When I heard this testimony in the courtroom, I had no idea why I would have nodded in answer to the questions Thornburgh had asked. My best guess was that when he leaned down to whisper to me, I may have heard him say Dawn’s name, but not the context of the question. I might have thought he was asking something like Do you remember your daughter Dawn? Do you want to see her? and I nodded, the way any mother would.
This solution didn’t explain why he hadn’t also mentioned Iris, but I figured that the detective didn’t know, at the time, that I had another daughter. Dawn would have been fresh on his mind because he’d met her only hours earlier, when he came to investigate the burglary at our house.
“The Nods,” as they were referred to by a local tabloid reporter throughout the trial, became the cornerstone of the prosecution’s attempt to indict Dawn Schutt on charges of murdering her father and attempting to murder her mother. District Attorney Gail Nazarian contended that although Rud Petty, Dawn’s boyfriend, had actually wielded the croquet mallet, Dawn helped him gain entry to the locked house and did nothing to stop him from committing the brutal attack.
I closed my eyes again, hoping that the phrase “wielded the croquet mallet” would conjure up some image of the killer raising his arm high above Joe and me, then bringing it down hard. For a moment I thought I could hear it, the crack—just as I had heard it when I left Iris’s house—and I braced myself, thinking I had remembered something about that night.
But then I realized that the image of the sound came, most likely, from the reception in our garden after Iris’s wedding, when Rud took it upon himself to teach Kirsten Danzig and the other kids at the party how to whack the ball through the wickets. Still, I felt encouraged. Exposing myself to the news story seemed to be prompting my memory in the way I had hoped.
Rud Petty claimed that he was alone at his apartment, three hours downstate from Everton near the campus of Lawlor College, where Dawn Schutt was a student, when the assaults occurred. But the jury convicted him largely based on the discovery of a print matching a shoe police took from his closet, and the fact that no one could confirm his alibi. (His fingerprints were also found on the murder weapon, but the defense had been able to prove that their client had previously handled a croquet mallet belonging to the set in the Schutts’ garage.)
The jury also believed Petty had motive to kill the Schutts, who had accused him earlier that day of stealing from them while a guest in their house.
A further motive police cited was Petty’s reported (and inaccurate) belief that Dawn Schutt stood to inherit a significant amount of money in the event of her parents’ deaths.
The biggest surprise of the trial for me had come the afternoon three of her classmates from college testified about how often Dawn bragged about coming from money that would all be hers one day. Of course it disturbed me that she’d had to create such a persona for herself, and tell such lies, once she left home and went off to school. But I knew it was necessary for the kids to be on the witness list, because it reinforced the prosecution’s contention that Rud Petty had plenty of reason to kill Joe and me.
At trial, the judge allowed police to testify about Hanna Schutt’s apparent implication of Rud Petty in the attack, under the “dying declaration” exception to the hearsay rule. In this exception, the testimony of a victim who is unable to testify in court because of death or, as in the case of Mrs. Schutt, disability may still be included in the prosecution’s case against the defendant.
Because the only pieces of physical evidence against Dawn Schutt were hair, fingerprints, and fibers taken from her parents’ bedroom, which could have been left there at any time she lived in the house, the grand jury declined to indict her. Though forensic investigation revealed that both Joseph and Hanna Schutt suffered defensive wounds to their hands and so likely did see their attackers, the district attorney was able to present nothing other than her mother’s nod to place Dawn Schutt at the scene.
Without realizing, I looked down at my hands and turned them palms up. The mallet had left no lasting marks in the flesh, and by the time I’d woken up in the hospital, the sting it must have delivered had disappeared.
Medical witnesses for the defense claimed that due to the severe nature of her injuries, Hanna Schutt could not have understood what she was doing when she appeared to answer Lieutenant Thornburgh’s questions. In addition, Dawn Schutt’s roommate testified that they were together in their off-campus apartment the entire night in question.
Nevertheless, questions remain. The key found by Claire Danzig in the Schutts’ front door, the morning the attack was discovered, was the spare key the Schutts kept hidden in a flower box outside the house; someone with this knowledge of the family’s habits, prosecutors told the jury, would have had to instruct Rud Petty as to its location. The keypad to the home alarm system was smashed in, but police determined that this was an effort to conceal the fact that someone who knew the code had used it to deactivate the alarm.
As I’d told Kenneth Thornburgh, Dawn had always had trouble remembering the code, even though it was simple: 768*. She couldn’t keep track of the order of the numbers, and she always thought the star came first.
Within minutes of police discovering her near death in her blood-soaked bedroom, Hanna Schutt was rushed to Albany Medical Center, where she underwent twelve hours of emergency surgery. For the next three weeks, she remained in a medically induced coma, from which she awoke just before Christmas. When the district attorney received permission from her doctors to conduct “a gentle interrogation” regarding her statement to police about her daughter’s presence during the assault, Mrs. Schutt appeared to have virtually no memory of the events that occurred that night.
Appearing before the grand jury, Dawn Schutt testified that after storming out of her parents’ house when they accused her boyfriend of stealing from them while he was alone in the home the day after Thanksgiving, she and Rud Petty drove straight back downstate to the town of Van Dyck, where Ms. Schutt was a student and Petty worked as a veterinary technician. Because she had promised to spend the evening with her roommate, who had remained in their apartment over the holiday, Ms. Schutt parted with Petty at his apartment, and did not see or speak to him again that evening.
Ms. Schutt and her roommate, Opal Bremer, ordered take-out Chinese dinners from a nearby restaurant, and then watched two consecutive Alfred Hitchcock movies before going to bed, according to the testimony of both women. The next morning, Ms. Bremer got up before Ms. Schutt, to go to her job as a waitress at a local pancake house. Ms. Bremer said she knew that her roommate was still in bed when she left the apartment because she could hear Ms. Schutt snoring, a condition she shared with her father because both suffered from asthma and sinus trouble.
This testimony of Opal’s had surprised me at the time, because it had been years since I’d heard Dawn snoring when she slept at home—in fact, her symptoms seem to have disappeared almost magically when she turned twelve, the same year she wanted to have her eye corrected. The pediatrician told us this sometimes happened with asthma, and while he couldn’t consider her cured, we could say she was in remission. I reminded myself that she’d been away for more than a year by the time of the attack, so if her breathing difficulty had returned to trouble her at night, I might not have known it.
After Hanna Schutt was rushed to the hospital, state police in Van Dyck located Dawn Schutt in her apartment. A “Be on the Lookout” advisory had been issued for her, based on what police took to be her mother’s identification of her attackers. State police informed Ms. Schutt of her father’s death and her mother’s injuries. They said she seemed to exhibit no reaction to the news, but they also acknowledged that such a response was not inconsistent with shock.
Officers did not immediately inform her that they believed her mother had identified her in the attack. Ms. Schutt said that she wanted to drive herself to the hospital, but instead police escorted her on the three-hour trip in an official police vehicle
, activating their lights and siren when necessary because they had been told it was likely that Hanna Schutt would die during surgery.
Testifying to the grand jury charged with determining whether Dawn Schutt should be bound over for trial, state trooper Ned Cushman said that during the trip upstate, his passenger had seemed particularly preoccupied with the condition of the Schutt family’s dog. “She didn’t ask me one question about her mother,” Cushman told grand jury members. “She just kept wanting to know, was the dog okay?”
This hurt, at first, but then I remembered that Dawn had always had a stronger connection to Abby than any of us. It made sense to me that in order to distract herself from sinking under the weight of Joe’s death, and the fact that I might be dying, too, she’d focused on Abby’s injuries instead.
The trooper added that as she voiced her concern about the dog, Dawn Schutt appeared to experience trouble breathing. She asked if the police car was outfitted with an inhaler, and when told it was not, she began to have what looked like a panic attack, Cushman said.
An inhaler. Something about these words made my own breath catch on something sharp in my chest, and for a moment I thought I might scream out. I closed my eyes. An inhaler. What was it those words stirred up? I had been around inhalers since I began dating Joe. When it became clear that Dawn also suffered from asthma, we always had inhalers on hand for both of them. They had become part of our routine as a family, though once Dawn seemed to outgrow the need for the medicine as an adolescent, it was only Joe who kept one with him. As far as I knew, she hadn’t even gotten a refill on her prescription before she went off to college.
The mention of an inhaler was significant somehow. I knew that, but I didn’t know why. If only I could concentrate a minute or two longer, I felt sure it would come to me.
Some have speculated that Hanna Schutt did remember what happened that night, and feigned memory loss in order to protect her daughter. Whether she actually suffered from amnesia or only purported to, the loss of Hanna Schutt as a witness to the attack that nearly killed her was, in the estimation of legal scholars and lay trial followers alike, a major factor—if not the key factor—in her daughter’s escape from prosecution.
“It’s sad,” commented a neighbor of the Schutts, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “She obviously can’t bring herself to see what’s right in front of her.”
I resisted the impulse to put my hands over my face. I’d always known that the district attorney, Iris, and members of Tough Birds believed I was faking my memory loss, but I didn’t realize the news coverage had also suggested it. No wonder people seemed to think I was so pathetic, if they didn’t outright scorn or hate me.
And who would that neighbor have been? I was sure it was Pam Furth. The next lines reminded me why she was so eager to point the finger in my direction:
Police briefly investigated a young man who lived in the neighborhood in connection with the attack, but no charges were brought against him. Though the case against Rud Petty was almost entirely circumstantial, the district attorney’s office said it was confident it was prosecuting the right person for the crime.
My focus blurred, and with it went whatever had been sparked by seeing the words on the screen. Feeling an almost unbearable pressure inside my head, I switched off the computer and rushed to lie down, but not fast enough to beat the pain.
Lots of Love
Though it was the last time I’d seen Rud Petty before his arrest that the prosecutor cared about, I had no trouble remembering the first time I’d seen him, or the way Joe and I learned about the new and powerful force—in the form of an older, handsome boyfriend—that had entered our daughter’s life. Our introduction came during the weekend of Iris and Archie’s wedding. We would have preferred to meet him at a time other than such an intimate family occasion, but as it turned out, we didn’t have much say about it.
We first heard Rud’s name during the spring semester of Dawn’s freshman year, when she called to tell us that she wouldn’t be coming home to live for the summer after all; instead, she’d found a job tutoring incoming students at her college, a private school downstate that made a point of appealing to “alternative” applicants. Though Dawn had wanted to live at home and go to the state university as Joe and I had, she didn’t get in. At first, after receiving the rejection (which I thought she seemed almost happy about, though it took me a while to believe my own perception), she said she’d just keep living at home, get a job, and try again the following year. But Joe persuaded Dawn to apply to Lawlor, which surprised me (and Dawn, too, I know) because it was so expensive. He didn’t want her to take a year off, he told me, or to live at home—he thought those things would make it too easy for her to slide into an inertia she might never shake.
Lawlor had rolling admission, but Dawn said she didn’t want to apply to some place she’d never seen. So Joe and I drove her down the Saturday after she’d gotten the “no” letter from SUNY, and though she tried not to show it, I could see she was impressed (it was impossible not to be) by the cozy green campus, the two-story aquarium in the student center, the plush dorms, and the fact that students were encouraged to design their own majors. When she got her acceptance letter, she was torn; she was pleased that she’d been invited somewhere, but she said she didn’t know how she could ever leave me. Though I knew it was the wrong thing to feel, I couldn’t help recognizing in myself a certain degree of pleasure when I heard this. On a Saturday at the end of August, she spent the morning sobbing before we virtually forced her into Joe’s car and drove her down to her new dorm.
But over Christmas we gave her a car of her own, the used Nova, and it seemed to inspire a fresh independence in her. In March she called to say that although she’d originally planned to come home for the week of spring break, she’d decided to stay on campus and catch up on coursework instead. Then, at the end of the semester, she called to tell us she’d be spending the summer at Lawlor tutoring new students. Of course she’d be home for the wedding in June, she assured me—and maybe another weekend or two, here or there, before then. Then I thought I heard her hesitate before she added, “I have to separate from you, Mommy. Stand on my own two feet.”
I tried not to let her know how upset I was by her news. I’d been so looking forward to her return for the summer that when she told me her new plan I said I was proud of her, but I had to hang up soon afterward. “She’s not coming home” was all I managed to say to Joe, at first, and then, after a short cry, I repeated the details of our conversation. “I know I’m supposed to be glad she wants to grow up. But it feels awful.”
Joe had a different intuition, and it turned out he was right. “There must be a boy in the picture,” he said. Though he tried to hide the disappointment in his face, I could hear it in his voice. Sure enough, in the next call, Dawn began mentioning Rud. Not a lot, in the beginning—she said she’d met someone, an assistant at the veterinary clinic in town, when she brought in the kitten she and her roommate Opal had been keeping illicitly in their dorm room before they moved together into an apartment off campus after Christmas break. Now she and this guy were having fun together, “just hanging out.”
Gradually, during phone calls and e-mails, we learned more. Rud wanted to be a vet himself someday; Rud called her Kitten—wasn’t that sweet?; Rud treated her like a queen. He’s also very good-looking, she wrote, which I know doesn’t matter, but wait till you see him. He looks like some kind of god.
“A god?” Joe said, reading the message over my shoulder. “I don’t think I like the sound of that.” He asked if he could sit down at the computer, and I watched his fingers twitch over the keyboard before he tapped out, Looks can be deceiving! LOL, your ordinary-looking dad.
“Why did you sign it ‘Laugh out loud’?” I asked him after he pressed Send, and he said, “What?” and I said, “LOL.” He looked confused and said, “That doesn’t mean ‘Lots of love’?” My heart split open for him then.
We aske
d Dawn when we’d have a chance to meet her new boyfriend, and she kept giving excuses about why they couldn’t drive up some weekend. Rud works crazy shifts at the vet clinic, she said. I think you’re all just going to have to meet him at the wedding. This took us aback, but there didn’t seem to be any way to avoid it.
Iris was none too happy about the plan. She hadn’t wanted Dawn to be her maid of honor in the first place, though she gave in to Joe on that when he told her how good it would make her sister feel to be asked. But adding a complete stranger to the mix put Iris’s nerves over the edge. “You guys haven’t even met him?” she said when we told her Dawn would be accompanied by a guest. “What if he’s some kind of nut?”
“She says he’s not,” Joe told her. “And apparently he looks like a god.”
“Oh, boy.” Iris groaned. “I wonder what he wants.”
“Iris,” I said, in the same scolding tone I’d used when the girls were children. “That’s not nice.” I wasn’t prepared to tell her she was wrong, though, so I changed the subject to something I was more sure about—what the tent was going to cost for the reception in the garden, or which photographer was going to give us the better deal.
Iris wasn’t the only one who wasn’t keen on including, in our family celebration, someone who was unknown to everyone but Dawn. It wouldn’t be the same as when she’d brought her friend Opal up to visit for a few days during their winter break; Opal came after Christmas and left before New Year’s, so her visit didn’t intrude on the family holiday, and she was a girlfriend, not a boyfriend, which of course made a huge difference.
Lacy Eye Page 9
