To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

  Trinity turned seven in March 2009. In the pictures, she and Eldon gaze at a tall cake with fluffy white frosting and her name in script on the top. It had been a busy fall for the children, a busy spring; there were new schools and new friends, a new place to live with their dad in Eugene, and a new place to play out at Keli’s, where there were dogs and sheep. The children look even older than at Christmastime, Eldon especially, in his collared shirt.

  They were acting older, too. Trinity decided in the spring she would cut her hair and donate it to Locks of Love. She wanted to grow it to the ground, but Keli convinced her that her waist would do. At the hairdresser’s, Trinity wears a smock imprinted with dogs and houses and holds the cut lock of hair. It was long and shining, the bottom lighter than the top; like Eldon’s, her hair turned blond in the sun, but most of her hair was darker now, almost as dark as her mother’s.

  In a last photo of them together, Trinity is sitting in her mother’s lap. Amanda is holding her daughter tightly around the waist, resting her chin in the crook of Trinity’s neck. Amanda is smiling. Trinity is smiling, too, but there was a little “eek!” in it, the anticipation of her first professional cut; until now, only her mother had cut Trinity’s hair. After the haircut, there is a photo of Trinity looking pleased, looking thoughtful, as though she knows she has taken a step into grown-up land.

  26

  Chelsea Beck said Amanda’s grandmother wanted to speak with me, and that I was to approach her at the boat dedication. I did, introducing myself as Nancy.

  “Rommelmann?” Jackie Dreiling said. She had a deep nasal voice and a frown that turned her chin into a pad of crinkles. She was tall, broad-shouldered, and walked with the aid of a gnarled wood staff, which she used that day to get away from me.

  “The timing was just bad,” she later told Chelsea. “Give Nancy my information.”

  The week after the dedication, I drove to the home Jackie shared with Amanda’s parents. The well-kept one-level ranch had a semicircular driveway set behind an evergreen with a crucifix at the top.

  Jackie opened her front door immediately upon my knocking. Her hair had not grayed but yellowed. She had small eyes behind large glasses. She motioned me to the kitchen, where she had plated some muffins. She asked if I wanted coffee. We took the muffins and coffee to her carpeted living room and ignored them. Jackie sat in a recliner across from a TV showing Fox News on mute. I sat on a footstool with a velvety yellow seat that made me think of Miss Muffet’s tuffet.

  Jackie stared at the TV and told me about her late husband, who had died of a brain tumor thirty years earlier. She and her three children had cared for him at home until his death, leaving Jackie a widow at age forty-nine. During our visits, which would stretch over the next fifteen months, Jackie sometimes rocked her recliner and stared past the sliding glass patio doors and into the garden.

  “How do you understand the not understandable and forgive the unforgiveable? I don’t know,” she said. Family members could not speak with one another about what Amanda had done. But the loss of Eldon, of Trinity, and the damage Amanda did were things Jackie needed to talk about.

  She was also looking for information. She wanted to know, for instance, why Keli Townsend had been “nasty” to her at the boat launch. She wanted assurances that Trinity was safe. She wanted it on record that Amanda had deliberately been driven crazy.

  “Mandy did it. She’s guilty; she’s in prison and deserves to be,” she said. “But you have to think how she got to that point.”

  Jackie charted how she thought Amanda got to that point—from adored baby and piano recitals and good grades and love of Christ, to a woman standing on a bridge in the middle of the night throwing her children away.

  “She didn’t throw them over. She dropped them,” she said. “Not that it makes any difference, it’s the same result.”

  Jackie told me she thought Amanda was more shaken by Shane Cook’s suicide than she let on. The family had been pleased when Amanda said she would marry the father of her second child; they all liked Shane Cook.

  “And she really cared for Shane, but he didn’t have any money,” Jackie said. “She told me he just wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted somebody with money.”

  Jackie believed Jason had been “waiting in the wings” when Amanda delivered Shane’s child. I wondered about the timing and asked Jackie how Amanda and Jason met. She did not know. No one seemed to. Tiffany Gray thought they met at a gym. April Anson said they met when they bought pot from Jason. Isaac said Jason told him that when he first met Amanda, she wasn’t interested in him, and that he had won her by “laying on the charm and the money.”

  Whatever Amanda and Jason’s origin story, Amanda herself would later write, “I was close to a person who committed suicide . . . that’s another story of my life, one that my husband was part of in a way. He had met the guy, Shane, once.” This might provide a chilling image: a young man eager to win the affection of a young woman carrying another man’s child, a woman ready to have her affections won. Amanda may well have been grief stricken by Shane’s death, but if she met Jason before Shane’s suicide, she would not have been in that state of mind yet.

  Jackie said she “did not see a lot of Mandy from the time she took up with Jason,” and that at her graduation from George Fox, Amanda said a quick hello to her family and left with Jason.

  “That was pretty much the end of us,” she said. “She hasn’t admitted to this since she’s been in the facility, but Jason hates all of us, and she was expected to hate us, too. Jason hates everybody. He doesn’t come across as a person that hates people, but he does.”

  It was Jason, she said, who “stole [Amanda’s] mind,” Jason who ruined Amanda’s credit, Jason who insisted he be Gavin’s father.

  “Mandy tried to give Gavin to Jason, that was her whole purpose,” she said. “Jason wanted to be a father.”

  I did not understand why it had been important for Jason to be seen as Gavin’s father. Was he giving Amanda what he thought she wanted? Was taking on her child a way to bind her to him? Jackie said it was the other way around: Amanda wanted to stake her position in the Smith family, and Gavin was part of the exchange. Jason did not tell either Ryan or Isaac for years that he was not the boy’s biological father, and several times Amanda sought to change Gavin’s legal last name from “Stott” to “Smith.”

  “Of course, it wasn’t the issue,” Jackie said. “She wanted to be a Smith; she wanted Gavin to be a Smith. She wanted to be a part of that family so bad, and she thought she was, and she thought . . .”

  Thought they would accept and love her?

  “Yes, yes, because they had all that money,” she said, money Amanda continued to believe would be coming to her.

  “She sat here in my living room after Jason was gone, and she’s telling Daryl and I, [she’s] describing the motor home she and Jason were going to get someday—it was a million dollars,” Jackie said. “She was so convinced she was one of them and she was going to get all this, because Jason was going to inherit it all, and Kathy would say to her, ‘How many people have to die, Mandy, before it gets down to Jason?’”

  Sheriff’s Office Classification Summary Report [selected]:

  5/23/09: Ms. Stott Smith will be a high profile individual for some time. . . . She came into our custody already on SU [suicide] watch. . . . She appeared to be in the “shock” stage and stated several times, she didn’t know the answer to the question. She did, however, say she was having Suicidal Thoughts. . . . She did go from one extreme emotion, crying and holding a conversation with self, to calm, cool, and collect. So Ms. Stott Smith definitely has some MH [mental health] issues.

  If Amanda and Jason’s arrangement contained the seeds of its own destruction, it was easy to see how the couple thought they might prop each other up, might capitalize on the other’s attributes, might play to the other’s vanities and exploit the other’s weak spots. The illusion had not provided much protection. Ryan Barron had
seen the welts on Jason’s back after Amanda beat him with a hanger. Tiffany Gray noted the strangle line on Amanda’s throat. Someone suggested Jason gave himself the black eyes. Who punctured whose tires can never be known.

  What is known is that police complaints repeatedly show Amanda and Jason pointing the finger at each other. Having people believe you are a victim is a form of control; it elicits sympathy and concern. Amanda’s friends felt sympathy for her when the man whose child she was carrying killed himself. It is doubtful she told them that Shane “just wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted somebody with money.”

  And Jason had money, or at least the illusion of it. While Amanda had evidence that their finances were nearly always in the toilet, there was also the promise of the motor home and the wedding ring of her dreams, which she had never seen but Jason said was locked in a safe place. Amanda had taken these things on faith.

  “She was totally devoted to him. She wouldn’t say anything bad about him,” Jackie said. “She sat there with a cell phone in her hand and said, ‘I don’t know what to do unless Jason tells me what to do.’”

  Jackie was alluding to something I had considered, that Amanda had been gaslighted. The term is from a 1938 play called Gaslight, later made into an Alfred Hitchcock movie, wherein Charles Boyer’s character isolates his wife, played by Ingrid Bergman, slowly breaks her will, and convinces her that his transgressions are her fault.

  “I tried to tell her. I said, ‘Mandy, don’t you see that Jason is a controlling person?’” Jackie said. “And her response was, ‘Oh no, Grandma. I am the one who’s a controlling person, not Jason. Jason is a wonderful person.’”

  In the months after Jason left, Kathy Stott checked Amanda into the hospital twice for depression, once to an eating disorder clinic. Amanda was either released early from the programs or walked out. Jackie said Amanda did not want to give up her eating disorder, and that Jason would buy her size-two clothes and say, “Fit into that.”

  “She could throw up the most expensive meal in town,” Jackie said, and the only food she saw Amanda consume in the months leading to the bridge was ketchup; that Amanda’s car was littered with hundreds of fast-food ketchup packets, which she would suck on as she drove. Amanda was also drinking heavily. Perhaps with the kind eyes of a grandmother, Jackie saw an objective here, as well.

  “She was trying to become an alcoholic, because Jason went to that place,” she said.

  Did she mean Serenity Lane? Yes, Jackie said. Amanda had asked Christine Duncan, whom Jackie called “Chris,” to pay for her to enter treatment.

  “Chris wasn’t going to do that,” she said. “She probably would tell Jason, ‘I’ll send you to rehab, but you’re going to have to get rid of Mandy.’”

  Later, Jackie would further demote Amanda’s status in the eyes of the Smiths. “She was the babysitter,” she said. “That’s what her function was.”

  By fall 2008, Amanda was no longer performing this function. She was a woman who drank herself into oblivion in front of her children. She was a woman stalking someone she believed to be her husband’s lover. She was a woman who, once her house had been emptied of furniture, sat on the floor picking little craft beads out of the carpet.

  “Mandy told me one day, she was sitting right where you are talking. I said, ‘Mandy, if you would just get yourself together and straighten out, you will get your kids,’” Jackie said. “‘It doesn’t matter how much money they’ve got, no court is going to take children away from their mother unless you give them cause to do so.’ She said, ‘Grandma, no one wins against Jason and Chris.’ She truly believed it was going to be however they wanted it to be, and there was nothing she could do about it.”

  5/27/09: [Stott-Smith] has been very quiet and doing a lot of sleeping. She seems really out of it and still doesn’t seem to know what’s going on.

  5/28/09: Amanda is on Psych Medication and should be considered to be moved off suicide watch.

  5/29/09: Inmate Stott-Smith tried to cheek meds, so the meds are being crushed.

  6/3/09: Stott-Smith will be on Suicide precautions for the indefinite future. They found comb under her mattress and added cell searches to the plan. Ok to have sanitary napkins but NOT underwear.

  Jackie and I were finishing our first visit when Daryl Gardner, who drove a forklift in the warehouse of the paper products company where Mike Stott worked, walked in. He stood in Jackie’s kitchen holding his one-year-old son and said he thought the boat dedication had been “a debacle,” that Randy Leonard was “an asshole,” and apropos of nothing, “Jason stole Vicodin from me when I was living in Mike and Kathy’s garage.”

  I mentioned to Daryl I’d heard about opiates being smuggled from Mexico. He confirmed this. He said Jason came from a “family of enablers.”

  “Chris has a real track record of buying Jason out of every problem he’s ever had,” Jackie said, but that there was no reason he should have needed her protection.

  “He is perfectly capable of being successful on his own right. He’s perfectly smart,” she said. “You’d be amazed how charming this guy can be.”

  Jackie was not charmed. She had seen Jason throw the family Chihuahua over her back fence. She said that Amanda had been “sent off to doctors to get pain pills, which she turned over to him.”

  April Anson had said that when she bought pot from Jason in 2008, “there was probably a kilo, in jars.” Daryl Gardner knew about the pills; Thomas Parrish knew about the pee. Ryan Barron said he watched Jason smoke an eight ball of crack, and two days later, Jason Frederick Smith was admitted to rehab for at least the fourth time. Maybe the gaslighting theory was too ambitious by half. Maybe what we were seeing was a garden-variety drug addict. Maybe Christine Duncan was a mother trying to protect her child from himself. She had helped support Jason, Amanda, and the children for years, bought the family a car, rented them houses, made sure they lived well in the teeth of her son’s instability and, in Duncan’s view, her daughter-in-law’s inability to do anything right.

  Jackie wondered, “Why didn’t Chris spend more time looking out for Mandy?” and suggested that “if she had, her grandson would be alive now,” but I could see Christine Duncan thinking she had done nothing but look out for Amanda. Who was the perpetrator here anyway?

  7/15/2009: Violation: Inmate Stott-Smith asked Deputy —— where the [television] remote was. Stott-Smith said deputy did not know. Stott-Smith said she had seen the remote in the officer’s station and “just barely leaned in to get it.”

  8/7/09: Staff has noticed Stott-Smith and Inmate Joseph Wild [a former Portland police officer arrested for sexually harassing women by phone, including a fourteen-year-old relative] have been talking together more frequently.

  8/10/09: Amanda requesting general housing and wants to go to church. She can be very manipulative. Does not currently pose a suicide risk.

  8/18/2009: Move to 8B on Wednesday. Need to monitor closely.

  8/20/2009: Moved back because another inmate was yelling baby killer out there [sic] door.

  I was back at Jackie’s the third week of January 2011. We drank diet root beer and talked about Eldon, whom Jackie said the family had not gotten to know well.

  “Jason kept Eldon very close to him,” she said. “He carried that kid around.”

  The last time Jackie saw Eldon was spring 2009. Amanda’s children and Chantel’s boys had been playing in Jackie’s garden. Jackie had yelled, “Who wants ice cream?” Eldon, she said, was the first to run up.

  “He stood there looking up with this scowl—Eldon scowled a lot,” she said. “I said, ‘If you want an ice cream, you’re going to have to give me a smile.’ And he flashed me the biggest, most beautiful smile you ever saw in your life.”

  Jackie cried now. “I can’t tell you why she did it, because I don’t think she herself knows,” she said. “I’ve been told she told the officers it was revenge.”

  That was the widespread story, I said.

  “You hav
e to be mad at somebody to feel revenge, don’t you?” she asked. “She’s never shown any sign of being mad at him. Never. Not once.”

  She was trying to fit what she had seen to the popular narrative. I empathized with the difficulties of doing this. Both of Jackie’s daughters had accused her of seeking vengeance.

  “I don’t want vengeance. The Lord says vengeance is His. But I want justice!” she said. “I am waiting on the Lord; Lord, I am getting tired of waiting! Kathy says Jason lost Eldon—who most people believe is the only person he ever loved beside himself. ‘Eldon was taken from him, so if you want vengeance, there it is.’

  “But I don’t believe like the rest of them do that he loved Eldon,” she continued. “Eldon was useful to him.”

  Jackie believed Jason had used Gavin, and Eldon in turn, “to move his drugs on I-5.” She said the entire family thought so. I asked if anyone had confronted Jason with these suspicions.

  “No!” she said. “We had no proof. To this day we have no proof.”

  They did have proof of the marks on Gavin. At age six, while in the bathroom at church, someone had seen the boy with bruises from hip to knee. Jackie’s daughter, Hildy, as an officer of the law, was a mandatory reporter. Though I was told the story by different people in different ways, it seemed someone photographed the bruising and told Amanda that if she did not file a report with Child Protective Services, they would. Jackie implied it had not been easy for the family to call CPS, a call that would perhaps get Amanda in trouble.

  It became easier. In August 2008, during a custody hearing with Nathan Beck, Amanda’s family testified against her. Daryl described how Amanda had driven drunk and into a ditch with the kids in the car. Jackie relayed that her granddaughter had dumped a milkshake on her head after Jackie tried to convince her Jason was seeing another woman. Amanda did herself no favors that day by acting as her own attorney.