Case Closed

Case Closed

It is late afternoon and the office is quiet. Doris, my secretary, is already at home by now. Our town is not all that big. I can get from one side of town where I live to one of my favorite eats on the other side of town in easily 20 minutes, or less if the lights are with me. She says she can be home in less time than it takes to walk from the office and around the block to the lot and then wait for a clearing in the traffic.

I always seem to leave after our rush half-hour.

But, today, we heard the verdict in a crazy case, and I’m thankful, but still in favor of having a scotch straight up in the office where I can take a deep breath and be satisfied at the end of this one. I closed the blinds on the west window but opened the window to the east. It wasn’t hot but I wanted a little bit of fresh air and street noise to help collect my thoughts. I wasn’t all that in doubt about the outcome but I’ve been around the barn enough times to know these things can take a right turn anytime.

It actually had not been a case needing a lot of police work or investigation on my part. I was there to provide some muscle for the victim. A private person had hired me to do that. The defendant, her ex-husband, had come loose a couple of times before the proceeding. He got himself cuffed to the chair for his antics which didn’t seem to really make him any smarter. I sat behind him and would have dearly loved the chance to deck his butt, bailiff or no bailiff. He proved to be a jerk which coincided with his Murder in the Second charge. Bought him 33 years, the max. Without parole. Rear smart guy. Career over. Life over. Every hope and dream will be locked up, basically, for . . . ever.

A doctor, no less. Trained? In what? Not how to murder your wife, for sure. They had become estranged. He was the first person the cops zeroed in on, before the night was over. They had two kids, aged 10 and 12. Nice kids. Now terribly traumatized but when I saw them this afternoon as we left they seemed relieved. By the time the mother was in the ER the cops were already interrogating the ex-husband.

He had offered up money but used his girl “friend” to act as go-between. She’d wormed her way into this teenager’s -- the shooter -- love-deprived brain. He was a dope. She was no winner. He was a bad shot. Dad thought he’d thought of everything.

If anyone was relieved -- if that-- at the verdict, it was the mother. She taken a bullet to her right hip, shattered it completely, and a second grazed just outside her right eye socket. The shooter’s little 32-caliber popgun did damage only because he was up to close but if she’d been five or ten feet farther back he’d missed her. It was some cheap piece of junk that jammed after the third shot. Bozo didn’t have hardly enough brains, he testified how scared he had been, dumped the thing in the bushes just off the porch. Patrol officers found it while they were standing outside on the porch making their calls to headquarters. The ex-husband had bought the thing, he thought, from some guy who would never talk, but did, and went scot free. Like I say, the case was pretty much over before it started. If Dad had listened to his attorney he might have --might have-- gotten a few years lesser but he decided to fight it out, ever thinking he wasn’t so much as innocent as much as he just too damn smart to lose, and kept losing every time he doubled down.

The deal between the DA and the supplier irked the judge and me, too. The guy should have been held responsible. He testified that the husband said it was for self-defense and the husband did not testify, at all or otherwise, so the jury went with what it had. The defense tried to discredit the supplier and did, I think, but that didn’t excuse the husband. Sometimes these things get a bit smelly.

She will be a long while before she walks right and they still aren’t sure how serious the wound is to her eye. It is serious enough that so far she hasn’t regained sight in it. She and her children are going to have a tough time but at least they can start with this piece of closure.

Don’t feel sorry for dear Bubba. He was bound to get caught and if she’d died he would be headed for death row, in Tennessee or most certainly life without parole. Slam dunk. No deals. No bargaining. Dead to rights nailed his behind to the barn door.

Dear ol’ dad argued he was the victim of some ill we never quite got a handle on. He grasped at straws, when he should have just left her and the kids and the county a long time ago. It was almost obvious from the git-go that he simply wanted her dead and didn’t have any qualms about who or how it was done.

If there is something uniform about murder, it seems to me, is the husband has a money interest that clouds his vision. He wants his cake and eat it, too. Never works that way. Never. Too many motives, too lazy, too chicken to actually pack up, and get out of Dodge. Or, in this case, Chattanooga. So, he’s got 33 long years to think about it. Thirty-three Christmases spent staring out the cell window. Thirty-three spring times missed. Thirty-three summer solstice spent in a 12-by-12 cell. By himself, most likely.

One of the reasons this crime really upset everyone, including me and the judge and the jury, for certain, was that the two little ones were home at the time, found their mother. Despite that they provided a couple of clues that identified the getaway car. Talk about impressive.

The jury was done in a hurry. Attorneys will tell you that a short deliberation is just for show. They’d made up their minds by the time they met in the jury room. Thirty minutes to formalize the vote and ninety minutes to make him suffer. They had no doubt of what happened and why and by whom.

The boy shooter --not long out of high school-- pleaded guilty. He rolled over on the girl. Accepted life with the possibility of parole. He knew he had been seduced and used but also knew he had pulled the trigger.

The girl rolled over on the father. She pleaded guilty, and was put on parole for five years. She got off easy. Love is a strange beast sometimes.

Dad, on the other hand, is going to go away. It is just as simple as that. Murder in the second. Conspiracy. Abetting. That sort of thing. One of those strings of offenses that is fifteen indictments long. He is already written out of the history books and out of the family record. He will never see his kids again. He will be an old man, if he gets out, and he might not get out. Tennessee prisons are neither better nor worse than any others and his kind is not liked behind bars.

This scotch is no help. The drift of street sounds do not distract my brain from the complete tragedy of this ordeal. The various stories unfolding down there on the street might come to a climax minutes from now. Who knows? I hope not. Cases like this do not have a winner. Everyone lost. Justice does not get served. One of my favorite quotes is from Faulkner about justice he wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot fence rail. That story of his has stuck with me since college.

The two young ones will have to adjust to knowing their dad tried to kill their mom. Not the kind of thing you talk about in show-and-tell. They will have a lifetime of personal emptiness to lug around like a ball on a chain. Mom will survive, I hope, although she might lose sight in one eye. The hip will be replaced and she will walk with a limp. Every time she opens the front door of the house, there will be this scary moment that this could happen all over. I don’t know if she’ll sell the house or not. At some point she’ll have to go back to work for a living. I have to wonder if any man will want to marry her. The victims always seem to remain victims forever. Just like once an ex-con always an ex-con, once victim always a victim. It all seems so utterly useless.

I wonder what will happen when her son, decides somewhere in the next few years, like a lot of young men, to own a gun. I wonder how she would react. Once a victim always a victim. We supposedly rehabilitate the criminal but do we ever relieve the victim of their burden? I suppose we can’t actually erase such trauma from the brain and about all they can do is scab over it.

 

[Note: This is basically a true story. The young man who pulled the trigger was eventually pardoned and allowed to return to Chattanooga. The father is still in prison. The girl left town. The mother was blinded in one eye by the shooting.]

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