“Cars were backed up bumper to bumper,” Day said. “I’d been advised by the dispatcher while I was en route about a tractor-trailer accident on Route One about a half mile south of the intersection with the road to the Boothby home. The trucker dumped a load of bait. Traffic was at a standstill both north and south on Route One.”
I gave myself a mental kick for not paying more attention when I drove that stretch of road the previous day. Mansfield had mentioned the bait truck mess when I talked to him in his office and again in his opening statement. I jotted myself a note to get the fish spill police report and drive back up Route One and take another look at the place it happened.
Day testified it took him a full five minutes to get through the snarl of cars, even with his siren blaring and blue lights flashing. He said he arrived at the Boothby home at 4:16 p.m. I added that fact to the chronological chart I was keeping on the back page of my notebook.
“I drove into the driveway till I could see the house, then got out of the cruiser and called to a man standing in the yard, off to the left of the porch,” Day said.
“Is that man in the courtroom?”
“Yes, sir. He’s sitting at the defense table.” Day pointed at Boothby.
“What did you say to him?”
“Standing with the door of the cruiser between us, I asked if he was Daniel Boothby. He said he was, and I asked if he was armed. He said he wasn’t, but you can’t ever trust that, so I told him to put his hands up and walk out into the middle of the dooryard.”
“Did he do what you asked?”
“He did. Walked to the middle of the dooryard with his hands up, not saying anything. I asked him who else was on the premises and he said his twelve-year-old daughter. Then he paused and gestured back at the steps, where I could see the body of a white male lying half-on and half-off the porch.”
I wondered how the O’Rourke brothers were handling this testimony, and wished I could see them from my seat without looking obvious about it.
“What did you do next?”
“I asked him if there were any weapons in the house and he said no. I instructed him to walk over to the cruiser and put his hands on the hood and spread his feet, not with his back to the house, but on the driver’s side of the vehicle. He did what I asked, and I frisked him while keeping an eye on the house. He didn’t have a weapon. I told him to return to the middle of the yard and sit down on the ground.”
Day described making a radio call to dispatch, asking for a status report on his backup.
“The dispatcher said it might be while. He told me one sheriff’s deputy was coming from Calais where he’d been testifying in District Court. Every other available deputy was on the other side of the traffic jam, though they were trying to get to the scene.” He paused. “The guys coming from the south had trouble getting through the lineup of cars, even with their sirens going, and then when they got to the spot where the truck jackknifed, they couldn’t get around it. The truck was blocking the road, there was a deep ditch on either side of it. The whole place was knee-deep in bait.”
Despite the seriousness of the testimony—or perhaps because of it—I had that about-to-laugh-in-church sensation. A tractor-trailer load of rotting fish spilled all over the road on a warm May afternoon, as smelly and slimy as it gets. And the deputies running around like Keystone Kops, half of them trying to get the truck moved and the fish cleaned up and the other half trying to move their cruisers past the gory mess so they could get to the scene of a possible murder.
I tweeted: Trooper testifies Route One bait spill trapped suspect and victim at murder scene, slowed police response #Boothbymurdertrial.
Day said he told Danny to stay put, then walked sideways to the porch, gun drawn, to check O’Rourke’s condition. I looked over at the jury. Every single person sitting in the box was riveted by Day’s narrative.
“I checked his wrist and his neck but there was no pulse. Then Mr. Boothby spoke up from where he was sitting in the middle of the dooryard.”
When Mansfield asked what Boothby said, Cohen objected that the question called for hearsay. The judge motioned the lawyers to the bench. After a minute or so she motioned for them to step back, and overruled the objection.
Mansfield restated the question.
“When the defendant spoke to you, what did he say?”
“He said ‘He’s dead, the bastard. Fell like a sack of potatoes, and hasn’t been breathing for an hour or so.’ I asked him if he killed the man, but he didn’t answer me. He sat there in the dooryard, his head in his hands.”
Mansfield paused to allow the trooper’s words to etch a firm image in the jury’s collective memory.
“Did you recognize the man lying on the steps?”
“I did not,” Day said. “I didn’t want to disturb the body, so I didn’t check for a wallet. I walked back over to Mr. Boothby and asked him again about his daughter. He said she was twelve years old. He said ‘too young, she’s too young.’ Then he looked at the ground, and shook his head, but didn’t say another word.” I scrawled Day’s words in my notebook and circled them so I’d remember this testimony when it came time to write.
“What else did you do while you were waiting for backup to arrive?”
“I went back to my cruiser and called in the license plates of the two cars in the dooryard—a Dodge pickup and a Volkswagen GTI.” Day shifted in his seat. “I didn’t want to leave Mr. Boothby in order to look for his daughter, and didn’t want to leave the victim’s body, either.”
Mansfield’s posture was relaxed despite the dramatic tension in the room. So far his direct examination was a home run, and he knew it.
“When did other law enforcement officers reach the scene?”
Day didn’t need to glance at his notebook.
“Four thirty-three,” he said. “Two sheriff’s deputies arrived at the same time.”
Seventeen long minutes being the only cop in that buggy dooryard, I thought. A dead man on the porch. Hoping to hell you had the right guy. Worrying about a freaked-out kid inside the house. Good God.
Day’s voice carried an echo of residual stress as he continued his narrative. “I told them what I knew, then we split up. Deputy Dupuis stayed with the victim. Deputy Harrow stood watch over Mr. Boothby. I went into the house. There was no one in any of the downstairs rooms—the living room, the bedroom or the kitchen. So I went up the stairs, calling ahead so I wouldn’t alarm Mr. Boothby’s daughter if she was indeed up there.”
Day’s voice was growing tight. “I found her in a bedroom, facedown on the bed. She was crying.”
“What did you do?” Mansfield said.
“I asked her if she was injured. She didn’t respond. So I walked over to the bed and told her everything would be all right, asked her again if she was hurt. She lifted her head up from the pillow a little bit and looked kind of sideways at me, and moved her head like this.” He demonstrated her head shake.
“Let the record reflect that the witness is shaking his head from side to side, as if to say no.” Mansfield returned to his original spot in front of the witness box.
“What happened then?”
“Everyone showed up at once. Dupuis called up the stairs to me that an ambulance had arrived, and I called down to him that they should send an EMT up to examine Mr. Boothby’s daughter. A female deputy came upstairs.
“We stood there together and watched that poor little girl cry.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
Chapter Nine
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Justice Herrick called a break. Caught in the grip of Day’s testimony, I scrawled words and phrases in my notebook, hoping I’d be able to capture the intensity when I sat down to write my story. Emma walked up beside me.
“Joe Ga
le. Is that you?” Her eyes darted from the top of my head to my face and back again.
“Yep, the Mad Barber of Machias got his hands on me and wouldn’t let go.”
“It looks...” Emma paused, as if searching for the right word “...great. Really great.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m dead serious,” she said, then frowned at her inadvertent pun. “You look almost handsome in short hair.”
“It was an experience being in Claude LeClair’s barber chair.” I kept my voice low, in case anyone was listening. “Kind of scary. He was all wound up, but kept clip-clipping away. I paid him twelve bucks and tip and I won’t need another haircut for six months.”
Emma rolled her eyes.
“That was powerful.” I jerked my short-haired head toward the witness chair.
She nodded. “Do we have time for a quick cup of coffee?”
“Only if we get it from the machine on the first floor. The chicken soup comes out of the same tube as the coffee, which I’m sure makes it extra delicious.”
“Forget it then, but let’s go find a quiet corner,” Emma said. “I want to talk with you in private.”
She was so lovely, her green eyes glowing, her red hair curling every which way. I would have followed her anywhere. We walked to the far end of the first floor and sat on an ancient wooden bench.
“I’m sorry I was so standoffish last night.” Her smile looked almost apologetic. “I went online and read what you’ve been writing. You’re no hack.”
“Why thank you, Dr. Abbott, for the vote of confidence.”
“I’m saying I’m sorry here. Don’t interrupt, okay?”
The disarming smile again.
“I shouldn’t have assumed the worst about you. And if you can promise me that you’ll respect whatever boundaries I set, I’m willing to, you know, talk in a general way about what’s going on here.”
“The trial?”
“Yes, the trial. And in the interest of transparency, I have a bit of an agenda of my own. I’m guessing you know a lot more about the law than I do. I need to better understand what’s happening beneath the surface in that courtroom. The way I see it, if we can talk off the record—share our insights—it might help both of us do a better job.”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“I have dinner plans, but not till six thirty. Do you want to have coffee as soon as testimony winds up?”
“I can slot that into my schedule. But the Java Nook closes up at four, so we’ll have to meet at the inn.”
“Deal,” she said, and stepped off toward the restroom. I used the rest of my out-of-courtroom time to dial my mysterious source in Biddeford, scrapper64. A woman picked up on the second ring.
“This is Joe Gale, I’m a reporter at the Daily Chronicle.” Before I could say more she interrupted.
“About time you called. Didn’t think you were gonna.”
The voice was raspy. A smoker.
“Are you the person who emailed me about Frank O’Rourke?”
“Yup. The stuff with Frank, it didn’t happen to me, but to someone in my family.”
“What stuff? What did Frank do?”
“What didn’t he do? He took a sweet kid and screwed her head up good. Bought her clothes. Took her to Boston once and spent the night in a hotel. Made her think he was in love with her.”
Ah, I thought. A jilted girlfriend.
“And then what did he do, break up with her?”
There was a pause.
“He transferred her,” scrapper64 said. “To another worker’s caseload. That kept her from seeing him anymore.”
I couldn’t think of a delicate way to ask the question. “How old is this girl?”
“Sixteen now. She’d just turned thirteen when he showed up in her life.” She coughed so hard I could hear nicotine rattling in her lungs. “She thought he was gonna take her away from Biddeford, make her somebody, like in that movie Pretty Woman. Turns out he was a regular pig.”
“What’s your name, ma’am? In order to follow this up, I need your name.”
“No name. This is one of those anonymous tips.” She was coughing again when she hung up.
When I dialed back, she didn’t answer. Before I could consider how to check out her story, a guy with a voice like a foghorn announced from upstairs that the jury was about to reenter the courtroom.
* * *
I tapped out a quick text to Leah telling her I needed to chat before deadline. Then I ran up the front stairs two at a time and eased through the back door as the jurors were taking their seats. Justice Herrick instructed Mansfield to pick up where he left off questioning Trooper Day.
The post-break direct examination was far less dramatic than Day’s earlier testimony. Day described the arrival of the evidence technicians and the state police big shot who ran the investigation.
As he went on, my mind shot back to my conversation with scrapper64. She was describing a sexual predator. And if what she was saying about O’Rourke was true, the multiple transfers probably were meant to cover up his sins. Whoa, Joe. Don’t jump on that fast horse on the basis of a couple of emails and a phone call with someone who’s going to great lengths to hide her identity.
It was a struggle to keep my attention on the testimony while trying to figure out how to determine if scrapper64’s story was true. People make stuff up all the time. Newspapers have been burned in the past by wild stories like this one, and there was no way the paper’s lawyer was going to let me print that Frank O’Rourke was a child molester unless that story had been corroborated by multiple sources. But if it was true, it was explosive.
Mansfield wrapped up his direct around two thirty, and Cohen took over. Focusing on the timing and sequence of every action between the moment the dispatcher first put out the call until the moment Day stopped his cruiser in the Boothby driveway, Cohen managed to elicit a few additional facts, some of which cast a different light on the morning’s testimony. He got Day to say that despite his request to county Dispatch, not one of the deputies flailing around at the accident scene had thought to wade through the fishy mess and hike the half mile up to the Route 191 intersection to keep track of the cars that reached that corner and turned north on Route One.
“When did you ask the dispatcher to make such a request?”
“When I was on my way to the scene.”
“What prompted you to do so?”
“It’s standard operating procedure,” the trooper said. “We’re trained to monitor all possible escape routes in case a perpetrator attempts to leave a crime scene.”
“It’s standard operating procedure for the state police, but is it standard operating procedure for the sheriff’s department?”
Day looked pained, like he didn’t want to disparage the deputies in public, but couldn’t find a tactful way to answer the question. “It’s standard operating procedure in all departments,” he said finally, leaving the jury with an image of a bunch of guys so worried about falling on their butts in a big pool of stinking redfish that they ignored the fundamentals of policing.
Cohen left the implication hanging that the killer could have left the scene, driven to the intersection with Route One, turned north and found clear sailing, traffic backup in the rearview mirror. As with the testimony about the fingerprints on the knife, I wasn’t sure why Cohen was going down this evidentiary road. If Boothby had been in the dooryard looking like a guilty duck when Day arrived at the scene, was there another suspect they planned to pull out of a hat?
Chapter Ten
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Curious about the evolving defense strategy, I tried to catch Cohen’s eye before leaving the courtroom. He was absorbed in a whispered conversation with Danny Boothby, ignoring the de
puty tapping his foot ten feet away. Figuring I’d catch up with him later, I found Emma in the hallway, zipping up her parka. We walked back to the inn together, grabbed mugs and coffee from the sideboard in the lobby and settled on either side of a checkers table in the fireplaced library. After answering Emma’s questions about court procedure, I maneuvered the conversation to Corrine, asking why her grandparents were visiting her in Cherryfield.
“A decision was made to place her in a therapeutic foster home. It’s a warm, clean, safe house where she’s the only kid. All of her needs are being met.”
“Why a foster home? She’s got extended family who love her to pieces—Dolores and Claude—right here in Machias.” I watched Emma struggle with her wariness.
“You sure we’re off the record?”
“Absolutely.”
“When I asked that question I got an evasive answer.” Her voice mimicked a bureaucrat’s official tone. “‘The girl’s under a lot of stress. These particular foster parents have more than a decade of experience working with traumatized kids. It’s best if she’s in a structured setting.’” She resumed her normal voice. “It’s not the choice I would have made, Joe. But Corrine’s family can visit her whenever they wish and they’re at the foster home a lot.”
“How about her dad?”
“Danny can’t visit her. She’d have to visit him.”
“Has she?”
Emma shook her head. “That would mean going to the jail, talking to him through a plexiglass window. I doubt she could handle that.”
“How’d you come to be her therapist?”
Emma drained her coffee mug. “Out of the blue. A couple of months ago the supervisor in the Ellsworth DHHS office called and said she’d heard I specialized in traumatized kids and asked if I’d work with Corrine. She wasn’t asking me to commit to being a regular consultant to DHHS, only to work on this case.”
“Is that unusual?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve only been in Maine for a year and a half, so I’m definitely the new kid on the block. I’ve had enough referrals to keep myself pretty busy in the Bangor area where I have an office, but I hadn’t done any prior work for DHHS.”
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