3/15/12: Inmate plugged toilet by flushing food (oatmeal).
3/28/12: Sleeping during count.
6/11/2012: Told to get along with her cellmate and be aware of how long she is running around in the cell nude.
6/24/12: Verbal warning given for foul language—using the word “fuck” several times.
7/17/12: Failed to dispose of contraband (picked flowers from yard)
9/10/12: Daily failure [in] ability to follow direction and hiding food and horseplay.
9/13/12: Sleeping during count.
6/21/13: Inmate sent me a kyte [inter-prison memo] wanting to move to J-Unit as her crime is “so high profile” that she finds it difficult in G-Unit. . . . I advised her if other inmates are threatening or harassing her, she needs to bring that to the attention of the unit officer.
9/13/13: Sleeping during count.
3/28/14: Inmate Stott-Smith wrote me a kyte stating she is “sorry to be a burden” . . . and she normally would not persist but her cellmate is very “sick” of her. According to Stott-Smith, her cellmate calls her names and she would like again to request a move.
9/7/14: Contraband butter.
11/21/14 (misconduct report): “During the [cell] search the following items were found: 7 extra pair of underwear, 2 pair red shorts, 2 pair extra socks, 6 envelopes and 1 pair hospital socks. On 11/10/14 there was an amnesty day for all inmates to turn in extra clothing. They had a 24-hour period to comply. Inmate Stott-Smith failed to comply.”
In February 2012, Jackie and I again met at the French bistro. There was no comic interchange with the owner this time. Jackie sat at a table against a wall drinking water in silence. She looked tired, closed in on herself.
“You don’t have to write this book, that would be okay,” she said. Maybe she was reading my mind. The troubles that might have led Amanda to murder—finding out the origin of her son’s name, her drinking, feeling both persecuted by and obligated to her husband, losing custody of her children, and being unable or unwilling to fix any of it—sometimes weighed on me, as did the late-night phone calls from sources I could not name asking about grandparents’ rights, and hiring detectives, and whether I thought it possible that Jason had poisoned Keli’s dogs. People remember things differently; they lie to be kind, and they lie by omission. I knew that. Still, the layers of obfuscation here, told by those who wanted to retell events, to sound the alarm or to spread culpability, were sometimes a lot to sort through and see clearly. Maybe, I told Jackie, I would not write about Amanda and the children after all.
Jackie’s face perceptively brightened, and I had a flash, oddly, of white doves flying up from her shoulders. She had told me more than once she was ready to be done with this part of her life. When I called her a year later to say hello, she seemed nearer to that readiness, asking me to repeat my name three times before saying, “Oh . . . I think I remember you.”
When we left the bistro this day, the sun had come out. Jackie and I knew without saying as much that we would not see each other again.
“I want to thank you,” she said. When I asked her for what, she said that no one in her family would talk about what happened but that she had needed to.
“It helped so much,” she said. I told her for me, too.
Coffee Creek Correctional offers more than 130 rehabilitation programs. These include life skills, education, behavioral and mental health, and other opportunities, from a beekeeping apprenticeship to barista training to volunteering in the prison hospice.
From April 23, 2010, to March 5, 2015, Amanda participated in dozens of activities. She had jobs with a floor-cleaning crew and as a food handler. She attended Toastmasters, where inmates learn “better communication strategies.” She did yoga. She went to lectures on frogs and on birds. She had six mental health sessions in her first month, and none after. She attended grief and loss classes in fall 2011. From June 2010 to March 2015, she engaged in numerous religious activities, some of which were ongoing and included Baptist services, choir, prison fellowship, OWP (Oregon Women’s Prison) Ministry, and Insight: Victim/Offender Education, a program that, according to its website, “supports incarcerated individuals in the process of understanding and developing insight into the underlying circumstances of their lives and the choices that led them to prison.”
27
Week of May 18, 2009, Milwaukie, Oregon
Justin Montgomery was in the middle of his shift at Foxy’s Den on the south end of Main Street in Milwaukie’s business district. Foxy’s was no bigger than an average suburban rec room, and from the doorway, customers could see the whole of it, including video poker machines and a counter at which to buy cigarettes, beer, and snacks. Every vice, Justin thought, except strippers and drugs. Foxy’s was open from 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. and was slow in the early afternoons, leaving Justin time to get his homework from community college done or to just stare out the scratched front window.
Justin watched a woman on a bicycle ride slowly past. He adjusted his thick-framed black glasses. The woman was wearing white shorts and a white top; she was attractive, with long hair and a tan. It was a sunny day, and watching her ride past provided a nice reverie. Justin had spent almost thirteen years in prison not being able to casually glance at a pretty woman, and at thirty-three, he was glad to do so now.
The woman rode past again, coming from the other direction. Justin watched her stop before Foxy’s front door. She straddled her bike and looked up at the business’s sign for so long it did not seem normal—all the sign said was “Foxy’s Den.” The woman looked down the street, back at the sign, and started to roll her bike inside.
She stayed in the entryway and looked at the video poker machines and at a side table covered with last week’s newsweeklies. She looked at the man behind the counter. He wore a navy fisherman’s cap pulled low over his coarse black hair.
Justin said, “Hi. How are you doing? Welcome to Foxy’s.”
The woman did not respond. Justin worked with the public; it was his job to read people, to make them feel relaxed. This woman’s smile looked painted on; it did not touch her eyes. She told Justin she had just moved to the area and was looking for a job. He told her Foxy’s was always accepting applications, that he would give her one, but she would need to turn it in to a different Foxy’s, about two miles away.
The woman said, Okay . . . in this slowed-down way that made Justin think she might be on drugs. Not smoking pot or hard drugs, more as though she had taken Valium, as though she had overmedicated.
Justin gave her a Pepsi. He gave her a job application and, seeing as there were no other customers, asked her name. She said her name was Amanda and she was riding around today looking at the area. Justin asked where she lived; she said with somebody in a house, and that she recently had been having some problems.
Amanda sat on an old kitchen chair near the side table and started to fill out the application, though Justin noticed she really didn’t; she was more just looking at it.
“You’re having some problems, you okay?” he asked when he saw her further dislocate, her eyes sliding over the walls, past the TV.
She said, I had some problems with my husband . . .
She stopped. Justin prompted, “Your husband.”
Oh, he’s my ex, she said, and seemed to get agitated, but again, to Justin her emotions did not touch her. She had a spacey, robotic quality as she continued. It’s our kids, she said. He won’t let me see them. I really miss them, and his family is involved, and they won’t let me see them because they think I’m . . .
Justin watched her work hard to not say the word “crazy.” As she repeated that she no longer had her kids, she did not get to see the kids, the smile on her face stayed fixed. It was a dead smile, really a dead smile. Justin told her a job at Foxy’s could help her, that it was a good company to work for, and that they were very understanding. He gave her everything she needed to turn in the application and told her that, if she wanted, to go ahead and put his
name on there, that it might help her get hired.
They spoke maybe forty-five minutes before Amanda rolled her bike outside. Again she looked up at the sign, almost as though she had been trying to memorize the place, and rode away.
Justin and his girlfriend were watching the news a few days later when Amanda’s mug shot came on TV. With the tension on her face and her hair a mess, she was practically a different woman. Justin stood and shouted, “That’s Amanda! I know her! I know her!”
The news detailed what Amanda had done. Justin’s girlfriend said it was monstrous, and he found himself trying to explain what Amanda’s mental state had been a few days earlier, how he did not think she did what she was accused of doing out of animosity toward her children. His girlfriend kept repeating, there’s no excuse. Justin agreed, while pressing the point that Amanda did not deserve to die for what she did.
The next morning, Justin bought a newspaper in order to find the attorney of record in Amanda’s case. He called the attorney, who said, I’m doing this as a favor; I will take your name and pass it on to the next attorney. Whether the attorney did, Justin did not know. He never received a call back from anyone.
Justin had wanted to speak with the attorney because he had faced the death penalty. He spent twelve and a half years in prison for killing a man during a meth deal. Justin had been eighteen at the time, and his involvement with drugs back then had been a bad, bad, bad experience. He began serving time at age nineteen.
Justin was released from prison in 2008. He had been thirty-two, a year older than Amanda was when she began serving time. His life was going one way, hers the other; they had intersected for less than an hour, but it was long enough for him to want to reach out to her attorney, to tell him he had seen Amanda’s state of mind in the days before the murder, and that if Justin could provide any insight, he wanted to.
It was not that he thought the crime should go unpunished. What Amanda had done was horrible, horrendous, disgusting, but at the same time killing her would not solve anything. It would not bring her son back. It would not take back the memories that her daughter was going to have to deal with. Justin knew, from his own family’s experience, that Amanda’s daughter was going to be punished right along with her. Trinity was going to have that stigma for the rest of her life: her mother was “crazy Amanda,” who tried to kill her.
Justin knew Amanda was in for a hard time, that prisoners who harm or kill children become targets of other prisoners’ special hatred. He thought, for her own protection, Amanda would often be sequestered, kept in a tiny room, with no window and a light on twenty-four hours a day. If she were suicidal, she would not be allowed to wear clothes, or not more than the turtle-shell vest strapped on prisoners at risk of taking their own lives. In Justin’s experience, people who hear of such conditions do not have a problem with them.
He interacted with hundreds of customers who bought a newspaper at Foxy’s or listened to the radio tuned to the news. As the week went on, Amanda was the news. Justin listened as customers talked about what a vile, disgusting human being she was, saying that she deserved everything she got.
Justin knew Amanda would be dealing with the ramifications of what she had done for a long time. He was still dealing with his. And if he wondered why Amanda would murder her child, he also wondered what she had gained. Something, he thought, must have been satisfied.
The most common assumption of what Amanda had satisfied was a desire for revenge against her husband. This was where most people stopped. They neither needed nor wanted to think further. The idea that Amanda would sit in a cell for thirty-five years relishing what she had done struck me as provincial, a fairy tale. Her life would go on. Even if she were kept naked in a tiny room, there would be evolution; there would be losses and gains.
I had considered the possibility that Amanda’s life in prison would be easier than her life had been outside of it. Her eating disorder would not be countenanced, or not as easily. She would not be able to drink alcohol, or not as much. She would not have to ask anyone if she could take a yoga class or go to a lecture on frogs. She would not have to listen to Jason call her a dumb bitch. Her movements would be prescribed in prison; while there were many things she would likely never again do, things I thought about when I walked on a beach, or flew in a plane, or curled up with my husband, or bought a dress at Nordstrom’s, she had, if looked at one way, been released from one kind of hell. And if I thought she had put herself in another, because my idea of hell would be if tragedy were to befall my child, I could also see she had, at the terrible cost to her children, bought herself some freedom.
“It’s almost as if prison has given Amanda her life back,” Samantha Hammerly said.
Samantha and I were having lunch in a burger bar in Portland’s Pearl District in 2014. Our exchanges had not always been friendly. In 2010, Samantha contacted me to say she was a long-time friend of Amanda’s, and “the last thing she needs right now is a book written about ‘the crazy mom who threw her kids off the bridge.’”
Samantha had proved open to changing her mind. She found our subsequent communications “therapeutic” and shared with me details of her visits with Amanda in prison, visits that had taken place every few weeks for the past three years.
“When I first started seeing her and talking to her, she was incredibly depressed,” she said today. “I was scared for her for a little while.”
Samantha had learned what her friend had done from the news on TV. She had not seen Amanda since tenth grade. Maybe it was residual affection. Maybe it was because Samantha had studied for a PhD in psychology, a pursuit kindled by a fascination with serial killers. But in May 2009, she stepped back into Amanda’s life. Samantha was the cried-out woman I had seen at Amanda’s second arraignment. She visited and prayed with Amanda’s parents in the days after Eldon’s murder. She went to Eldon’s funeral. She wrote to Jason, urging him to allow Trinity to see Amanda’s family. He had not written her back.
Amanda dropping her children from the bridge had a magnetic effect on Samantha. She would stand by Amanda because “she really does need support.” Visiting her friend, the child killer, in prison fulfilled what Samantha saw as her duty as a Christian and as a friend. The visits also provided a light that Samantha sensed she ignored at her own peril.
“I agree that Mandy suffers from depression, something I know a lot about, and her symptoms are a lot like mine,” she once told me, and that if I were to write about Amanda, “then do it justice, please. Help that mom out there in the same situation.”
Samantha today spoke of the changes she had seen in Amanda, who had been moved to “a special part of the prison that’s for people that have been on good behavior.” Her weight had stabilized. She had visitors, including Chantel and her sons, who played in the prison’s playground and had a blast each time they came.
Samantha said Amanda talked and wrote about her life in the years leading up to the bridge, how she had not been able to see her friends or go out or do what she wanted.
“She said she felt really bad about herself for a long time,” Samantha said. “But she’s not like that. She’s never been like that. She’s not a depressed person. She’s always been happy, and so, what made her that way?”
Whatever had made her that way seemed to Samantha to be reversing, a “transformation” she attributed to Amanda getting involved with the church inside prison and “back in contact with God.”
“She’s happy and go lucky the way she was when we were in high school,” she said. “She doesn’t seem oppressed, and she’s not depressed. She’s very much like she was.”
I was shutting off my tape recorder when Samantha stopped me.
“I did want to say one other thing,” she said. “I did one time feel comfortable enough to ask her about what happened, and she just hung her head and started crying and said, ‘I can’t talk about that right now.’”
Samantha also started to cry. “And that was after we were just j
oking around and being happy.”
28
“We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this human tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative.”
—Janet Malcolm, Iphigenia in Forest Hills
Defense attorney Shanon Gray was sitting in a coffee shop across from the main branch of the Portland Public Library in July 2014. It had been more than five years since his wife, Tiffany, had urged him to get down to the jail where Amanda was being held to see if he could help. He had walked in just as detectives were trying to get her confession.
“I said, ‘I’m representing her. You’re not doing any interviews,’” he said. “They were pissed.”
As it turned out, Gray would not represent Amanda. He had reached out to Amanda’s family to say his wife had been her college friend and that he knew Amanda personally and was offering his services as an attorney. He never heard back. It had been one of Gray’s law partners who stood by Amanda during her first arraignment “as a courtesy to the family,” after which he was replaced by Ken Hadley. Gray had reached out to Hadley. As a former Multnomah County district attorney, Gray had been through enough aggravated murder trials to feel he would be an asset to Amanda’s defense team. He received no response from Hadley.
I had previously met Gray and as before was struck by his intense physicality. He had a granite jaw, sharp blue eyes, and the readiness of a wrestler, or maybe a lion, as if at any moment he might propel forward and bite his opponent in the neck. I had once asked him what he and Amanda spoke about in the hours immediately following her arrest. He had declined to tell me then, and today invoked attorney-client privilege, despite never having been her attorney. But he was willing to say a few things: that Amanda recognized him when he came to see her and that, contrary to what Tiffany had said, he did not sit with Amanda for hours, more like twenty or thirty minutes.
To the Bridge Page 21