by Sarah Perry
Regardless of their guilt or innocence, I’d always feared young men like these, high on their own privilege and secure in their image of boys-will-be-boys innocence. I had long known that evil could hide in plain sight, that this must have been the case in Bridgton. And now I had proof that it had been, that Michael Hutchinson, at nineteen, had a baby face, that he had a soft voice, that he worked hard at his job. That you’d never know, just by looking, that he was a murderer. And I was learning that some people still weren’t convinced he’d done it. That’s impossible, they said. He’s such a normal guy.
A normal guy who had been the subject of numerous domestic violence calls. Who had beaten his ex-wife, Melanie, in front of their children. She had an active restraining order against him at the time of the DNA match, and still she went on television, polished and calm, and said, “I don’t believe Michael’s a murderer. I don’t believe he’s capable of it, and I support him fully.”
Lisa Ackley, the Bridgton News reporter who had insisted that the paper run the body bag photo at the time of the murder, immediately wrote an article contrasting Melanie’s statement with what she had written in her application for the restraining order, which she had filed just one month earlier. Melanie had described a night when Michael assaulted her while their young children were at home. “When I attempted to go to my daughter,” she said, he locked her in the bedroom with him, refusing to let her out. She eventually managed to call the police, who took Michael to a motel. “He immediately called me and threatened to kill me if I didn’t go bring him cigarettes to the motel,” she said. He told her that he’d walk to their house, and “the longer it took the angrier he’d be and the worse I’d suffer.”
* * *
The indictment was handed down on April 6, 2006, around two o’clock, in a hearing where the DNA analyst, the state prosecutor, and Detective Chris Harriman presented affidavits to a grand jury, who agreed that there was enough evidence to charge Michael Hutchinson with murder.
Early that April afternoon, I sat at my desk, ears tuned to the shrill fax-machine clatter that would mean Walt had sent me Chris’s affidavit, which would contain a clear summary of the facts of the case and the evidence that had been presented. Once I read that statement, I would finally know many of the details the police had been unable to tell me before. I sat at my desk tensely, waiting. My coworkers now knew what had happened—I’d had to tell them so that they would be prepared if reporters or others tried to reach me. But I didn’t want any of them pulling those pages off the machine and reading them. It would be unseemly, too personal. At the end of that day, the charges would be made public, media coverage would heat up again in Maine, and thousands of people would know what I was about to discover. But I didn’t want anyone around me to know. I wanted to stay within the safety of distance.
As I waited for that fax, I tried to focus on light work, filling in a spreadsheet or answering e-mails. Courtney had been closely following the news of the rape allegations at Duke, and that day the police had released e-mails a player had written his teammates on the night of the alleged event. It was all so fascinating, so wild—everyone wanted to hear. I sat nearby, listening and trying not to listen.
“Oh my God,” she said, eyes glued to her computer. “Listen to this! He said he was going to hire more strippers, and wrote, ‘I plan on killing the bitches as soon as they walk in and proceeding to cut their skin off—’”
White lights flashed within me, alarms blared. Run. Make it stop. “Wait!” I said. “You have got to stop reading that right now. I can’t take that right now.”
I watched all of Courtney’s excited, curious energy evaporate in an instant, only to be replaced with scrambling remorse. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I—I wasn’t thinking . . .”
“It’s fine,” I said, wrestling my voice back down. “Just stop, though.”
I felt cruel for having shamed her. She hadn’t thought ahead, hadn’t made the connection; she’d forgotten that there were people behind these news stories, that I was one of them. This was the first time I had asked someone not to talk about violence in front of me, and I was immediately embarrassed. I felt like I had done something wrong by imposing my messy feelings, and my uncommon experience, into a supposedly “normal” discussion of a news story.
The Duke rape allegations would prove to be untrue, but that wouldn’t change how the country had talked about them, which parts were found to be interesting, who was considered credible. It wouldn’t change how alone I’d felt, hearing and reading most of that coverage.
* * *
The affidavit finally came through on the fax machine around three o’clock, and I drove home early. I couldn’t really pretend to care about anything else that day, and no one expected me to.
That Saturday morning was perfectly beautiful, the kind of fragrant, bird-filled spring morning that had pleasantly shocked me my first year in North Carolina. I made coffee and brought it outside to my friend Evangeline, who’d flown into town the night before. We’d been best friends since meeting as roommates in a high school summer education program. She was one of the few people I could speak frankly with about Mom’s death.
She was settled into a whitewashed porch swing, her strong, compact body curled up because her feet didn’t reach the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but . . . will you read something for me?”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
“It’s the statement from the police,” I said. “I mean, I’ve read it. But I need someone else to read it, someone who isn’t a damn reporter.”
She nodded. I went inside and retrieved the three sheets of paper. When I came out, she put down her coffee and took them from me briskly before I could grab them back. As soon as they left my hand, I felt embarrassed, melodramatic, exposed, like it would have been more polite to keep those terrible things to myself.
Her serious face became more drawn. When she pulled the first sheet off the second, it stayed there, hovering in the air, the fingers of her right hand gripping it just hard enough to bend the paper.
Finally she looked at me, and I could see that we were thinking the same thing: it was actually worse than we had thought. Worse. She said, “Fifty times?” and I could tell it was anger that kept her voice from cracking. I nodded.
Although I must always have assumed there was more than one knife wound, the coroner’s count of “approximately fifty” was so much larger than I ever could have predicted. The sturgeon sound that night, which I’d always thought to be some sort of seizure—some last, heroic impulse of the body—was made of one blow after another. I heard every one.
But that wasn’t the information that I most needed Evangeline to read. There was another thing, the one thing I had never thought to expect, the one thing that weighed so heavily upon me that I knew I could not carry it myself. Not only had Crystal Perry been raped, but she had been raped anally. I could not quantify the additional pain and humiliation caused by this, but I could sense it. I could feel it threatening to push all the air from my body. Neither Evangeline nor I even mentioned it aloud. We couldn’t. Not then.
Violence is violence; it shouldn’t matter exactly what form a rape takes; there isn’t a way to compare the effects of one rape to another. But it felt so much worse to know that she had been raped in this particular way. It feels so much worse, even now. And the autopsy report shows that she was on her period. Of course, it is impossible to inhabit Michael Hutchinson’s mind, but I can’t help but think that he noticed this, found it dirty, and decided to outdo her, out-dirty her, to hurt her even more, punish her both physically and mentally. Everything about his crime indicates a man full of elemental hate, whose every action is meant to convey that he is bigger, meaner, harsher, more powerful than his victim.
I hate that I am compelled to think all of this, that I can imagine his impulses for even a moment. I hate that he’s made all of us think any of this, that’s he’s given us this one last entirely u
nspeakable thing to share in silence.
* * *
After the indictment, I agreed to do an interview with a reporter named David, from the Portland Press Herald. He seemed kind, and it was a good paper. He arranged to come to my house in Durham to interview me, and this meant I finally had to tell my roommates that my mother had been murdered. I had been friends with them for two years.
David wrote a good story—courteous, with little sensationalizing. Still, when I read it, I was embarrassed. I’d talked about volunteering to feed the homeless. I’d talked about what a great success I was, how I’d done well in college, how I’d done it all to respect my mother’s memory. I’d been reaching during the interview, trying to put together some kind of story for David, and now I saw my words broadcast for all to read and was repelled by them. In the aftermath of Mom’s death, I’d worked so hard to avoid the cliché of failure, and now I’d fallen into a self-congratulatory narrative of success, the same old story of bootstraps and determination. I had done well considering my circumstances, sure. But I was too eager to let people know, to perform the good-girl routine. But I didn’t know what else to do. Back then, I didn’t know how else to make sense of any of it.
I didn’t actually believe there was a way to “make her proud,” and I never really had. I didn’t believe that her spirit was hovering out there somewhere on a cloud, that she was enjoying an afterlife. Any faith I’d had in such things was destroyed on the night she died.
But over the years, I have sometimes wondered what my mother’s last thoughts were. I know she loved me very much; there is no doubt of that. And I’m positive that even in the midst of the pain and humiliation and terror that was inflicted on her, she thought about me. But when I try to imagine exactly what she thought, it’s a lot darker and more complicated than well-wishers must think when they smile and tell me, “I’m sure her last thoughts were of you.”
There was never any sign of forced entry into our house, so Mom must have let Michael Hutchinson in. He was either an acquaintance who said he wanted to talk to her, whom she wasn’t expecting but wasn’t afraid of, or a harmless-looking guy with a convincing story—broken-down truck, perhaps. In this case, it might’ve been the rain that killed her. I can imagine her barring entry to someone in the middle of a clear night, but it’s harder to imagine her leaving someone out in bad weather.
As far as anyone has been able to determine, Mom and Hutchinson were not friends; he was not supposed to be there that night. If they knew each other at all, they didn’t know each other well. Maybe they had seen each other in a bar once or twice—he, nineteen, in there thanks to a fake ID or a bartender’s goodwill, Mom laughing and leaning into Linda’s shoulder at a little table in the corner. He would have known enough about her to figure out where she lived, once he wanted to. His parents were recently divorced: he lived with his father on High Street, almost within sight of Linda’s house, and his mother lived about a half mile from us, farther down Route 93. He would have driven past our house about once a week to visit her, on that same trucker route that Gwen had worried about. In warm months, our walks would take us past his father’s house, out to the War Memorial and back. As Walt had told me, Hutchinson had plenty of opportunities to see Mom—her brilliantly red hair marking her like a target—and become fascinated with her. Obsessed.
I had always suspected that she had been raped, but until Chris’s affidavit confirmed it in harrowing, bleak legal language, there was a small, willful part of my brain that hoped she hadn’t been. Looking back at the records, I now see that in Texas, Dale Keegan had told me, “We also know that your . . . your mother had sex, just before she died. Did you—when you looked down the hall, did you see her having sex? Did you know that? We know that she had sex, that night. That’s another reason we think the person must have been someone she knew.” Being raped is not “having sex.” I doubt Keegan thought the act was consensual; I can only think that he chose those words to convince me that the police knew for sure that Mom’s killer was someone she knew, so that if I was protecting someone, I would get scared and give them up. But his choice of words also may have let me believe that Mom wasn’t raped that night.
I had never asked the police for clarification on this point; I assumed that the answer was one of those details that had to be kept secret so as to remain incriminating. This assumption was also a form of self-protection: if I didn’t ask them, I didn’t really have to know. But when I’d allowed myself to think about it, I figured she had been raped, simply because that fit the murder story I was most familiar with from movies and TV: intruder rapes and kills beautiful young woman. No objects had been removed from the house; we owned few things worth stealing. But he must have left with something.
Whatever Mom and Hutchinson said to each other that night, there would have been a moment when he started getting rough, when he kissed her against her will or grabbed her breast or pressed her against the wall, when he made it clear that he was going to get what he wanted. Mom would have seen the violence in him, would have known that he was going to try to rape her; she might even have worried that more abuse would come after that. She would have realized that she had made a terrible mistake letting him in. That she had miscalculated.
I didn’t fully wake up that night until I heard her final screams. Earlier, when I had briefly awoken to the beginnings of an argument, I hadn’t so much heard a disturbance as sensed it, and then drifted back down to unconsciousness. But this was different. When she woke me screaming—really screaming—she was emitting all the sound her body could produce.
So before that, she must have been much quieter. She was raped on the living room floor, I now know, just a few feet and a thin sheetrock wall away from my bed. Our house was very small, barely more than nine hundred square feet. It was almost impossible to do anything in one room without being heard throughout the entire place—I knew because Mom was very sensitive to noise. And so all those years later, as I lay in bed the night the indictment was handed down, I realized: she must have tried to be quiet. Surely she struggled, but she must have struggled quietly, taken her rape quietly, so I wouldn’t wake up, so I wouldn’t be put in danger.
If he had left her alive, if he had only raped her, would she have called the police? Gone to the hospital? Or would she have locked the doors once more, taken a shower, and lain down, shaking and sleepless in her bed, vowing never to tell me about the horrible thing that had happened in our home, a home she could not afford to leave for another? Would she have thought the police would dismiss a story about a random Wednesday night rapist, one she let into the house herself, no less? Would she have known how frequently rape victims are cast as having brought the crime upon themselves?
But Hutchinson did not leave her alive. For some reason, the rape wasn’t enough, and he killed her. I cannot know when she started screaming—after he pulled the knife? After he punctured her chest? But at some point her nervous system overrode her determination to keep quiet. At some point she became a body singing fear.
To the deep wound just above her heart, Hutchinson added knife blows to the head, utterly destroying her beautiful red hair. The medical examiner would find a sliver of the steel tip in the muscle of her temple. At that point, I’m certain thought was drummed out of her. Under a certain amount of terror, the mind bends. More, and it breaks completely.
I have repeatedly relived that moment when the screaming first woke me and I yelled “Mom?!” It is the moment that still brings retroactive fear: he could have heard me and come down the hall to extinguish the witness. Those boot prints that Dale Keegan showed me, which I forgot about for years after that interview, indicate that he might have started to.
But as much as it scares me, that moment also fills me with a terrible, terrible sadness. For if she heard me, she did not answer. Her child called out to her, and she was unable to go down the hall and help her, to smooth the hair back from her forehead, to tell her it was all just a bad dream. All she could do wa
s scream more, and louder, to conceal from this man the sound of another girl in the house. All she could do was scream “No!”—a sound loud enough to contain another message: Sarah, get out—get out now. And then her screams quieted, and then they stopped, and then she died, not knowing if I would make it out of there alive.
39
* * *
As a child, I had always been sad that I didn’t look more like my mother. When I was very small, this was about my love for her, about wanting to be even more closely connected. In first grade, I begged her to let me dye my hair red, and didn’t understand why she said no. Anytime someone told me I looked like her, I figured they were just being nice, and I’ve never been able to shake that feeling. Later, my desire to look more like her took on a tinge of jealousy. I imagined bringing future boyfriends home to meet her, and seeing in their eyes that they thought she was more beautiful. I didn’t want to compete with her, but I wanted to share that power and attention. I felt it was terribly unfair that I hadn’t inherited her unique looks. But I liked that we both had blue eyes, even though mine are more gray.
When I’m heavier, I look like my father; when thinner, more like my mother. In the pictures accompanying that Portland Press Herald article, I am blatantly Tom’s daughter. The wait between the DNA match and the trial was projected to be a year, and I decided then that I’d use the time to remake myself in Mom’s image. I had been dyeing my hair red for years by then, but at that time it was much shorter and darker than hers had been. I had just enough time to grow it out to my shoulders and lighten it gradually until it looked naturally bright auburn.
I was the heaviest I’d ever been, and weak and unhealthy from too many late nights and too little exercise. I planned to pare myself down to essentials, muscle and bone, until I was almost as thin as she was. I knew I couldn’t expect to hit her 117, not only because she was an inch shorter than me but also because I had my father’s thicker frame. I told a close friend that I was aiming at 130, down from 150, but the real number was 125. That number was like a talisman I carried. I kept it secret; I didn’t want to seem crazy. But I wanted to scare Hutchinson. I wanted him to walk into that courtroom and see Crystal sitting in the front row, staring him down.
