“I can say she was in a glaze,” he said. “She was just checked out.”
Gray had not known Amanda well and had never met Jason. He said he did not need to know them to understand the dynamics that had been at work. The factors here—someone threatening to take the kids, one side with money and power, the other side feeling cowed—were to Gray prosaic. If I thought the situation unusual, that Amanda was somehow an exceptional victim and Jason an exceptional abuser, I was fooling myself.
“You think some abusers are different? No! I’ve been a defense attorney for twelve years, and if you don’t think he’s a dime a dozen—he’s a dime a dozen!” he said. “These guys have a certain thing: they knock ’em down, they cut them off from all their family and friends, they control the money, they control the resources. It’s piece by piece by piece by piece to where they control everything, and in the process they’re beating them down emotionally: ‘You’re not smart enough. You’re not pretty enough.’ I don’t need to know who the abuser is. I know who he is: he’s an abuser. It’s not like it’s a new way to do it.”
Gray believed the end came about prosaically, too. “He was the kind of guy who was probably going to say, ‘Hey, when I take [the kids]? You are never going to see them again,’” he said. “This has been years of him beating her down and him following through with his promises, and she thought to herself, ‘How can I hurt him the most? How can I hurt Jason and his family the most?’ I don’t think she thought about the kids. I think she just thought, how can I hurt them the most? And that’s what happened.”
Gray was talking about Jason and Amanda as if they were classical characters. He was not the only one. As I wrote about Amanda and the children, people repeatedly brought up Medea. I reread the Greek tragedy, about the hero Jason and the sorceress Medea. I noted that Jason, who has left Medea to marry a king’s daughter, does not seem so much cruel as an opportunist when he tells her, “What more need hast thou of children? And for me, it serves my star to link in strength the children that now are with those that shall be.” I noted Medea’s conviction as she makes her choice:
LEADER: O lady, wilt though steel thyself to slay thy children?
MEDEA: I will, for that will stab my husband in the heart.
LEADER: It may, but you will be the saddest wife alive.
MEDEA: No matter; wasted is every word that comes ’twixt now and then. Ho!
An old story. But was Amanda the saddest wife alive? She might have panicked when Jason committed the hit-and-run with Eldon in the car, might have seen this as evidence the children were not safe with their father. But she had driven drunk with them. And dropped them from a bridge.
When I asked Gray whether Amanda might have been afraid of Jason raising the children without her, he said, “I would imagine that. She knew he would probably raise a son that would be an abuser, and a daughter that would be bore down on; he was going to command that family. That may have been a secondary purpose. But the thing is, nobody ever gets to that second part. I don’t even think her attorneys got to that part.”
He snapped his fingers. “They got her in and got her pled so fast . . . I wouldn’t have agreed probably with the way it was resolved.”
Gray thought the case should have gone to trial. What needed to happen, in his view, was for Amanda’s family and friends to have come forward; they needed to stand up and press with what mitigating evidence they had.
“Did they ever present any [mitigating evidence] in court?” he asked. I told him, not in open court.
“It disappoints me that her family completely abandoned her once they found out about the kids, the grandkids,” he said, and asked rhetorically if I had seen them at any of the early arraignments. “No,” he said, “because they had not been there.”
“They were playing the game from the start,” he said. “They could not come out on Amanda’s side if they ever wanted to see their grandchildren again.”
I knew Amanda’s parents had not abandoned her. They visited her in jail. The family had been afraid she would receive the death penalty and so encouraged her to plead guilty. Still, Gray’s idea that the Stotts felt they had to make a choice—publicly support their daughter, or try to keep access to their granddaughter—was one I had not considered. I told Gray the latter had not happened. The Stott family had not seen Trinity in five years.
“It didn’t play out the way they wanted it to,” he said. “They thought if they sucked up enough—bad Amanda, bad Amanda—that they would eventually be able to see their grandchildren and be part of [her] life. ‘You were right, Jason; Amanda, our daughter, was a mess; she did this horrible thing!’”
Gray felt Jason never had any intention of letting the Stotts see Trinity. The only option the Stotts had was to fight in court, and they had not taken it. Gray understood their fear that Amanda might have received the death penalty. “And yeah,” he said, “the DA might have pursued that,” but the mitigating evidence, in his opinion, would have probably more than canceled that out. As I cited the drug use and the hit-and-run, Gray shook his head.
“The thing is, they’re going to say that type of stuff isn’t relevant in a trial for her thing,” he said. “The mitigating damage is the abuse. The why she did it, the reason behind it, would have all been relevant.”
Relevancy was the key to how the case would be classified, he said.
“I don’t think it was premeditated in any way—and that, in essence, takes away the [aggravated] murder aspect of it,” he said. He believed “the stressor at the time, whatever that stressor might have been, there was something that pushed her button that night. Maybe it was the lack of [Jason] returning the phone calls.”
What had been said when Jason and his mother dropped off the children for the last time? Earlier in the evening, Chantel overheard Amanda telling Jason on the phone that she was trying to get a job but that it was hard. In February, Jason had come to pick up the children with, as Amanda would write, “a most beautiful and skinny and blond and smiling Kelly [sic] with a yellow shirt and a cute ponytail and Daddy all handsome with a new tie.” Later in the month, Amanda gave up custody of Gavin and was made to regret doing so. Piece by piece.
I told Gray that Jason had a new wife, two new children, and a new job with a different office equipment company.
“Other than obviously losing a child, it worked out perfectly,” he said. “He’s got the kids all to himself, he’s got a new woman to abuse, and he got rid of Amanda. It’s perfect, and he’s the hero. He’s the father of the children. He got all the media attention. He’s the knight in shining armor.”
That phrase, I said, had come up again and again.
“I don’t know the guy. All I can say is, he fits the profile of the guy who has the wife who does this type of thing,” he said. “It’s almost a kind of psychotic episode, of postpartum depression; women do these kinds of things, right? They do these drastic things, and then they drown their kids . . . This wasn’t anything like that. This was a guy who’d been bearing down on her for years and was eventually moving her out of his life completely and moving her out of the kids’ lives.”
Amanda had been moved off the stage. And then she did something that put her front and center. I asked Gray whether he had been at the jail when Amanda wrote on her intake paper that she wanted no media attention.
“I don’t know who would have filled that out,” he said. “She wasn’t in any position to respond to anything, especially ‘Do you want media attention?’ ‘Hmm, hold on; let me think about it for a second . . .’”
I told him I understood the resistance, but after five years I also wondered why she would not want to set the record straight. Again, Gray was shaking his head.
“When you want to ‘set the record straight,’ that means you’re opening up wounds,” he said. “It’s your worst day, and someone wants to write a book about your worst day—fuck me. I don’t know if I would be as cooperative, either.
“Now as a journalist,
I see you want to explain: ‘It wasn’t really your fault; it was your worst day because someone helped make it your worst day. There were factors that [contributed] and people want to know why.’ I get that. But when you’re in that spot, it’s like, ‘It was my worst day. I want to leave it alone.’”
Gray planted his hands on his thighs. “It’s surprising she didn’t reach out to more people; she had a really good group of friends,” he said. “But that’s part of [being] the victim. You don’t realize how many friends you have until something bad goes bad.”
In the 2004 book Are You There Alone? The Unspeakable Crimes of Andrea Yates, author Suzanne O’Malley wrote, “At the end of the day, Rusty Yates hired a handyman to smash to pieces the white porcelain bathtub in which his children had died.” I did not know whether the story was apocryphal.
In 2011, Multnomah County announced that the Sellwood Bridge would be replaced. The new Sellwood Bridge would be better able to sustain an earthquake and to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians, with LED lighting and benches where people might contemplate the river. The city had offered pieces of the historic bridge for sale. There had been no takers. A spokesman for the county said the distinctive orotund concrete railing, over which Amanda Stott-Smith dropped her two children, would be taken away and recycled.
PART THREE
Eldon and Trinity. Photo courtesy of Ryan Barron.
29
“It’s one of those things you look for: the repeating thing, the thing that after thirty years probably contains some nugget of truth, though it comes in different iterations, because at its heart it’s the same story.”
—Leah Carroll, Down City
May 23–28, 2009, Portland, Oregon
A call was logged into Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communication just before 1:20 a.m. on May 23, 2009: an incident near the Sellwood Bridge. Police were on-site within minutes. Officer R. Storm entered the waterfront condo of Pati Gallagher in response to her 911 call saying she heard someone screaming for help from the river.
Storm could hear the screams, too; they sounded like those of a child.
A fireboat was requested. Dispatch said a boat would be available in thirty minutes. Another officer pointed his flashlight at the water but saw only blackness. He shone the spotlight from the patrol car at the river. Still nothing.
Sergeants Matthew Stimmel and Pete Simpson arrived. Simpson walked north in an attempt to triangulate the screams with the other officers. At 2:09, he saw a civilian boat heading toward him. A woman in the boat cried, “We need help!” David Haag and Cheryl Robb brought the boat in fast. Simpson called for Emergency Medical Services.
Haag told Simpson they had found two children in the middle of the river. The girl and boy were in the boat. Haag carried the girl to the dock and wrapped her in a blanket. Simpson carried the boy and laid him on the dock. He checked the boy for a pulse and found none. He began CPR but could not resuscitate him.
Simpson carried the girl to the top of the Oregon Yacht Club dock to meet Emergency Medical Services in the parking lot. He saw no visible injuries on the girl. He noted that her missing front teeth seemed age-appropriate. He asked if she had any “owies.” The girl nodded. He asked where. She pointed to the right side of her jaw. Simpson wrote that she was “able to keep her eyes open and was crying.” Stimmel noted that the girl “had a distant stare and a chatter about her mouth.” She was taken by EMS to the hospital.
Portland and Multnomah County boats arrived and began the search for more bodies or evidence. The Sellwood Bridge was closed to traffic. At about 3:15, Stimmel drove the neighborhoods south of the bridge. He returned to the dock at 3:52. The medical examiner was photographing bruises on the boy’s face and knees and a scrape on his back. Stimmel assisted the medical examiner in getting the boy’s body on a gurney and into a vehicle.
At 3:22 a.m., the Tualatin Police Department took a missing person report on an adult female, a four-year-old male, and a seven-year-old female. The caller was Christine Duncan, who said she was the children’s grandmother. The names of the missing children were Eldon Smith and Trinity Smith. The adult female was their mother, Amanda Stott-Smith. Duncan explained that she and her son, Jason Smith, the children’s father, had brought the children to the family’s former house on Southwest Cayuse Court in Tualatin at approximately 7:30 p.m. Duncan said that Amanda “did not appear to be unstable or distraught at this time.” Family members had become concerned when Amanda did not return as expected to her parents’ home with the children. Duncan reported that after several attempts at calling Amanda failed, Jason reached her sometime between 2:00 and 2:40 a.m. He told his mother that Amanda sounded upset and “would not mention the children at any time . . . and told him she had nothing to live for.”
Officer Bryan Belcher also spoke with Jason. “Mr. Smith told me that Mrs. Smith has a history of alcohol abuse and depression,” he wrote. “She has been very depressed since their separation and missed her children.”
Officers with the Tualatin Police Department called Amanda. She did not answer. They drove by the Tualatin residence and found it empty. They spoke with Kathy Stott, who had been trying to reach Amanda for hours.
Based on this information, the Tualatin Police Department submitted an Emergency Request for Transactional Records with Cell Site/Location with AT&T in order to track Amanda’s cell phone. At 6:30 a.m., Amanda’s phone sent off two pings, but officers were unable to identify an exact location.
Around 7:00 a.m., Channel 12 Fox News in Portland reported that the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) was investigating two children found in the Willamette River. Christine Duncan heard this report and called 911. An officer on call wrote that Duncan “was sure based on the description that it was her grandchildren and was hysterical.”
At 7:45, the Tualatin Police Department received confirmation from PPB that the male child was found deceased. The female had been transported to Oregon Health & Science University and was expected to survive.
At 8:41, officers received an additional ping on Amanda’s phone.
At 8:45, Jason and Christine Duncan met Detective Michele Michaels in the downstairs lobby of Justice Center in downtown Portland. They were brought to the thirteenth floor and joined by Detective Bryan Steed. Jason and Christine Duncan were very concerned the children found in the river might be Jason’s son, Eldon, and daughter, Trinity. Jason recalled the last conversation he had with Amanda, sometime after 1:30 a.m. She sounded “odd” and “said something like, ‘Help me. Help me.’” She told him, “You’ve taken all my joy away. I don’t have my kids anymore.” She accused him of having an affair with Keli Townsend. Jason told detectives Amanda had gotten angry over this issue before, to the point where she had driven to the town in which she believed Keli lived in an effort to find her.
During this interview, the children were positively identified. A Crisis Response Team officer helped to tell Jason of the death of his son, and that his daughter was in the hospital and expected to make a full recovery. Immediately after telling Jason of Eldon’s death, detectives received word that Amanda had been located.
Amanda had stopped her car on the ninth floor of a parking garage two blocks from Pioneer Courthouse Square. She was parked nose to the wall. On street level, there was an Apple Store, a Tiffany & Company—places she might have gone to replace the computer she no longer had, a ring that in better days she had never seen. Dreams, all gone.
Around 9:00 a.m., Officer Wade Greaves and his partner received information regarding another cell phone ping on the phone belonging to the mother of the children in the river. The ping was traced to Southwest Fifth Avenue and Yamhill Street in downtown Portland. The officers drove the area and located the vehicle in the top level of a parking garage a block away. Greaves radioed that he had spotted the car, a 1991 Audi. He and other officers could see there was one female in the car. He further radioed that the car door was opening and the female was exiting; she was heading for the open wall of the p
arking structure. Greaves and other officers ran toward her. She climbed the wall and was over when Greaves grabbed for her.
“[She] dropped off the ledge while I held her from falling by her right wrist,” Greaves wrote.
“He kept her from falling nine levels to the sidewalk,” added Lieutenant H. Miller, who assisted in getting the female over the wall to safety and taking her into custody. She was handcuffed and placed in a patrol vehicle. She made no statement other than to complain that the handcuffs were too tight. Miller checked.
“They were not too tight,” he wrote.
Chantel and Daryl Gardner had been up all night, first driving around looking for Amanda, including in Washington Park, where they’d previously found her drunk and passed out in her car. They had not found Amanda, and by 10:30 a.m. they were in downtown Portland. When they were a half block from the Police Bureau, officers drove up with Amanda in custody. Chantel was newly pregnant. When she saw her sister being walked into the station, she collapsed on the sidewalk.
At 10:40 a.m., Amanda was in a Detective Division Holding Room. At 10:50, the handcuffs were removed. She was searched by Detective Michele Michaels. The log said Amanda was wearing a red floral top, size-thirteen white shorts, a black belt with white stitching, and sandals. She had two one-dollar bills in her front pocket. Photographs showed “scrapes on her arms, legs and right hand,” wrote Detective Steed. Steed’s report offered no opinion as to whether the fingernails of her children might have caused the scrapes. Between 11:00 and 11:39, Amanda squatted in the corner. At 12:30, she was taken out of her cell to be interviewed.
To the Bridge Page 22