A strange thing happened as we kissed—I began to replay our rounds of beer pong in my head, and suddenly all these deep truths of the game revealed themselves to me. I understood the shots I should have made, the times I’d held off the ball, waiting for my cousin to make a move when the move was mine to make, and even how I’d been balancing on my heels when I needed to shift more onto my toes. It’s not that I wasn’t present with Tessa, wildly in the moment with her—no, the opposite was true. I was so entirely in the moment that the whole night seemed to bleed together into one pulsing beat. Flashes from my past and from my future strobed through my mind. Everything made sense to me—where I’d been, the mistakes I’d made, and where I wanted to be and what I had to do to get there. Musical prodigies, genius mathematicians, and world-class athletes call this being in the zone. Maybe it’s what Olympic Ping-Pong players feel in the heat of competition, closing in on the medal rounds, this sensation of profound understanding and insight, as close to nirvana as I’ve ever felt.
In the midst of this I felt my entire body jerked upward, like a beached whale in a chopper’s sling, and then I was heaved face first into a wall (the Sixers wall, incidentally), Bauer’s iron elbow pinned to my spine.
“What the fuck is going on right now?” he yelled with anguish and rage. He pulled my right arm behind my back, and my shoulder burned with pain, as though the socket might cave and let my limb loose. I opened my eyes and discovered that my face was pressed directly into the eerie portrait of Sixers point guard Maurice Cheeks. Before I could respond or even cry out, Bauer dumped me out of his room, into the stairwell, and slammed his door shut.
I faced the door; I could hear him shouting on the other side. Then, after a half minute, he settled down, and not long after I heard him and Tessa start fucking. Hollowed out, on the edge of tears, I wandered down the stairs. In the dark living room, a dozen of my cousin’s housemates were passed out on sofas and across the floor like victims of an atomic blast, caught in SportsCenter’s grim flicker. I grabbed a stray cushion, continued on down to the basement, and sat against a wall, sipping on the last third of a beer, lost as an old-timer at the end of the bar. At last I righted the Ping-Pong table, stretched out on top of it with the sofa cushion as a pillow, and fell fast asleep. At dawn, I slipped out of the house before anyone else was up, and a day later I was headed back to Michigan. On the train ride home I wrote Tessa a long love letter that I mailed to her at her parents’ house in Glasgow, Delaware (the registrar’s office gave me the address). I proposed that we run off together out west. I never heard back.
But it’s funny the way one night can shape you. For example, I discovered that night that Ping-Pong tables are oddly comfortable to sleep on. I’ve slept on about thirty in the years since; I will always sleep on a Ping-Pong table if the choice is between a Ping-Pong table and the floor. Also, whenever I’m at the bar and I glance at a TV hanging from the rafters and happen to catch any Philadelphia sports highlights, I still get a strange, hot jolt—those murals in my cousin’s bedroom the night I kissed Tessa, they’re to credit and to blame. I’ll even pass a dude on the street wearing a Phillies jersey and that room comes back to me, Mike Schmidt’s bug-eyed face, the taste of Tessa’s lips.
If I’d known that night, as I sat sipping the last third of a beer in the basement of my cousin’s frat house, that I’d still be in love with Tessa twenty years later, that I’d be spending four nights a week at bars in cities like Mobile, Alabama, and Kansas City and Little Rock, falling in love with Tessas, dying to kiss them, would I have done anything differently? Maybe once a year I get to kiss a Tessa, the other eleven months and change I get tossed out of Bauer’s room and sleep on Ping-Pong tables, but still, if it happens even once a year, all those trips to the bar are worth it. I’ll never be the kind of drinker who drinks to get wild or drinks to get numb; I’ll be the kind of drinker who drinks because that’s what you do at a bar, and I’ll hang out at bars because that’s where you’ll find Tessas.
Tessa, I still love you. Tessa, see what you’ve done?
THE STRONGEST MAN IN THE WORLD
Once a year, maybe every year and a half, I go to visit my friend Byron Case at a sprawling, maximum-security state prison called Crossroads Correctional Center in the town of Cameron, Missouri. Picture me early this morning, driving up I-35 from Kansas City in a soft, warm rain, Byron’s mom, Evelyn, in the passenger seat of my van, telling energetic stories, and in the back, my brother Peter, listening in and looking out the window. It’s November, the week before Thanksgiving, and once we’re through the suburbs, the rain-soaked malls and Best Buys and Outback Steakhouses slide away, and dense patches of woods, filled with black, wet trees, their branches shaken free of leaves, rise up on either side of the highway, beside vast empty fields of yellow wheat and dirt, and an occasional farmhouse or pair of sagging barns slumbering in the distance out on the rolling plains. Crows feasting on a roadkill deer halfway on the shoulder, halfway in the ditch, scatter as we rumble past, and I watch in my rearview mirror as they reconvene. Every time I make this drive, I feel the same heavy combination of emotions—excitement to see my friend, and an unshakable melancholy that another year has passed and Byron is still locked up. In my sadness, the world grows more vivid.
After an hour, Evelyn says, “Okay, it’s this one,” and we coast up an exit ramp, hang a left, then a right, and roll down Cameron’s main commercial drag—a Wal-Mart, a four-screen movie theater, a bowling alley, two pawnshops, a shuttered appliance store, and a guy under a tarp selling tires in the lot of a long-forgotten Dairy Queen. At the end of the stretch, oddly close to town—where you might expect to find the high school instead—a series of low-slung tan brick buildings folds into sight. If it weren’t for the high, chain-link fences and fearsome rolls of razor wire, you could mistake the prison for the campus of an aging, underfunded community college. The lot out front is so full that it’s hard to find a parking space, a reminder of just how many locals the prison employs.
Inside the lobby, we fill Evelyn’s clear change purse with quarters for the vending machines, leave our keys and wallets in a tiny coin locker, show our driver’s licenses to an officer at the desk, and walk through a metal detector and on through two sets of security doors into a Plexiglas antechamber that looks out into the visiting room. Evelyn is buzzing; these visits with her son, she’s told me, are the highlight of her week. She introduces me and Peter to some of the other folks in the waiting room—the parents, spouses, and young kids of other inmates at Crossroads. There’s a compassionate, knowing kindness and friendliness to the small talk—whatever anguish you experience when your son or husband is locked up, it’s nice to be around people who won’t judge you and understand exactly what you’re going through.
Even as she chats freely, Evelyn keeps one eye trained on the visiting room, and when she sees Byron walk in, she cries out with the giddy chirp of a teenage girl, “Here he is! Here’s Byron!” She gives him a friendly, excited wave, and Byron breaks out in a smile and waves back. He’s in his late twenties, pale-skinned with buzz-cut black hair, a wispy goatee, and the open, friendly look of a college kid working the help desk at Barnes & Noble. He smooths out the folds in his gray prison scrubs, waiting for an officer to retrieve us from the waiting room. Once we’re inside, he gives his mom a hug, then turns and wraps a strong hug on me. “It’s great to see you, man!” he says with quiet vigor.
“It’s great to see you, Byron!” We release. “You remember my brother Peter?”
“Of course I do,” says Byron, and when he and Peter share a hug, that, for some reason, is when I start to get teary. “Well,” says Byron, looking out across the room, “let’s find a place to sit down. I believe we’ve got some catching up to do!”
*
Lincoln Cemetery, on the eastern edge of Kansas City, is best known as the burial place of jazz legend Charlie “Bird” Parker. It occupies a large swath of forest and open land on Truman Road just off I-435, opposite a
stretch of gas stations, adult bookstores, and seedy motels. On October 23, 1997, around four a.m., a Kansas City cop on routine patrol was rolling a slow loop through the pitch-black graveyard when he saw a teenage girl lying on her back near the road. He figured she was either drunk or passed out, but when he climbed from his squad car and approached her, he found, to his horror, that she’d been shot in the face at close range. Blood had pooled in the grass under her head. She was cool to the touch, as though she’d been dead for hours, her eyes wide open. Her name was Anastasia WitbolsFeugen, an eighteen-year-old college freshman.
The next day, before police had a chance to question him, Anastasia’s boyfriend, Justin Bruton, was found dead behind an abandoned warehouse fifty miles south of town; he’d turned a shotgun on himself. After some investigation, the cops told the local press that they believed it was a murder-suicide, though they lacked conclusive evidence, and soon the case faded from view.
Years later, though, an old friend of Anastasia’s named Kelly Moffett, who was being treated for an addiction to crack cocaine, came to the cops with a different story. She told them she’d witnessed the murder of her friend, and that the killer was not Justin, it was the guy who’d been her own boyfriend at the time—Justin’s best friend, Byron Case. Kelly said Byron and Justin had felt that Anastasia was “annoying” and had decided to kill her, and that Byron had pulled the trigger. Byron was arrested and tried for the crime.
The prosecution had no murder weapon, no crime-scene DNA—in fact, no physical evidence of any kind. Their star witness had a fragile mental state and had spent time on the street strung out on drugs, and there was no one to corroborate her story. Any motive for Byron was murky at best. But the case went forward, and the prosecution found ways to sneak in mentions of Byron’s “goth” lifestyle—the fact that he wore a black trench coat, and that he used antique autopsy pictures, pulled from the Internet, as screensavers on his computer. The Jackson County jurors—blue-collar, churchgoing, and conservative—appeared to be swayed by this testimony, according to the accounts I read. As for Kelly Moffett’s reliability as a witness, the prosecution turned her past as a drug addict on its head—they suggested that she’d gone downhill only because she’d witnessed Anastasia’s death and had been harboring a “horrible secret,” though Byron contends that she’d been unstable and had experimented with drugs long before Anastasia was killed.
Byron was too poor to hire his own lawyer and was represented in court by a public defender named Horton Lance. While many public defenders are known for their seriousness and effectiveness, they’re also notoriously underfunded and overworked. One of my close friends, a public defender in the Bronx, often complains of being stretched too thin, without adequate resources to research cases or the time to properly prepare for a trial, and worries that his most skilled colleagues burn out quickly, while the incompetent ones are rarely weeded out. Perhaps these factors explain some of the crucial mistakes Horton Lance made during Byron’s defense, as revealed in the case’s 1,290-page trial transcript.
Now, I’m no courtroom pro, but I’ve spent enough time around trial lawyers to know that although defendants are meant to be presumed innocent, with the burden of proof in the hands of the prosecution, things often don’t play out that way. At Byron’s trial, the prosecution offered a single, compelling, and vaguely plausible explanation for Anastasia’s death, and made up for their lack of material evidence with convincing, emotional witnesses, especially Kelly Moffett. Horton Lance, on the other hand, failed to present any alternative scenarios for the defense. He said only that the cemetery was bordered by sketchy neighborhoods, the oblique implication being that Anastasia might have been the victim of a stranger’s act of random violence. (Indeed, in the years before and since Anastasia’s death, other random shootings have dotted that stretch of Truman Road close to the cemetery.) Lance never delved into the fact that Anastasia’s boyfriend, Justin, had purchased firearms in the past, while Byron had never even held a gun in his life. And he did little to highlight the inconsistencies in Kelly’s account or to reflect on what motivations she might have had for lying about Byron’s involvement.
At one point, Kelly blurted out from the stand that she’d passed a lie detector test, which was highly misleading. First of all, polygraphs are rarely admissible in a courtroom because of their unreliability, and the truth was, she hadn’t taken a polygraph, she’d taken an even less reliable voice stress test, and in that conversation she’d actually attested to Byron’s innocence. Although the judge cautioned the jury to disregard Kelly’s remark, the damage was done—in a case that depended largely on one person’s word against another’s, Kelly had gained the upper hand. Here, Horton Lance could have moved for a mistrial; he failed to do so. Byron, who’d proclaimed his innocence since day one, then testified on his own behalf, but when he took the stand, Lance had no cohesive plan for what to ask him, and Byron’s sullen, disengaged testimony may only have marred the jury’s perceptions of him.
The trial had been short, just three and a half days. After each side gave a closing statement, the jury deliberated for a couple of hours and came to a decision—Byron Case was guilty of murder, they said. His sentence: life in prison.
*
The magazine I run, Found, collects notes, letters, and pictures found on the ground and on the street by readers across the country and around the world. In the early days of the magazine, I used to personally open every found item we received, and often, if it was a particularly captivating or intriguing find, I’d write back to the person who’d mailed it in.
Byron Case was an early reader of the magazine, and he’d regularly send us to-do lists and love letters and other fascinating scraps he’d plucked off the floor of his favorite coffee shop in Westport, Kansas City’s quaint hipster neighborhood, or had discovered in a used book, or come across in his old job as a front desk clerk at a motel. He always wrote short, funny letters to accompany his finds in distinct, carefully printed handwriting, and before long I found myself trading letters back and forth with him.
After a period where I hadn’t heard from Byron for a couple of years, I sent him a copy of the latest issue of Found, which included a couple of finds he’d sent to me long before. Two weeks later, I got a note from his mom, Evelyn, explaining that Byron was in prison, the result of a wrongful conviction. She gave me his new address, and referred me to a website built by friends of his outlining the details of his case. I remember the shock of logging on and seeing that he’d been handed a life sentence. I spent all night poring through trial documents online, horrified that someone could be locked up on the basis of such flimsy evidence. Like all of life’s massive strokes of misfortune—fatal car accidents, plane crashes, spinal injuries, testicular cancer, Lou Gehrig’s disease, or losing both arms or both legs in an IED blast north of Mosul—it’s never a surprise that these kinds of things happen, it’s only a surprise that it’s happened to someone you know. As dawn light filled my bedroom, I imagined Byron waking up in his bunk in prison, and having to register again, each morning, that this Kafkaesque nightmare was real.
The next night, I settled down again at my computer to research his case some more, when I came across another site, created by friends and family of Anastasia WitbolsFeugen, partly as a memorial for Anastasia, but mostly, it seemed, to refute the claims on Byron’s site. This opposing site painted Byron as a coldhearted killer who was brilliant and sophisticated, full of dark menace and masterful cunning. For every question raised on Byron’s site that seemed to point toward his innocence, Anastasia’s memorial site had laid out a convincing rebuttal. Each site also had a guestbook page, and on these pages a furious feud had broken out between supporters of Byron and those who believed he’d been convicted justly. The same was true in the comments sections of the articles about Anastasia’s death and Byron’s trial and conviction on the websites of the Kansas City Star and the Pitch, a local alt-weekly. A short blurb about the case on the site of a community
college’s school paper would be followed by hundreds of comments, condemning the courts, the cops, the prosecutors, and Kelly Moffett—Byron’s accuser—and, in immediate response, condemning Byron himself. Many of the commenters had resorted to back-and-forth name calling, but a lot of them also dug into the facts of the case right down to the most infinitesimal minutiae, arguing about evidence presented during trial, as well as evidence that was never presented. People who’d personally known Byron, Kelly, Anastasia, and her boyfriend, Justin Bruton, offered anecdotes attesting to either Byron’s guilt or innocence, and to the idea that Kelly had lied on the stand, or that she’d been telling the truth.
In the week that followed, I found myself talking about the case to anyone who would listen—and for as long as possible—until they’d leave the room to get away from me. At night, I lay awake, turning things over in my head, trying to pierce the knot of contradicting stories. The more and more I read, and the more anonymous, wild accusations I sifted through online, the further I felt from getting a sense for what had really happened to Anastasia that night. From a distance, the case was impenetrable. The only way I’d be able to sort it out in my own mind, I decided, was to reach out personally to those involved, and hear the story in their own words. For that sole selfish reason, pretty much, I decided to leap right in.
I e-mailed Evelyn, Byron’s mom. The next day we spoke on the phone for two hours. She had a strong German accent, and explained that she’d come to the States at the age of twenty, just to explore for a few months, but had met Byron’s dad, Dale, fallen in love, and remained in the country ever since, though she and Dale had eventually separated. She was friendly, gracious, smart, tough, and clear minded, with a mother’s absolute (if predictable) faith in her son’s innocence, but also a detailed grasp on the mistakes that had been made during the trial. At one point, she began to choke up. “If only I had more money,” she said, her voice breaking. “We wouldn’t have had to go with that—that crummy defense lawyer. I just figured it was all a big mistake and they’d get everything figured out and it would quickly be over with. Oh boy, was I wrong.” She allowed a short laugh. “It’s okay. We’re gonna keep working till Byron is home.” Evelyn seemed to have channeled the bulk of her grief over her son’s predicament into an energetic, protracted campaign to fight for his freedom. She worked as a language tutor and a pet-sitter and sold vintage furniture and housewares she turned up at estate sales, and her limited income was funneled almost entirely into paying the lawyers who were working on Byron’s appeals. When possible, she traveled the country to attend conferences for the Innocence Project and other wrongful-conviction groups, bending the ear of anyone who might be sympathetic to her son’s plight.
My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays Page 24