Conviction

by Julia Dahl

  “Whoa.”

  “I know. I’m insane. But I was an only child. My husband’s from a big family and I always really wanted that.”

  “How old are the other two?”

  “Two and four. The oldest one starts preschool next month, thank God. Having three at home at the same time might actually kill me.” She laughs. “That would be hilarious. You could take over the blog and write about me! Amanda Button, insane person, was found dead in her home. Police suspect her children are at fault, but can’t find the murder weapon.”

  I laugh, too, partly because Amanda’s laugh is so funny. It’s this grumbling cackle that sounds like a cross between Dr. Evil and Bette Davis. I like this girl.

  “How do you take care of two kids and do the blog? There’s, like, almost a murder every day, right?”

  “Just about. I do a lot when they’re asleep. I’m kind of an insomniac. My husband works from home, too, so we trade off. He does freelance web design and software stuff.”

  “You do everything from home?”

  She nods. “I’ve got a police scanner so I get alerted when there’s a body. Then I start trolling social media for keywords in that neighborhood. Now that people know about the blog they tweet at me and send me Facebook messages. But what about you? What are you working on?”

  “Nothing, really,” I say. Amanda doesn’t seem like the judgmental type. “I’m kind of looking for something.”

  “Well, if you’re interested in pitching Valerie’s wrongful conviction project, I get letters all the time from prisoners who say they’re innocent. I don’t have time to go through them, but there might be something there.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Two days after the cocktail party, I take the F train to a neighborhood called Ditmas Park, which is south of where I live in Gowanus and north of Borough Park. Amanda and her brood live on the second floor of an enormous old house that was probably once elegant, but is now covered entirely in roofing shingles. An exterior staircase indicates the home has been partitioned into apartments. It’s the biggest house on the block—and all the houses are suburban-style big—but hands down the ugliest.

  There are four buzzers by the front door. I press the button marked “BUTTON!” After about thirty seconds, Amanda opens the door, carrying a little boy on her hip.

  “Welcome to the madhouse,” she says.

  “Who’s this?” I ask. I’m not exactly a kid person, but it seems rude to ignore him.

  “This is Liam,” she says. “His brother is asleep and he’s supposed to be asleep, too. Isn’t he?”

  Liam rests his head on his mommy’s shoulder. Big eyes blink at me.

  “Come on up. It’s messy but we’ve got the AC cranking.”

  I follow her up the wide carpeted staircase to a landing with one door at either end.

  “They split the house into apartments in the eighties, I think,” says Amanda, pushing open one of the doors. The main room is enormous—someone must have knocked down a wall at some point. A bank of windows faces the backyard, and the space appears to function as a combination kitchen-office-playroom-living room-dining room. The floor is half-covered in foam tiles with a letter of the alphabet on each and strewn with toys. On one side is a playpen, a stationary tricycle, an easel, a plastic table and chairs set, and a tub full of more toys. On the other side is a flimsy IKEA desk with three computer monitors in a semicircle.

  “This is mission control,” says Amanda. “The bedrooms are tiny and there’s only one bathroom, but this room makes it doable. I mean, it’s insane. But doable. Do you want something to drink?” She opens the refrigerator. “I actually made lemonade last night. Do you want some?”

  “I’d love some,” I say. Liam has closed his eyes. “Looks like he’s out.”

  Amanda looks down at him. “Sweet,” she whispers. “Okay, give me a minute to see if I can put him down.”

  “I’m not in a hurry. Do what you gotta do.”

  Amanda smiles and disappears down the hall, waddling in bare feet, one baby in her belly, one on her hip. Before I got here, Iris and I had brunch. When I leave, I might take a nap. Tonight we’re headed to Prospect Park for a free reggae concert. We’ll take a blanket and a cooler and maybe stop at a bar on our way home. That’s a Saturday in my life. But for a mom like Amanda, the work never ends. Even leisure life is work. I’m not going to lie: it doesn’t look fun.

  The dining room table is a circle with four chairs, two of which have booster seats strapped to them. I sweep a couple Cheerios off one that doesn’t and drop them in a trash can near the stove, then sit down. As I do, one of the dark computer screens comes to life. Amanda is getting an alert. I get up to look and see her coming back from the bedrooms.

  “Your computer just lit up.”

  “Oh, yeah? There was a stabbing in Brownsville last night. Female. She wasn’t dead when the cops found her, but she might be now.”

  Amanda sits down at her station and moves the mouse around, presses a few keys. “Yeah, looks like. Getting RIP tweets from the neighborhood.” She points at the middle screen, which shows a map of Brooklyn, and every few seconds a red flag pops up. “I can search for hashtags, like RIP, in the neighborhood where the cops find the body. Then whenever anybody who’s got their locator on tweets with that hashtag it maps it. Look.” She clicks on one flag and a window opens with a tweet from BayBeGurl89: too young too soon. I’ll always love you @Jasmeen190. #RIP #lovekills #prayersplease

  “Love kills,” says Amanda. “I bet it turns out to be her boyfriend. Or an ex.” Amanda clicks into the profile of Jasmeen190, aka Jaz. Her profile picture shows her as a young dark-skinned black woman with neon pink and black cornrows and a silver stud in the space above her lips where Cindy Crawford has a mole. Her personal description reads: sing from the heart.

  “Sad,” I say.

  “Yup,” says Amanda, clicking around. She opens a window on the computer screen to her left. “I entered a dummy post last night when I heard the scanner call. Female and Brownsville. I’m gonna message this baby girl eighty-nine and ask her if she has a photo of Jasmeen I can use. And see if she can hook me up with family for a full name and DOB. See if they’re taking donations. I can post a link to that.”

  “Should I get out of your hair?”

  “No, no. It’s nice to have company. Jonathan’s out of town all weekend doing an on-site with a client in North Carolina. Bastard!” She giggles. “I haven’t left the city in years! That cocktail party was the first time I’d been in Manhattan since there was snow. Literally. Okay. Let me just send a couple quick messages.…” She types and clicks and then swivels around in her chair.

  “Lemonade?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Thanks.”

  She pops up and goes to the refrigerator, which is covered with children’s drawings, wedding announcements, and coupons from CVS. She grabs a Tupperware pitcher from the top shelf and rights two glasses that appear to be part of a set from McDonald’s from their upside-down perch in the dish rack on the counter.

  “Hope you don’t mind the Hulk,” she says.

  “Not at all,” I say. “I love the Hulk.”

  “So,” she says. “The letters. I realized after I mentioned them to you that I really have no idea if they’re even worth looking at. I started getting them a couple months after the blog went live. At first I was going through them, but then they just piled up. Everybody says they’re innocent, obviously. But a lot of the cases are from the eighties and nineties, which was ground zero for murders in the city. There were more than two thousand murders in 1991. That’s what, six times as many as last year? And it’s not like there were six times as many cops or prosecutors. It makes sense that they might have botched some of the cases. DNA technology didn’t really exist. And all that stuff Domanick wrote about with false confessions. Not to mention how unreliable eyewitness testimony is.…”

  “The Central Park Five case was around then, right?”

  “Exactly! Those
poor kids were totally railroaded. I was in elementary school in 1989. My mom used to run in Prospect Park and my dad made her stop after that. We lived in Park Slope, which was nicer than Harlem or Crown Heights, but there was still, like, broken glass from crack pipes all over the sidewalks. I remember I wasn’t allowed to wear open-toed shoes at all until high school when things started getting a little better. My dad was convinced I’d step on glass or a needle and get AIDS.

  “The tabloids had everybody scared, too. They made it seem even worse than it was. Now, everybody’s all over the killer cops, but back then it was all about the scary black men terrorizing the city. Men and boys. Teen super-predators, shit like that. Did you know Donald Trump actually took out a full-page ad to declare that the Central Park Five should get the death penalty? I’m serious! And they were more than happy to take his money.” She pauses. “Sorry, I’m rambling.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I didn’t grow up here, so there’s a lot I don’t know.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Florida.”

  “Oh, yeah? What part?”

  “Orlando.”

  “Near Disney World?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “My grandpa worked there for years. In the corporate offices.”

  “Did you get discounts?”

  I nod. “I worked in the park the summer right after high school. At one of the stores that sold Mickey hats and stuff. It was hell. Hell. That’s sort of when I decided I wouldn’t have kids.”

  “I should have worked at Disney World!” shouts Amanda, laughing that enormous laugh. Then she covers her mouth. “Shit. I really hope I didn’t wake them.” She shakes her head, smiling.

  “Are you sure this isn’t something you want to work on?” I ask.

  “Oh my God, no. The whole fucking ‘justice’ process makes me crazy.” She uses her fingers to put air quotes around the word justice. “I’m about the victims. I mean, if somebody got wrongfully convicted, they’re a victim, too, obviously. But mostly I try to give the people who literally can’t speak—the dead people—a voice. Make sure they aren’t completely forgotten. And the people left behind. Have you ever known anybody who was murdered?”

  “No one I was close to,” I say.

  “Good,” she says. “I don’t wish it on anyone. When I was fourteen, my aunt’s husband came home and shot her and then himself. They lived a couple blocks from us. She was a lot younger than my dad, and he’d practically raised her after his mom died from cancer. It destroyed him. My parents got divorced a couple years later. He just gave up on everything. He started drinking too much, lost his job. I was really pissed at him for a long time. I mean, I loved her, too. So did my mom. But you can’t predict how a violent death like that is going to affect someone. Some people can take it. But, I mean, some people can take war, too. When somebody you love is murdered, it’s like a bomb goes off in your life. If you survive intact you’re lucky. And the thing is, there are neighborhoods in this city where bombs like that are going off every night. The same families are getting hit over and over. The cops come in and maybe the reporters come in, and they ask questions so they can do their jobs, and then they’re gone. Can you imagine if your brother, or your best friend, was shot to death and didn’t even get his picture in the paper? For you, for everybody around you, it’s front-page news. It’s bigger than 9/11. But for the rest of the world, it’s like nothing even happened. That disconnect fucks with people. What I do is mark the deaths. All of them. The rest of it, ‘justice,’ that’s somebody else’s job.”

  * * *

  Amanda puts eight packets from various prisoners across New York State into a paper shopping bag from Trader Joe’s and tells me she’d love to help if I find anything interesting. I walk a few blocks south to Cortelyou Road, order an iced coffee at a café with a sidewalk patio, and start opening the envelopes. Some are more than an inch thick, with photocopies of motions and statements and judgments, sentencing reports, witness lists, disciplinary records, medical histories. Some even include crime-scene photos. Each begins with a letter, addressed to Amanda. Dear Ms. Button. The handwriting breaks my heart: careful, neat and even as a grade school cursive test. I almost feel embarrassed for the men writing, imagining them hunched over in a cell with a pen, trying to imbue each letter with the sincerity of their plea. Thinking, if this f is upright, she will believe me and I will go free.

  Michael Malone, writing from Otisville Correctional Facility, was convicted of rape and burglary in 1997: The victim had bite marks on her and a doctor said they matched my teeth. He includes an article from Mother Jones with the headline: “Everything You Think You Know About Forensics Is Wrong: How Prosecutors Sold Bite Mark, Bullet Casing and Fingerprint Analysis as Real Science.” Timothy Whiting, an inmate at Attica, says he has been serving time since 1989 for a bank robbery in Queens where a guard was shot and killed: Two of my friends testified I was in Manhattan that day, but the prosecutor said they were lying because we grew up together. Timothy’s packet has statements from his friends, a photograph of his daughter (she was eighteen months old when he went upstate) and grandson, and a photocopy of a certificate that congratulates him for completing an associate’s degree through Genesee Community College. Elmira inmate Kenneth Deeds, convicted of hit-and-run homicide in 1990, says that his lawyer was incompetent: The witness who swore it was me told the cops she saw a tall man running away. I’m 5' 6" and my lawyer didn’t ask her a single question at trial. Deeds includes the witness’s original signed statement to police, as well as a photograph of him standing next to a wall height chart.

  DeShawn Perkins, a prisoner at Coxsackie State Prison in Greene County has written in blue ink.

  Dear Ms. Button,

  My name is DeShawn Perkins. Every time I can get to a computer, I read your blog. I think you are doing a very good thing. My mama died by murder when I was little but nobody cared. I’m glad to see some things are different now.

  I got in a lot of trouble when I was a teenager. I stole and I lied. But I didn’t do the crime I was convicted of. I’m not a murderer. Malcolm and Sabrina Davis took me in when I was 6 years old and they were my family.

  I was with my girlfriend, LaToya Marshall, that night of the murders, but the cops didn’t believe her when she told them. And the detective tricked me into confessing.

  Since I’ve been inside I’ve learned a lot. I got a high school diploma and I work in the kitchen. I know life isn’t fair. But somebody else killed my family and I’m paying for his crime.

  Thank you. God bless.

  DeShawn

  Along with the letter, DeShawn included the original incident report on the murders, his signed confession, and a statement from a woman named Henrietta Eubanks. I don’t see anything about physical evidence, but there are some administrative-looking documents identifying DeShawn’s lawyers—for the trial and his appeal—and a sentencing report. Sandra Michaels was the original prosecutor. The confession and the witness statements are both just a few lines long. The confession was signed and witnessed by Detective Pete Olivetti on July 6, 1992, at 2:15 P.M. Henrietta Eubanks’ statement was signed and witnessed on July 5, 1992, at 8:45 P.M., by Officer Saul Katz.

  “Holy shit,” I say, out loud.

  The waitress and the couple she’s seating all look at me.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  I haven’t even known Saul Katz for two years, and yet he has become one of the central figures in my life. I met him one freezing night last January outside the home of a murdered Hasidic woman in Borough Park. He said I looked like my mother—the mother who abandoned my father and me when I was an infant—and ushered me into the ultra-Orthodox world she had been born into. It was a circuitous route, but Saul led me to Aviva. Now I know my mother. Or rather, I have met her and learned some things about her. I know, for example, that she didn’t leave us because she wanted to go back to Brooklyn and live the strict Hasidic life she’d been raised in. Quite the opposite: getting knocked
up was an accident, and she fled because becoming a mother at nineteen years old was the fate she thought she had escaped by running off to Florida with my dad. I know other, more human things, too. I know that when I hug her she feels fragile, but that she has endured shunning and homelessness and divorce and despair. I know that she cleans homes for a living, and I suspect it is partly because she never considered the idea that she could make money doing something she actually enjoyed. She didn’t grow up being encouraged to strive for anything but motherhood, and she fucked that up early. I know that her sense of humor is limited. I know that, like me, she takes antidepressants. And I know that, until last year, she was mostly alone in the world. Now, she and Saul are together, which makes him almost like a stepdad. Saul owns a one-bedroom in Brighton Beach, but Aviva still lives up in New Paltz. They take turns driving to see each other every week.

  I don’t know much about Saul’s life as a cop except that it ended badly. His son committed suicide a few years ago. As a boy, Binyamin had been sexually abused, and after he died Saul beat the man who helped cover it up into a coma, which got him suspended. When he pretended he was still on the job and convinced a rookie reporter (me) to use him as a source in the story of a murdered Hasidic woman, the NYPD finally fired him.

  In 1992, when Saul witnessed this statement by Henrietta Eubanks, he would have been new to the force. I wonder if he even remembers the case.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Morning

  July 5, 1992

  Crown Heights, Brooklyn

  Olivetti knocked on the window of the unmarked sedan to get Saul’s attention.

  “Call the precinct,” he said when the younger officer opened the door. “Tell them we need to transport a child, then meet me inside.”

  Saul did as he was told. It wasn’t even ten o’clock, but when he stepped out of the air-conditioned vehicle, the wet July heat pressed back at him. Parishioners were beginning to arrive at Glorious Gospel, and he had to “excuse me” his way to the glass door of the church. The men and boys were dressed in suits and the women in jewel-colored dresses, stockings, matching hats. Some wore short gloves on their hands. The little girls had ribbons on their socks and the little boys wore bow ties. If you looked at it a certain way, Saul thought, you could find similarities in the attire of the Hasidim he had grown up among and these black church folk. Everyone in a costume signifying fellowship. A man in a certain hat was haredi. A woman in a certain hat was church-going. His wife, he knew, would call these people vain. Do they think Hashem is impressed by sparkles? Frieda’s spirit had turned mean since Saul shaved off his peyes and enrolled in the police academy. He moved out of their little apartment three years ago, but she refused to grant him a divorce. If he wanted to see his son—which he did, desperately—Saul had to remain cordial, walking a fine line between respecting Frieda as his child’s mother, and taking care not to give her hope for a reconciliation. He endured her venomous words against the people of Brooklyn whom he had sworn to protect, and only occasionally attempted to explain why he did the work he did. After the riots last year, he stopped bothering.