Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  According to Sean Kenny’s records, Boyd Davies reported to him three of the first five times he was supposed to, each time accompanied by his mother or one of his sisters. After that, he simply stopped coming altogether. Eventually, Kenny cited Boyd for being in violation of his parole, and got a judge to issue a warrant for his arrest, describing him as an “armed and dangerous fugitive from justice.” But the warrant squad was understaffed and badly backed up at the time, and none of them ever did get around to driving down to Pittsville to look for Boyd Davies. Had they done so, no doubt they would have found him sitting out back of the family home, staring intently at some twig or leaf or rock, as though it held the very secret of the universe.

  That armed and dangerous fugitive from justice.

  With the fog as thick as it was, there was no way to tell when afternoon turned to evening, or evening to night. Once the dinner dishes were done, and his guests had outdone one another in serving up compliments to the chef, Jorgensen suggested they adjourn to the study, where they might be more comfortable.

  The study was one level above the kitchen and therefore a bit smaller and cozier. That was the way things worked in the lighthouse: Since it was slightly tapered, everything got smaller as you climbed upward - the study, the three bedrooms, and finally the observation room. The observation room was tiny, barely eight feet in diameter, though it opened up onto a platform, a deck of sorts that wrapped around it a full 360 degrees. Atop that stood the light chamber, the glass-enclosed housing at the center of which was the light itself, around which swung a highly polished mirror, in order to create the perfect illusion of a flashing beacon for a ship feeling her way up or down the coast.

  But no more.

  They settled into more comfortable chairs in the study, and though there were electric lights, Jorgensen lit an old oil lamp instead. He offered them brandy, which one accepted but two declined. And as he listened, they told him the rest of the story that had brought them there.

  About a mile from the house where Boyd Davies lived with his mother, aunt, sisters, nephews, and nieces, was a small tobacco farm. There are no small tobacco farms to speak of anymore, and this was one of the very last. The big tobacco companies (which actually today are even bigger food companies) have bought up all the family farms, to better control costs and ensure uniformity of product. But back in 1985, there were still a few in private hands, and this was one of them.

  The family that owned and worked the farm was named Meisner. They were white people, Lutherans, with ancestors who had come over from Holland or Germany, or perhaps both, when coming over meant making the trip by boat. Kurt Meisner was a hardworking, God-fearing man who - despite the fact that he’d been injured in an accident with a wood-chipper - rose with the sun, worked all day, and had no tolerance for those who didn’t. His wife Anja never seemed to stray beyond the walls of her kitchen, except for Sunday services or special occasions. She baked her own bread, churned her own butter, pickled and canned fruits and vegetables, took care of the house, and saw to the needs of four children - Kurt, Jr., sixteen, Katrinka, fifteen, Peter, thirteen, and Ilsa, eleven.

  Other than the fact that tobacco prices were falling and expenses rising, things seemed to be going tolerably well for the Meisners. All four of the children helped out on the farm and in the home. There was food on the table and a couple of dollars in the cookie jar, and young Kurt was even talking about being the first in the family to attend college.

  Then, one afternoon in mid-September, Ilsa, the youngest, who by rule always arrived home from school by four o’clock at the very latest, failed to show up. A call to the school confirmed that she’d been in class, had left when school let out at 2:40, and had been seen in the company of two other girls, setting out for the two-mile walk home. The two classmates were soon identified and contacted; they lived closer to the schoolhouse, and each had arrived safely at her respective home. Ilsa had continued on alone, as she did each day.

  The local authorities - which in this case meant the county sheriff’s office, since Pittsville was too small to afford its own police department - were promptly notified, and they in turn contacted the state troopers. Bulletins were broadcast, a description of the missing child was circulated, and officers drove up and down the two-mile stretch Ilsa had last been seen on, knocking on doors and asking if anyone had seen her or noticed anyone suspicious in the area.

  No one had.

  A call was placed to the nearest field office of the FBI, over in Charlottesville. The special agent in charge (for some reason, all FBI agents are called “special”) explained that in the absence of evidence of foul play, they couldn’t become officially involved in the case for twenty-four hours; after that it could be presumed to be a kidnapping, with sufficient time for the victim to have been transported across state lines, giving them a jurisdictional basis to enter the investigation. In the meantime, however, the special agent agreed to “monitor developments” and offer advice as requested.

  Around 10:00 that night, a deputy sheriff found Ilsa’s book bag beneath a tree, about a quarter of a mile off the road she’d been walking, and an equal distance past the point where the second of her girlfriends had waved good-bye to her. By mid-night, a search party had been formed, and dozens of local residents were combing the woods and fields, stopping every so often to shout the girl’s name.

  No one answered.

  Although it was a moonless night and there was a shortage of flashlights among the searchers, they kept at it until dawn, crisscrossing the countryside, calling out, and listening in vain.

  Among the searchers were Ilsa’s father and two brothers. Her mother and sister sat in the kitchen, crying, waiting for news. They were accompanied by a state trooper and a deputy sheriff. Although the family had little in the way of money that would make their daughter a likely target for a kidnapping for ransom, a recording device had been hooked up to the phone, just in case someone called with a demand and instructions to be followed.

  No one did.

  Shortly after noon, two bloodhounds were brought in by the K-9 unit of the Richmond Police Department and given the scent of the little girl’s book bag. One of the dogs promptly led its handler back to the road and all the way to the schoolhouse, proving that its nose was up to the task, even if its intellect wasn’t.

  The other dog had more luck. Pulling its handler behind it, it made a beeline farther into the woods, stopping only when it reached a creek bed that, given the time of year, was almost dry. Its handler coaxed it across, but the hound failed to pick up the trail on the far side. Brought back to the spot where it had lost the scent, the dog circled around for a minute, before beginning to follow the creek upstream. After a hundred yards or so, it stopped, retraced its steps a bit, climbed up the far side of the bank, and stopped just beyond a big sweet gum tree, at a spot where the dirt was noticeably darker than the surrounding area, and softer to the touch.

  According to the coroner, Ilsa Meisner had been manually strangled to death. There were several additional minor injuries to her hands and arms, which he described as “defensive,” suggesting that she’d tried to fight off her attacker. There was also a fairly deep gash in the back of her head and an underlying depressed skull fracture, but given the minimal amount of bleeding associated with it, the coroner was of the opinion that the wound had most likely been inflicted post-mortem, perhaps during the burial process. “Whoever did this to her might have dropped her head onto a sharp rock afterward,” he theorized, “or accidentally hit it with a pick or a shovel.”

  It wasn’t until he was conducting the autopsy two days later that he discovered that she’d been raped or sodomized, as well. While there was no evidence of ejaculation, the little girl’s vagina had been badly torn, “suggesting forcible penetration by an adult penis or a similarly sized object,” wrote the coroner. The small amount of dried blood (which upon DNA analysis turned out to be her own) made it impossible for him to determine if she’d been alive at the
time of the act, although he added that he hoped it was otherwise.

  It didn’t take long for suspicion to focus on Boyd Davies. He lived less than three miles from the spot where Ilsa Meisner’s body had been buried. He was known to have been seen from time to time in the company of young children (though no one could say with certainty that any of them had been white). He was widely regarded as “different,” “strange,” and “downright peculiar.” And, worst of all, he’d recently been released from prison after serving three years for the rape of a ten-year-old girl.

  When the sheriff and three of his deputies came knocking at the door and asked to speak with her son, Hattie McDaniel wished them luck. It’s hard to believe that she hadn’t heard about the disappearance of the Meisner girl and the subsequent discovery of her body. Perhaps she’d never connected those events in her mind to Boyd; perhaps she had, and already feared the worst. Then again, maybe she simply couldn’t bring herself to imagine that her son was capable of committing such a horrible crime.

  It turned out the officers didn’t want to speak with Boyd, so much as they wanted to have a look at him. And when they had that look, they saw that he was big and scary-looking, what with his bad eye and his habit of staring any direction but at them. They noticed that he had cuts and bruises on both of his hands, some of them quite fresh, and dirt beneath his fingernails.

  “Does the boy work?” the sheriff asked Hattie.

  “No, sir, he don’t work,” she said.

  “Is he in school?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you know where he was yesterday afternoon, about three o’clock?”

  “Out, I guess.”

  That was all they needed to hear. Firmly, but politely, they explained that they were going have to ask Boyd to accompany them to their headquarters for a couple of hours, “for investigation.” Then they walked him outside, placed him in the back of one of their patrol cars, and drove off. For Hattie, it must have been like déjà vu. Only this time, things would not be the same as last. They would be worse, far worse than Hattie could ever have dreamed.

  Long on suspicion but short of evidence, the sheriff’s department deserves some credit for the way they went about their investigation. They took color photographs of Boyd’s hands, and had a doctor examine him to verify the recentness of the cuts. They took scrapings from beneath his fingernails, saving material for microscopic comparison with soil samples removed from Ilsa Meisner’s grave. They confiscated his boots, not only to collect soil samples, but to make plaster impressions from them. From the impressions, they made casts, to compare with footprints found at the grave site.

  In time, the cuts on Boyd’s hands would be shown to be only a day or two old; the fingernail and boot scrapings would prove identical to the soil at the grave; and two partial footprints left nearby would perfectly match Boyd’s boots.

  Fifty years earlier, that might have been as far as the police felt compelled to go, and their next order of business might have been to find a rope and look for a suitable tree. But this was 1985, not 1935, and - as some sociologists have tried to explain - Southern law enforcement pretty much spent the second half of the twentieth century undoing the damage it had done during the first half. So not only did the sheriff and his men refrain from succumbing to the mentality of a lynch mob, they went further in their investigation.

  What they did was to interview Boyd Davies.

  The man chosen for the job was an investigator, a rank roughly the equivalent of a detective. His name was Daniel Wyatt, and he was a veteran of seventeen years with the department. Physically, he was tall and slender, with narrow shoulders, and he tended to slouch a lot. He had a full mustache, bright blue eyes, and a good head of dark hair that was beginning to gray. But perhaps the most striking thing about him was his voice, which was deep to the point of being gravelly. It was the voice of John Wayne, of Gregory Peck, of Clint Eastwood, all wrapped up into one.

  It didn’t take Daniel Wyatt very long to realize that he wasn’t going to able to interview Boyd Davies in the usual sense of the term. With Wyatt’s death in 1993 - his gravelly voice apparently a precursor of throat cancer - no record exists as to how he happened upon a successful method of conversing with a suspect who, for all intents and purposes, was not only mute but illiterate. But happen upon it, he did.

  What Wyatt did was to take advantage of the only communication skill Boyd Davies possessed: his ability to draw. Having once made the discovery (and again, there is no suggestion as to how he made it), Wyatt provided Boyd with paper and pencil, and asked him to draw three pictures for him. We have Wyatt’s notes to tell us the requested subject matters:

  The place where you buried the little girl.

  The thing you used to dig the hole.

  The place where you put the thing you used to dig the hole.

  And we have Boyd’s three drawings, preserved as evidence from his trial. They are faded some, having been made in pencil, on pages torn from a spiral notebook. But they are exquisite in their detail, perspective, and sense of place. The first is of a large sweet gum tree, surrounded by ferns, with a narrow stream in the background. The second depicts a shovel, the handle of which appears to be taped about halfway up. The last shows a group of large rocks or boulders, with the early morning or late afternoon sun (it is impossible to tell which) casting long shadows from right to left.

  The investigator pointed to the first drawing. “I want you to take me to this place,” he told Boyd Davies. And Boyd took him. That is to say, once Wyatt and two deputies had driven him to the spot on the road closest to where Ilsa Meisner’s book bag was found, Boyd led them across a field, into the woods, and over the creek bed to the grave site, by then cordoned off with yellow crime-scene ribbon.

  “Is this where you buried her?” Wyatt asked.

  By all accounts, Boyd nodded affirmatively.

  Pulling out the third picture, the one Boyd had drawn in response to the final question, Wyatt asked Boyd if he could show him the place he’d drawn. Boyd nodded again, and began to walk farther into the woods. After about a quarter of a mile, they came to a gentle rise, followed by a steeper climb. Without ever hesitating, Boyd picked his way over and around rocks of increasing size, until they arrived at a grouping of small boulders not far from a summit. There Boyd stopped and pointed between two of the boulders. One of the deputies moved forward, crouched, and reached down. When he straightened up, he was holding a shovel with black duct tape wrapped around the handle, about halfway up.

  The “guilt phase” of the trial lasted four days. The prosecution had no eyewitness, but they had Boyd’s drawings, and the way he’d led the investigators directly to the grave site and the shovel. Together, they provided overwhelming circumstantial evidence of Boyd’s guilt. His lawyer, a woman from the Midwest named Andrea Katz, who’d been brought down by some national death penalty defense organization to represent him, did her best. But when it came time for her to call witnesses, she simply had none to call.

  “There was no way I could put Boyd himself on the stand,” she explained afterward. “For one thing, his prior conviction would have come out, and that would have been the end of things right there. But even without that, he simply had nothing to tell the jury. It’s not like he ever came right out and told me he’d done it, in as many words, but he never once denied it, either. But that happens sometimes, and when it does, you pretty much know what it means, and after a while, you learn not to press your client too hard. There are some things that are just too difficult for people to admit.”

  Without an alibi or character witnesses (whose testimony again would have opened the door to Boyd’s past record), and with her own scientific experts in agreement with the prosecution’s, Katz rested. To her credit, she gave an inspired summation, arguing that that the state’s case was purely circumstantial, and that without a single eyewitness, the proof couldn’t possibly convince them of anything beyond a reasonable doubt.

  But the jury di
dn’t buy it; it took them less than two hours of deliberation to return a verdict of guilty.

  There followed a “penalty phase,” in which the same jurors who had convicted Boyd were presented with aggravating and mitigating evidence, before being asked to decide if he should live or die. Here, for the first time, the prosecution was permitted to tell them about Boyd’s prior record - the public lewdness arrests and the rape of the 10-year-old, to which Boyd had been permitted to plead guilty to a lesser charge. They heard that he was a parole violator and a “fugitive from justice” at the time of his arrest. They learned that he wasn’t working, and in fact had never held a job in his entire life.

  Andrea Katz offered a wealth of mitigating evidence. She introduced school records, test scores, and psychological profiles of her client; and a psychiatrist flew down from Harvard and testified that, in his opinion, Boyd Davies suffered from a form of autism. But the prosecutor had done his homework, and he was able to get the doctor to concede that in spite of whatever limitations Boyd might have, or whatever syndrome he suffered from, he wasn’t retarded, knew the difference between right and wrong, and was fully responsible for his own acts.

  Finally, Katz called Hattie McDaniel to the stand, and Hattie described how difficult things had been for her son growing up with no father, no schooling to speak of, no real friends, and no ability to communicate on any meaningful level. And when it was her turn to sum up, Katz spoke passionately for two full hours, telling the jurors that the choice they were about to make was “truly a matter of life of death,” that “nothing less than the fate of one of God’s own children” rested in their hands, and imploring them to “choose life.”

  The jurors chose death.

  A series of appeals had followed, a series so familiar to August Jorgensen that he could have recited it himself. Up and down the state courts the case traveled, with a battery of lawyers raising every argument they could come up with. Boyd’s mental condition had never been properly taken into account; the officers who came to his home lacked probable cause to seize him; they’d failed to properly advise him of his Miranda rights; he’d been denied the effective assistance of counsel; individuals opposed to the death penalty had been systematically excluded from the jury pool, as had blacks and other minorities; the evidence adduced at the guilt phase of the trial had been insufficient; the prosecution had unfairly appealed to the jurors’ sympathy during the penalty phase; and on and on.