The Red Parts

by Maggie Nelson

  HOLDING HANDS, sitting side by side on our bench at the January hearing, my mother, Emily, and I now watch an overweight, bespectacled, sixty-two-year-old man in a forest-green prison jumpsuit shuffle into the courtroom. He is mostly bald, with white, craggy hair in a crescent shape, and a face full of whiskers, which he runs his hands over frequently. He has a large, bulbous nose that occasionally flushes dark red, and small, stunned eyes. Under the defense table, his feet lie flat against the floor, shackled at the ankles, in black socks and plastic brown prison sandals. Periodically he takes off his glasses and cleans them with the edge of his green prison shirt, then squints back out at the courtroom. The few times he turns around to scan the entire room he looks completely disoriented, as if he has no idea where he is.

  I feel disoriented too. Where I imagined I might find the “face of evil,” I am finding the face of Elmer Fudd.

  On this day Leiterman spends a lot of time watching his hands, which for the most part stay in a steepled position in front of his face or against his swollen belly. I am reminded of his nursing career by the way he shoots into action when anyone in the courtroom needs to put on latex gloves to handle evidence. Otherwise fairly motionless, he quickly picks up the box of powdered gloves and shakes it out to witnesses or lawyers whenever they need them, often a moment before the need arises, with a nurse’s instinct for protection. In the late afternoon a deep shaft of sunlight moves over the courtroom, and eventually lands on the defense table. Everyone else shifts positions or moves seats to get out of it, but Leiterman cannot move, he has to abide it. I watch the sun saturate his face and body, watch him shield his face with his hands in vain. Just as he instinctively offers up the gloves, I feel the urge to shield him, to block the sun with my body, or at least pull down a shade.

  We stay planted in our positions; I watch the light move over him.

  I watch the light and I watch his hands and I try to imagine them around the trigger of a gun, I try to imagine them strangling someone. Strangling Jane. I know this kind of imagining is useless and awful. I wonder how I’d feel if I imagined it over and over again and later found out that he didn’t do it. I stare at him all day as if a sign were about to come down from the heavens to indicate his guilt or innocence. It doesn’t come.

  The purpose of the January hearing is to lay out the bare bones of the case before a judge: to prove that a homicide was committed, to confirm that the victim was Jane, to offer enough probable cause to warrant a full trial, to determine whether Leiterman should remain in custody until that trial, and if so, to post or deny bail, and so on. On this day my grandfather is the first witness called to the stand. Everyone in the courtroom worries a bit as he totters in and out of the witness box; it seems an especially cruel moment to bust a hip.

  Once on the stand he looks ancient. He is wearing a favorite royal purple blazer and a bright red cashmere sweater that my mother gave him for Christmas a few weeks earlier. The state’s attorney, Steven Hiller, asks him to please tell the court what he saw at the morgue on the afternoon of March 21, 1969. My grandfather leans forward and says clearly: It was my second-born daughter. He still looks amazed.

  At the end of this day my grandfather announces that he has a “gut feeling” about Leiterman. He announces this at dinner at the Olive Garden in the strip mall across the freeway from the motel where the state has put us all up for the night. He mentions this “gut feeling” several times, but never says exactly what it is.

  All I’m saying is that he looks like a tortured man, he says.

  I don’t expect you to have empathy for the guy, Schroeder had told me the day after Leiterman’s arrest. I mean, he’s a sorry sack of shit. But he’s in hideous health, and, in my opinion, his body is completely eaten up by the things he’s done.

  Sitting at the Olive Garden, I wonder, does looking like a tortured man or having an eaten-up body mean that you premeditated and carried out the brutal, sexualized murder of a complete stranger three decades ago? I am also now remembering that when I tentatively, covertly interviewed my grandfather for Jane a few years back, he said that he had a “gut feeling” about John Collins.

  Although in his nineties, my grandfather shows few to no signs of fatigue, either with daily life or with the nine decades of it prior. He drinks about three pots of coffee a day, and takes hot baths and does crossword puzzles throughout the night. The prosecution team calls him “Dr. Dan,” which suits him well; he was a practicing dentist for more than sixty years. He wants to be sharp as a tack and he is. And yet I know he gets tired, because in court he falls asleep a multitude of times, his head slumping onto the shoulder of whichever family member happens to be sitting beside him. Each time he wakes up he appears alarmed, and immediately reassures the dead courtroom air, I’m all right, I’m all right.

  In the months leading up to the July trial, he will become increasingly concerned that the police are going to suggest exhuming Jane’s body from her grave in search of more evidence. He starts calling my mother late at night to say he won’t allow it, he simply won’t allow it.

  My mother tells him not to be paranoid. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, she says. So far we have not come to it.

  A Live Stream

  ON THAT JANUARY day Hiller warned us that the medical examiner’s testimony was but a warm-up for the graphic nature of the trial to come. Before he began his opening arguments on July 12, 2005, he warned us again. He took the members of Jane’s family who were present that day—me, my mother, my grandfather, Jane’s younger brother and his wife—aside in the courtroom hallway to tell us that he would be projecting several photos from Jane’s autopsy for the jury, photos that we might not want to see.

  My uncle heeds the warning, says he can’t think of one good reason to have those images in his mind, and heads straight down to the courthouse coffee shop.

  My mother feels differently. We’re tough, she tells Hiller. We can take it. I’m not sure for whom she’s speaking.

  My grandfather seems distraught, stranded between the polar stances of his two surviving children. He turns to me and asks, What do you think I should do, kiddo?

  I think you should do exactly what you need to do, I say inanely, knowing full well that he has no idea what he needs to do, and that he’s not going to be able to figure it out in the two minutes he has to decide before the courtroom fills up.

  He shuffles in, and the slide show begins.

  Photo #2:

  Jane, on a metal gurney. A profile shot, from the sternum upwards. She is naked, except for a baby-blue headband, which is thin, just a little more than a ribbon. Her hair is auburn and shiny with blood. And then, tied around her neck, almost like another fashion accessory, like some perverse ascot, is the stocking that was used to strangle her, its knot and two ends streaming toward the camera. The stocking looks reddish, probably from the age of the photo. As far as I know it was just a plain brown stocking. Not hers. “An import into the scene,” as they say. Embedded so deeply and wrongly into her skin that it appears here as a cartoon. Her face and shoulder and armpit are luminous, light sources unto themselves. Her armpit looks especially white and tender, like the armpit of a little girl. An armpit that’s never seen the sun.

  After the first few photos, Hiller comes over to our bench. He whispers to us that the next is particularly gruesome, that we might not want to see it.

  It shows Jane’s neck after the stocking was removed, he whispers. The furrow is quite deep.

  My mother repeats this information to my grandfather, who is sitting to her right and whose hearing isn’t good enough to make out the low decibel of Hiller’s whisper.

  He says we might not want to see this one, my mother says into his ear. The furrow is quite deep.

  Huh? my grandfather asks, what’s that?

  YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO LOOK AT THIS ONE, she repeats in a stage whisper as she lowers her head toward her knees.

  On her way down she whispers to me, Tell me if I should look
.

  With my mother bent over I feel suddenly exposed on the bench, the sole bird left on a wire. I just sit there dumbly staring at the screen, waiting for the next image to come up, feeling about as able to control what I allow in as an antenna.

  I am developing little methods, however. Each time an image appears I look at it quickly, opening and closing my eyes like a shutter. Then I look a little longer, in increments, until my eyes can stay open. I know the image will stay on the screen for some time, until the attorneys and their witnesses have said everything about it that needs to be said. So there’s no rush. You can acclimate to it slowly. And the thing is, you do acclimate.

  Well? my mother whispers from her bent-over pose.

  It’s not so bad, I whisper back, but you might as well not look.

  AS WE FILE out of court at the end of this day, my grandfather slaps my mother’s and my backs and says confidently, Well, that didn’t hurt us.

  I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  Speak for yourself, I want to say.

  Or, That’s what you think now—but just you wait.

  Or, What do you mean by “hurt”? What does “hurt” mean to you?

  I hold him up on one side as we descend the stairs, and he holds on to the railing on the other. At the bottom he hugs me closer and says, You know you’ll always be my Janie.

  Jesus, Grandpa, I want to say. Did you see how your Janie looked in there? She didn’t look so good.

  But I just nod, as the automatic doors of the courthouse swing open, and deliver us back out into the oppressive summer heat.

  COURT TV later reported:

  As the washed-out pictures were flashed onto a large projection screen, jurors appeared solemn. A few women on the panel looked toward the victim’s relatives, seated in the front row of the courtroom. On three separate occasions, Hiller approached the family to warn them that he was about to show disturbing pictures, but each time, Dan Mixer, the victim’s ninety-year-old father, replied, “I’ll stay.”

  THE PERSON WHO first discovered Jane’s body on the morning of March 21, 1969, was a young housewife named Nancy Grow. I had read about this woman and her discovery in many different places over the years—in The Michigan Murders, for example, she makes a cameo appearance as “Penny Stowe.” I had also written a poem about her in Jane. I never dreamed of seeing her in the flesh.

  Now in her sixties—birdlike, restrained, her nerves taut under her skin—Grow resurfaces at the January hearing to describe her encounter with Jane’s body over three decades ago. She does not seem happy to do so. Nonetheless, she politely explains how her son brought her a bloodstained bag he’d found on his way to the school bus, how she shooed him off, then took a look around her street. She walked over to Denton Cemetery, stopped outside its chain-link fence, and stood there at Jane’s feet, paralyzed with horror. She can’t recall how long she stood there, staring. She kept thinking, Maybe it’s a dummy, maybe it’s a dummy. At some point she walked a few feet into the cemetery, past the fence, to get a better view. Then, wearing just her nightgown and loafers, she ran to her car and drove to her sister’s house a few blocks away. She began screaming uncontrollably as soon as she got there.

  Grow didn’t think she absorbed anything at all about Jane’s specific features at the time, but surprised herself later by being able to pick Jane’s face out of a yearbook. Her face stayed with me, she says.

  Grow admits that she never told the police that she crossed the fence and went into the cemetery. When an attorney asks her why, she says she felt too ashamed. She can’t say why, but she felt ashamed.

  Watching this soft-spoken, traumatized woman on the stand, who steadfastly avoids looking at my family and instead stares down at her hands for the majority of her testimony, I begin to feel ashamed, too.

  Grow felt ashamed then for stepping in to take a closer look. Perhaps she feels ashamed now because it can feel hard and wrong to talk about the suffering of a stranger in the presence of those who knew and loved her.

  I know both of these feelings well. I have been taking a closer look for some time. And although Jane and I are connected by blood, she remains as much of a stranger to me as she was to Grow. The story of her death may have affected both of our lives and brought us into the same room, but that doesn’t mean that either of us feels that it’s ours to tell.

  Grow’s shame at the January hearing will set her apart from almost everyone else at the July trial. No one else will seem to have any—not the medical examiner who compares the body temperature taken in Jane’s rectum at the crime scene against that taken from the center of her liver during her autopsy; not the middle-aged true-crime writer from Australia who sits on the bench in front of ours every day, taking notes for a book; not the dowdy journalist from the local paper who lurks in a bathroom stall in the ladies’ room to eavesdrop on my mother’s and my conversations; none of the cameramen who film us walking in and out of the courthouse day after day, our faces wrinkled with sleep in the morning, then tear-stained and haggard by evening; none of the producers from 48 Hours, who will make heavy use of the crime scene photos in their show, and who had planned to use the autopsy photos as well until Hiller stepped in to say absolutely not; none of the Court TV correspondents, who will stream the autopsy photos live on the Web, then keep them available to the public in an online archive.

  Perhaps the shame I feel is a stand-in for the shame I think someone ought to feel.

  Or perhaps it’s due to the fact that during Leiterman’s trial, I sat in the courtroom every day with a legal pad and pen, jotting down all the gory details, no different or better than anyone else. Details which I’m reassembling here—a live stream—for reasons that are not yet clear or justifiable to me, and may never be.

  But as I told my mother after her tumble in the kitchen, some things might be worth telling simply because they happened.

  The Red Parts

  IN THE YEARS after my father died, I often found myself alone, or alone with my mother. Just us chickens, she’d say. Emily left for boarding school when she was thirteen and I was eleven, a departure that marked the start of a series of adventures and incarcerations from which she would never return home. My mother had a new husband, but his presence felt alien, intermittent. He appeared sporadically at the dinner table with hands darkened by paint and oil. He was a housepainter and carpenter several years her junior whom she and my father had hired years ago to paint our family home in San Rafael, the only house I remember living in with both my parents. My father was a lawyer who was out of town a lot in those days; my mother was a frustrated housewife at home with two small children. She fell in love with the housepainter when I was seven, divorced my father when I was eight, and married the housepainter when I was nine.

  For about a year and a half after the divorce Emily and I cavorted between our parents’ various apartments and homes under the rubric of “joint custody.” But a phone call in the early evening on January 28, 1984, altered this structure. My father was supposed to meet a friend that afternoon, but he never showed up. The friend called my mother, said she was worried, that it was unlike him, that something about it didn’t feel right. At this point my mother and father were living but a few miles away from each other in a town called Mill Valley. They were still close—in fact, my father often acted as if one day the cloud of madness would simply pass and they would get back together as if nothing had ever happened. My mother told his friend she would stop over at his house and make sure everything was OK. Emily and I went along.

  Although we had no reason to suspect anything was seriously amiss, the short car ride over to his house felt ominous. Emily or I—I can’t remember who—asked my mother to shut off the radio, as its manic chirping sounded all wrong. Pulling up to his house, my mother noticed that there were several newspapers in the driveway, and that the mail hadn’t been taken in.

  We all went inside together, but my mother went downstairs to his bedroom alone. A minute later, she
was back upstairs, yelling at us to leave the house, immediately.

  Emily and I sat for some time outside on the curb, watching our mother through the windows as she moved hysterically from room to room, screaming, You can’t come in until I make sure there are no signs of foul play. I need to make sure there are no signs of foul play.

  I was ten, and did not know what foul play meant. I knew it was the title of a Goldie Hawn/Chevy Chase movie I’d recently watched with my father on Showtime, but that movie had been a comedy.

  Where does your father keep the goddamn phone book, she yelled, frantically throwing open cabinets, forgetting, in her shock, that all she had to do was dial 911.

  For about a half hour Emily and I shared the darkening street with a teenage boy who skateboarded up and down the block, quizzically watching the scene unfold as dusk gave way to night. When the police and ambulance finally arrived, he clattered away.

  Emily and I followed the paramedics into the house, where I took up residence in a crevice between a wine rack and couch in my father’s living room. I don’t know where Emily went. From my crevice I could stay out of the way but still see what was happening. First I watched the paramedics rush down the stairs to his bedroom with a stretcher. Then I watched the staircase. After what felt like a long time, I watched them come back up the staircase. They were moving much more slowly now, and carrying a stretcher as flat and empty and white as it had been on its way down.

  That’s when I knew he was dead, although I didn’t know how or why, and I wouldn’t really believe it for some time.

  My mother told us later that she had found him lying perpendicular on his bed, as if he’d sat up, planted his feet on the ground, then fallen backwards. He was already cold.