To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

  “She came to court in a very expensive suit, her long hair braided down the back. She looked real classy,” Jackie said. “She has this briefcase, and she pulls out a jar of peanuts. Nuts! And the court clerk says, ‘You can’t eat in here!’”

  10/22/2009: Cell searched, [found] sugar, pepper, elastic from clothing, two sets of linen, newspapers, too many books & mag—verbal warning. Needs to make her bed every day.

  10/29/2009: Stott-Smith’s room still a mess. She had extra clothing, a bedroll and two cups of ice tea from dinner. I gave her a Rubbermaid bin and told her everything needed to be on table, rail or in box.

  10/30/2009: Stott-Smith not listening. Stuff all over her room; trash on floor, books on floor, pencils all over the floor. Seized everything not in the box/shelves.

  “Did I make it clear why I wanted Nathan to have custody?” Jackie asked.

  The subject of Amanda giving custody of Gavin to his biological father had come up several times during our visits.

  “The big thing with me was fear . . . that she would get back with Jason,” Jackie said. “Even if they didn’t get back together, Jason could still—anything that he told her, she would do. So it was just very important to me, from the standpoint of getting Jason so totally out of [Gavin’s] life, that he could have no little crack to seep in. The only way that could happen is if Nathan had custody.”

  Jackie wanted Nathan to have custody, she said, “because he is a good guy; he’s stable, he’s intelligent, he’s his father.” She knew that Amanda—ketchup-eating, over-drinking, milkshake-dumping Amanda—was in no shape to be a mother. Amanda seemed to recognize this, too, and asked Jackie in early 2009 to help her draw up a custody agreement giving Gavin to Nathan. Amanda made Jackie promise she would tell Jason and Christine Duncan that it had been Jackie’s idea.

  “I did not talk Mandy into it,” Jackie said. “Maybe if I had needed to, I would have; I sure wanted him away from Jason. But Mandy came to me.”

  Amanda, Jackie said, “would leave little notes at my doorstep” about child support and visitation, notes Jackie fashioned into an agreement. After several drafts, she and Amanda were satisfied. They drove to Jackie’s bank to have the agreement notarized, after which Amanda went to her parents’ side of the home and started to make dinner.

  “She had no qualms, no misgivings; she knew exactly what she was doing,” said Jackie. “And then she told Jason what she had done.”

  Jason told Amanda she had made a horrible mistake. Christine Duncan thought she’d made a horrible mistake. Kathy Stott told Amanda she should not have done it. She told Jackie that she would seek to have the agreement nullified on the grounds that Amanda was not mentally competent to sign it. Jackie countered that if Amanda weren’t competent to sign it, how was she competent to be a mother? I pictured Amanda standing in her parents’ kitchen, being berated by everyone except Jackie, who had held on to the signed agreement and had already called Chelsea Beck to tell her, “Come and get it, come and get it now.”

  Whether Jason did or did not care about Gavin was not the point; the point was that Amanda had done something without asking permission. She had made a play, for which she could expect to be penalized.

  “When everyone she looked up to—Kathy, Jason, and Chris—all told her she’d made a mistake, this was a turning point,” Jackie said. “She thought she did something wrong and bad when actually she took the first step I thought was right since this all started. Had they not done that to her, I think she was ready to go ahead [with her life]. They did her in right there.”

  Circuit Court of the State of Oregon for the County of Multnomah, Judgment of Conviction and Sentence:

  04/13/2010: Defendant agrees to a life sentence. There is a possibility of parole only after the defendant has served a minimum of 35 years in prison.

  No contact with surviving victim or victims’ immediate family without prior written consent. This includes contact in person, in writing, by phone, by email, and through third parties, and includes coming to the homes, workplaces, and schools of surviving victim and victims’ family as well as coming into visual or physical presence of the victims.

  “What do you have against railings?” Jackie asked. It was a warm August afternoon, and she was climbing the front steps to my house with the help of the walking stick. She had called the night before and said it was “urgent” that she see me.

  The urgency had to do with a two-year-old photo she had given me, of Kathy Stott surrounded by her grandchildren. Kathy knew her mother and I had been meeting and had asked that Jackie never speak for her. Jackie thought giving me the photo might imply she was doing so.

  “I have just been sick about this,” she said. She needed the photo back. I went to my office to get it. In the photo, Kathy is seated on the floor. Trinity sits on her left knee, Gavin holds her right, and Eldon is in her lap; the other grandchildren lean in, and behind them all is Amanda. With the exception of Eldon, the children are all smiling, as is Kathy at center. Half of these people had been lost to each other in an instant.

  When I got back to the living room, my cat was in Jackie’s lap. She petted it for a long time. Her favorite place, she said, was the Oregon Zoo. She had mentioned the zoo before, with regard to Jason’s ultimatum about how he would come home if Amanda got a job.

  “He knew she couldn’t. He had her to where she couldn’t have gotten a job to save her soul,” she said. “I told her, ‘Well, Mandy, what you probably ought to think about doing is volunteering. Why don’t you volunteer at the zoo?’ And she says, ‘I can’t do that; it’s too close to Suicide Bridge.’”

  Vista Bridge sits 120 feet above a roadway in southwest Portland and has proven compelling to jumpers, hence the name Suicide Bridge. The jumps often prove fatal, including to the five people who went over in 2013, after which a suicide barrier was installed. Within months, a fourteen-year-old boy scaled the barrier, shot himself, and fell to his death.

  That Amanda had not jumped, from anywhere, was “a real puzzle” to Jackie. Or maybe not: Jackie said Amanda had several times told her, “Grandma, I don’t think I’m saved.” She was concerned, Jackie said, “that if she committed suicide and she was not saved, she could go to hell.”

  Amanda had nevertheless been talking suicide for months. The family, Jackie said, had been “scared to death” she’d hurt herself, never the children.

  “I consider her to be a coward to tell you the truth,” she said.

  I told her my husband felt the same way.

  “Very, very cowardly, yes,” she said, and later, “I’m sure people wonder why she didn’t just jump with her kids.”

  The question had come up.

  Jackie said the answer was that Amanda had worked summers as a lifeguard.

  “She’s too skilled,” she said. “She would know she wouldn’t drown.”

  Oregon Corrections Intake Center—Intake Assessment Report

  STOTT-SMITH, Amanda

  Report date: 29 Apr 2010

  Reported Drug [and Alcohol] use in 12 Months Before Lockup: [Answer]: “Never”

  How serious do you think your alcohol or other drug problems are? [Answer]: “Not At All.”

  Marital Status: Married

  Children: 1

  Living with: 1

  For a visit in October 2011, I brought Jackie a bag of coffee beans.

  “That’s funny,” she said. “I have a present for you, from Mandy.”

  I considered how this could be as Jackie handed me a box from Hilo Hattie, a chain of stores on the Hawaiian Islands.

  “The last time Mandy went to Hawaii, she brought this back for me,” she said of the ceramic mug imprinted with hibiscus and Bird of Paradise. I told her our swap was like “The Gift of the Magi,” and we took our usual places, she in her rocking recliner, me on the tuffet, the TV news on mute. I caught a glimpse of a corpse on-screen, its face and hair caked in what looked like plaster dust.

  “Did you hear about this already? Gadd
afi’s dead,” she said. I asked who had taken responsibility.

  “The rebels,” she said. “Though I would not give you two pennies on a bet that they will set up a democracy over there.”

  We watched the news until Jackie said, “Well, we have some things to get to.”

  She slid open her glass patio door. We walked through it and into another on its right, into Kathy and Mike Stott’s side of the home. The living room was immaculate and had the powdery scent of Love’s Baby Soft, a cologne I wore as a teenager. I followed Jackie to a home office. Mike Stott had given permission for me to see photos on the family computer. Jackie narrated the slideshow: Chantel and Daryl Gardner’s son Noah playing an electric organ; Kathy taking a nap on the beach; Chantel on her father’s riding lawn mower; Mike and Kathy with their faces close together.

  “These two have been madly in love since they were sixteen,” Jackie said.

  One slide showed goldfish swimming in a little pool in Jackie’s yard, as well as a big turtle Jason brought back from Hawaii. Was it still alive?

  “Oh, yes,” Jackie said.

  Gavin and his cousin Luke on skimboards, Gavin looking tall . . .

  “He’s a freshman at Benson [High School],” she said.

  Kathy holding a giant Hershey’s chocolate bar . . .

  “Kathy is a devotee of ’smores,” Jackie said. “Show her a flame.”

  The boys by a fire on the beach two years and four months after their cousins were dropped off a bridge. The people in the photos were smiling—smiling at a child’s birthday, smiling at a rock-climbing gym. There was one quick shot of Trinity from years earlier and the slideshow started again.

  “I asked Kathy, I said, ‘You know, [Nancy] has asked me a couple of times how you got through this,’” Jackie said. “I’m going to give you an exact quote—she doesn’t know I’m doing this but it will be all right with her. She said, ‘Without the Lord, I’d be in a psych ward.’ And I am sure she would!”

  “And I’ll give a you a quote from Trinity,” she said when we were back in her living room. “They were sitting in the back seat of the car, and Trinity was trying to comfort Mandy, and she was patting Mandy, and see Trinity knew all about Keli, and Trinity said, with her exact words, ‘Don’t worry, Mama, he loves you better.’ It was so heartbreaking. If any wife ever had her husband’s girlfriend shoved in her face . . . Chris told Mandy that Jason and Keli were good together because they were both coming off bad marriages.”

  Jackie was under the impression Keli Townsend’s family had money, and if this were the case, then what did Keli see in Jason? I had been told certain things: that starting in fall 2008, Jason asked Keli to watch Eldon and Trinity, saying he had no one to look after them. That Keli became close with the children, a closeness perhaps kindled by the possibility that she could not conceive children of her own. [This would prove not to be the case: in January 2013, Keli gave birth to Jason’s fraternal twin daughters.] That Jason wooed Keli the way he wooed Amanda, buying her jewelry and designer jeans and fifty-dollar pieces of cheese. And then the jewelry started to go missing.

  Jackie circled back to Amanda finding out for whom Eldon had been named. It galled her that the Smith family knew the name’s genesis but never told Amanda. She thought her granddaughter had been set up from the beginning.

  “I told Kathy, ‘Just you wait. When they don’t need Mandy anymore for those kids, they’ll get rid of her one way or the other,’” she said. “And that’s exactly what did happen.”

  I did not know whether Jackie was suggesting Jason wanted the mother of his children dead or that he did not, once he had primary custody of the kids, concern himself with the histrionics of his estranged wife. He had just gone through rehab. He had nearly lost his job. The lawsuit with Brian Burr was pending. Maybe Jason was exasperated with Amanda’s repeated run-ins with DHS, her driving to Coburg to track down Keli, and her calling him dozens of times in the middle of the night. Maybe the suicide threats had a numbing effect on whatever feelings he had for her. Amanda had not been able to punch her way out for a long time, and there was no reason to think she could now. What was she going to fight with?

  “None of us ever thought that Mandy would hurt one of the kids,” Jackie said. “It never even crossed our minds.”

  I suggested that people who act in good faith assume others will, too.

  She nodded. “Naïve.”

  Jackie walked me through her garage. On the wall was a message Amanda had written years earlier, in lipstick: I GRAMS. I asked if I could take a picture of it.

  “Of course,” she said.

  We stood in the driveway.

  “If you speak with Keli, tell her to come see us. We are not the terrible people she thinks we are,” Jackie said, and that if things with Jason went the way Jackie thought they might, Keli would need support. Jackie’s thinking about Keli had turned around since the boat dedication, a turn that had Trinity at its center.

  “She’s lost so much, have you considered that? Her mother, both her brothers, her cousins, the rest of the family that is us,” she said. “And who knows what she’s being told about us?”

  I knew that for the past two years Trinity had referred to Amanda as “that girl,” though she sometimes slipped and called her “Mommy.” I told Jackie as much. I thought this might upset her. On the contrary, standing today in the sun she looked as strong as I had ever seen her.

  “She loved her mother,” she said, nodding. “Very much.”

  Coffee Creek Corrections Information Systems—Offender Chrono History, with comments [selected]

  6/15/2010: Placed items in back pocket after breakfast.

  7/3/2010: [Warned] not to change clothes while her door was open.

  11/5/10: No show for legal library.

  11/9/10: Sleeping during count.

  11/18/10: Sleeping during count.

  12/18/10: Had 10 hard-boiled eggs in cell from breakfast.

  Jackie called in early November. She had been “going through some papers that needed to be shredded” and came across writing Amanda had done on her mother’s computer and given to Jackie to hold on to. Jackie suggested we meet at a restaurant near her home.

  We were the first customers of the day. No sooner did Jackie sit down than she handed me the pages. I did not look at them at the table. We ate pad Thai and talked about Occupy Wall Street. After lunch we walked a block to a French bistro whose owner I knew. He was solicitous in the way of the French, oh-la-la-ing and doing everything but kiss Jackie’s hand. She gave him the frown she had given me at the boat dedication, which today I found so funny I laughed out loud.

  I did not wait to get home to look at the pages. I read them in my station wagon, parked near the light-rail tracks. Amanda, sometimes typing late at night, wrote of her isolation in the months leading up to the bridge. In every document, on every page, sometimes in the same sentence, Amanda wrote what she knew of Jason and what she hoped of him. These often contradicted each other.

  “He is the smoothest talker around . . . and his memory allows him to form lies in a way that seems to be foolproof as well unfortunately,” she wrote. “He has taught me everything I know and I will never not love him.” She wrote she trusted him when others accused him of theft, followed by an itemization of jewelry and household goods he pawned or sold.

  “I will agree to anything that man says,” she wrote. “If he told me we were going to sail the ocean blue in 10 years, I’d wait.”

  What were her objectives in writing these pages? Was it a chronicle, a confession, an indictment, and if so, against whom? Was she leaving a trail, and if so, for whom? Whom did she want to know of her “joy and peace” at having given up her and Shane’s baby for adoption? That Jason “did hurt Gavin leaving several bruises on his upper thigh” but that she and Jason had “fervently prayed” that Nathan and Chelsea would not see them? That she was “told one thing by my mother-in-law and another thing by my husband and trying to follow the authoritie
s God had placed above me, I became more codependent than I’d ever like to admit”? That knowing of Jason’s affair with Keli, Amanda “was dying in side [sic] trying not to be depressed”? That “alcohol became my friend”? Was Amanda a reliable narrator when she said she had gone to a doctor for depression, took one Zoloft, and “thought about suicide for a couple of days and didn’t take any more”?

  One of the documents was typed into the body of an email. It was in draft mode. There was no addressee. Amanda began the unsent email, typed on Valentine’s Day 2009, “To whomever this may concern.” I had no idea who she envisioned this concerned person might be, but today it was me.

  “I am self-centered. A narcissist. A dramatic interpreter. For some reason, worthy of love, and for another reason going mental. Not really. That’s what everyone else thinks. I am kind of smart. But I am in la la land part of the time because I choose to be. Anyways. This is not my plan,” she wrote, and later, what her plan might be.

  “I thought maybe the right thing was to make sure that everyone knew how perfect and wonderful Daddy was and I would take all the heat.”

  A plan she had followed through on.

  3/18/11: Sleeping during count.

  4/2/11: Had discussion with inmate tonight regarding her lack of hygiene. Explained that she is expected to shower on a regular basis and that she is also expected to wash her clothes and bedding on a regular basis.

  4/6/11: O was experiencing stress over her high-profile case and stated inmates on H unit were harassing her, not letting her sit at tables etc.

  4/9/11: Disobedience for standing on top of her toilet and talking through the cell vent.

  5/9/11: Covering cell vents with pads.

  6/20/11: Disobedience, horseplay—Inmate was sprinting in dayroom trying to make line movement, which she missed.

  12/31/11 (misconduct report): “We found in your bag the following items: 1 large bag of sugar that was wrapped in plastic and placed inside a serving glove, 1 large bag of butter placed in a serving glove, 22 individual packets of sugar. . . . It has been my experience that inmates in possession of sugar in that quantity are attempting to create what is called pruno (or prison wine).”