by R.J. Ellory
Lewis Woodroffe lowered his head, and he didn’t say another word.
I left quietly, drove home, hugged and kissed Evie, looked in on the kids. I had a beer and a cigarette in the backyard, and then I went to bed.
I slept like a baby, nothing behind my eyelids, and when I woke in the morning they were still as blank as the sky.
The statement, the arraignment, the trial, the sentencing—it all went like clockwork. Lewis Woodroffe was the boy, no doubt about it, and though his PD did as fine a job as could be expected, there was no other way for it to come back. Woodroffe had killed Carole Shaw, confessed everything. He gave us times and places, the people they saw, the diners, the restaurant, the museum, The Blue Parrot. He even remembered Howard Schumann’s name, the few words they’d had about the respective military experiences.
And that—to be honest—was the thing that finally got to me.
The devil is in the details, or so they say.
It was the details, but not for the reason you’re thinking. The details came through alright, no doubt about it. We even spoke to the victim’s sister, Maryanne Shaw, and she said that meeting a guy in a diner like that would have been exactly the sort of thing Carole would have done, so even someone who wasn’t there confirmed Stanley Hayes’ version of events. Carole picked up Lewis Woodroffe. Woodroffe was having breakfast not so far from where he was working, and there she was. He was his own man. He was ahead on the painting job. He decided he’d earned a day off, and he took it. What happened at the end of that fateful day was just what he said in court. She got upset with him, she threatened to call the neighbor around to slap him into touch if he didn’t leave. She’d told him this neighbor of hers was a boxing champion or something. Our boy got agitated, scared even, and then he got mad with her, tried to quiet her down, and he put his hands around her throat. He was stronger than he believed, and he ended up killing her. It was that simple. That pointless, and that simple.
The jury came back unanimous. Sentencing? Well, there was only one option. Death by electrocution.
The case was done and dusted by the 14th of November. Woodroffe was held over in the County Jail until there was room for him at Pontiac, which—ironically—never happened due to overcrowding and refurbishment plans and all sorts of things. They even established an execution chamber in the County Jail in the latter part of 1958. I heard about it on the same day as I heard about the fire at Our Lady of the Angels School. Ninety-two kids and three nuns killed. Tragic, horrifying, and all the more poignant because Pete knew the folks of one of the kids. Anyway, that was right at the beginning of December, the 1st as far as I recall, and I heard about the thing at the County Jail the same day, maybe the day after. That’s where Woodroffe would be executed, not so far from where he killed that girl, and not so far from where the sister still lived.
Anyway, we were talking about details, and where you found the Devil.
Again, it went back to something Dougie said. It was a week or two before the execution, no more, and he was studying something or other at school. He asked me a question about handwriting.
“Dad, is it true that you can tell about what someone’s like from the way they write their name?”
“I don’t know, son. I know that there’s a science of handwriting, but that’s not my field of expertise.”
I didn’t give it a second thought. Not until later that day. And then I gave it a second, a third and a fourth, and finally I was in Evidence Archives, digging out the newspaper that the short-order cook had given us. There were the margin notes, the blocks that Woodroffe had counted off from where he lived to the prospective places of employment. It never struck me before, but not only was the handwriting somewhat different from the statement Woodroffe had penned the morning after his transfer to the 9th, but the jobs he’d circled were all driving jobs. He was a painter. That’s the job that he was doing when he had met Carole Shaw. Why would a painter be looking for driving jobs? The answer was straightforward enough, in all honesty. Many a man took any job going. Times were tough. Driving was as good a rate of pay as most everything else in the blue-collar range. Woodroffe was no rocket scientist, and so he might have turned his hand to anything that paid sufficient.
I left it alone. The man had confessed. It was signed, sealed, delivered. He was going to die in a fortnight, and I—for one—wouldn’t be shedding any tears.
But then the handwriting started to nag at me. And after the handwriting came the statement. It was the details. The details were the same, over and over and over again. What he said, what he wrote, the answer to every question—at least when it came to times and locations—was identical. There was no I’m not exactly sure . . . I think it might have been . . . or Let me think now, did we go there first, or did we go there? None of that. None at all. And I thought of something my own dad had told me years before. Liars never change their story, he said. They practice it. They go over it again and again and again. They get it down cold, and then they trot it out parrot-fashion, and they never change a word. Honest people don’t do that. They are vague, indecisive. They doubt their own memory. Lewis Woodroffe never doubted what he said. Not once.
And then there was the kicker. The real solid gold clincher.
I remembered when we searched his apartment. Hell, I say apartment, but it was little more than a single room with a small en suite on one side, a kitchenette on the other.
There were books everywhere. Piles of them. Magazines too. It was like a private library. Books about birds, about sculpture, about architecture. Books about different religions and cultures. Novels as well. Stacks of novels. Woodroffe was like Evie, never without something to read. But when we took his statement, when we interviewed him, all the days we held him over on remand, all the times I visited him in the County Jail, I never saw him read. Not once. I never saw him with a book, a magazine, nothing.
A reader is a reader is a reader. You get that bug, and you never lose it, no matter your circumstances. And when it comes to hard time, if you’re a reader, well that’s how you make the time disappear.
I never looked at these things. I never put two and two together. Not until Dougie said what he said about the handwriting. It could have been the same handwriting, sure, but it might not have been. The handwriting was simply the thing that opened a door into doubt, and from there on my doubt just seemed to grow and grow.
I spoke to Pete Quinn about it. I spoke to the squad sergeant. I spoke to the PD that had defended Woodroffe. I even spoke to the Precinct Captain, and then wrote to the Chief of Police, but it came to nothing. It was all opinion, nothing more than circumstantial, a hunch, nothing. The man had confessed. He had been tried and found guilty by a jury of his peers. The law had been applied to the letter, and justice had been seen to be done. Chicago did not want to hear that a guilty man had been walking the streets for four years while an innocent man rotted in a cell.
I never did go down and see Lewis Woodroffe.
I couldn’t face it.
I could have been wrong. It could have been him.
But then, finally—on Monday, November 7th, 1960—he said what he said in that execution chamber, and I knew I was right. In the eyes of God, I am innocent of this thing, but in my heart I am guilty. I am sorry . . . so truly, deeply sorry . . .
I honestly believed that we had arrested, charged, tried, sentenced, condemned and executed the wrong man, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
I even told the sister, for what good it did.
She didn’t want to hear that. Didn’t want to hear it at all. Understandable, of course, and perhaps—in hindsight—I should have said nothing to give her such alarm.
After all, there are burdens we are destined to carry alone, and the wrongful death of Lewis Woodroffe seems to be mine.
I do not know if I will ever learn the truth of what really happened that evening in Carole Shaw’s apartment. The only people who know the full truth are dead.
Sometimes
I wake in the cool half-light of nascent dawn, I feel the warmth of Evie sleeping beside me, I sense the presence of Dougie and Laura in the adjacent room, and I wonder if there is a God. I wonder if there is some sort of divine justice in this life, or if we have to wait until Judgment Day.
Evie read me a poem one time. It was by Emily Dickinson and it was about someone’s final resting place.
A few days after Woodroffe’s execution I looked it up, and I read that line, the one about waiting ’til judgment broke, excellent and fair, and I wondered if God had welcomed Carole Shaw home, and even now she was looking down on me and telling me not to worry, that she had found rapture, that even now she was helping to teach those little kids that had died in the December fire.
I hoped so. I really did.
And if Lewis Woodroffe was innocent of her murder, then I hoped he’d found peace too, and whatever reasoning had existed behind his confession had brought him salvation and redemption.
I have to let it all go. I have to get on with the life I am living now. I have a family, a job to do, people who count on me.
I might not have been able to save Carole Shaw, but maybe I can save some others.
After all, if I can’t do that, then what’s the point?
About the Author
R.J. Ellory is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling A Quiet Belief in Angels, which was the Strand magazine’s Thriller of the Year, shortlisted for the Barry Award, and a finalist for the SIBA Award. He also the author of The Anniversary Man, A Quiet Vendetta, Candlemoth, and A Simple Act of Violence, winner of the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award.
