The Best American Crime Writing

by Otto Penzler

  Hallman questions Mike in the kitchen. The Garrish family doesn’t know it, but this is typical. You first eliminate the people closest to the victim. The father, mother, brother, and so forth. Where were you this afternoon, he asked Mike. What did you do? Say you smoked a little pot? With who? What time did you leave for work? Did you see Lisa? What time was that? Did you have a fight? Did she catch you smoking pot? Were you afraid she was going to tell on you? Hallman finds Mike vague and uncooperative. “If something happened to your loved one and we came to you with questions, we’d expect you to be cooperative,” Hallman would explain later. “Maybe you’d be cooperative for an entirely different reason. Maybe you’ve got fifty kilos of cocaine in the trunk of your car, who knows? If you’re not cooperative, that raises suspicion. He was scared. There was the marijuana. And he’s a kid.”

  Hallman ratchets it up a bit, tries to provoke Mike with intimidation: You did this, didn’t you? You did this and I’m going to see you go to the electric chair for it. Mike—terrified, pissed off—says, intending sarcasm: “If I did, I don’t remember it.”

  Now this, to a detective, is a red flag. Mike Garrish is the last to see Lisa Garrish alive; has spent the afternoon using drugs; does not seem overly distraught about his sister’s death or interested in answering questions. And now this little gem—If I did, I don’t remember it. Hallman thinks he may have his man.

  Having just been told he’s going to the electric chair, Mike is stunned. He staggers outside into the night and sits beneath a peach tree at the edge of the yard. He is crying now in the dark. When his mother and stepfather pull up and get out of their car, the first thing Mike says is, “Mama I didn’t kill her.” And his mother says indignantly, “Well who says you did?”

  What a mess there is in the Garrish house. Because Lisa has a severely sliced hand and what looked like a cut beneath her chin, investigators at first think she has been stabbed to death. It isn’t until later, during the autopsy, that they find the bullet holes in her head and chest. She hasn’t been stabbed at all; she was shot with a .38-caliber gun—and a .38-caliber gun is soon discovered missing from her father’s closet. The crime scene investigators, out of Atlanta, have to turn around and head back to Demorest to reprocess the scene, pull up the carpet and retrieve the slugs from the hardwood floor.

  A murder weapon would be helpful, but the cops can’t find one. They are back the next day to search the creek and woods for a gun and/or knife. The Garrish family, meantime, makes funeral arrangements. At the visitation, there are hundreds of people—classmates, teachers, neighbors, coworkers, friends, relatives—and Mike believes every last one of them is staring at him. Actually, some are. Everyone knows the police consider him a suspect and want him to take a polygraph (which he will pass). Many wonder at his dry eyes and composure, even consider it a sign of cold-blooded guilt and will someday testify to that. Mike sits alone on a staircase and wishes they all would just go away.

  Before they close the casket he takes all he has on him—a dollar bill—and tears it in half. He puts one half in his sister’s coffin and the other in his wallet, where it will remain for the rest of his life.

  He cannot bear to return to school. His mother and stepfather have decided to move to Michigan to be near his older sister, so Mike decides he’ll go with them. On the day he turns in his textbooks and withdraws from school, there appear to be a million kids in the hall, staring, whispering. The crowd seems to part as Mike walks through. It is all he can do to keep his head up and finish what he started.

  Mike and the rest of the Garrish family do not know it, but Hallman has stopped suspecting him because his time card at the factory gives him a solid alibi. Whoever did it left no fingerprints, no murder weapon, no witnesses, nothing. Technology is lacking—no DNA or Luminol to pick up trace blood, none of the sophisticated techniques crime scene specialists would be able to use in the decades to come.

  But soon Hallman would develop a theory: Lisa was watching television in the den when the killer arrived, probably with the intention of molesting her. That there was no sign of break-in or struggle suggested she knew the attacker. He pulled a knife. She tried to grab it away and it sliced her right hand to the bone. She went to the kitchen to clean up, unaware of the danger she was in. At some point, Lisa must have gone to her father’s bedroom for one of the guns she knew he kept in the closet. The killer either beat her to the gun or wrestled it away from her. He shot her once in the back of the head, three times in the chest, left her for dead on the carpet and fled with the weapons.

  This happened right at 4:00 P.M.—just as Mike Garrish was punching the clock at work—because at that moment, R. L. Hansard, who lived across the road, heard chilling screams from the direction of the Garrish house. Not sure what he’d heard, he stepped out onto his porch to listen more closely, but then a motorcycle roared to life somewhere and the screams disappeared.

  What could Mike Garrish do but go on?

  In Michigan it was cold, too damn cold. He stayed for about a month and then came home to Georgia. His father still lived in the house on Hancock Road. His friends were still around. He tried to fit in. He asked a few girls out but they turned him down. One, whose father had known Mike as far back as Cub Scouts said, “You ain’t going nowhere with that boy.” As District Attorney Mike Crawford would one day put it: “Can you think of anything worse that could happen to you as a young person than to be accused, wrongfully accused, of killing your own sister?”

  Mike’s life would’ve been a hell of a lot easier had Hallman told him he was no longer a suspect—better yet if he’d come out with it publicly, like cops sometimes do. Problem was, Hallman was sure but the sheriff wasn’t. Despite the time card, despite witnesses who put Mike at work at the time of the murder, Sheriff Bill Pitts made it clear to agents that he believed Mike killed his sister to keep her quiet about his drug use. The Garrishes would not learn this for many years—and would have their theories about why the sheriff clung so strongly to his—but bottom line, the contradiction in speculation left Mike “twisting in the wind for twenty-two years,” as he puts it. You might in fact call him a two-time victim. First, he lost his sister. Then he was wrongfully considered her killer. “I was so mad and hurt and angry with Jim Hallman,” Mike says now. “He was archenemy number one.”

  Mike believed it would be impossible to return to school or to work in Demorest, so he commuted to Gainesville to work for Pepsi, loading trucks. His friends graduated from high school, but Mike’s formal education ended that Wednesday in November.

  He joined the Army, got his high school diploma through Savannah Tech, and began driving trucks. Driving trucks was what he had always wanted to do. Four or five years passed. When he got out of the Army he didn’t want to go back to Demorest, so he took off again, to drive semis for a living. He hauled carpet west, produce east, whatever kept him moving.

  Still, he couldn’t escape. Once, at a local fall festival, Mike heard one woman say to another as he passed: Don’t you recognize him? He’s the one who killed his sister. And in Savannah, for St. Patrick’s Day festivities, he turned around in a crowd of 10,000 and found himself face-to-face with none other than Jim Hallman. It was a coincidence, nothing more; but to Mike it felt like the haunting never would end. In his worst nightmare he was being led in handcuffs down a prison hallway and saying, “Why won’t you just stop and listen to me? Why won’t you believe me?”

  He felt frustrated but also hurt that anyone could think him capable of violence, much less murder; guilt that he wasn’t there for Lisa at the moment she needed him most; self-loathing that his actions—smoking pot, making that sarcastic and ill-timed crack at Hallman—stole precious time from finding the real killer. He spoke to no one of these feelings, not even his family or friends.

  During one visit home he attended a cookout at the home of his old friend Todd Kennedy. Todd’s little sister, Johnna, had been Lisa’s best friend. Now Johnna was a woman. She had never believed any o
f the things people said about Mike. She accepted a date with him, and then another, and eventually they married. They had two daughters, Micah and Autumn, whom they tried to protect from the darkest family truth, that a long time ago everyone thought Daddy killed his little sister.

  The family rarely talked about Lisa. On the first day of each November, they would call each other for comfort. Pat was the obsessive one. She grieved doubly—for her slain daughter and for her suspected son. Both were victims; neither had been vindicated. She hired psychics, kept notes, went over the facts of the case until her head swam. She talked to Lisa at night before bedtime, and sometimes in dreams Lisa talked to her. Pat continually called investigators and the district attorney and said check this and that. She would not—could not—let it go.

  Meanwhile, the GBI transferred Jim Hallman to his native Atlanta to work on the investigation of the infamous missing and murdered children case. He still kept in touch with his old friend, boss, and conscience, Douglas County Sheriff Earl Lee, who above all could not abide crimes against children. “What are you doing about Lisa Garrish,” Lee asked Hallman every time they met. “Are you going to let that child’s death go unpunished?” In 1993, when Hallman made it back to the Gainesville office, one of his first acts as special agent in charge was to rekindle the case.

  Hallman’s agents began to reinterview people and chase twenty-year-old leads. In 1998, Hallman summoned Mike Garrish and his parents to the GBI office in Gainesville. It was a strange scene. Everyone was twenty years older and had lived with Lisa’s murder in his own way. The last time Mike sat down with Hallman was as a terrified teenager with pot in his bloodstream, and as far as he knew, the electric chair in his future. But Hallman—the law, and Mike’s nearly lifelong archenemy—did not chastise him, accuse him, shout at him, or antagonize him in any way. He did something extraordinary, something long overdue. He apologized.

  What Hallman’s agents had just discovered was this: In the hours after Lisa’s killing, bloodhounds from the state prison at nearby Alto tracked a scent from the back door of the Garrish house to the back fence of the Pruitt house next door. The dogs’ handlers did not let them enter the Pruitts’ property. They dismissed the trail—did not even enter it into the investigative file—perhaps because Tony Pruitt’s father was a prison guard and the handlers assumed the dogs had latched onto a familiar scent. To Hallman, though, this was significant, because in the days after the killing he and another agent interviewed the Pruitt family and found reason to suspect the teenage son, Tony.

  Tony Pruitt rode the bus with Lisa. He was known among his neighbors and peers to be “weird.” He was absorbed by space stories and comic books and was an only child. His mother once asked Mike to tutor Tony in algebra and Mike did, for one afternoon, but then told his mother he would never go back because Tony giggled inappropriately and refused to concentrate, was immature beyond words. Neighbors told agents he liked to set bugs and frogs on fire and engaged in the torture of other small animals.

  Strange things certainly had happened around the Garrish house. A cow had its eye gouged out, and the pet cat was hanged by a rope from a tree. The Garrishes would come to believe Tony not only watched their comings and goings but also went into their house when they weren’t home. Nobody in Demorest locked doors. An intruder could walk in, get the layout, and even learn that John Garrish kept a couple of handguns and a shotgun in his bedroom closet.

  Hallman’s agents also discovered that on the day of the killing, Tony Pruitt had called a friend, Chuck Whitmore, to tell him Lisa had “been shot” to death—even investigators did not know this because until late that night they thought she had been stabbed. Whitmore also told police that Pruitt many years later confessed the murder to him while drunk at a party.

  Pruitt had other troubles, too. In 1996, he was convicted of child molestation and sentenced to fifty years in prison. In the process of that investigation, Pruitt’s wife, Mary Sanders, told the GBI that in the mid-1980s Pruitt confessed Lisa Garrish’s murder to her, too, but she had been too afraid to say so until now.

  At the GBI office that day, Hallman told Mike they were making a case not against him but against the boy next door.

  He didn’t apologize for suspecting Mike back in 1978 but for having had to do his job that way. (“I always kind of felt bad about getting on him so heavy at the time, when we first started,” Hallman says now. “But I was trying to solve a homicide.”) It was merely a tactic, he told Mike, and nothing personal, but he couldn’t reveal this in 1978 or as the years passed, he said, because the case was still open and investigators disagreed about the chief suspect.

  Hallman: “We can’t give him that twenty years back, but at least it’s over.”

  Mike: “I don’t hold any grudges because I think he was doing the best he could at the time, the best he knew how. But at the same time I don’t think he really knew how hard it was. He has turned out to be one of my biggest heroes because he helped us see it through to the end.”

  On November 1, 1998—twenty years to the day of Lisa’s murder—a grand jury indicted Tony Pruitt in her killing. In November 2000, he stood trial. Surely a conviction would clear Mike Garrish in the eyes of the community. Or would it?

  All through those days in court the Garrishes swore they heard Mike’s name more than the defendant’s, that Mike was the one on trial. The defense was playing its only hand: If the jury suspects one man, it can’t very well convict another. Yet on the strength of the Whitmore and Sanders testimonies, and on the new fact about the bloodhounds, a jury on November 29, 2000, convicted Pruitt of Lisa Garrish’s murder. He is serving a life sentence in addition to the child molestation sentence.

  Does Mike Garrish, now 40, finally feel relief and vindication? Of course. Did the conviction close the door on suspicion? “If it had happened within a year of the murder I think it would have,” he says. “Because this drug on for twenty-two years and twenty-eight days there’s people out there thinking, ‘They pinned that on him just to close the case.’”

  It’s like the reverse of trust, which, once lost, is hard to regain: Once doubt is introduced, it can be impossible to dislodge. Before meeting Mike Garrish, for instance, I read the Pruitt trial transcript and background materials on the case and found that Garrish’s guilt seemed, on paper, to be very possible. A few days later, on my way to interview him in Demorest, I was uncomfortable enough to let family know where I would be and with whom. Spending time with Mike Garrish almost immediately erased the doubt, but I began to understand how others inevitably might have felt in his presence back then, and how those doubts must have affected him for most of his life. “It’s one of those Richard Jewel syndromes,” he says. “He’ll be branded for the rest of his life. No matter what, he is branded. And so am I. Best you can do is not worry about it. Forget about it, pull yourself up, and go on.”

  New people now live in the old family house on Hancock Road, but the Hansards still live across the street, and the Pruitts are still next door. Except for the new highway nearby and the trailer park in the woods, the place might as well be frozen in time.

  When Mike Garrish goes there now, he can’t get over how small the house looks. He does not wish to go inside. “I feel more sad than anything because this was such a great little town to grow up in,” he says. “This was the kind of town you’d want to raise a family in, and I feel like I can never be a part of it anymore.”

  His life is in Athens now, with Johnna and their daughters and his sales job at a manufacturing plant. They live in a nice, large home on the edge of town. The air there feels lighter now. Mike can wake up in the morning without a sense of fear and dread. He can finally think of the happy times with Lisa, and the family can speak of her. He no longer hates Jim Hallman. In fact, Mike called him at Christmas to tell him happy holidays.

  He got the answering machine.

  Nothing has happened with Mike Garrish since the article was published. He has pretty much gone on with his li
fe, obviously with some relief that he’s been publicly vindicated. He still blames himself for his own misery and says if he hadn’t been so stupid all those years ago none of this would have happened, but I think he’s been too hard on himself. He was a kid caught in an unfathomable situation.

  MAD DOGS AND LAWYERS

  EVAN WRIGHT

  It was about four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, January 26, 2001, when Esther Birkmaier, a single retiree in her seventies, heard screams outside her front door. Birkmaier lives on the sixth floor of an art deco apartment building in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco, one of the city’s prime neighborhoods, known for its panoramic views of the Golden Gate Bridge. As Birkmaier pressed her eye against the peephole, a woman in the hallway outside yelled, “Help me!” Birkmaier couldn’t see much from her limited fish-eye perspective, but what she did see shocked her. There was a blond woman on the floor. A huge dog was attacking her.

  Birkmaier phoned 911 and reported “dogs running wild” in her hallway. When she hung up, something began pounding on her door. She panicked, phoned 911 again and this time just screamed into the phone. A man heard the screams and also phoned 911 to report what he thought was a rape. Alec Cardenas, a SWAT-team medic and one of the first cops on the scene, arrived about seven minutes later to find the victim lying facedown on the hall carpet in front of her apartment. She was naked, covered in blood, her upper back punctured with dog bites. Blood was splashed on the walls for about twenty feet down the hall. As Cardenas approached, the woman attempted to push herself up and crawl into her home.

  About this time, a middle-aged woman who identified herself as Marjorie Knoller stepped out of Apartment 604. She too was covered in blood. But aside from a cut on her hand and a few scratches on her arms, she was not injured. She told the police she had been walking her dog Bane down the hall when he lunged at the victim, who was entering her apartment carrying a bag of groceries. “I told her to stay still,” Knoller said. “If she had, this would have never happened.” Knoller told police she had managed to lock Bane and his mate, Hera, in her apartment. She was afraid to go back inside.