After the Eclipse

by Sarah Perry

  But surely Walt would read me the name of a town that, no, we’d never visited, a man that, no, I’d never heard of, a supposed lead that would prove to be the product of rumor. Many people called the police because they craved the shadowy fame of being connected to the case, thought it would throw them into relief against the gray background of other people’s calm, uneventful lives. They tried to imbue incidental connections with meaning, their imaginations fast-forwarding to headlines about a heroic tipster. They claimed to have overheard confessions, to have found a knife in the woods, to have seen a vehicle that night, eight or ten or now twelve years ago, and the police would cautiously and thoroughly investigate and come up with nothing. As I got up from my desk, I prepared myself for the familiar whoosh of disappointment, the quick loss of hope, followed by the shame of ever having felt that hope, even if just for a moment. My life would not change, I told myself, and that would be fine. Just fine.

  I shut myself into the dim spare office. White light from the overcast sky came in through the big window, angling down between our building and the next. I sat down at the large desk, armed with a white legal pad and a blue pen. I uncapped the pen, just in case. I picked up the receiver and pushed the button for Walt’s call.

  “Okay, I’m ready. What’s going on?” I asked smoothly, calmly, in my work voice.

  Walt took a breath. “Well, Sarah. We think we know who killed your mother. In fact, we’re sure we know.”

  I can’t remember what I said first; my heartbeat hammered in my ears, erasing the words as I spoke them. I do know that the surface of the desk suddenly seemed very far away. If I faint, I thought, will anyone hear it?

  Walt first asked if the man’s name was familiar to me: “Have you ever heard of a Michael—Mike—Hutchinson?” I hadn’t. But as Walt explained, this was most certainly not another false lead. The sickening feeling of disappointment did not come. My pulse gradually slowed to normal.

  Walt was sure. And the evidence sounded good. I lowered the pen’s fine point and wrote: “Michael Hutchinson.” I still have those notes. The handwriting is tight and cramped, unlike my usual scrawl, as though tentative or disbelieving. But the period after “Hutchinson” is large and sure, his name a sentence unto itself, a complete idea. I’d let the pen tip sit there for a second or two, flooding the paper with ink.

  Walt told me that Hutchinson had matched the DNA samples taken from the murder scene. He had been convicted of a felony—kidnapping, plus criminal threatening with a firearm—in late 2003, and so he’d had to submit to a cheek swab for entry into the FBI’s criminal database. The typing of each sample can take years, Walt said, because of a long backlog. Violence outpaced lab funding everywhere. Maine’s delay at the time was two years; in some states it was up to ten. But Maine had recently received some federal funding, to catch up. Well, the lab had finally gotten to Hutchinson’s sample just a week before, two and a half years after his kidnapping conviction, and as soon as they entered it into the database, there was a match to the blood samples that had been waiting twelve years, that had failed to match with nearly thirty other men. A solid match; no doubt about it. Hutchinson was now thirty-one years old. On that day, I was twenty-four, had lived without Mom for half my life.

  The typing would be repeated, as was standard, but Walt had already spoken with Hutchinson—twice—in the county jail, where he’d been incarcerated after violating his probation. I listened closely, made a few more carefully inscribed notes, trying to retain each detail. I seized the most surreal one and asked, “You talked to him?” Someone I knew had sat down with this man, just the day before. He was no longer an abstract concept, a blank space behind the explosion of the long silver gun in my mind. He was real, a person upon the earth.

  “Yeah,” Walt said, and here his excitement broke through; he was thrilled to tell me the story. He sped up, and his sentences were scattered with little laughs: the happiness of victory. “I sat him down and I said, ‘Do you know Crystal Perry? Were you ever in Crystal Perry’s house?’ And he up-and-down denied it, absolutely denied it. I came back the next day, I gave him another chance! And he denied it again. And that’s going to be really good when it’s time for the trial, because he won’t be able to make up some story about knowing your mother—he’ll be out of a lot of alibis for why we found his DNA all over the place.”

  Trial, I thought. Trial, oh my God. It’s going to happen.

  “And, y’know, too: we knew all along this guy had cut his hand. That he must have had a wicked gash across his palm, from the knife—that was the reason his blood was all over. Happens all the time in cases like this: they slip. And as soon as I saw him, Hutchinson, I asked to see his hand, and he has this big scar, right across his palm. He claims it’s from a car wreck, but I just knew it—I always knew this guy would have this old injury.”

  Walt told me that if we got a conviction, the attorney general’s office was considering pursuing a life sentence—as Maine does not have the death penalty. He explained that Maine was one of the few states where a life sentence carries no possibility of parole, and because judges can be hesitant to apply such an absolute punishment, the AG’s office rarely suggested it. But in this case, it seemed more than warranted.

  It turned out Hutchinson had been living right there in Bridgton all along; I hadn’t been unreasonable when I’d imagined him walking down Main Street. He had a wife, two kids. Worked as a mason for his father’s company, sometimes. Sold drugs, often.

  I stopped writing and took a deep breath. “The thing is . . . I have to admit that at some point, I just thought I was never going to get this call.”

  Now Walt’s tone got more serious. “You know, Sarah. I never wanted to say this, but sometimes, especially when there’d be months with just nothing, sometimes I thought I’d never be making this call.”

  Walt said that he and his colleagues were rushing to collect the facts they needed for the upcoming indictment, when charges would officially be brought and Hutchinson’s identity would be made public. Walt had been promoted to a supervisory position but had stayed on the case, assisting the new primary investigator, Chris Harriman, and now they were tying up a twelve-year investigation, making sure that all the evidence was solid. They had to talk to a few more people, Walt said, to check up on some things. It would take a couple more days. I was the only person they’d told—they hadn’t yet called the rest of my family.

  “Should I tell them?” I said. “I mean . . . when should I call?”

  “Well,” Walt said, “it’s totally up to you. You absolutely can do whatever feels best. If you want to tell them, that makes sense, and of course you can. But you should know that we really do need to keep things quiet—just for a few more days. We are going to do these interviews as quickly as possible, before word spreads—you know how it gets there in Bridgton. We need to surprise certain people. So you guys need to not tell anyone outside the family. We’re expecting the indictment to be next Thursday; I’ll call again on Monday or Tuesday to update you. And you can call me anytime.”

  I thought about my nine aunts and uncles. Their children and friends and neighbors. Groups of women sitting around kitchen tables, smoking and drinking coffee and talking for hours on long Sunday afternoons. I thought about how this news would alter reality for all of us, how impossible it would be to know this and then talk to a friend and not mention it. How quickly news flew from Oxford County, where most of them lived, to Cumberland County, where Bridgton was, to the south. My grandmother was desperate to know who the killer was; she would never be able to keep quiet once she knew. Word would leak as soon as she went to her hairdresser’s, as soon as the Avon lady came. The Avon lady, incidentally, was my old babysitter, Peggy.

  I decided to wait on word from Walt. I just had to lay low for one week.

  I didn’t want to risk damaging the investigation. I worried that someone would get information they weren’t supposed to have, that some key piece of evidence would turn into gos
sip that would turn into hearsay, and in the process become inadmissible in court. I felt like my silence meant loyalty to Mom, putting her before those who had lost her.

  But I also wanted to put things on hold. I’d done my best to move forward without this call. There had been life with her, and now there was life without her—a stark before and after, twelve years of each, splitting me in two. I needed time to adjust. I needed time to think. I wanted to keep it small, controlled. Walt advised me to have my office number removed from the university’s website, in anticipation of press coverage, or worse. I was glad to hide.

  Finding the man who’d killed her would mean once again imagining life if he hadn’t. And I’d gotten so used to ignoring her absence. To pretending that I wasn’t supposed to have a mother. That mothers were just something other people had.

  I had a good excuse for hiding the news from the family, but in the coming days I would feel like a traitor. Word leaked out, but not through me. Carol called me suddenly, for the first time in months. We talked about everyday things, the usual catch-up basics—my roommate, work, improvements she was making on the house—but the end of the call was ragged, extended, her usual brisk sign-off was forever in coming. Finally she said, “Gloria called that police hotline. They said something about talking to people in Bridgton. It’s so strange; she just called randomly, and then they acted like something was going on, but they wouldn’t say what.”

  I wouldn’t say what, either. I hedged. I acted surprised but not terribly interested. I got off the phone as smoothly as I could. We all just had to hold on for a little while longer. Walt would call soon.

  But two days later, before I was able to call my family, they called me: my grandmother, Grace, had passed away. The next week, the indictment was made public, and I called them back. Walt had spoken to them earlier that day; he was the one to bring them the news, not me. If he’d known my grandmother was nearing the end, he would have called them earlier. But no one had told him. No one had told me, either.

  In many ways, my grandmother had stopped living many years before. Her life had more or less halted when Mom died. She was obsessed with the murder, thought and talked about it constantly, could not stop wondering who had killed her daughter. She called the police incessantly, demanding information, detailing her theories about this man or that man. She rarely left the house; she had no hobbies. She told a friend that she couldn’t leave, didn’t want to: “This is where my memories of Crystal and Sarah are.” Isolation and fear accelerated her decline into dementia. It’s hard to know for sure what she understood in the end; she was often lost in time, sometimes didn’t recognize people. But if we could have told her Michael Hutchinson’s name, there’s a chance she would have had some peace before dying.

  37

  * * *

  Here’s how he got caught.

  In 2002, Michael Hutchinson heard that a few of his friend Rob Desjardins’s pot plants had been taken from a power-line forest clearing. They knew who was responsible—a guy named Ian, a sort-of friend of theirs who would know where the weed was kept. Rob and Michael rounded up another friend, Derek. The three piled into Michael’s dump truck, picked up some beers, and drove to the construction site where Ian worked. Just before they got there, Michael dropped Rob off, to wait in the woods a short distance away.

  Michael and Derek found Ian, said they had weed and some beers. “Come for a ride,” they said.

  Ian, just nineteen years old, was dumb enough to get in the truck. Michael drove fifty or so yards down the road and slowed to a stop as Rob walked out from between the trees. Derek stepped out so Rob could climb in and wedge himself next to Ian. It was only after Derek got back in and the truck started to move that Ian noticed that the guys had a gun on the dashboard—an actual Glock. Rob grabbed hold of Ian’s fingers and started pressing them back, hard, demanding to know where his plants were. Then they drove him to the woods and showed him the empty spot, like rubbing a bad dog’s face into a ruined rug. Derek carried the gun as they walked through the trees. “Where are the plants, Ian?” they asked. “Where are the fucking plants?”

  Ian walked around aimlessly, looking for the plants that he knew were actually back at his house. Finally the guys gave up. When the others stopped to smoke a cigarette, Ian bolted. Then he heard the gun fire, and knew things were serious. He ran and ran. By the time he reached the police station, he was so scared, he didn’t even lie. Said he’d stolen the plants and he was in danger.

  But Ian was just a kid. The next day, he and his girlfriend, Alyssa, were driving down Maine Hill when they saw Michael and Derek coming up in their rearview mirror. Ian leaned out the window and gave them the finger, and when he and Alyssa pulled into the Big Apple parking lot, Michael and Derek pulled in behind them. Derek grabbed Michael’s gun, got out, and pointed it in Ian’s face. The two exchanged words, and moments later Derek got back into the truck and Michael drove off. They didn’t get far before the police pulled them over, dispatched to respond to the 911 call Ian had made from the Big Apple.

  Both kidnapping and criminal threatening with a firearm are felonies in Maine; Derek was charged and convicted, and so was Michael, most likely because it was his firearm and because he drove the truck. Eventually Michael had to submit to a cheek swab for entry into CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, which contains DNA profiles of thousands of forensic samples from suspects, convicted criminals, and crime scenes nationwide. There’s no way to know what this meant to him, if he understood that opening his mouth for this brief moment could end up revealing that he was a killer. Still, two more years would pass before the match. Maybe by then he thought he’d gotten away with it. Or maybe not. A friend of his later told the police about a party where Michael, wasted beyond comprehension, had held his hands in a campfire, fingertips out. Looked like he was trying to burn his prints off.

  In those two years between the swab and the match, Michael Hutchinson served six months in prison, got out on probation, and returned to Bridgton. Then he violated his probation when he failed to show up in court to answer a driving-to-endanger charge, one that involved driving high with his children in the car. He had also tested positive, on separate occasions, for weed and cocaine. His probation officer recommended that a warrant be issued for his arrest, and the Bridgton Police were eager to comply, happy to haul in a guy who had always given them trouble—driving under the influence, domestic violence calls, drug possession, the usual. But first they had to find him.

  The Bridgton cops knew Hutchinson would soon be getting married to his second wife. “Let’s get him then!” they said, laughing, having no idea they would be arresting the killer who had evaded them for almost a decade. They pulled him over as he was driving from the ceremony to the reception and transferred him back into state custody immediately, leaving the confused wedding guests waiting who knows how long at the VFW hall. It was Bernie King, who had been one of the first on the scene of Mom’s murder, who made the arrest. A mere twenty-one days later, the state crime lab caught up on their backlog and discovered that Michael Hutchinson’s DNA matched the samples from the Crystal Perry case. After all those years, the timing aligned perfectly. He would remain in jail until the murder trial began.

  Upon hearing about the match, Hutchinson’s new wife, Christy, called her cousin, Dennis Lorrain. Christy knew, of course, that Dennis had once been engaged to Mom.

  “They charged Michael again!” she said. “They’re saying he killed Crystal Perry.” She was distraught. “Do you know anything about this?”

  He didn’t. But as they talked, Dennis rewound the tape in his mind. He remembered a day back in 1998. He and his friend Tammy had been standing in her driveway, talking about the murder, and she said, “I thought Michael Hutchinson did it.” But Dennis didn’t take her very seriously. At the time he thought, Nah, I’d fucking know that. He and Michael weren’t friends, but they’d been in the same high school class. I know him, he thought. I’d know that. But when it c
ame down to it, Dennis knew anything was possible. And despite all the trouble he’d been through as a suspect, all of the polygraphs and blood draws and the aggressive interviews with Pickett, he had continued to cooperate with the police over the years, even calling them up and bringing them leads when he found them. He respected Walt, and he understood the science of DNA testing. As Christy spoke, he could feel himself getting twitchy, warming up. He started to get angry, thinking he had missed this guy. He had been right fucking there.

  Dennis interrupted Christy’s tears. “Just so you know,” he said, his voice level, a man giving a reasonable warning, “he’s safe as long as the cops have got him. But if he gets out for any reason, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to kill him.”

  38

  * * *

  The day Walt called me, the Durham County district attorney went public about an investigation into an accusation of gang rape by several members of the lacrosse team at nearby Duke University. The house where the attack was alleged to have happened was less than a mile from mine. Suddenly I wished my house had more secure windows. Suddenly the drafts and the chill that seeped in through the warped floorboards made it seem like anyone could come in. I asked my roommates to please remember to lock the doors at night.

  The case went national; the woman was black, the boys were white. The press was far more interested in the effect these accusations would have on the lives of these promising young men than in the effect of the possible rape on this girl. The district attorney had asked news outlets not to use the alleged victim’s name, but MSNBC let it slip: Crystal. This was when I learned that many people considered Crystal to be a low-class name. To me, “Crystal” meant beautiful. To others, it meant disposable.