in the rain, looking for him.
I finally went back to my apartment with Cheryl and cried for hours as she tried to console me.
After days of frantic worry, my father called. We decided to meet at REI, the large outdoor equipment store that was one of the few landmarks in downtown Seattle I was familiar with, because you could see it from the freeway.
When I saw him waiting for me outside the store, I ran into his arms. It was such a relief to see him, to see that he was all right. “Baby Hope, you know I didn’t do this,” he said.
“Of course I know that,” I said.
He was cold and hungry. He told me the police had questioned him for hours, browbeating him in an attempt to get a confession. But he had stood his ground, telling them over and over, “Fuck off. I didn’t do it.” He said the harsh treatment might have broken him if he had been younger, that he could now understand how people confess to crimes they didn’t commit. But as he liked to remind me, he was “a tough son of a bitch.”
The police had distributed posters of him all around Kirkland, where the murdered man’s stolen Escalade had been recovered. My father still sometimes hung out in downtown Kirkland after Terry had kicked him out of her house. But now he was blackballed, refused admittance into Starbucks or any of the fast-food restaurants where he often took shelter. Worst of all, the police had taken everything from him, he said, including his warm coat. And it was January. Fortunately, a detective who had taken a liking to him—and believed he was innocent—brought him a new coat. I took him to get some food. As he walked beside me, hobbling on two canes, I was painfully aware of his limp. It had gotten much worse. There was no way my dad could have dragged a man’s body up a flight of stairs and lifted it into a bathtub.
I had never seen my father so upset. He felt he was being framed. He didn’t understand why the police were hounding him. He had an alibi—he had been at a doctor’s appointment at the V
A Hospital the day the murder was committed. He had taken a lie detector test and was sure he had passed. But the police were still harassing him.
As my father told me of his ordeal, he broke down in tears. “You know, Baby Hope, I did a lot of bad things in my life,” he said. “Maybe this is payback for all of that.”
He had gone to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer out of fear that I would be linked to the news story and that my reputation would be harmed. He agreed to an exclusive interview in exchange for withholding my name.
“I just want to make sure you’re protected,” he told me.
My father had damaged a lot of people in his life, and hadn’t cared about hurting the people who loved him. But now at sixty-two—at least that’s how old the newspaper reports said he was—he seemed determined to protect at least one relationship. Ours.
III.
That spring April named me to the national team squad that traveled to Europe and then on to the Algarve Cup in Portugal. She was taking a very young team: all the national team veterans were getting ready for the inaugural season of the WUSA, the professional league they had founded. So our traveling roster was full of college players, including a few I had never heard of. Our average age was nineteen. Despite the hodgepodge of talent, it was fun to be with players of my own generation—and not excluded by the veterans. But it felt a little too comfortable.
It was the worst U.S. performance ever in the prestigious Portuguese tournament. We lost three games, including the two I started, to teams that had brought their full senior rosters. In a 3–0 loss to Canada, their veteran star, Charmaine Hooper, chipped a ball over me in the first half. And a new Canadian player named Christine Sinclair scored off a corner kick: it was the first battle of many between us. Sweden beat us, 2–0, in my second start.
While I was traveling, I heard that my father had been cleared in the Emert murder case. Sort of. A story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer made it clear the police still had doubts about him. A King’s County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson, John Urquhart, was quoted as saying: “We don’t believe that he was part and parcel to the homicide. We’re still trying to figure out what, if any, connections to the crime Mr. Solo may have.”
Urquhart also said that authorities had not ruled out the possibility that Emert’s killer may have set Solo up to look like the killer or that he was somehow involved in another way.
My father had taken and passed two polygraph tests, and his alibi was solid: a physician at the VA Hospital confirmed that he had seen my father that day.
“He has a very strong alibi for the day before the murder, which we fully believe,” Urquhart said.
But Solo says he and his family suffered greatly as a result of the investigation.
My dad told the paper that the investigators were threatening when they talked to my mom and Marcus, and had even used me as leverage to try to get him to confess to the slaying. Again, my father said he went public only to protect me.
When I returned to Seattle, I could tell my father was frustrated. He didn’t feel his name was fully cleared. He was still being harassed by police, banned by shopkeepers. The taint of the murder accusation lingered, and would for years. Marcus and I stood by him. Marcus had been traumatized by the murder investigation. The FBI had gone to Richland and talked to my mother, who had been storing my dad’s old duffel bag from Terry’s house in the secondhand store she now ran. Of course my mother had looked through it and seen the disgusting pictures of prostitutes. Marcus had taken the bag out of the store and destroyed the photos, but my mom told the FBI about the albums, so the FBI grilled Marcus. It was clear they thought that my father could be a suspect in the infamous Green River killings. Several prostitutes had been murdered over the years and at the time the killings were still unsolved. Just the mention of the Green River murders terrorized the Northwest at the time—and now someone was trying to link my father to that horror.
I knew that others in my family doubted whether my father was truly innocent. Their long-simmering animosity toward him was fueled by the lingering questions left by the police. My sister’s husband told a detective about a time that my father had stolen some knives from him. Any past slight or misdeed was hauled out and used against him.
For a long time, I would hear other family members speculate about my father’s role in the murder. Those doubts infuriated me. I knew he was innocent.
Meanwhile, the Emert murder remained unsolved. There wasn’t any real closure for his widow and daughter. Or for my father.
IV.
The VA Hospital did more than just provide an alibi for my father. It threw him a lifeline.
He liked hanging out at the VA Hospital, shooting the breeze with other veterans. Through an outpatient program, homeless vets could get secondhand clothes, a cup of coffee, a sandwich. The first floor of the hospital was a gathering place that offered a little more dignity than a homeless shelter. A Vietnam veteran named Mark Sakura started the program on a volunteer basis. He knew my dad as Johnny and became quite friendly with him. My dad liked to talk, and Mark liked to listen. Mark really wanted his program to be useful to the homeless population. He picked my father’s brain for information. What did the vets really need? Coats? Backpacks? Sleeping bags? Personal care items like toothpaste?
Shortly after Dad and Mark became friends, my father was implicated in Emert’s murder. My dad was afraid it would ruin their friendship, but Mark believed in him, sensed a good heart beneath the rough exterior. “If you tell me you didn’t do it, then nothing else matters,” Mark told him.
Mark spent a lot of time with my dad, who liked to joke that they were like the mismatched cartoon characters Mutt and Jeff. My father was a loud, large, heavyset Italian American. Mark was a soft-spoken, small Japanese American. He would take my father to Burger King and get the two-for-one deals. When my father insisted he wasn’t hungry, Mark would shrug and say, “You might as well eat it. I can’t eat two.” Just like me, he learned to help my dad in subtle ways, without hurting his pride.
Mark was an incredible resource. He understood how the system worked and how to help homeless people get on their feet. He helped my father sign up for Social Security benefits and disability. He helped him get full veteran benefits—tracking down his service record and clarifying at least one thing about my father’s mysterious past: that he had, indeed, served in the navy. My father badly needed surgery for his knees, and Mark assisted in arranging the operation at the VA Hospital. While my father was recovering, Mark did something even more profound. He helped secure low-income housing at Hilltop House, an affordable complex for the elderly in downtown Seattle. In a quirk of bureaucracy, my father couldn’t qualify for the housing if he was homeless. He needed to prove he had been living somewhere besides the street. So Mark filled out the paperwork and said that my dad had lived with him.
“A little white lie ain’t hurting nobody,” Mark told me.
Mark’s mother-in-law had recently moved into an assisted-living facility, so he had all her furniture in storage. He gave it to my father to furnish his new studio apartment. He took him shopping for groceries, filling the refrigerator and cupboards in the small kitchen. He helped my father move in. My father had a roof. He had food.
After years on the street, he had a place to call home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
An Arm Like Frankenstein
After a slow start, I was getting the hang of college life. I dated a lot of guys, and I enjoyed the party scene around campus, so when the All-American Club—sports bar by day, trendy nightclub after dark—opened near UW, I wanted to get in. Still several months away from my twenty-first birthday, I stood in front of an intimidating bouncer and presented the Washington driver’s license I’d borrowed from a friend who looked vaguely like me.
The bouncer shined his flashlight in my face and then back down on the license. He shook his head. “Nope,” he said.
>
That couldn’t be the final verdict. They had already let Cheryl in, and she looked ten years old in her fake ID. I pleaded with the bouncer, who called over the club manager, a handsome dark-haired guy with a friendly smile. He looked at my ID and rolled his eyes. “I’m going to give you one chance,” he said. “Tell me the truth: Is this you?”
For some reason I couldn’t lie to him. “No,” I said. “But can I have my ID back? It usually works.” The manager started to turn away, but our friend Mark—a UW soccer player who possessed a legitimate ID—stepped in. “Dude,” he said, pointing to me. “Don’t you know who this is?”
“I have no idea who she is,” the manager said. “And I don’t really care.”
“Come on, let her in,” Mark said. “I won’t let her drink. Trust me, she’s cool.”
The manager sighed. “Just this once,” he warned and looked me in the eyes. “Remember—no drinking. I’m watching you. And,” he added, pulling the ID back from me, “I’m keeping this.”
When I thanked him, he warned me not to make a habit of it, but the next weekend, I was back in line behind the ropes, catching his eye. He smiled, rolled his eyes, and let me in again.
And that’s how I met Adrian. A grown-up by my standards and seemingly worldly, he was twenty-five years old and managing nightclubs; he had played soccer in community college, and didn’t care one way or the other about my soccer career. He made it clear that he’d rather watch water boil than women’s soccer. I took that as a challenge.
Adrian liked to do the same stuff I did: shoot hoops or go snowboarding or just hang out. He was easy to be with, and pretty soon I was spending most of my free time with him. I still dated other guys, and he dated plenty of women, but when we were together, it felt special. And I needed a friend. There was a widening gap in my life as Cheryl and I grew apart. Malia had graduated, and every time I came back from a stint with the national team, I felt pushed farther out of Cheryl’s circle. I was living a dual existence with my college and national teams, pulled between two sets of women who often seemed less like friends than work colleagues. I wasn’t good at doing the things that kept friendships smooth—returning phone calls quickly or staying in touch while I traveled. But Adrian wasn’t bothered and we could pick back up where we had left off, without a lot of drama.