by Megan Goldin
The area where she was murdered was a popular neighborhood for college students living in off-campus apartments. Rumors spread like wildfire that she was killed by a serial killer. Well, you can imagine the hysteria.
It didn’t help any when the cops told women living in the area to take precautions. You know, the usual stuff. Hold your keys between your fingers to use as a weapon. Keep your phone in your hand and dial nine-one-one if you’re being followed or feel afraid. If every woman who felt afraid called nine-one-one, the switchboard would melt. That is what women live with every day of our lives.
A lot of women felt the cops were blaming Cat Girl instead of her rapist and killer. These women argued that women should be able to walk wherever they want, whenever they want. If they walk home late at night through a park, they shouldn’t be criticized for it. And they sure as hell shouldn’t be raped and murdered for it.
When school kids are shot by a random shooter, nobody asks whether the victims should have taken more precautions. Nobody suggests that maybe the victims should have skipped school that day. Nobody ever blames the victims.
So why is it that when women are attacked, the onus is on them? “If only she hadn’t walked home alone.” “If only she hadn’t cut through the park.” “If only she’d taken a cab.”
When it comes to rape, it seems to me “if only” is used all the time. Never about the man. Nobody ever says “if only” he hadn’t raped her. It’s always about the woman. If only …
As I was researching possible cases for Season 3, I thought a lot about Cat Girl and what happened to her. Mostly I thought about the way she was blamed for her own rape and murder.
Then I heard about the upcoming trial in Neapolis. Something about it moved me so deeply that I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It reminded me of the Cat Girl case even though the Neapolis case is different in so many ways. In almost every way.
There is one thing that is exactly the same. That’s the blame-the-victim game. That hasn’t changed at all. Just like with Cat Girl, I kept hearing people blaming the girl at the center of this case in Neapolis.
This trial isn’t about the victim. It’s about the man accused of raping her. Yet somehow you could be mistaken for thinking that the victim is on trial, too, because, like most rape trials, the case largely rests on his word against her word. The alleged rapist and the alleged victim. Which one of them is speaking the truth?
The trial starts next week. We’re in this together. Let’s see where the evidence takes us.
I’m Rachel Krall and this is Guilty or Not Guilty, the podcast that puts you in the jury box.
5
Rachel
Rachel had to stand on her tiptoes to get a glimpse of the sea from her hotel room window. The reception clerk had told her that she’d been upgraded to an ocean view room when he handed her the key card downstairs. He hadn’t mentioned the view would be obstructed by the smokey gray glass of the marina restaurant complex across the road.
Rachel let go of the white netting of the drapes, disappointed by the uninspiring view. She returned to unpacking her suitcase and settling into what would be her home and office for the duration of the trial.
There was a desk, a coffee-making nook, and a brocade armchair alongside a bronze lamp on the blue-gray carpet. In the bathroom was a glass-enclosed shower with a pile of fluffy white towels and an assortment of miniature bottles of translucent body wash and shampoo. The room smelled of carpet deodorizer, vacuum cleaner fumes, and cleaning spray.
Rachel stifled a yawn as she slipped off her shoes and collapsed on the starched white sheets of the king-size bed, staring up at the ceiling until her eyes blurred. She’d been driving since the middle of the night. She longed for sleep and was tempted to take a nap, but she reminded herself that she had work lined up later that afternoon and couldn’t risk oversleeping.
She reluctantly climbed off the bed and finished hanging her clothes in the wardrobe before arranging her files on the desk along with her laptop and power chargers. When she was done, she changed into shorts and a T-shirt and went downstairs for a brief walk to loosen up her body, stiff from hours sitting behind the steering wheel.
It was a relief when she was finally outside the hotel, strolling in the sunshine along the boardwalk. After a while, Rachel sat on a bench and soaked up the almost blinding explosion of color from neon-clad swimmers in the blue water and rows of striped beach umbrellas across the strip of golden sand. She felt so relaxed that she briefly wondered how she’d get any work done She had to remind herself that Neapolis might be a vacation town, but she was there for business.
A white-haired couple walking arm in arm smiled at Rachel as they went past. She smiled back and then surprised herself by calling out to ask them where she could find the Morrison’s Point jetty. She regretted each word as she said it.
“Morrison’s Point,” repeated the man. “Haven’t heard it called that for a long time. It’s past the headland over there.” He pointed to the south. “Nobody goes there much. Not since they built the marina and fixed up the beaches around here.”
“Except for fishermen,” his wife corrected. “Always plenty of fishermen. Just like the old days.”
“Yup,” her husband said. “Fishing’s still good down there.”
“Is it far? Can I walk?”
“Sure can. Keep walking till you can’t walk anymore. You’ll see it across the beach. Can’t miss it.”
As Rachel walked, she told herself that she was breaking a cardinal rule for true-crime podcasters: Never rendezvous with fans who leave notes on your car windshield. Never.
Rachel had a tendency to break cardinal rules, so she kept walking. Her feet hit the concrete of the boardwalk faster and faster in her determination to get there on time. The boardwalk ended and Rachel jumped down onto the sand. She took off her shoes and jogged by the shoreline, jumping over seaweed while trying to keep out of reach of the lapping waves.
She had a clear view of the Morrison’s Point jetty from the next headland. It looked old and decrepit from a distance, but when Rachel came closer she saw that it was solidly built from aged timber.
A handful of fishermen were scattered across the jetty, their eyes fixed on the tension of their nylon lines. One fisherman sitting on a red cooler box gripping a fishing rod looked half-asleep, with a canvas hat slouched over his head.
Rachel walked to the end of the jetty and leaned against the rails as she watched a sailboat maneuver in the distance as sunlight hit the water.
“Have you caught anything today?” Rachel asked a nearby fisherman whose face was creased in concentration as he hunched over his rod. In answer, he kicked open the lid of a white bucket next to his stool. Rachel peered inside. Two silver fish sloshed around in circles.
“Pulled in a flounder earlier. Threw it back. Too small,” he said, indicating the size of the fish with his hands.
“Seems big to me,” said Rachel.
“Nah, that’s nothing,” he said. “When I was a kid, we’d get fish three times the size without even trying. Best place to fish for miles. No rocks here. It’s all sand. On a windless day when the water is clear, you can actually see the fish through the water. They’ve got nowhere to hide.”
“Sounds like you’ve been fishing here for a long time?”
“Used to come with my great-granddaddy. This jetty has been here for over a hundred and twenty years. It’s survived more hurricanes than you can poke a stick at. We thought it would get blown away when Sandy hit. But it held up good.”
Rachel turned around to look for Hannah. She’d made it to the jetty by the deadline. But there was nobody around other than the fishermen and a man with a shaved head jogging along the beach. His dog trailed behind, yapping at the waves.
Rachel examined a brass plaque inset into a timber rail on the jetty. It was engraved with a brief dedication to the crew of a trawler who’d died in a storm in 1927. There were other plaques, too, in memory of sailors whose boats h
ad gone down in storms over the years. The most prominent was a plaque dedicated to a merchant ship torpedoed in nearby Atlantic waters by a German U-boat during World War Two.
“The coast around here is a graveyard. My daddy used to say it was haunted. At night the ghosts of—” The fisherman’s rod jerked and he abruptly stopped talking as he quickly reeled in the line until an empty hook emerged from the water. “Got away,” he muttered, rehooking his line with fresh bait and shuffling to his feet to recast it into the water.
“Did you see anyone waiting?” Rachel asked once his line was set. “I’m supposed to meet someone here. A friend,” she added, looking around again. “I don’t see her anywhere.”
“Can’t say that I’ve seen anyone standing around. Except you. But that’s not to say that nobody’s been here. I keep my eyes on my line,” he said. “Got to be quick or you lose ’em.”
Rachel could feel her skin starting to burn as she waited. The sun was strong. She regretted not putting on sun lotion. She hadn’t expected to be out that long and certainly never planned to wait at the jetty for Hannah to turn up. Rachel didn’t even know why she’d come. She was in Neapolis to cover the trial for the podcast. She couldn’t help Hannah. She didn’t have the time. The trial would take up all her focus and energy.
Still, she didn’t leave. She looked across the beach. There was nobody heading toward the jetty. The beach was deserted now that the man and his dog had disappeared. The old couple who’d given her directions earlier were right. Nobody came there except for fishermen.
A gull squawked. Rachel swiveled around to watch it swoop down toward a school of silver perch. The fish darted under the jetty to take cover. Other gulls swept in and hovered over the water, but the perch remained stubbornly under the jetty.
This is ridiculous, Rachel thought. She’d wasted a good part of the afternoon and she wasn’t going to waste another second. She was done waiting.
As she walked back down the jetty, she noticed a gleam of metal. It was a pocketknife, stuck into the post of a timber rail. Rachel squatted down to take a closer look. The pocketknife was skewering an envelope into the timber. The knife’s blade was pushed into the wood so deeply that Rachel had to use all her strength to tug it free, grabbing the paper before it fell between the slats of jetty. It was an envelope. Her name was written on it in what was becoming familiar handwriting.
Rachel closed the knife and put it in her pocket. She took a closer look at the timber post. Someone had carved a heart into the timber exactly where the envelope had been pinned. An inscription had been painstakingly pried into the wood with the sharp tip of a knife: In loving memory of Jenny Stills, who was viciously murdered here when she was just 16. Justice will be done.
Rachel remembered seeing a fisherman slouched on a red cooler box in the same spot earlier. The fisherman was gone.
She sat down on the timber decking. Her legs hung over the side of the jetty as she opened the envelope. It had a big hole through it from being pierced by the knife.
Rachel heard the faint ring of her phone. She retrieved it from her bag. It was Pete, but he had already hung up by the time she answered it. He’d left her a voice mail message. She pressed her phone hard against her ear to listen to his message above the wind.
“Rach, I called Tina, the student who interned for us in the spring. She remembers getting emails asking you to investigate the death of a girl called Jenny. She sent back the usual form letter. The writer wasn’t happy. She wrote back. Begged us to help her. Tina sent another ‘rejection’ note. Then the writer stopped emailing us—”
The last part of Pete’s message was drowned out by a sudden peal of laughter. Teenagers were running onto the jetty, making it sway as they climbed over the handrail and jumped into the waves with loud whoops. One splash followed another until they were all in the water except for a girl with long blond hair, who stood uncertainly on the narrow ledge, her back to the rails. The others treaded water, waiting for her to jump.
“Come on,” someone shouted.
The girl hesitated.
“Jump already!”
The girl took a deep breath and jumped into the water, splashing Rachel and the note. The paper was damp and the ink was bleeding as Rachel began to read.
6
Hannah
Rachel, I wrote to you about my sister Jenny five months ago. I received a response from your office. It was signed by you, but I got the impression that you didn’t write it. In the letter, you said that you were deeply sorry to hear about my tragedy but that you weren’t able to help. You wished me the best of luck and said that you hoped that I’d get justice for my sister.
I appreciate the sentiment. I really do. At the same time, and I hope you don’t mind me saying so, I don’t see how that could possibly happen. Not without your help. The cops gave up a long time ago. You’re the only person who can help me now. If I didn’t believe that then I wouldn’t have left you that letter at the rest stop. You looked flustered when you found it. I wasn’t sure whether you’d read it. But you did. Otherwise you wouldn’t have come to the jetty and you wouldn’t be reading this note.
I know that Jenny is just a name to you, so I want you to understand what she meant to me. Perhaps then you’ll reconsider.
Jenny had long blond hair the color of corn and the same pale blue eyes as our mother. Light freckles flecked her nose and cheekbones. She had a wide smile with a slight gap between her front teeth that she hated. I always thought it was her most beautiful feature.
Jenny was more than my big sister. She took care of me when our mother was at work, which was often, since Mom worked two jobs until her health waned. Jenny picked me up from school and took me to the supermarket, where we’d do homework in the staff room until Mom’s shift was over. Sometimes if Mom worked late, we’d take the bus home and Jenny would fix dinner. My sister’s loss left a gaping hole in my heart that has never healed.
After Jenny’s funeral, Mom’s decline was quick. Her complexion faded into the lifeless gray of a dying tree. Her eyes were flat. She moved slowly with the listlessness of an old woman. Most troubling of all, for the first time since she’d been diagnosed she made no effort to hide her suffering.
Before Jenny died, Mom would pick lemons from our tree and juice them by hand to make a pitcher of lemonade. All the while, she’d talk enthusiastically about plans for the summer and a promised road trip the following year. Though maybe even then she knew that it would never happen.
After Jenny died, there was nothing. No hope. No plans. No thoughts about the future. Mom stopped fighting. She capitulated. Without a will to live, those relentless invaders surged through her body, leaving devastation in their cancerous wake.
Day and night, she lay in bed facing the wall, staring at photos of Jenny. It was almost as if she turned her back on life. And me. Within weeks of Jenny’s death, my mother’s casket was lowered into the ground alongside Jenny’s grave. I wasn’t there for the funeral. I was in the hospital.
When I was feeling better, the psychologist, a pretty woman with a heart-shaped face and short dark hair whose name I have long forgotten, offered to take me to the cemetery so I could lay flowers at their graves. She said it was important to say goodbye. I ignored her offer as I sat in my usual spot on the floor by the hospital windows, hugging my knees to my body as I looked through the glass panes at hedges clipped to rectangular perfection.
I haven’t told this to a living soul, but if I’d gone to the cemetery and stood by my mother’s and sister’s graves then I would have found a way to join them. For they were the only family that I had ever known and the pain at their loss sears my soul to this day.
I never returned home, though I remember every nook and cranny of our simple house. We lived south of town, inland from the beach. Mom called it no-man’s-land, because there was nothing much there except for us.
It was an old two-bedroom house with a rusty flat roof that leaked when it rained hard. We had an overgr
own garden of fruit trees in the back. Hanging from an apple tree was a rope tied to an old tire that I’d swing on while Mom hung clothes on the washing line. That house and her beaten-up station wagon were about all we had in the world.
I don’t remember much about my time at the hospital. I sat by the bay window most days, thinking about home. It was from my usual perch that I saw a man and woman arrive one afternoon. He walked with a pronounced limp. She was soft and ached with a maternal need that I could sense as I watched them through the glass window.
They shuffled across the sloping lawn to the hospital entrance. Their pace was excruciatingly slow. I silently urged them on. She held his arm to support him as they climbed the stairs to the main doors, and then disappeared out of my line of sight.
I knew without having to be told that they were the couple who had offered to foster me. I’d already informed the psychologist in no uncertain terms that I would not live with strangers. She said that I needed a family that would love me as their own. I told her that no family would love me the way my real family had done.
It took time, but eventually I realized I couldn’t stay at the hospital forever. A foster family was my only option. I had no relatives that I knew of. I asked the psychologist if the couple she’d told me about had other children. She said they hadn’t been blessed in that way. I asked why and she told me that she guessed it was because he’d been hurt in a war and that it had taken a long time for him to heal.
I learned much later that Henry was injured five weeks into his first tour of Vietnam, when a grenade exploded in a ditch not far from where he lay. He spent more time in rehabilitation than he had on the battlefield.
A surgeon at a U.S. military hospital saved him by stopping the bleeding and removing whatever shrapnel he had time to pull out in the meatball surgery they did in those battlefield hospitals. The shards he left behind caused Henry terrible pain for the rest of his life. Henry was a kind man who spoke little and left it to his wife to run the household. Her name was Kate. Henry always called her Kitty.