I mentioned my plane-drop solution to an acquaintance, an attorney. He disagreed with the revenge fantasy, not because he thought Helen’s killer might be innocent but because he thought the man could not help doing what he had done. The man had mental health issues, as did, in the attorney’s opinion, anyone who committed murder. He was extending the exemption we make for mothers who murder their children to everyone who murders anyone; he saw the act axiomatically as one done by the mentally ill, and thus, it must be forgiven.
His explanation made me uncomfortable. Summer 2009 was forcing me to consider what we make of the people who kill children. You might think such consideration would galvanize a position. This was not the case. The more I looked, the more each position had some legitimacy. Mikal Gilmore, brother of executed murderer Gary Gilmore, explored this condition in his memoir, Shot in the Heart. “Individual murders could be solved or punished, but murder itself, of course, could never be solved,” he wrote. “That could not be done without solving the human heart, and without solving the history that has rendered the heart so dark and desolate.”
I did not see a paradox in wanting to understand why Amanda had killed yet condemning Helen’s killer to death. I thought people had the right to as many views as the human heart could summon. I also wondered at the idea of meting out justice, whether only the murderers could do this for themselves.
In the film I’ve Loved You So Long, the protagonist has served a fifteen-year sentence for killing her terminally ill young son. Leaving prison, she hears birdsong. The recognition of it brings a flicker of a smile, which she instantly loses. Smiles are no longer allowed. They are for the world before. She lives in the after world, the world in which your child is dead. Later, she expresses how she had wanted to go to prison; she did not want to live in the outside world. It held nothing for her.
Amanda had seemed unmoored in court. Had anyone allowed her to express her grief? Were mothers who killed their children allowed to grieve? Did their culpability render it grief qua grief, and if so, how did they go on?
In July 2001, Newsweek ran a piece entitled “Anna Quindlen on Every Mother’s Struggle.” Quindlen was writing about Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who had drowned her five young children in a bathtub the previous month: “Every mother I’ve asked about the Yates case has the same reaction. She’s appalled; she’s aghast. And then she gets this look. And the look says that at some forbidden level, she understands.”
I did not think this statement was true, and not just because I did not detect in myself, as every mother (how many?) Quindlen asked evidently did, the aforementioned forbidden level on which I could see myself murdering my daughter. Quindlen seemed in the essay to be tossing one tarp over all mothers in order to make a point about agency or lack thereof: motherhood can be a terrible trial, one only other mothers can understand and acknowledge only via forbidden levels. That I thought the statement glib, if not syrupy, was not the (only) problem; the problem was that it made motherhood a syndrome, a handicap, with a hazard that most of us thankfully avoid. But who knew? It could happen to you.
In fact, what Andrea Yates did was exceedingly rare, so rare that she landed in the national consciousness and stayed there. We would struggle to understand how she could commit an act so horrific. We would learn her mind had been struggling for a long time, about her firm diagnosis of postpartum psychosis, of depression that had rendered her catatonic, of her multiple suicide attempts and hospitalizations in the years before she killed her children. We would learn that she was deeply religious and believed her children were not developing correctly according to God’s law.
“My children were not righteous. I let them stumble. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell,” Yates told a prison psychiatrist the day after the murders. Later, she would say she had been planning to kill her children for several months. The latter would seem to imply premeditation, and in 2002, a jury judged Yates responsible for her actions and sentenced her to life in prison.
Dr. Phillip Resnick, sometimes referred to as the father of maternal filicide, disagreed. On a 2013 CNN program, “Crimes of the Century: Andrea Yates,” he spoke of what Yates told him during an interview a month after she killed her children.
“She believed that one son would become a serial killer. One son was going to become a mute homosexual prostitute, and she had these fantastic beliefs that each of her children was going to end up in some evil way and would literally go to hell,” he said. “She did not show remorse. She did not show regret. She believed that she had arranged for her children to go to heaven.”
He went on: “I find her quite sympathetic. And not only do I think that she is not criminally responsible, but the fact that she has to live with what she has done and live childless and so forth, that’s the tragedy in its own right.”
Resnick had advocated to have Yates’s sentence overturned, and in 2006, a second jury decided she was insane at the time of the killings, a decision that sent her from prison to a mental hospital, where, as of this writing, she spends some of her time making greeting cards and aprons and giving the proceeds to a fund started in her dead children’s names.
12
Baker City, Oregon, is three hundred miles from Portland. The high-desert town, established in 1870, is close enough to the Idaho border that those arriving by air often fly to Boise. Not many do fly in. The population in 2009 was less than ten thousand, and while the Old West storefronts along Main Street had a bygone charm, many were vacant. The town’s riches lay in its scenery. Baker City sits in a valley, with the Wallowa Mountains to the northeast and the Elkhorn Mountains to the west. The Powder River runs through the center of downtown. On a Friday afternoon in mid-August, downtown was ninety-one degrees and pedestrian-free. There was little to occupy the visitor, so I headed to my air-conditioned motel to wait for Hadley’s call, which came a little before five. Before we talked about Amanda, he said, we were going to take a drive.
Hadley revved the Chevy Avalanche up a narrow rural road.
“What’s the definition of a three-time loser?” he half shouted as the brush outside slapped my window. “A pregnant nun driving an Edsel with a Nixon sticker!”
We were on our way to the town of Elgin. On July 24, 2009, children trying to catch goldfish in a pond outside of town had instead found a human hand. Authorities later recovered the body of a woman. She was missing her head and feet. Several days later, the remains of two men were found in the woods north of Elgin. Gregory Cook was arrested for the killings on August 3.
“I did it,” a handcuffed, shirtless Cook, age forty-two, confessed on camera. “Methamphetamines were largely responsible.”
Hadley had been appointed Cook’s defense attorney, another case where guilt was beside the point. While he was not conducting business today in Elgin, there was something in town Hadley thought I might like to see. He parked across from the Elgin Opera House. A two-story brick Colonial built in 1911, the opera house was an unexpected refinement in a town whose businesses ran to auto repair shops and livestock feed, but the building was not why Hadley had brought me here. Greg Cook, he said as we walked the two blocks that constituted downtown Elgin, wanted his story written. Unlike Amanda, Cook craved media attention, so much that he had asked Hadley if he knew a writer. Or, Hadley said, it might have been that he told Cook about me. Or, I thought, pretending to look through the plate-glass window of another out-of-business-looking business, having me on a story other than Amanda’s might be a relief for Hadley. I told him I appreciated the courtesy. I did not say that I was not writing about Amanda and the children because I relished murder per se.
We drove back to Baker City, no jokes this time. We stopped for a drink at the formerly grand Geyser Grand Hotel, on Main Street. The place was so empty I felt as though we were entering the bar from The Shining. I had a pad but did not take it out. Hadley said I was not to take out my money, either. It was nine o’clock, not yet dark.
“High desert here,” he
said. “Plenty of quail and deer around.”
And hot, I said, so hot.
Sure, he said, but in winter it could drop to twenty below; that’s when he liked to hunt and fish.
We had a second drink. He told me about his kids, his grandson. I told him about my daughter. We talked about how Portland’s new Democratic mayor had flown back from DC on the day of President Obama’s inauguration to face questions about having had a sexual affair with a then-underage legislative intern with the made-to-order name of Beau Breedlove. We might have ordered a third drink, but the bartender had disappeared. Hadley put some money on the counter and had me walk out ahead of him. I drove to my motel with the windows down and thought how we had spent an hour not talking about murder.
Back in my room, I looked up Cook’s case. He had been charged with three counts of aggravated murder. His on-camera testimony left small doubt that despite entering an initial plea of not guilty, he would eventually change his plea to guilty and accept whatever sentence Hadley was able to strike with the prosecution, thereby avoiding a trial and a possible sentence of death. Amanda had pleaded not guilty to five counts of aggravated murder. If her case went to trial, the jury would have the option of imposing the death penalty. The chance of this happening was low. There were thirty-five people on Oregon’s death row in 2009, none of them women. The state had never executed a woman and had sentenced only one to death: In 1961, nineteen-year-old Jeannace Freeman and her lover, Gertrude Mae Jackson, had thrown Jackson’s son and daughter, ages six and four, off the Crooked River Canyon Bridge into a three-hundred-foot gorge. Jackson had testified against Freeman, who was sentenced to death, a sentence commuted to life in prison when the state’s death penalty law was repealed in 1964. Voters reinstated the law in 1978.
Hadley had represented women up against the death penalty, if none for killing their own children. None had been condemned to death. Hadley worked inside what I was coming to think of as the murder machine. I had followed him inside the machine earlier in the summer, to the postconviction relief trial for an inmate on death row for fatally shooting a security guard in 1992. The proceeding, in the state capital of Salem, featured a half dozen “expert witnesses” for the defense, testimony countered by the prosecution, and nearly seven hours of opinion, which resulted in the judge deciding nothing beyond that there would be another hearing six months hence. The whole thing seemed like a jurisdictional circle jerk with no climax, a questionable use of time and money, and a frustrating experience for the inmate, who had been locked inside this machine for seventeen years and could expect to stay there until he died or was put to death. Amanda had now entered this machine, was just starting down whatever years-long path the system would create for her. I had heard that she was off suicide watch. That she was a model prisoner. That she was a bossy prisoner, yelling after guards that she wanted more cake. That she told police revenge was her motive. That she told police nothing. The stories could be true, or they could be conjecture; people stuck stories to her like wet plaster. Into what position would they set?
Hadley lived a few miles outside of Baker City, in a triple-wide manufactured home with what were once stunning views of the mountains.
“Of course, none of these houses were here when I bought,” he said, waving at a neighbor backing out of his driveway. “They let me go over and look at the view once in a while.”
Hadley walked up his own driveway, most of it taken up by a twenty-seven-foot RV, and into the cool of the house. From the threshold, I could see into several empty rooms. Hadley had, until recently, lived here with his fourth wife, a Mormon he met on the Internet. When she left, she took the furniture.
Hadley was a bachelor again, which meant he could paint the walls in colors he liked. If the ochre he had chosen looked “a little too much like baby poop,” he didn’t much care. There was rarely anyone here to see it, to tell him he might move the cases of Diet Orange Crush within arm’s reach of the lounger to the kitchen, or to stop him from bringing dogs home from the pound, including the chocolate Lab slobbering in the driveway.
“I don’t even like to see a dog put to death,” he said. Then, “I think we understand each other. I just cannot talk about any specific case.”
We were just going to talk about him, I said.
“Oh, that’s even worse.” He looked at the room’s other furnishing, a TV on mute, and spoke about his time in college and the air force, his respect and affection for his late father, who had been a policeman before going into the motel business. His father was one of the people Hadley had looked to early in his legal career for reassurance.
“I said, ‘You know, Dad, I don’t think you’ve ever had an enemy, and I wish sometimes I could say that,’” he recalled. “He said, ‘Son, I thought about what you said. Running motels, we treat people different than you do, so don’t feel bad about it. You got a job to do.’”
Hadley had to take off his glasses for a moment. “Anyway, I know what I do is right,” he said. “I’m proud of what I do.”
And if some people heard “meth addict murders three people” or “mother throws children from bridge” and thought, get rid of them, and then voted for the death penalty?
“But that just isn’t justice,” he said, later emphasizing, “It’s a pendulum swing. I still don’t quite understand why the United States wants that kind of vengeance, and that’s all it is.”
It was not that Hadley did not appreciate swift justice. He had cheered several months earlier when US Navy snipers shot and killed pirates holding hostages on a cargo ship off Somalia. And he vigorously defended people’s rights to own guns.
“But self-defense has nothing to do with executing people,” he said. “It’s not just an easy one-liner. The state can’t seem to keep the roads paved; you think we should trust them with life-and-death decisions?”
There were aggravated murder cases he was not eager to take on. He was grateful, for instance, that he had not been assigned “the woman who cut the baby out of the womb,” if only because defending her and Amanda at the same time risked attracting attention that benefited neither client. But he believed there could never be someone whose crimes could not be understood.
“There have to be reasons. Just a normal person doesn’t walk down the street and start wanting to kill people,” he said. “One of the things that happens when I start working with a client, and the things we do with a jury, is called humanizing. We show them it’s not just this monster. You’ve got to start showing how they were raised, the problems that came up, if they had fetal alcohol syndrome. It’s sure not their fault if their mother was drinking John Barleycorn while they were in the womb. That doesn’t excuse them; that doesn’t get them off. That doesn’t send them home.”
Hadley stared at the TV, preseason college football.
“If you watch people, get to know them, you realize . . .” He paused. “I don’t know that anybody is just one hundred percent bad. I just don’t believe that.”
Hadley had said he did not think Amanda’s defense would be ready for a year, and that he was looking at a possible October 1, 2010, start date for the trial.
“It takes time to get acquainted and time to build trust and confidence,” he said. “You can’t just walk in and say, ‘I’m your lawyer; I need to know everything about your life.’”
Hadley would of course not ask Amanda to tell him everything. He would approach her as a craftsman. He would observe and assess and build a story meant to save her life. She was fully in the machine now, both cosseted and at its mercy. Maybe she felt safer there. Maybe she did not want to be understood. Hadley would not, as I did, write letters to Amanda that came back marked “Undeliverable.”
13
Summer 2008, Tualatin, Oregon
Amanda’s husband left her on June 5, 2008, her thirty-first birthday. There was no plan for when Jason would see the children. She was to care for Gavin, Eldon, and Trinity by herself in the Tualatin house, a split-level ranch on the
corner of a street of tall pines and homes flying American flags.
Amanda’s house had no flag. It also had no VCR, no computer, and no grown-up bicycles, all of which Jason had hocked or sold. Soon Amanda would not have a working car. The Honda Odyssey her mother-in-law bought the family needed repairs. Amanda asked her permission to get it serviced. The answer was no. Mike Stott offered to fix the brakes for free. The answer was still no; Jason and his mother said they would have it towed and fixed professionally; they asked Amanda for the keys, including the spare, but the car just sat in the driveway, never going anywhere.
Amanda was able to use her old car from college, the beat-up 1991 Audi. She spent time with her folks and with her sister. That was a nice change; Jason had not liked her family being around the kids. Still, she couldn’t concentrate when she was away from the house; she wanted to be there in case Jason came by, and never knowing when he would was making her jittery. Amanda knew her husband was probably using drugs, if not what kind. Sometimes he would show up just to take Eldon; he would not tell her where they were going or when they’d be back. Eldon would come home in clothes belonging to the son of Jason’s drug friends. Amanda washed and dried the clothes and put them in a separate pile so Jason could return them. He told her not to do that. She suggested they could have them over to dinner; she could return the clothes then. Jason didn’t want her meddling. He told her Eldon was his son, and he would take the boy when he wanted, or Amanda could face legal action.
And then he’d be gone again, telling her his being away was probably temporary and that if she stopped smoking, stopped drinking, lost weight, and got a job, he would come home. She wanted to do what he wanted her to do, but it was hard. Jason and his mother demanded contradictory things: she needed to stay home with the kids, she needed to get a job, she needed to let Jason keep control of the finances, she needed to take control of her own life. She wanted to get a stop-smoking patch but missed the appointment, and anyway, her medical records were all screwed up from the times Jason had her go to the doctor—for a low-bone-density test for a cracked tailbone—and get pain pills that he would take. She knew her husband had been stuck in the world of narcotics for as long as she had known him, maybe longer. A few times, she hid his car keys so he couldn’t go meet drug people or bad company, but he would get angry. She thought the children were mostly oblivious to the problems, though one time Eldon did see Jason throw a chair at her. It broke against the wall.
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