To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

  The relationship, I suggested, had elements of deception from the start.

  “They were both narcissistic people. They were both in it for themselves. . . . They are both not necessarily good people, but it was both of them combined that created the problem,” Gavin said. “I think what it came down to, with both of them, was they tried to keep up this illusion that everything was fine for so long, and then to a point they just couldn’t do it anymore.”

  It sounded like a lot of work.

  “I imagine,” he said, “it takes its toll.”

  EPILOGUE

  On January 19, 2014, I sent a card to Amanda for what I sensed would be the last of our one-way correspondence:

  Dear Amanda—

  Please accept my apologies if my contacting you has brought you and your family unhappiness. I might have shown grace and patience regarding your wishes not to speak with me (rather than asking you to see things my way), and understanding as to why. I do understand. I send you as always my best regards.

  Understanding is a fluid proposition, and a year later I would see things differently. That I did would not matter to Amanda, who stood firm, sending me two messages in six years, both times via Samantha Hammerly. The first came by email on New Year’s Day, 2012:

  I did ask her [Amanda] about corresponding with you, either in person or by mail. She is not interested in any at all. She said to tell you that she sees it as rehashing her sins, for which she needed to answer to God about only, and He has forgiven her.

  Amanda did not mention needing to answer to her surviving children. I wondered about that. Chelsea Beck did not wonder. She also did not give Gavin the letter Amanda sent each year on his birthday, with a check for thirty dollars.

  The other message came soon after I sent the last postcard. Samantha and I were at the burger bar. She’d had a tough year. She had questioned her faith and left the church she attended with her husband and children. She had been a Christian since Amanda took her, in eighth grade, to services at the Stott family’s church. I told Samantha I had heard less than favorable things about this church. Jackie Dreiling, who had worked in administration there, told me she had left because of the pastor’s attitude, especially toward women, which included telling Chantel that if she left his ministry she would go to hell. April Anson recalled Amanda telling her that, during a marriage counseling session there, the pastor had said of Amanda, “‘She’s a whore; she’s a bitch; she’s a slut. You need to figure it out because you’re living in sin, and the devil has a hold of your soul.’”

  I could not know whether the pastor (who had been instructed by Amanda not to speak with me, and who has since died) said these things, only that Amanda said he had, or that this was how April remembered it.

  A week after our lunch at the burger bar, Samantha again asked Amanda if she would speak with me. Why Samantha did this I did not know, but she had and received a variation on the first answer, which Samantha emailed to me.

  She is convinced you are only out to drudge [sic] up horrible memories and events and make a buck off her.

  Depending on which end of the tube you looked through, Amanda’s summation of what I was doing here was exactly true and exactly false.

  More than a year after this lunch, after I learned things that would harden my sympathies toward Amanda, after official reports had shown that people rewrite their stories by the hour, that we read through subjective lenses, I came to a place that felt as solid as any would, and feel confident saying Amanda was ill prepared. What portion is attributable to what Jackie Dreiling termed “Defective Character Disorder,” to religious inculcation, to Jason’s dominance and addictions, or to Amanda’s narcissism, catalyzed by spite, can continue to be debated. There is no such thing as an immutable truth, much as our hearts might yearn for it and our justice systems demand it; there are only the stories we tell ourselves. But there are facts, and one—the one that started this story—is that Amanda tried to murder two of her children and did murder one, which tells us she was not prepared to navigate her own or her children’s lives, and we know this because she threw her children off a bridge. We are right when we claim mothers do not do this out of the blue, that doing so is aberrant behavior. We may not when we are young know why we are certain of this—Eldon’s friend Max did not make another best friend at school for several years after Eldon’s murder because he was afraid that friend would die—but we know this as adults, which makes it all the more troubling, or troubling to me, when judges, attorneys, family, and strangers promote some version of “what Amanda Stott-Smith did will never be understood,” to which I counter, with all due respect and because we do not know what we will find, that we can understand if we try.

  POSTSCRIPT

  On February 6, 2016, Trinity Smith and Gavin Beck were allowed to communicate via FaceTime. It was the first time they had seen or spoken to each other since the boat dedication in December 2010. Chelsea Beck and Christine Duncan, with whom Trinity was then living, arranged for the contact between the children. Jason Smith was not consulted.

  In March 2016, Gavin Beck joined the US Navy, where as part of basic training he would learn how to survive in open water.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When I was very young, my brother and I played a board game called Candy Land. In my recollection, pieces advanced along a winding path with the help of guides offering hints and totems. That I recently looked up this game and saw that’s not how it works at all does not alter my sense that, during the years I worked on the story of Amanda and the children, others led the way. Some of these people walked with me for a long time. Others offered what they knew and disappeared. That anyone would speak about an issue as charged as the murder of a child by his mother seems to me an act of faith, and I am indebted to those who communicated with me, in some cases over a period of years:

  April Anson, Sara and Ryan Barron, Chelsea and Gavin Beck, Pati Gallagher, Tiffany and Shanon Gray, Samantha Hammerly, Jen Johnson, Isaac LaGrone, Justin Montgomery, Thomas Parrish, Sabrina and Max Trembley, others who go unnamed, and those who asked not to be named. Whatever I am able to offer the story is thanks to them and the love and concern they carry for those who were lost.

  Ken Hadley is wise and wry and patient. I thank him for letting me stick to him like a limpet during the run-up to Amanda’s sentencing and for being a pal afterward.

  What began as all-sorrowful conversations with Jackie Dreiling gave way to debating politics, going to lunch, and watching daytime TV. This might seem remarkable (and it is). It is also a result of becoming friends, if under most unlikely circumstances. Jackie, who died in 2016, told me one of the reasons she spoke with me was because “it’s the only way I can leave any information for Trinity. Tell her how much I love her. And how much I miss not being able to see her grow up.”

  My appreciation to the agencies and organizations that provided records, including the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, the Portland Police Bureau, the Tualatin Police Department, the Oregon Department of Corrections, Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, the Circuit Court for the State of Oregon, and the Counties of Clackamas, Lane, Multnomah, and Washington. Thanks to Matt Davis, then at the Portland Mercury, Kyle Iboshi at KGW-TV, and Amy Frazier at KOIN-TV. My thanks to Rene Denfeld, attorney Michael Rose, and Hank Stern for help in navigating various legal and governmental channels.

  My thanks to readers of this manuscript in its various forms: Victoria Martin Del Campo, Charles Dubow, David Rensin (twice!), Nanci McCloskey, Ali Selim, Claire Anderson-Wheeler, Claire MF Rood, and the small groups at Queens University of Charlotte. To Steve De Jarnatt for the writing sojourn in Port Townsend, Hillary Johnson for her editor’s eye and big brain, and Juliette Levy, who let me read her the entire manuscript aloud and fed me as I did so.

  Matt Welch sent an email of encouragement during a dark time, a note so comprehensive and convincing I kept it on my bulletin board for four years (and referred to it as needed). Katherine Boo’s friendsh
ip and generosity helped push me through to finish the book. Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich and Robert Kolker were open handed in their introductions to agent and editor. All these writers floor me with their dedication to follow hard stories where they want to go. Read their work.

  My thanks to the editors who gave me assignments as I worked on the book: Jeff Baker, Robert Messenger, Tom Beer, Emily White, Erik Lundegaard, Tom Christie, and, in perpetuity, Janet Duckworth.

  Robert Guinsler at Sterling Lord Literistic took the manuscript over the transom and did so with enthusiasm and effectiveness. Barry Harbaugh at Little A bought the book and knew what to do with it. I am tremendously grateful to his editor’s eye and sensibility. Angela Moody’s cover design captured the book in one image, thank you. Also, to the fact-checking department, which clarified thousands of points, saved me from evident numbers dyslexia, and were able to snatch a near-finished draft from the jaws of a computer glitch.

  My thanks to the home crew: Josh Gibby; Tim Sampson; Jonathan Tinn; my parents, Kathy Hayes and Richard Rommelmann; everyone at Ristretto Roasters; and Tafv’s superstar crew, the wondrous young ones.

  To Deborah Reed, beloved Lady Deborah, who from the day we met has made life better and better yet.

  I am privileged to spend my life with the most calm, clear-eyed, and honorable people I know: my husband, Din Johnson—steady, strong, true—and my daughter, Tafv Sampson, shining light, seeker and bequeather of beauty, my very heart.

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  I am indebted to the following authors and how they put together their work. I looked to these books, as well as to an uncounted number of articles and essays, as I figured out how to write this story.

  Boo, Katherine. Behind the Beautiful Forevers. New York: Random House, 2012.

  Buss, David. The Murderer Next Door. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

  Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. New York: Random House, 1965.

  Carrère, Emmanuel. The Adversary. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000.

  Cleckley, Hervey. The Mask of Sanity. St. Louis, MO: The C.V. Mosby Company, 1941.

  Cullen, Dave. Columbine. New York: Twelve, 2009.

  Didion, Joan. After Henry. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

  Dow, David R. The Autobiography of an Execution. New York: Twelve, 2010.

  Gilmore, Mikal. Shot in the Heart. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

  Hare, Robert D. Without Conscience. New York: The Guildford Press, 1993.

  Junger, Sebastian. A Death in Belmont. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

  Kipnis, Laura. How to Become a Scandal. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010.

  Kirn, Walter. Blood Will Out. New York: Liveright, 2014.

  Kolker, Robert. Lost Girls. New York: HarperCollins, 2013.

  Krakauer, John. Under the Banner of Heaven. New York: Anchor Books, 2004.

  Lazar, Zachary. Evening’s Empire. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

  Lowry, Beverly. Crossed Over. New York: Knopf, 1992.

  Mailer, Norman. The Executioner’s Song. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1979.

  Malcolm, Janet. Iphigenia in Forest Hills. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

  Malcolm, Janet. The Journalist and the Murderer. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

  McKee, Geoffrey R. Why Mothers Kill. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  Meyer, Cheryl L., and Michelle Oberman. Mothers Who Kill Their Children. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

  Oberman, Michelle, and Cheryl L. Meyer. When Mothers Kill: Interviews from Prison. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

  Olmi, Veronique. Beside the Sea. Translated by Adriana Hunter. Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2012.

  O’Malley, Suzanne. Are You There Alone? The Unspeakable Crimes of Andrea Yates. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

  Rule, Anne. Small Sacrifices. New York: Dutton, 1987.

  Stout, Martha. The Sociopath Next Door. New York: Broadway Books, 2005.

  Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher. London: Walker Books, 2008.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © Tafv Sampson 2016

  Nancy Rommelmann has written for the LA Weekly, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, among other publications. She is the author of several previous works of nonfiction and fiction. She grew up in New York City and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Find out more at nancyromm.com.