The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  Thirty-Three

  “Murder is not simple, but the elements are.” At roughly 10:00 a.m. on Monday, May 6, 2003—eleven years after Ricky Langley killed Jeremy Guillory, nine years after he was sentenced to death for that murder, and two years after a new trial was ordered—prosecutor Cynthia Killingworth stands at the front of the jury and begins to tell them the story of the murder.

  Killingsworth is second counsel on this case. With her hair cut into a sensibly short shag, and the fatigue in her face, she looks something like an older and more moneyed version of Lorilei Guillory. First counsel is the assistant district attorney, Wayne Frey, prematurely balding, with a chin that echoes the roundness of his glasses and whose state bar photographs betray questionable taste in ties. Third counsel for the prosecution, Sharon Wilson, is the lone black lawyer in the room. Killingsworth and Frey specialize in the death penalty cases for this parish, and if anyone notices how right their names are for this job—Frey so easily pronounced “fry” in a state that once had the electric chair—there is no reference to this Dickensian rightness in the record. The prosecution’s strategy is fury: Killingsworth is a mother, and she’ll linger on the details of what Ricky did. She’ll say the sock he put in Jeremy’s mouth was dirty. Call Ricky evil. Frey is a crusader, a law-and-order man.

  On the defense side are Clive, tall and jittery and intense as always, as first counsel, and Phyllis Mann, whose plainspokenness matches her plain brown hair and the plainness of her suits, as second counsel. Against the prosecution’s barrage, the defense’s strategy is earnestness: to speak always as though from the heart. Both Clive and Mann are skilled at that.

  Ricky has been formally charged with first-degree murder. Louisiana law requires that two elements be proved: first, specific intent, meaning that Jeremy intended to kill Ricky. And second, to make the murder first-degree, an aggravating circumstance. A murder is considered aggravated if the person killed was under twelve. Jeremy was six. That’s met. So the trial will focus on the first element, specific intent.

  In response, Ricky pleads two things: one, not guilty, and two, not guilty by reason of mental insanity or defect. What he and Clive once promised Lorilei they wouldn’t plead for. So Gray, before anything has begun, has instructed the jury that because of Ricky’s insanity plea there are actually two burdens of proof in the case. Yes, the prosecution must prove Ricky guilty beyond a reasonable doubt if it wants to prevail. But the defense now has a burden, too. If it wants to succeed on the insanity plea, it must prove that Ricky didn’t know right from wrong at the time of the murder.

  All this framing, all this setup. By the time the jurors take their seats they have been given clues about what this man seated at the defense table between his lawyers did, clues doled out in bits and pieces by Gray and the lawyers over the past two weeks.

  But today, Killingsworth tells them, “the speculation ends.” She is the first to tell the story of the murder in this space. The first to tell here this story that has been told so many times. “Jeremy lived in a very remote area of Calcasieu Parish,” she says. “There aren’t that many houses out near where Jeremy lived, but there are some.” In one of them lived Jeremy’s playmates, Joey and June. On the afternoon of February 7, 1992, Jeremy knocked on the door of the white Lawson house, but June and Joey were gone. Ricky invited Jeremy in. “And you will learn in this case that the fatal error Jeremy made that day was going into the home where the defendant, Ricky Langley, was.” Jeremy walked up the stairs. He sat down on the floor and began to play.

  Then, Killingsworth says, Ricky came up to him, inserted his penis into Jeremy’s mouth, and ejaculated.

  It is a bold move to begin the trial this way. Picture the courthouse on this morning. The jurors spent the night in a motel, hours from their homes. They were all assigned their own rooms—a splurge for the parish, but Gray made sure of it, he’d promised them during voir dire—and they bedded down away from their spouses and loved ones, knowing that in the morning a murder trial would begin. When their alarms went off, far too early, they tossed back the weak motel coffee, boarded the shuttle bus, and there they made awkward small talk with the strangers with whom, they began to realize, they would make the gravest decision of their lives. They noticed who among them was pushy. They noticed who among them was shy. They began to get a sense of where alliances would lie. Once in the courtroom, they noticed the man at the defense table, with his jug ears and thick glasses and pale blue shirt and mismatched red tie. This was the man whose fate they would decide.

  Now they are being told that he ejaculated into the mouth of a child. Killingsworth has begun her story with the element that will be most difficult for the state to prove.

  But likely that is not what the jurors are thinking, that she must still prove this. They have just been told a story. They are thinking, Poor child. Ricky was referred to as a pedophile many times during voir dire. They are thinking, So that’s what happened. They are thinking of the murder as sexual. That poor, poor child. The white clock with the black hand on the wall ticks slowly. Killingsworth pauses dramatically.

  Then she finishes the tale. Ricky killed Jeremy. First his hands, then a wire around Jeremy’s neck, then a dirty sock in his throat. He carried the child’s body to the closet and propped it up against the wall, fixed a white trash bag around Jeremy’s head and shoulders, and piled blankets on top of him. Lorilei at the door; the long, fruitless search; Ricky’s blurted-out confession; the arrest; Jeremy’s body. “I’m sure that the defense is going to tell you that nobody in their right mind, nobody who could tell the difference between right and wrong would do this to a child. But listen carefully. Listen carefully to everything this person did. And listen to how he told police he took that child’s life on February 7, 1992. And at the end of the trial we will come back again and ask you to use your common sense and find the defendant guilty as charged.” She sits back down, leaving her words to linger. Common sense. Yes. That is what it must seem like now.

  Phyllis Mann, the defense attorney, gets up and paces. Then she stops in front of the jury box. “The things you’ve heard from the prosecutor this morning are a small part of the whole story. Clive and I have represented Ricky for a while now. And today, with the beginning of this trial, we hand him over to you.” She looks searchingly down the row of seated jurors. Some of them must meet her eyes. Some must look away. “So if I seem a little nervous, it’s because I am. A terrible, unimaginable tragedy happened on February 7, 1992, when Jeremy Guillory died. We have never from the very beginning ever suggested that Ricky was not the cause of Jeremy’s death. But what we will show you during this trial is that Ricky Langley did not, could not, intend to kill Jeremy Guillory.” Ricky’s life is in their hands now, she reminds them. She asks them to spare it.

  On television screens all over town, KPLC-TV, the local news station, is airing coverage of this trial. The lawyers talking to the cameras. Lorilei and her son Cole huddling together, Lorilei looking pained and Cole slightly stunned by the camera light. Then one clip that repeats over and over: Ricky Langley, twenty-six and scrawny, his floppy brown hair as wild as a current’s shock, sits in the police station in an orange jumpsuit and tells Lucky and Dixon the story of the murder. “And then I got a wire and”—he jerks his hands up to his neck. He pinches his fingers together. He draws the imaginary wire across his neck and pulls his hands to tighten it. Like he tightened the wire around Jeremy’s. “I made sure he couldn’t breathe.”

  Two seconds of tape, if that. When the news anchor returns to end the segment, a small photographic still from this moment hangs in the upper right corner of the screen. Ricky, his hands at his throat. Killing Jeremy.

  “This is Jeremy Guillory,” Mann continues. They’ve enlarged Jeremy’s last school portrait and mounted it on cardboard. He wears a checked shirt, his hair parted neatly. He smiles, missing one tooth. “Can y’all see? As we talk about Ricky’s mental illness I want you to know that we are doing that so we can learn why
Jeremy Guillory died. He was an innocent six-year-old boy. He made no mistakes. Back in 1992, his mother, Lorilei, was pregnant with another son she’d name Cole, and she and Jeremy were living in Iowa, Louisiana. Iowa is about ten miles east from here. And just down the road from Iowa is another little town called Hecker, Louisiana. And that’s where Ricky grew up with his mother, Bessie, and his father, Alcide, and his older sisters, Darlene, Judy, and Francis, and his younger brother, Jamie. But what happened in this case was first set in motion several years before Ricky was born.”

  Now Mann tells the story of the murder. She doesn’t begin with Jeremy’s grabbing his BB gun and running out the door. She begins before Ricky was born, and tells the story of his birth: the crash, Bessie in the cast, all the drugs, Ricky. “The bottom line,” Mann says, “is that Ricky was destined to be psychotic, and the only question is what form that psychosis was going to take.”

  (“Destined.” That first taped confession, when Lucky interrogated Ricky:

  Q: Now, you’ve had problems with kids in the past.

  A: Yeah.

  Q: You want to tell me about those?

  A: It’s just, I can’t explain. I guess that’s my destiny, okay, it’s true.)

  That’s when Mann talks about Ricky’s beginning to see Oscar as a child. He’s the form the psychosis takes. In the story Mann tells, Ricky talks about the car wreck as though he were there. He talks about Oscar and Vicky’s funeral: how pretty the children looked laid out in the caskets, the white ruffles on Vicky’s dress and the brush of Oscar’s eyelashes against his cheeks.

  (Has Mann forgotten that Oscar was decapitated, decapitated even in Ricky’s dream? The story is being told a different way now.)

  The way Mann tells it, Bessie and Alcide once took Ricky to a therapist when he was a child, but they didn’t want him diagnosed with anything that could trail him throughout his life. They wanted their son to be normal. So they did their best to pretend that he was.

  It was Ricky who realized something was wrong. Ricky tried to get help, but was turned away. He tried to kill himself, but failed or secretly wanted just the help attention would bring, not really to die. By the time Ricky killed Jeremy, Mann says, he was in a long psychosis brought on by stress, the stress of being back living with his family, the family that was so difficult for him, the family with whom the past resided. He strangled Jeremy thinking he was ridding himself of Oscar. Thinking he was getting rid of the past. Only when the child was dead did he look down and realize whom he’d killed.

  Two stories. Two different meanings.

  This is how the choice has been framed for the jury: Is Ricky a bad person, an evil person who brutally murdered an innocent child? Or has Ricky battled demons his whole life, battled who he is, a battle that has left him psychotic and has resulted in the tragic death of a child?

  The prosecution calls its witnesses, including the 911 dispatcher who took Ricky’s phone calls; Calton Pitre, for whom Ricky drew the search diagram; and the photographer who took aerial photographs of the scene.

  “The state’s next witness, please,” Gray says.

  “Lorilei Guillory.”

  Thirty-Four

  The jurors must tense in their seats. Five of them are mothers. The prosecution hopes they’ll see themselves in Lorilei. The defense hopes they’ll see themselves in Bessie and be horrified by what she endured during her pregnancy. Overhead, the fluorescent lights buzz. The jurors’ hearts quicken.

  The mother has light brown hair, like the light hair of her son in his picture. She looks like any mother, not someone you would notice if her name hadn’t been called. She’s older than they were imagining, perhaps. Listening to the officers who searched for him, they have forgotten that the murder was more than ten years ago. So the lines around her eyes lend a new gravity. Ten years she’s lived without her son. All their children, they told the lawyers during jury selection, are living.

  Lorilei settles herself into the witness chair. The jurors stare.

  Under their stares, she must look down at her hands, she must brace her shoulders. Eleven years have passed. She’s been living out of state. She’d forgotten about the stares.

  “Ms. Guillory,” Killingsworth begins. Maybe her voice has a note of sympathy that wasn’t there before. It’s careful, a little mournful. Lorilei must have forgotten about this, too. The being handled with gloves. Of course the prosecution has Killingsworth doing the direct examination. A mother, talking to a mother. “Can you tell me the name of your children?”

  “My first child’s name is Jeremy James Guillory. I have a second son, Cole Innis Landry.” She shifts in her seat. “I have a third child that I gave up at birth named Rowan Lovell, as far as I know.”

  “Jeremy Guillory, the little boy who was killed in this case, that’s your son, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was the last time you saw your son?”

  “The last time I saw my son was that Friday afternoon when he went outside to play.”

  “OK. And what was…?”

  “Alive.” Lorilei’s voice rises. “That was the last time I saw him alive.” She describes going to the Lawson house and using the phone. She describes standing at the edge of the woods and yelling out Jeremy’s name and the silence, the terrible silence in response. Then the police, the searchers, the dogs, and the boats.

  “How long did the search continue?”

  “Three days.” There is again in the transcript the problem of the enormity of what Lorilei must convey. She tries again. “To me it was three days and three nights. Friday, Friday night. Saturday, Saturday night. Sunday, Sunday night.” Likely she wasn’t told to continue on past this point in the story. But she can’t help herself. This is how it ends. “And then on Monday, sometime Monday, they told me they’d found my son. And I said, where is he? And they said he was dead.”

  * * *

  Cole is the reason Lorilei never has to wonder how long Jeremy has been dead. How old Cole is, plus half a year: That’s how long his brother’s been gone. Cole’s age, plus six and a half: That’s how old Jeremy would have been.

  Seventeen now, as Lorilei sits on the hard pew bench in the gallery. Two days have passed since she testified. On that first day after Lorilei spoke, the state called Pearl Lawson, who described meeting Ricky. Nothing about her son or her husband, nothing about whether she knew Ricky was a pedophile. Then Lanelle Trahan, Pearl’s supervisor at the Fuel Stop, who described Ricky’s blocking her way on the stairs, his face turning beet red. The next morning, the state began with the FBI agent Don Dixon, now chief of police for the parish. (“I got a ticket, Chief,” Gray said. “I ain’t too happy.”) In the middle of Dixon’s testimony, Ricky felt light-headed, and Gray adjourned for the day. He wasn’t going to have a mistrial, he said. The next morning, Dixon finished testifying about the search and Ricky’s confession, then Lucky led the jury through the photographs of Jeremy. By the time he got to the close-up of Jeremy’s body in the closet, wrapped in blankets, his boots and his BB gun tucked at his feet, Lucky was crying.

  Now it is day four, and they are just back from lunch after a very long morning. First the lawyers fought, and though they fought in whispers in front of the judge’s bench, their suited backs turned to the audience like the hard shells of beetles, Lorilei knows part of what they were fighting about was her. Her here. How she went and talked to Ricky. What she wants to say about how she feels.

  At the first trial, in 1994, when her grief was fresh and full of anger, the prosecutors were eager to have her in the courtroom. But now that she’s met with Ricky, they’ve called her an unfit mother. A fit mother, they say, would never support her son’s killer. And they have evidence on her, she knows. All those years of alcohol and drugs, of trying to find her way before Jeremy came and gave her a purpose. Then more alcohol and drugs after Jeremy was taken from her.

  But she has a purpose again. Mothering Cole, yes, but also, somehow, this trial. What this trial has become
. The prosecutors paid to bring her and Cole here from South Carolina for the trial—they had to—but now they say that since they don’t want her testifying in the penalty phase if there is one, not if she won’t say she wants Ricky killed, they won’t pay to keep her and Cole here anymore. Like she’d go home before the trial’s over. And Cole’s started the school term.

  Then there’s the evidence they’re fighting over. The judge has up at his bench a letter from Ricky to Lucky written in 1992 from his cell at the correctional center, offering to sit down with Lucky and an atlas and mark everywhere Ricky has traveled to so he can tell Lucky about all the children he says he molested along the way. Those stories come to Lorilei like the silk and seed a dandelion sheds in the wind. Only the hard knot reaches her. Though the courtroom is the neutral temperature of still air, the stillness feels too hot and tight around her, and perhaps she feels a headache coming on. She rests her head back against the bench and closes her eyes for a minute. How many children were there? Did they meet ends like her Jeremy?

  Jeremy. Maybe she lets herself imagine him. Jeremy at seventeen like he would be now. Finding somebody with an ATV he could sweet-talk them out of or jack out of their yard when they weren’t looking, and riding it out over the reedy swamp grass on the long, empty weekend afternoons, maybe running it too quick and jumping off—wouldn’t matter how many times she told him it is was dangerous, in this story he wouldn’t know what dead was—until he and his buddies were thick-covered with mud, laughing, alive. That BB gun he’d loved would be an air rifle, the walks in the woods longer. He’d be sweet on a girl at the high school by now, and when she asked him about her he’d redden from his chin to his ears. She knows his smile so well that her heart aches. Jeremy under the Christmas tree at six, wearing a red sweater, his blond hair gleaming in the lights, grinning so hard his cheeks bulged. That was two months before he died. Don’t think about the way they ran that picture on the evening news; don’t think about the way they’re running that picture on the evening news all over town now. Think of his smile. She transposes it. Grows it up. Subtracts the roundness from the jaw, makes stubble appear above his lip. Seventeen.