by Sarah Perry
The VHS stopped with a heavy clack. The bailiff bent and pulled the tape from the machine, and the jurors settled back into their seats. Murmurs and sighs spread around the room under the quiet thunder of the bailiff rolling out the TV.
Craig Handley resumed his testimony, explaining, “The reason we process a scene is the theory that when you come to a place, you leave something of yourself there. And when you leave, you take something with you.”
I’ve recently learned that in the ambulance that night, I kept asking to return to my house. I don’t remember this desire, and the idea terrifies me. But now I see: I thought that if I could just get back there, I could regain what I had lost. Like walking back into a room to retrieve something you’ve forgotten.
Handley had “turned the kitchen black” with fingerprint powder, and all he had found was one palm print and five fingertip prints on the glass of the kitchen door—my last mark upon the place, the mark that had matched my inked hands in Texas. This was one of the many moments during the trial when an expert witness stressed how clean our house was—nearly every house carries countless fingerprints of those who live there. Handley said the dearth of prints in our house was “extremely rare” and admitted that Mom’s cleanliness was “very frustrating” for an investigator—she may have been so thorough that cleaning solution lingered on the countertops, dissolving marks as they were made. “The house from one end to the other was in impeccable order,” Handley said. “It was extremely clean, cleaned from one end to the other.” Cleanliness being next to godliness, this was an excellent way to imply that Mom would have had nothing to do with Hutchinson.
Handley also pointed out that sometimes people who work with abrasive materials and chemicals wear their fingers so smooth that they leave no prints upon what they touch, their hands turned ghostly by work. Examples of such people, he said, include dishwashers, bricklayers, and masons. Although he was not technically able to say it, it was easy to hear the rest of his sentence in our heads: “masons, like Michael Hutchinson.”
Now, years after the trial, I pull out Handley’s original typewritten catalog of items in the house. It is heartbreaking in its precision. I know that it’s his job to be detailed and thorough, but still I feel a strange affection for him: without his careful attention, I would have lost these details forever. On the coffee table, next to a couple of round drops of blood, was a stack of magazines. The top one was Better Homes and Gardens. He notes that there were two stuffed animals on the floor next to the couch: a cat and a mouse. On the accompanying diagram, about an inch from the outline of Mom’s body, they are represented by two irregular circles, one slightly larger than the other. Handley took the time to add tails: a long line for the cat, a squiggle for the mouse.
* * *
The trial lasted a total of six days: the rest of that week and the following Monday, dozens of hours of intimate facts interspersed with forensic details. Most were distressing, but some offered unexpected comfort. There was a solace in the mortal wound: a major vein and artery had been cut, very near her heart. There was nothing I could have done, no door I could have reached fast enough to save her.
As the days passed, the invisible was made visible. One expert described the use of orthotolidine, a spray that reveals traces of blood that the naked eye can’t see. Normally, we see only red blood cells; orthotolidine reveals hemoglobin. I had seen the substance in the photos of the crime scene, particularly in the kitchen: a dirty blue-black in the shape of additional smears and splatters, and, most important, boot prints. Because orthotolidine is so reactive, it’s usually the last thing done in crime scene processing—in order to see the hidden, you risk destroying all that can be seen.
This idea of undetectable blood haunted me. Before the trial, I would never have thought that blood could hide—that it could sit on an otherwise harmless-looking surface, a tiny web of stray molecules. Although I’d tried to step on only clean floor that night, the investigators found my small, faint barefoot prints. And treading on her blood seemed like a desecration.
But orthotolidine was interesting to me—blood as invisible ink. That evening, I called a friend down south and told her about it. I was in a good mood, sharing something I’d learned—a small, weird benefit of the trial.
My friend said, “Oh, yeah. I know about orthotolidine.”
“Um, what?” I couldn’t imagine why she would have heard of it.
“Y’know. From CSI.”
“Oh,” I said, and felt absurdly silly. It was an uncool, last-to-know kind of feeling. I didn’t say anything more about it, because I didn’t want to have to explain. I knew about orthotolidine because I had to, but I wanted my friends to be safe harbors. And I felt nauseated, knowing that my friend sought out this kind of information for casual weeknight entertainment, and that it hadn’t occurred to her that I’d be disturbed by that. After all this time, I still felt so distant from other people, and the distance was increasingly exhausting.
In the coming days, I would also learn about bloodstain pattern analysis: the difference between passive and active blood spatter, droplets and directional castoff, a whole system of codifying the intersection between physics and common sense, illustrated by abundant blood that was perfectly visible without the help of special chemicals. There were some droplets in the house that especially bothered me. They went beyond scientific interest, were scary in a way that was different from the horror-movie splash of directional castoff. Droplets are round, undistorted by lateral movement: they indicate blood that fell from directly above, dripping from a stationary or slow-moving source. The crime scene processors had noticed droplets in the scene, and found that they belonged not to Crystal but to her attacker, the same person who left the semen found by investigators and the medical examiner. The droplets went from the body to the kitchen counter, where it seemed the person had pulled off a paper towel from the roll mounted under the cabinet. They also dotted Crystal’s legs, and there were orthotolidine boot prints straddling one of her calves, indicating a person standing still and bleeding on her. Just standing there. Minutes before—or minutes after—I’d stood in just the same place.
As opposed to a droplet, a swipe is blood transferred onto an object by a combination of contact and motion. There was a swipe on the dimmer switch in the kitchen that I became fixated on. It suggested that after killing my mother, Michael had turned off the light. If he hadn’t, I would have seen every gory detail, fully lit, rather than the softer outlines afforded by the lenient darkness. I can’t help but feel an isolated, bizarre gratitude toward him for that one act.
* * *
My year of preparing paid off. As I sat there, hour after hour, I learned a lot, but not much of it was surprising. As the trial progressed, we fell into a rhythm, and much of it began to feel normal. One day was truncated by foot-deep snow—a reminder that Maine was unstoppably itself, no matter what—and when I got to the courthouse, I felt a bit like I’d been running late for work.
By day three of the trial, we were deep into detailed evidence, and my mind was starting to wander. The droning exchange between Lisa and the first forensic chemist to take the stand, combined with the dry heat of the room, had soothed me into a state of near relaxation. I was almost bored. I thought briefly of my office down south, wondered how my boss was getting on without me. Whether Mindy was enjoying her trip to England. If Evangeline had started her new job.
And then Chris Harriman stepped back behind the witness stand and went through a door to retrieve something for Lisa. He came out with a big sheet of plastic. It hung stiffly between his outstretched arms, and there was something pressed flat between two layers of the transparent material. He walked up to Lisa, coming much closer to us, and showed the object to the court, making an arcing semicircle so the judge, the jury, and those of us watching could see it.
It was Mom’s blue bathrobe. Less than twenty feet away from me.
The terry cloth robe that she’d owned for years, that she alwa
ys wore in the soft early mornings, the cozy late evenings, the times when the world seemed far outside, harmless, unable to reach us. The robe she’d made me breakfast in so many times, that she wore in one of my favorite pictures of her, holding our cat Max and smiling. The robe I found her in.
It felt like a little hole had opened up in the universe, just big enough to show us this object. It was here in the room with us, but surely it came from another planet, another reality.
Seeing that bathrobe was so different from seeing pictures of her body, from sitting across from Michael Hutchinson and looking into his eyes. It was flat, the shape of her absence. The body that should have filled it no longer existed, was long ago ashes. I knew the robe was still bloody because it had been preserved in that stiff plastic just as they had found it, but suddenly I wished that someone had cleaned it all those years ago. Blood comes out if cleaned right away—Mom always got it out of my knee-skinned jeans. I imagined putting it in the washer, water on cold, plenty of soap, no other items to share that load. I’d put it in the dryer and it would come out clean and warm and fluffy. I could fold it up and put it on her bed.
* * *
That evening, I got in the shower and was gripped again by that feeling of physical disgust from long ago, the corpse feeling. I could not escape how closely my legs resembled hers, those legs that figured prominently in so many of the crime scene photos. How the curves above my ankles exactly matched that thrown-out left calf, the last place I’d touched her. I stood motionless and staring in the steaming water until Ashley knocked on the door and asked if I was all right. “I’m fine!” I called, and snapped awake, finished soaping and rinsing. She said nothing of the length of my shower, and I did not acknowledge it. But that night she lay next to me, holding my hand until I fell asleep. It was this, and only this, that saved me from becoming an island, that allowed me to let anyone touch me upon my eventual return to North Carolina.
41
* * *
When it was Walt’s turn to take the stand, Andrews gave him the tough cross-examination that he had resisted giving me. Walt was a stand-up guy, a strong and gentle person. It was his job to investigate the case, of course. But investigators have to set priorities, and he always prioritized us. When asked why this case was especially important to him, he would always say that it was because of me: the tragedy of an only child losing her single mother, the horror of my being home for it. It was difficult to see Andrews lay into him.
Andrews’s major point of argument was that Walt and others had been erroneous in assuming that whoever “had sex” with Crystal had killed her, and that they had no reason to conclude that a rape had occurred. The line he took while questioning Walt either revealed his ignorance or was meant to manipulate ignorance in the jurors.
“Just so we’re clear: she wasn’t tied down anywhere, was she?” Andrews raised his eyebrows benignly.
“No, she was not,” Walt answered.
Andrews continued. “Okay. And there weren’t any obvious signs that she had her wrists or ankles restrained?”
“No, there weren’t signs of that.”
“And there was no blunt force trauma visible to the face?”
I thought I could see Walt’s face flinch, just slightly: a small crack in his professional demeanor. “Well, she had a lot of injuries to her face. I don’t know about blunt force trauma, but I mean her face was covered in blood and stab wounds.”
“Okay. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that there was a sexual assault, right?
“No.”
Andrews continued: “Now, it’s true that what really formed your opinion was the picture of her anus, right? When you saw the picture, you didn’t think to yourself, ‘I should talk to a doctor about this, because maybe this is evidence of consensual sex’?”
Walt paused. I could see him take a deep breath, an effort at gathering his patience. “I’ll be honest with you.” He leaned slightly forward, toward Andrews. “When I saw that picture, I didn’t believe it was consensual. The photo, in my mind, when I looked at it—I mean, it took my breath away. I mean, it was . . .” He leaned back, lifted an open palm and swept it to the side, searching. “It looked—the visual, what I saw there, I said, ‘Oh my God.’ That was awful, the damage.”
Others apparently agreed. Justice Warren himself had said he didn’t want to look at that picture if he didn’t have to. Our prosecutor, Lisa, would eventually decide not to show it, deeming it unnecessary. I had seen it with Susie the day before the trial and was glad to be spared seeing it again. Unfortunately, this was the photo that I would accidentally turn over while sifting through the records in the Gray police barracks years later.
Andrews barreled past Walt’s evocative stutters and focused instead on timing. How could Walt know that the sex was related to the killing, when the medical examiner, Dr. Kristen Sweeney, had said that the injuries in the photo—officially, fifteen lacerations, and bruising—could have been incurred at least an hour before the time of death? To me, Sweeney’s testimony meant that there could have been up to an hour of torture, not that Mom and Hutchinson were having some sort of affair. I hoped the jury would see that, too. To debate whether the sex had been consensual seemed, to me, like a complete waste of time.
But then Andrews pulled out what he thought was a trump card. “Now, when you were also reviewing the case file, you knew that Crystal didn’t necessarily mind that kind of sexual activity?”
I took a sharp, deep breath. I was so glad to hear Lara Nomani object before I could even exhale. It was like being pushed off a cliff and then caught in midair.
Everything ground to a halt. Justice Warren sent the jury out. I could see him making an effort to speak to them calmly and neutrally.
As we knew from earlier motions out of the jury’s presence, Andrews was referring, obliquely, to a letter in the case file from Tim to Mom, one of those letters that kept coming in the months of her engagement to Dennis. They were ardent letters, in which they relived nights they’d spent together and shared their fantasies. In this one, Tim had referred to a discussion they’d once had about trying anal sex. Essentially, they had considered it; Crystal was interested in trying it, but they never had. I felt so sad for her. What a travesty, to have your love letters used against you, to have them leveraged as part of the defense of your killer.
Andrews wanted this letter to imply that the act that caused those terrible injuries was consensual. Once again, he was either betting on sexual ignorance or was ignorant himself. But Justice Warren did everything right. The Tim letters, he reminded Andrews, had already been discussed—out of the jury’s hearing—and he had ruled that they were off-limits, inadmissible as hearsay. Andrews apologized, said he’d misunderstood, that he thought he could ask the question if he didn’t mention the letters explicitly. But without them, he couldn’t offer any basis for asking the question. I sat and fumed while I heard him say, several times, “I apologize. I understand that.” He was too calm. He’d already gotten what he wanted by throwing the question out there. It had already escaped from his mouth, like a plume of dark smoke, and could not be retrieved.
Justice Warren was perfectly intelligent; he said everything I could not. “The witness did not say he reached the conclusion of rape just because of anal sex,” he told Andrews. “He said he reached that conclusion after looking at a picture with a lot of—which he thought was just horrendous—a lot of trauma . . . The fact that someone may have discussed some certain kind of sex at some point in their life does not mean that they engaged in it consensually on May 11 or May 12 of 1994.”
This would have been enough, but it was even better to hear Justice Warren make it personal: “I’m pretty annoyed that we went to that place. I will not conceal my annoyment.”
“I understand that.”
“Annoyance,” he added, firmly.
Andrews pursed his lips. “I understand that, Your Honor.” But I remain convinced that he was never confused about procedure,
that he was purposely pushing, trying to see what he could get away with.
Warren brought the jury back in. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sustaining the objection. The question was inappropriate. You should entirely disregard the question in this case; it’s not part of this case at all.”
I hoped that it was possible for a person to unhear something. To cast such a salacious detail entirely out of mind. Unfortunately, the prosecution had only one more witness to call, so we didn’t have a lot of material in which to bury this one moment before the defense began.
42
* * *
I had no way of knowing if my attempt to look like my mother bothered Hutchinson, or surprised him. If I’d ever hoped it would shake him up enough to confess, that was not to be. But it turned out that Hutchinson was looking to unbalance me, too.
On the fourth day of the trial, after many hours of testimony from police officers and forensic experts, it was finally the defense’s turn. Their first witness was Michael Hutchinson.
Andrews treated Michael like a lost little brother. I sat and stared at the lawyer, ungenerously focused on the fat rolls at the back of his neck, the straining seams of his suit jacket, his childishly pursed lips. It was almost easier to hate Andrews than Michael—he operated in the known world. Over that long week, I had seen him speak to many people, had seen him defer to some, condescend to others. I had watched him struggle with an overhead projector. I had seen him nervously button and unbutton his jacket when he didn’t think anyone was looking. I knew he shuffled his papers to buy time. He was more real than Michael, who had mostly been still and silent through the long hours. Michael’s testimony was the first, and perhaps only, chance for me to figure out who he was.
