by Paul Doiron
I decided to read in bed, with my inflamed hand elevated against my chest.
As I rearranged the lumped-up sheets, I found my bottle of Vicodin under a pillow, where I must have tucked it. I swallowed a pill and settled down to immerse myself in a juicy conspiracy theory.
* * *
As best I could tell, the J-Team’s argument was that the state’s case against Jefferts was entirely circumstantial and made in bad faith. Investigators hadn’t framed Erland per se, but they’d bent the law to convict a man they believed from the start to be a sex killer. Winchenback had fabricated a confession, the prosecutors had conspired to conceal exculpatory evidence from the defense and jury, and forensic science proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Erland Jefferts could not have committed the crime.
The J-Team stipulated that, yes, Erland had been intoxicated on the night of Nikki’s disappearance. But they took issue with Mark Folsom’s ex post facto statement that he had bounced Jefferts out of the Harpoon for making lewd remarks to Nikki. In fact, patrons remembered the bar owner dragging a stumble-drunk Jefferts into the parking lot, but no one could attest to the exact reason why. After Erland was arrested, however, the story that he had groped Nikki became the accepted version of the event.
Furthermore, Erland Jefferts had no record of violence. So what had made this affable man, so well liked in the community, commit such an atrocity? A credible motive was therefore a problem, according to Ozzie Bell.
Then there was the question of opportunity. The time-of-death evidence indicated that Nikki—like Ashley Kim—was kept alive for some hours before being murdered. She even had a bump on her head that seemed to have been inflicted many hours before her other wounds.
“Somebody played Mr. Jefferts for a patsy,” his attorney said at trial. “They found him passed out in the woods and planted the rigging tape to frame him.”
Typically, sexual predators take an object from the body of their murdered victims, panties being especially popular. So where was Nikki’s underwear if Jefferts didn’t have it in his possession?
When forensic technicians examined Nikki, they found traces of blood beneath her fingernails. But the DNA didn’t match Erland’s. It belonged, instead, to an unidentified male. Dr. Kitteridge countered that there was no reason to surmise it came from Nikki’s assailant. She could have picked it up anywhere.
Bell found this statement ridiculous, and it showed in his overheated prose. “Why is some other man’s DNA in the blood under Nikki Donnatelli’s fingernails, and why did investigators focus on Jefferts to the exclusion of other suspects, including a well-known predator who lived nearby and had recently been arrested for sexually abusing a teenage girl?”
That person was Calvin Barter. Given his criminal record, he was high on the J-Team’s list of alternate suspects. But so was Nikki’s employer, Mark Folsom, along with a bunch of other people, some of whose names I recognized (such as Dave Drisko) and some I didn’t. Reviewing the list of sexual predators—more than sixty within ten miles of the crime scene—made me nauseous. As a game warden, I saw Maine’s crushing poverty and hidden depravity every day, but the sheer number of local perverts stunned me.
Reading through these twice-baked documents, I began to form an opinion of Ozzie Bell. As a “retired” big-city reporter, he had an undisguised contempt for small-town rubes. Dane Guffey, the deputy who found Jefferts, was a “cue ball–headed kid with a cynical streak a mile wide.” Joe Winchenback, the detective who took Erland’s “confession,” was a “bulbous-nosed man with a penchant for telling off-color tales.” I knew neither of these individuals, but I did know Danica Marshall, whom Bell described as an “ice-blooded beauty who might have walked straight out of a cheap film noir.” The one adjective he used for Warden Kathy Frost was “mannish,” which was accurate in the sense that my sergeant could have kicked Oswald’s ass from here till Sunday.
Bell’s worst vitriol was saved for the medical examiner, Dr. Walter Kitteridge, who, more than anyone else, in his view, bore the blame for Erland Jefferts’s wrongful conviction.
Determining the time of death has been described as both an art and a science, and there are many techniques at a medical examiner’s disposal. The temperature of the body is one method, but Kitteridge never measured Nikki’s. Nor did he record the ambient temperature of the forest in which the corpse was found. He also failed to conduct a standard test of her eye fluid, which can indicate the hour of death.
Then there were the blowflies.
In his trial testimony Kitteridge was quoted as saying, “With a cadaver found in the woods in July, I would have anticipated seeing more fly activity, especially after two days. Flies land and lay eggs on the body at sites of injury, as well as the eyes.” That statement suggested, in Bell’s mind, that Nikki hadn’t been dead quite as long as the coroner claimed—and the longer she’d been alive, the more the case against Erland Jefferts fell apart, since he’d been in police custody for a full day before Pluto sniffed out the dead body. So the fly evidence might have been exculpatory.
There was only one problem: The forensic lab had somehow, mistakenly or deliberately, discarded the fly larvae collected at the scene.
In the end, Dr. Kitteridge based his estimation of time of death exclusively on rigor mortis, the extreme stiffening of the body that follows death. From my course work, I understood the process to be a chemical change in the muscles—something about the stoppage of the blood flow causing various proteins to begin locking up in weird ways until digestive enzymes start the process of decomposition.
Bell described the progression: “In an adult, under general conditions, rigor mortis begins in about two hours after death, spreads through the skeletal muscles within ten to twelve hours, and resolves within thirty-six hours after death before the muscles become flaccid again.” Hot temperatures can speed the process up. Body size and physical condition play roles, too. There are innumerable variables, but generally speaking, a body that still shows signs of rigor hasn’t been dead all that long.
When Kitteridge examined Nikki Donnatelli’s body, he reported that “rigor mortis was easily broken.” In the J-Team’s interpretation, this meant that it was scientifically impossible for Erland to have killed Nikki, since he was under police supervision during the entire window of time when she might have been murdered.
Unfortunately for Jefferts, his country bumpkin attorney had failed to pick up this bombshell. And now the lobsterman was serving a life term without the possibility of parole.
Ozzie Bell described himself as an unwilling recruit to the cause. He hadn’t known Jefferts or Donnatelli. But as a former newsman from Queens who’d retired to quiet Seal Cove, he couldn’t help but take an interest in such a heinous crime. He began researching the evidence, spoke with Lou Bates and the principals on the other side, but it was only when he encountered Dr. Kitteridge’s testimony that he had his eureka moment: “The state’s own forensic evidence proved that Erland Jefferts couldn’t possibly have murdered Nikki Donnatelli!”
I didn’t know enough about rigor mortis to share Bell’s certainty. And I had more than a few questions of my own. What about Jefferts’s confession, for example?
“Do you remember what you did with Nikki?” Detective Joe Winchenback had asked him.
“What if I said yes?” replied Jefferts.
Bell and the J-Team waved off this statement. Jefferts had been confused, half-drunk, sleep-deprived. Winchenback never taped Jefferts’s “admission,” and his own contemporaneous notes contradicted the exact phrasing he used in court. Therefore, the detective must have been lying on the witness stand. The primary investigating officer had coerced a vaguely worded confession out of a suggestible young man who couldn’t remember his own actions on the night of Nikki’s disappearance. In effect, Erland had been bullied into making a hedged admission, which the prosecutors instantly held up as proof positive of his bloody deeds.
It makes for one whopper of a story, I thought sleepily.
But I doubted any of it was true. It didn’t surprise me that the cops might have conducted a messy investigation. Half my own arrests were fucked-up in one way or another. Had Danica Marshall used every weapon in her arsenal to shoot a rocket up Jefferts’s ass? Of course she had. When a prosecutor got a sex killer in the courtroom, and there was a chance he might walk free, what else was she supposed to do?
I swung my legs off the bed and crossed the creaking floor to the box of files. I leafed through the contents until I came to the collection of photographs I’d noticed earlier. They were pictures of Jefferts having a birthday party in prison with the J-Team. The convict had put on weight over the years, but he was still devilishly handsome, with wavy blond hair and a Hollywood smile.
Attached to one of the photos was a poem.
Solitary
I don’t know why
A man can’t cry.
Holding on to his father’s pain
That will become his son’s in time.
The only legacy left now.
Imprisoned in himself first
And in four walls second.
Iron bars for an iron soul.
From yourself there’s no escape.
No time off for good behavior.
No parole or earthly savior.
Hours go by
And become days.
Days become months.
Months become years.
Walled up in this place
Without sunlight or air.
We are all dead here.
We just don’t know it.
BY ERLAND R. JEFFERTS
The thought of this handsome con man selling his bullshit story to naïve friends and family infuriated me. Nothing I could say to Lou Bates or Ozzie Bell would change their minds about him. Those fools were absolutely convinced of Erland’s innocence, just as Jill Westergaard was certain her missing husband was a model of fidelity.
But I knew what kind of a monster Jefferts was. Better than anyone, I knew.
I found the phone number I was looking for on a business card stapled to a folder. I dialed the seven digits and waited until a man with a thick New York accent answered.
“Oswald Bell here.”
“Mr. Bell, this is Mike Bowditch. I read the files you gave me. I’d like to meet Erland Jefferts.”
26
The world was melting. The next day, the sun reappeared, as if it had suddenly remembered it was springtime now and no longer winter. The tidal creek behind the house was swollen with runoff from the dripping ice, and the chickadees in the pines were singing a libidinal tune.
I didn’t tell Sarah where I was going. I let her leave for school in the belief that I planned to spend my day on the couch reading the Hemingway book Kathy had brought me from Key West. I knew that if I told her about my call to Ozzie Bell, she would assume I was meddling in the Ashley Kim investigation—which I was.
Dressing yourself with one hand is harder than you think. After trying for ten minutes to button a flannel shirt, I switched to a military-style sweater. I didn’t even bother attempting shoelaces, but tugged on my neoprene boots. Inspecting myself in the mirror, I thought I looked like a sickly duck hunter about to venture onto the frozen flats. I wondered if the prison guards would discern the opaque Vicodin glassiness in my eyes.
I wasn’t accustomed to driving with my left hand, having to reach across my body to shift gears, using my bad hand to hold the wheel steady. I’d arranged to meet Bell at a gas station up the road from the prison, where he would leave his vehicle. The two of us would ride in my Jeep, we’d agreed.
He stood waiting outside a blue Nissan about the size of a golf cart. He was dressed in exactly the same clothes he’d worn to the diner—black pants, black polo shirt, and black blazer lightly dusted with dandruff along the collar. His glasses were enormous, with heavy plastic frames, and his thick white hair was styled and swirled in a manner that made me think of a soft-serve ice-cream cone.
“Warden Bowditch! Or can I call you Mike?”
“Mike’s fine,” I said.
“Thanks for coming. Yowza, what happened to your hand?”
“I was in an all-terrain-vehicle accident.”
“What—like a go-cart? One of those things the kids ride?”
“Something like that.”
He coughed suddenly, a phlegmy sound that rattled wetly around his throat for a long while before he managed to gulp it down. “Cigarettes,” he explained at last. “What was it Norman Mailer said? ‘It’s easier to give up the love of your life than quit smoking.’ It took me forty years, but I finally did it. I knew Mailer back at the Voice. If there was a real newspaper editor in this backwater state, Erland Jefferts wouldn’t still be behind bars, I’ll tell you that much.”
I glanced at my watch for effect. “I’d like to get going, Mr. Bell.”
“Call me Ozzie. I appreciate your taking the time for this, Mike. But you won’t be sorry you did! If you don’t leave today convinced an innocent man is behind bars…” He trailed off, paused to collect his thoughts, and then began again. “You’re going to like Erland. You remind me of him a little. Not physically. But you’ve got the same inner strength. I’m a good judge of people. Every real journalist has a foolproof bullshit detector.”
When he climbed into my passenger seat and watched me reach across my body to shift gears, the peculiarity of the situation seemed to dawn on him. “Maybe we should take my Nissan. You shouldn’t be driving with a hand like that.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I can manage.”
The Maine State Prison in Thomaston used to be a landmark on Route 1, a brick and razor-wire edifice that some called “Shawshank.” Then in the 1990s, the state built a massive complex on a wood-shrouded hilltop in the nearby town of Warren. Except for the distant spotlights, which gave the night sky an ocher glow, the new prison was largely hidden from the view of passing motorists. Out of sight, out of mind seemed to be the architectural and governmental intent.
“So you read the files, then?” Bell asked me as we turned up the hill toward the immense cream-colored structure. “You understand that the scientific evidence is indisputable. Kitteridge’s own report proves Erland could not have killed Nikki Donnatelli.”
I smiled at him. “You seem to have a low opinion of Dr. Kitteridge.”
“The guy’s a disgrace.”
“In your report you wrote that he threw away the fly larvae collected from Nikki’s eyes.”
“Threw it away! We don’t even know if they were Calliphoridae or Sarcophagidae.” Bell shook his hands in the air as if they were wet and he needed to dry them. “And he never measured the hypoxanthine in the ocular fluid. The least he could have done was to take the body and ambient temperature! All he did was a bullshit test for rigor mortis.”
I flicked a glance at him. “He testified rigor was passing off when he examined the body.”
“Which proves that Erland couldn’t have killed her, because he’d been in police custody for the previous thirty-six hours.”
“My understanding of rigor mortis is that there’s lots of variation depending on body size, temperature, and other factors.”
“Yes, yes. But Nikki was a small girl, and it was a hot day. Based upon the state’s own findings, there can be no question about the time of death.”
“I guess that’s what puzzles me,” I said.
“How so?”
“Well, you say that Dr. Kitteridge is incompetent, and you cite all these mistakes he made at the autopsy. But if he’s such a quack, why are you willing to take his word about the rigor mortis? How do you know he didn’t get that part wrong, too?”
He stared at me through those Coke bottles. “I don’t follow you, Mike.”
“It just seems like you’re trying to have it both ways. You don’t want to believe anything Dr. Kitteridge says except when it validates your theory about the time of death.”
Bell pointed a big finger at a building. “Park over there,”
he said, disregarding my argument.
The rules at the Maine State Prison require that all inmate visits be scheduled twenty-four hours ahead of time and that new visitors complete a detailed application form. But someone—I suspected Sheriff Baker, with his deep prison connections—had greased the skids for me. They let me in with just a glance at my driver’s license, warden’s badge, and a cursory pat-down. As for Bell, they led him away to a special room. As a perennial pest, he was probably subjected to cavity searches on a routine basis—how else to find the bug up his ass?