Two Lost Boys

by L. F. Robertson

  For the most part, the police reports and transcripts in Andy’s case expanded on the depressing story I’d heard from Jim. Andy and his brother Emory had been arrested after a runaway teenager from Sacramento, Nicole Shumate, was picked up by a rancher on a country highway twenty miles from Shasta City. Nicole said she’d been kidnapped while hitchhiking near Shasta City, taken to a ranch somewhere outside of town, and raped by two men, after which one of them had driven with her out onto the highway late at night in his pickup truck. She had jumped from the man’s truck and hidden in the woods until after daybreak. The rancher drove her to the main police station in Shasta City, where she reported the crime. As the truck drove away, she said, she read and memorized its license-plate number. The plate came back to Emory Hardy.

  The police put Emory’s driver’s license photo into a photo lineup and showed it to Nicole. She picked him out without hesitation as one of the kidnappers.

  Emory’s address, which appeared to be where Nicole had been taken, was outside the Shasta City limits, and the job of making arrests and investigating the crimes was assigned to the Pomo County Sheriff’s Department. Several deputies were waiting at the house when Eva Hardy, Emory’s mother, came home from work that night, but neither Emory nor his brother Marion showed up. Eva said she had no idea where they were.

  It didn’t take long to find them. They were arrested at a motel in the mountains near the Oregon state line, after the manager recognized the truck and license plate from the TV news and called 911.

  After a night in jail and a long, mostly silent ride to the sheriff’s station at Shasta City, Emory was ready to talk. He gave a statement saying Andy was the instigator of the whole sorry escapade, and he went along with it because Andy made him. They talked to Andy, too, and he said it was his brother’s idea and he went along with it because, well, she was a hooker and she would have given it to them for money anyway. Reading their statements, I felt a little sick. It’s hard to sympathize with someone like that, even if he’s your client. But interrogating cops are trained not to show their real feelings when they’re trying to get information, so the questions in the transcript were pure Joe Friday, neutral and bland, designed to get as much out of Andy as possible and keep him from lawyering up.

  The sheriffs went out to the farm the next day with a search warrant. In the barn, they found the room where Nicole had been held, just as she described it. They also found a purse with a wallet belonging to a different woman. The ID in it turned out to be that of another young woman who had been reported missing the previous spring.

  Two homicide deputies from the Pomo County Sheriff’s Department, Ron Canevaro and Dave Hines, were assigned to the case, and they grilled Emory about the new information. They used a time-honored interrogation trick, telling him that Andy had confessed and fingered Emory as the killer of the missing girl. Emory took the bait, and in exchange for a promise that Canevaro and Hines would tell the district attorney how cooperative he’d been, he told them that Andy had killed not one, but two women, and where the bodies were buried.

  As Emory told it, on both occasions, Andy and he had kidnapped a prostitute and hidden her in the barn on the ranch where they lived, where they took turns having sex with her. When they got tired of it, Andy decided the girl needed to be gotten rid of because she could lead the police back to the ranch. Both times, Andy had gone into the barn and killed the girl—Emory didn’t know how. He and Andy carried the bodies out to the woods behind the ranch buildings and buried them. He had no idea why Andy decided to let the third one go. “Felt sorry for her, I guess,” he said.

  In the woods behind the ranch, the sheriffs found two grave-sized indentations in the ground pretty much where Emory had said they would be. Digging equipment and a crew of police officers and crime-scene investigators were brought out to the site. A couple of feet down, they found the decomposed bodies of two women.

  Canevaro and Hines brought Andy out of his jail cell and questioned him again. This time, they turned up the heat.

  When the police interrogate a suspect in custody, they’re usually no longer trying to find out what happened and whether or not the guy was really involved. Police may interview witnesses to find out information, but an interrogation is something else entirely. By the time officers begin interrogating a suspect, they’re convinced he’s guilty; the point of the questioning isn’t to find out what really happened, but to wear the man down psychologically until he confesses to what the police believe he did. Textbooks and manuals have been written on how to isolate and disorient a perpetrator and work a confession out of him, and cops go on training courses where instructors teach techniques for extolling, cajoling, frightening, and tricking confessions from reluctant suspects.

  Hines and Canevaro knew their work. Andy told them a story—in fact, he told several. At first he denied knowing anything about the bodies. Then, when the detectives confronted him with what Emory had told them, he admitted to helping kidnap the women, but said he didn’t know they’d been killed; they’d just disappeared during the night, and Emory had told him he’d driven them some distance down the highway and let them go. The detectives told him how incredible that sounded, and he admitted that maybe he’d suspected that they were dead. The detectives said they knew he was lying, that he knew the women had died and that he had killed them, and they wanted him to be straight with them and tell them how it had happened. Andy balked and kept insisting he didn’t kill them and didn’t know how they’d died. Then the officers told him that he was looking at the death penalty unless he came up with some explanation for killing those two girls. They lied, saying his fingerprints had been lifted from the skin of one of the women’s necks. They suggested that Andy might have killed the women without meaning to, maybe during sex, or that he had grown angry because he’d had trouble performing and they had taunted him.

  Andy, confused and tearful, continued to deny that he’d killed the women. He asked to see his mother, and the officers said they’d let her visit him when he’d told them the truth.

  Andy stuck with his story for another hour or so, until the detectives threatened to arrest Eva for murder and conspiracy. Andy reacted with terrified indignation. “You can’t arrest Mama—she didn’t have nothin’ to do with it!” The detectives, seeing a weakness they could exploit, took that as the opening they needed. They played Andy with it, telling him that if he knew his mother didn’t have anything to do with the murders of the two women, then he must know who did and that the only way to keep her out of trouble was to tell them. From that, it was only a few minutes until Andy broke and let the officers tell him how the killings must have happened. Maybe he really didn’t remember, they said. Maybe he’d done drugs on those nights or been drinking, or just blacked out. He had strangled them, perhaps, or stabbed them; it was up to Andy to tell them what he’d done.

  Andy’s confession, in its final form, was a lot like Emory’s. He told the detectives that he and Emory had kidnapped the women; that the two of them had taken them to the ranch; and that they had put them in a room in the barn behind the house, where they both subjected them to various sex acts. With a lot of prompting from the deputies, Andy said that each of the women might have said or done something that set him off, and, he guessed he could have strangled them. He and Emory buried their victims in the woods, far enough from the house that their mother wouldn’t see the disturbed ground.

  When the deputies asked him why he let Nicole go instead of killing her, he said, “I didn’t want her to get hurt.” He told how he had gone out to the barn while Emory was watching television and Eva was upstairs in the house, untied Nicole, told her to get into the truck, and started driving toward town. He told her he was going to let her go, but she didn’t believe him and jumped out of the truck and ran into the woods. Andy drove back home. “But Em heard the truck, and when he found out, he was madder’n hell. He went out looking for her, but he couldn’t find her in the dark. When he comes back he says we was
both dead men and we had to take off. So we left that night in his truck.”

  Between the bodies, the confessions, and the testimony of Nicole, the district attorney had the issue of Andy and Emory’s guilt pretty well sewn up. Arnold Dobson, Andy’s court-appointed lawyer, apparently agreed with the prosecution’s assessment of the case, because he put on no defense. His strategy, such as it was, was to rely on the mercy of the jurors at the second phase of the trial, when the jury decided whether to give Andy the death penalty or life in prison. In mitigation, Dobson leaned on the fact that Andy had no prior criminal record and no history of violence. There had been one referral to juvenile court for assault, but the charges had been dismissed when all the witnesses said Andy had been defending a girl against a couple of boys who were pushing her around. The prosecutor didn’t even bother to introduce evidence of that incident.

  But at the penalty trial, the relatives of the murdered victims get to come before the jury and testify—about the victim herself and about how her murder has shattered their lives and left them choked with helpless anger, grief, and guilt. The mother of one of the women, Lisa Greenman, said Lisa’s murder had killed her stepfather. “He loved her like his own daughter. He died eight months after we learned what had happened to her. It was a heart attack; the doctor said it was the stress from all the grief. It just ate at us.” As for herself, “I just can’t keep from thinking about her last hours and wondering what she must have felt. I don’t think I’ve had a day since when I felt really happy.”

  The grandmother of the other victim, Brandy Ontiveros, testified awkwardly, through an interpreter, about bringing up her granddaughter after her own daughter’s early death in a car accident, and Brandy’s struggle with crack cocaine addiction and her love for her own baby girl. Now she was raising her great-granddaughter and trying to find the right answer when the child asked where her mama was. The whole family felt the pain of Brandy’s death; even though she was troubled, they loved her. “Her brother, he couldn’t get over it. He got in with a gang, and he’s in prison now.”

  Nicole Shumate testified about the aftermath of the kidnapping: her withdrawal into depression and heavy drug use, the months she had spent in counseling, the nights she still spent watching television until sunrise, afraid to go to sleep.

  Even reading their words, unadorned by how they must have sounded, how their faces must have looked, I felt desolate. I could only imagine the impression they must have made on the jury.

  To make the case for giving Andy a life sentence instead of death, Andy’s lawyer had presented two witnesses: his great-aunt and a jail deputy. Both of them had said Andy was quiet, slow, and docile, and liked to be helpful.

  The prosecutor argued indignantly that Andy deserved death if anyone did, for the horror and degradation he and his brother had inflicted on three helpless young women. “Look at him,” he told the jury, “sitting with his lawyer here in this courtroom. He’s getting a trial, with a jury of twelve honorable people to decide whether he lives or dies. Lisa Greenman and Brandy Ontiveros never had a trial before their lives were taken, and they never killed anyone. If you give this man life in prison, he will have three meals a day, a television to watch, time every day to go outdoors and hang out with his buddies in the sunshine. Lisa and Brandy won’t have any of that. They will never see the sunlight, never have the chance they needed to turn their lives around and look for happiness. Brandy Ontiveros will never see her little girl, the baby she loved so much, grow up. Does this monster, this predator, deserve to keep his own life after taking theirs? Brandy’s grandmother came here, all the way from Los Angeles, to tell you about her little girl. Who came here to speak for the defendant? No one who knows him. A great-aunt who hasn’t seen him since he was a kid. A jail guard. Not even his mother stepped up to say anything for him.”

  In the end, it took the jury just over an hour to come back with a death verdict.

  At the sentencing hearing, the judge made a speech about the horror of the women’s deaths and Nicole’s courage in surviving and coming to court to confront her tormentor. “Mr. Hardy,” he had said—and even on the page I could hear the righteous satisfaction in his voice—“Mr. Hardy, if anyone deserves the death penalty for what they have done, it’s you.”

  After Andy was sentenced, he sat on death row for four years, his case on hold, while he moved up the waiting list for the state Supreme Court to appoint an attorney for his automatic appeal. Mark Balestri was the lawyer they’d appointed. He’d written a good set of legal briefs, given how little there was to argue from the meager record of Andy’s trial. The state Supreme Court had upheld Andy’s conviction and death sentence, a little more than thirteen years after the jury’s verdict.

  Andy’s case then went to the federal district court, where Jim was appointed and given a year to file simultaneous petitions for habeas corpus on Andy’s behalf in the state and federal courts. The petitions would argue that Andy didn’t get a fair trial and that the state Supreme Court had been wrong in upholding Andy’s conviction and death sentence. All Jim needed was the evidence to prove it. The state and federal courts each gave him some money to investigate the case—not a lot, to begin with, but enough to hire an investigator and another lawyer as second chair. That’s where I came in.

  By this time, Andy’s case was very, very cold.

  We would have to turn the field again after nearly fifteen years, reading every piece of paper, looking for things not done, favorable evidence and witnesses that weren’t found or, if found, were ignored—anything that might help convince some judge that Andy deserved a new trial. We were starting at square one, with nothing obvious to look for—hell, we were behind square one, because Andy had had a trial and an appeal. We’d have to convince a skeptical judge that enough evidence had been left out the first time that Andy deserved a chance to be tried again.

  Along with the charts and timelines, I was keeping a running list of documents we needed to get, people we should find and talk to, possible legal issues, and questions. Which of the brothers had had the idea to kidnap women and kill them? Did Andy have any history of mental illness that might have foretold his being part of a scheme like this? Did their mother have any idea what was going on while it was happening? Was there anything in Andy’s background, not mentioned at the trial, that might have persuaded the jury to show him some mercy?

  The crime-scene photos and autopsy reports were worse than most, given the state of the bodies, though they lacked the Grand Guignol quality of images on television crime shows. There was no teasing suspense, no ominous music or disorienting camera angles—just dark earth and earth-colored bone and dried flesh and stained and crumpled shreds of clothing, made two-dimensional and nearly unintelligible by the camera flash. They weren’t terrifying, just sickening and sobering—the human husk resolving itself back into earth, dust to dust, a crime scene as memento mori.

  Sometimes, though, I ran across an unexpected detail, something in the background in a photograph or said in a report or transcript, that pierced my detachment. The reports and photos called up scenes: the policeman turning a shovelful of earth and smelling the musky, sour tang of decomposing animal flesh, saying softly, “Oh, hell,” in the instant before collecting himself and calling out, “We’ve got one here.” The faces of the mothers of the girls when they were told that their bodies had been found. The smiling baby in her pink sundress in a photo in Brandy’s wallet, a child who would never see her mother again.

  Working murder cases isn’t easy for anyone. But prosecutors and policemen can at least fall back on a simple moral position. Their role is to bring punishment down on the killer, and they can feed their strength of purpose on the ugly facts and the pain and outrage of the victims’ families. Prosecutors are easier for juries to understand than defense attorneys. Being the champion of the bad guy is the harder road. We have to embrace and explain something much more ambiguous, the Greek tragedy set in motion by capricious gods, in which everyone
loses, hero and victim, and moral choice is a pretense, an illusory belief that only makes the downfall more complete.

  It was a long couple of weeks. Toward the end, I started alternating my reading in the Hardy case with a lot of yoga and meditation. Sometimes I walked with Charlie down the rocky path to the beach and let him sniff among the tide pools and the slippery boulders while I sat on a rock in the salt-sprayed air, looking for calm in the rhythm of the breaking waves and the impersonal vastness of the ocean.

  Working on a capital case again made me think more of Terry. It had been six years since that phone call from Dave Rothstein that had split my life in two. I’d half died, feeling myself pulled down the road he had gone, like Orpheus following Eurydice, but then come slowly back to life again, done therapy and antidepressants, and finally simply run away from the soul-crushing back-and-forth slam of grief, guilt, devastation, and overwhelming anger. I’d missed him, I’d hated him, I’d screamed in silence at the brass bell of the sky in disbelief that he was gone, I’d wondered what I hadn’t seen and might have done to pull him back from whatever edge he’d fallen over. Our son Gavin, our only child, spun away from me, working out his own grief and guilt while I was too broken to help him. But nothing is as complete, as irrevocable as death. Nothing I could wish or hope would reverse the tape and bring him back—bring us back—to try again.

  People who knew Terry—and there were a lot of them—seemed tacitly to blame me; and sometimes I blamed myself, wondering how I had missed his despair, the end of some exhausting trek through life that he had decided one day he couldn’t endure any more. But unlike most of his friends and colleagues, I knew how well he could hide it.