To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

  Jason described his wife to detectives as “not a nurturer. Amanda focused on Amanda’s needs.” He said she was “extremely jealous” of his spending time with anyone other than her and for months had focused her jealousy on Keli Townsend, whom Jason described as someone he grew up with; their families were friends.

  Jason told detectives that when he met Amanda she was nine months pregnant by a man who committed suicide, and that at the time Jason thought she “had a very hard life and [he] felt sympathy for her.” He said he “tried to help her and used a lot of money to try to buy her the happiness she wanted” but had come to realize that she had “character flaws. She could be jealous and mean. She could be very vengeful. She would break things I care about to be vengeful.”

  The interview needed to be cut short because, detectives wrote, Jason “had an appointment to view Eldon.”

  Eldon Smith was four years, eight months, and twenty-seven days old at the time of death. He was forty-three-and-one-half inches long and weighed forty-five pounds. His clothing included a yellow T-shirt with gray sleeves and a bulldog logo on the front. He wore long black pants, white socks, and Marvel Comics underwear. He was wearing no shoes. Kayakers later retrieved a child-sized sneaker from the waters beneath the Sellwood Bridge.

  “This unfortunate case involves the death of a young, currently unidentified Caucasian boy approximately 3–5 years of age who was found unconscious and not breathing in the Willamette River,” the medical examiner wrote on May 23, the day the autopsy was performed and before Eldon had been identified. “Details await survival and a return to consciousness from the little girl who will, hopefully, shed some light on the mystery surrounding how these two children ended up in Portland’s Willamette River near Oaks Park and the Sellwood Bridge in total darkness screaming for help.”

  With the exception of contusions to his face, neck, and upper chest, injuries later attributed to the blunt force with which he hit the water, Eldon was “well-developed, well-nourished, well-hydrated.” His limbs, trunk, hands, and feet were, in autopsy parlance, “unremarkable.” After Eldon’s body was opened “with the usual Y-shaped incision,” his organs were examined. These were likewise unremarkable. His heart weighed 107 grams. His spleen weighed 55 grams and was “smooth and glistening.” His brain weighed 1,558 grams; it had suffered no trauma. Eldon was perfect in nearly every way, except that he was dead, and because of the manner of his death, the perfect boy had been taken apart.

  Jason visited with Eldon when his son was put back together. He visited every day. Someone who asked not to be identified said that once Eldon was brought to the mortuary in Eugene, Jason sat with him there for more than a week, and even after the memorial, he did not leave his son’s side.

  On May 28, Detectives Steed and Michaels visited Amanda’s brother-in-law, Daryl Gardner, where he worked at West Coast Paper. They wanted to speak with him again because the principal at his sons’ elementary school had contacted the police. The principal told police that Chantel mentioned how Amanda had once asked Daryl something like, “How would you feel if you found your wife and kids floating dead in the river?”

  The detectives and Daryl went to a break room. Daryl began by telling them he did not like Jason and was not “overly fond” of Amanda. He called Jason “a habitual liar” and said Amanda was “no saint.”

  Daryl characterized Jason and Amanda’s marriage as “the most unstable” he had ever seen; they abused each other “physically and emotionally. . . . She has hit him and beat him up like crazy. He’s had a knife. They have thrown each other’s clothes out the window.”

  Daryl confirmed that Amanda had been pregnant when she and Jason met. She gave the baby up for adoption and hadn’t “mentioned that in years.” He told detectives, “Neither set of parents approved of the marriage. . . . He [Smith] married for control. She [Stott-Smith] married for money.”

  Daryl said Amanda was “a good mother, except for the cleaning up after, the feeding, and the caretaking part.” He said she “used to be a very good mom, except for Gavin. He [Gavin] had a hard time with both of them [Amanda and Jason].” Jason had been “not good” with Gavin and caused the boy to be “withdrawn.” Daryl described Gavin as being close with the Stott family, but “closed off. Distant. The physical abuse by Jason and Mandy and the mental abuse hurt him.”

  Daryl said Jason had been a “zombie” and used OxyContin prior to entering rehab. Daryl told detectives the story of Jason taking family leave from work by claiming Amanda was pregnant when she was not. “She felt she couldn’t appear at his work after that because it was a lie,” detectives wrote. Daryl said he believed Jason had wanted the time off so he could use some of the drugs he had brought back from Mexico. Daryl said Amanda told him Jason had brought “50,000 pills of prescription medication” over the border.

  Four sources had said that Jason had brought back drugs, and likely OxyContin, from Mexico. It was true, or it wasn’t. There was no way to know unless Jason admitted to doing so, and even then, his reported reflexive lying, as well as his and Amanda’s predilection to play the victim, would likely result in the story shooting off in another direction.

  Daryl said Amanda lied to the family a lot. She had not, for instance, told them she had lost custody of Trinity and Eldon. Jackie Dreiling had said that Amanda “would not say anything bad” about her husband. Daryl confirmed this.

  “Jason was her god,” he told detectives. “When it came to Jason, she was an easy person to mess with.”

  Detective Michaels wanted to know more about the statements Amanda made to Daryl about putting the children in the river.

  “It’s not the kind of thing someone says and means,” he said. “I’m not making excuses for her, but I believe in my heart she didn’t know what she was doing when she did it.”

  Asked again about any statements Amanda might have made to him about doing something to the children, Daryl said, “She once said the perfect revenge against Jason would be to do something like this, but then it wasn’t something she could do.”

  Here, finally, the word “revenge” appeared on record.

  “[Daryl] said he didn’t think she ever meant it and didn’t take it as a serious threat but more of just being upset about the situation with Jason,” the report continued. Detectives pressed: Had Amanda been more specific about what she would do?

  “Roughly,” Daryl answered, “it was that getting rid of the kid would be a good way to get back at Jason.”

  Michaels asked Daryl whether Amanda had asked him how he’d feel if he found his wife and kids floating in the river.

  “She asked me,” Daryl said, “‘Can I throw your wife in the river?’ She was just kidding because Chantel was giving her a hard time.”

  This was not germane to what detectives were trying to get at.

  “I asked him,” Michaels wrote, “if he could remember more specifically.”

  Daryl said, “She said, ‘the perfect revenge against Jason would be to kill the kids. But I wouldn’t do that.’”

  And there it was. And just to make sure:

  “I asked,” Michaels wrote, “if she mentioned killing herself, and he said she did not.”

  Picturing Daryl in the break room, I wondered whether he realized what he had revealed, whether he understood that now the case could be built for premeditation. Daryl probably did not know, or did not know right away, that he had led detectives to a place where Amanda’s idea was made tangible, because he did not see things the way detectives did. If he did not take seriously what Amanda said about exacting revenge on Jason by killing their children, if to him it was one more lunacy in the least stable marriage he had ever seen, the detectives did take it seriously.

  Discussing Amanda’s role in Eldon’s death and Trinity’s injuries, detectives noted the last thing Daryl said to them: “In my eyes, she is guilty.”

  The police apprehended Amanda nine hours after she dropped her children from the bridge. Within forty-eight hours, de
tectives had interviewed her and Jason’s families as well as people who had direct and indirect involvement with her and the children on the night of the crime. More than three dozen officers, detectives, and criminalists from the forensic evidence department, at least two people from the medical examiner’s office, and an uncounted number of medical staff were among those involved.

  This was fast, solid, effective work. The officers and others operated in life-or-death zones, where resolutions were needed and outcomes expected. The public needed resolution in order to feel safe, needed consensus that what Amanda had done was monstrous and that she must be locked away. As subject to interpretation as the justice system can be, there is satisfaction in conclusion. Without it, we might have chaos; we might fall off the earth, or be dropped from a bridge. As a young teenager, my daughter drew me a Christmas card of the solar system, on which she wrote, “Thank you for being my gravity all my life.”

  Everything I had learned about this case showed that Amanda, for a short or long period of time, had been the center of her own universe. She defied or deflected the pleas of those around her and drifted further and further from putting her children’s needs first. The alarm this caused others was palpable. Nathan and Chelsea Beck had repeatedly tried to convince various agencies that Gavin was in danger. Kathy Stott checked and rechecked her daughter into mental health clinics. During an August 2008 interview, she and Chantel told a Department of Human Services caseworker that “Amanda knows how to ‘play the system’ and that she is skilled at presenting well.”

  It would be easy to blame the system for breaking down, to say, “If DHS had done its job right, Eldon would be alive today.” This would be asking caseworkers to see through the walls of lies Amanda and Jason had been building, together and separately, all their adult lives.

  After years of looking, I could no longer differentiate between Jason’s and Amanda’s pathologies. Who was abusing whom? Who slashed whose tires? Did Amanda really sleep in her car on Christmas Eve and watch her children celebrate the holiday without her? What did she mean when she wrote that Jason “has taught me everything I know”? Did she mean it at all?

  The exertions the couple employed to take each other down were sustained and, in their way, viscous. Amanda and Jason may have wound up in the same nexus by different routes, but by the end of 2008, and likely much earlier, they were both stuck there, together with their children. Maybe it felt, for a time, like them against the world. Then Jason decided he wanted out. He had the means to get out, and he took it. This for Amanda was heartbreak but also betrayal, not least because she could not find a way out herself, until she did. She would get them all out in 2.41 seconds.

  30

  Two dogs announced visitors at the front door of the Beck home in Vancouver, Washington. Chelsea Beck waved them down.

  “Forgive the mess,” she said of the boxes and craft projects on the dining table. Chelsea and Nathan had purchased the long, low ranch house in 2014. It was closer to the church they attended, and Nathan’s brother planned to build a house on the footprint of a former cow barn on the three-acre property, a barn that Emily, Chelsea and Nathan’s eight-year-old daughter, wanted to show me. In her shorts and cowboy boots, Emily hop-skipped toward the barn. The dogs stayed at her heels. Crickets, rarely heard ten miles southwest in Portland, chirruped in the green-gold landscape, hazy with dust on a hot Saturday afternoon in September 2015.

  “Watch for holes,” said Gavin, who seemed to make a point of staying beside me. He had turned eighteen in March. He said he was five foot seven but looked taller. He had straight glossy black hair, strong eyebrows, and the beginnings of a mustache that, asked to guess, I might have said had yet to be shaved. He wore dark Levi’s, a black T-shirt, and rubber Crocs sandals, which he said worked well for the terrain. Were the pocks and dried mud holes the work of gophers?

  “Rabbits!” Emily called over her shoulder.

  “Maybe snakes,” said Chelsea.

  “Rats, Mom,” said Gavin, who would be in a position to know. The previous summer, he had lived here alone for two weeks, except for drop-ins by his dad, to do scraping, painting, and cleanup. Had he ever been scared, staying on the property by himself?

  “No,” he said in a way that implied, what would there logically be to be scared of? When I asked if there were still rats on the property, Gavin broke into an open smile.

  “The dogs,” he said, “took it upon themselves to eliminate trespassers.”

  The Becks had also moved away from Portland to get some physical and psychological distance from the Stotts and Smiths, whose ongoing struggles Nathan had been sucked into essentially since meeting Amanda. Fighting to see Gavin had cost Nathan and Chelsea thousands of dollars and untold aggravation, for no good reason they could see.

  Gavin graduated from Benson Polytechnic High School in June 2015. Within two weeks, he had a job at a Goodwill sorting center, five miles from their Vancouver home. Because he did not yet have a driver’s license, he biked both ways. This and being eighteen kept him gangly.

  “I am the least health-conscious person I know,” he told me, again with the open smile. “You think I look this way from playing video games and eating junk food? You’re right!”

  We were seated at the end of an L-shaped couch in the Becks’ living room. After showing me a new pair of pink cowboy boots (“With gold,” she said, running her finger along a toe tip), Emily strummed a toy electric guitar. Chelsea maintained the illusion of not hovering over Gavin’s conversation by sitting in a recliner across the room.

  Gavin said he liked the work at Goodwill—trying to be the first to stock newly emptied tables—because it gave him the opportunity to observe acutely, to identify problems and come up with solutions.

  Coming up with solutions was what Gavin liked to do. He decided his senior year that he would join the navy, because the navy would pay for college. He had been on his high school’s robotics team for four years, captain or cocaptain for the last two, and worked on programmable logic controllers and industrial robot arms. He had taken apart his Kindle and added a program that allowed him to play Game Boy games on it.

  “I want to see how this works with this and that,” he said, “and why things are the way they are.”

  Gavin had the habits of an engineer. He had an example in his father, who had run electronic systems on nuclear submarines as an active member of the service. Nathan currently served in the reserves, including this weekend aboard a rescue vessel stationed off San Diego.

  “When a submarine sinks unintentionally, it’s up to teams like his to get the crewmen off, starting within seventy-two hours,” Gavin said of his father’s work, work that required precision and reliability, required doing what you said you were going to do lest other people die.

  I noted that Gavin calling Chelsea “Mom” meant there were no longer any children who referred to Amanda as mother.

  Gavin had been the one to wake his grandparents when Amanda did not return home with his siblings. That detectives had not interviewed Gavin until seven months after the crime, that the press had rarely mentioned him, struck Chelsea as yet more people showing Gavin he did not matter. Whether he wanted public acknowledgment was not the point. Chelsea wanted him acknowledged. To that end, she read a statement at Amanda’s sentencing in April 2010, which read in part:

  Since May 23, 2009, our family has forever changed. For my husband, Gavin’s father and myself, we worry about our children in a different way now. We worry if they walk around the corner to the grocery store and we can’t see them; if Gavin doesn’t get home from school right on time; and the list goes on. You name something that a parent worries about and compound that times one hundred. Our family could be just as devastated as Eldon’s because Gavin was with his mother for visitation that weekend and chose not to go with her that night to pick up the kids. When we think about that, it causes us as parents to not want to let our kids take any risks or do things on their own. That is unfair to us al
l. Amanda has taken that freedom and innocence away from us.

  As the mother of Gavin I see every day how this has changed him. He loves stability and wavers when things don’t stay the same. He has had to learn to talk deeply about his broken heart, his pain, his anger, all before he turned thirteen. He has to relearn how he and Trinity will relate to one another as they share this tragedy of having their brother taken from them, each child unknowing of the things that might bring up pain when they just discuss day-to-day life. No children should have to monitor themselves when sharing with their siblings, in hopes that they don’t say something that will hurt the other more. Gavin faces life knowing he did not go with Amanda that night. He will continue to ask himself, if he had been there, could he have stopped her. The truth is that even though he thankfully was safe that night, with her choice, Amanda did throw Gavin away that day too.

  Chelsea cried her way through this speech in court. Amanda did not cry or, as far as I saw, look Chelsea’s way. She also did not let Chelsea adopt Gavin. Chelsea had written Amanda in jail, asking her to release her parental rights to her son. Amanda wrote back saying she wanted to hear from Gavin that this was what he wanted. Gavin had written Amanda, saying that it was.

  “She wrote back to say that’s not his ‘voice,’” Chelsea told me in 2010. Gavin wrote Amanda again, as did Chelsea. Amanda did not respond. Chelsea wrote once more.

  “I said, ‘Show him you have some grace for him, the way the judge had for you and your life,’” she said. “It would show Gavin she was human and had some love for him.”

  Amanda responded to this letter.

  “She said I was ‘asinine,’ and how dare I say she was not a good mother to Gavin?” Chelsea said.

  Amanda instead suggested a rapprochement in jail with her surviving son. “Tell Gavin to forgive,” Chelsea recalled Amanda writing. “The visiting area has so much warmth.”