To the Bridge Read online

  PRAISE FOR NANCY ROMMELMANN

  “‘How do you understand the not understandable and forgive the unforgivable?’ So asks one of the characters in this clear-eyed investigation into something we all turn away from. To the Bridge is a tour-de-force of both journalism and compassion, in the lineage of such masterpieces as In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song. Word by word, sentence by sentence, Rommelmann’s writing is that good. And so is her heart.”

  —Nick Flynn, PEN/Martha Albrand Award–winning author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

  “In To the Bridge, Nancy Rommelmann takes what many consider the most unforgivable of crimes—a mother set on murdering her own children—and delivers something thoughtful and provocative: a deeply reported, sensitively told, all-too-relevant tragedy of addiction and codependency, toxic masculinity, and capricious justice. You won’t be able to look away—nor should any of us.”

  —Robert Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery

  ALSO BY NANCY ROMMELMANN

  The Bad Mother

  The Queens of Montague Street

  Transportation: Stories

  Destination Gacy

  Text copyright © 2018 by Nancy Rommelmann

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

  We gratefully acknowledge permission from the following:

  Excerpt from Day Out of Days: Stories, by Sam Shepard, copyright © 2010 by Sam Shepard. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from Netherland: A Novel, by Joseph O’Neill, copyright © 2008 by Joseph O’Neill. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from Iphigenia in Forest Hills, by Janet Malcolm, copyright © 2011 by Janet Malcolm. Used by permission of Yale University Press.

  Excerpt from Down City, by Leah Carroll, copyright © 2017 by Leah Carroll. Used by permission of Hachette Book Group USA.

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  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542048422 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542048427 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542048415 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542048419 (paperback)

  Cover design by Angela Moody

  First edition

  To Gavin, Trinity, and Eldon, for what they did and did not live through

  To Din, for everything

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  PART TWO

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  PART THREE

  29

  30

  EPILOGUE

  POSTSCRIPT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  It is easy—terribly easy—to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.

  —George Bernard Shaw, Candida

  How did fear and respect become synonymous? Whenever there’s a murder here, the suspect always says, “Maybe now they’ll show a little respect.”

  —Sam Shepard, Day Out of Days

  Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?

  —Joseph O’Neill, Netherland

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of reported nonfiction. All scenes are reconstructed from interviews, published reports, court documents, police and correctional facility files, witnessed accounts, or my own experience. Dialogue has been taken from audio recordings, handwritten notes, interviews, emails, phone calls, and other direct forms of contact. I have consulted Amanda Stott-Smith’s own writing, as well as the letters, emails, and documentation of family members, friends, legal teams, and others. People in this book are called by their real names, with the exceptions of two who did not wish to be identified, one of whom is given the pseudonym “Molly,” as noted in the text.

  PROLOGUE

  The breakup of Amanda Stott-Smith and Jason Smith’s seven-year marriage did not seem out of the ordinary. They were arguing about money and stressed about the kids. Jason moved out of the family home in Tualatin, Oregon—thirteen miles southwest of Portland—in June 2008. Amanda stayed in the house, which one of her college classmates later described as “the color of throw-up,” with the couple’s nearly four-year-old son, Eldon; six-year-old daughter, Trinity; and Gavin, Amanda’s eleven-year-old son from a previous relationship. Jason moved in with a buddy for the summer, and by fall he was living in one of his mother’s rental properties in Eugene. As he had throughout his marriage to Amanda, Jason relied on his mother, Christine Duncan, to pay for what he could not. She helped with the rent on the Tualatin house and made sure the children were cared for when they visited their father. She took the family to Southern California for Thanksgiving. She saw her daughter-in-law’s increasingly poor mothering skills as reason why Jason should pursue custody of the two younger children in the divorce.

  It was also not out of the ordinary, at the start of the new American century, when following her arrest for dropping Eldon and Trinity from a Portland bridge just after one o’clock on the morning of May 23, 2009, Amanda would tell detectives, several times, that she did not want to be on television.

  The request for anonymity proved impossible to honor. Amanda’s picture ran on the front pages of the Portland Tribune and Oregonian newspapers. Advocates for capital punishment argued that mothers who kill their children are the reason the state has the death penalty. Those who saw mental illness as a factor called for more funding of social programs, and a city councilman told fellow council members that he became committed to finding money in the budget for a new rescue boat after he “listened to the 911 tapes, [and] could hear the little girl screaming, ‘Don’t, Mommy, don’t.’” That this was not what Trinity or any child had screamed on tape did not stop the Oregonian from running the quote.

  Most people found what Amanda had done unfathomable. Unpacking the reasons why a mother kills her children can scare people, and spectators at Amanda’s sentencing in April 2010 may have felt the burden lifted when the judge called Amanda’s actions “truly incomprehensible.” It was a sentiment echoed by Jason. During sentencing, he told Amanda, who would not meet his eye, “The nature of this crime will never be known to me, and no thoughts of the murder will ever make sense to anyone.”

  If Amanda briefly cried that day in court, she for the most part maintained the half smile I had seen her wear at previous court dates, one that could be described as placid, or bemused, or frozen, or as a latent tell of the criminal mind. The smile might have been locked in place by the antidepressants she both had and had not been taking since Jason left, or by bewilderment. It made sense that Amanda would be bewi
ldered by where she found herself, at the defense table during her conviction for the murder of her son and attempted murder of her daughter, her ex-husband sitting beside the woman he had married earlier that week, giving him the opportunity to say, for the TV cameras and thus posterity, that Trinity now had “a new mother she can love.” Amanda Stott-Smith’s identity had been pinned to being her children’s mother, to being Jason’s wife. Hearing how she had lost it all and would pay for that loss would have been stultifying, and in addition to whatever else it was, the half smile seemed like a way for Amanda to cover her mortification.

  Whether Amanda had lost her identity before or after she dropped the children from the bridge was not addressed that day in court. “Truly incomprehensible . . .” put a period on curiosity. If the judge declared examination futile, if Jason believed the murder of his son would never make sense to anyone, then spectators could reasonably conclude they were off the hook, that incuriosity was perhaps kindlier, safer for all involved. When given the opportunity to stand and tell Amanda how her actions had undone their lives, only Jason and two of the perhaps seventy other people in the courtroom chose to do so. Jason’s mother read a poem written by Eldon’s preschool teacher; Gavin’s stepmother, through tears, said, “I pray now that this part of the story is completed.”

  Amanda herself kept it short, saying she was “deeply sorry” for what she had done and hoped that people would someday find it in their hearts to forgive her. And then she was led away, and the case was closed, and anyone with questions about why a mother who loved her children would take them to a bridge in the middle of the night and drop them over was, if informally, invited to keep quiet and let the healing begin.

  Or that’s how I saw it. Others saw it differently. Two days after her arrest, a commenter on the website The Weekly Vice with the screen name Lil Miss Sunshine posted, under a summary of the crime and Amanda’s mug shot, “Stop crying you dumb bitch cuz NOBODY feels sorry for you!”

  After sitting for a somewhat longer period of reflection, the poet Mary Szybist wrote “So and So Descending from the Bridge” about Amanda and the children. The poem appeared in her collection Incarnadine, which won the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry.

  “Behavior makes sense,” Jen Johnson, Amanda’s college friend, told me four days after Amanda was sentenced. Also, the last time she had seen Amanda, “she was pregnant with Eldon. She was beautiful and radiant and knew she was having a boy.”

  During the years I looked into Amanda’s story, I sometimes thought of her half smile in court and wondered how deliberate the expression had been, how much control she had over keeping her face just so. I read the John Cheever story “The Country Husband” and came across the sentence, “Her head was bent and her face was set in that empty half smile behind which the whipped soul is suspended.” I wondered whether Amanda’s soul was whipped or if she were sly, and also, whether looking into the murder of a child by its mother was like staring into a prism in your hand: the more you turned it, the more possibilities beamed back, anguish, rage, comprehension, and untruths refracting—whatever you wanted to see you would find there.

  PART ONE

  Sellwood Bridge, 2010. Photo courtesy of Zeb Andrews.

  1

  At 1:17 a.m. on May 23, 2009, Pati Gallagher and her husband, Dan, were having a last after-dinner drink on the patio of their waterside condo in Portland, Oregon. Their chairs were angled toward the Willamette River, not fifty feet away, when they heard something hit the water. The couple did not become alarmed. Lots of things fell from the Sellwood Bridge: shopping carts, bottles tossed by hooting teenagers.

  Then they heard a child yell, “Help me!”

  There was no moonlight that night and few lights onshore. The couple scrambled to the river’s edge but could see nothing.

  “Where are you?” Dan shouted.

  Pati called 911. She told the operator someone had fallen from the bridge and was in the water yelling for help. It had been more than two minutes.

  “Can you hear that?” Pati said, and she held the phone toward the river.

  The voice floated north with the current, past a recreation area, past an old amusement park. It was a clear night, and had someone in the water been looking toward the river’s east bank, they would have seen the outline of a Ferris wheel and a thrill ride called the Scream-N-Eagle.

  The screams continued. “Help me! Help me!”

  David Haag, who lived in a floating home along the river, heard the cries for help. At one thirty, he and his companion, Cheryl Robb, motored their boat onto the Willamette to find whoever was screaming. It was twenty-five minutes before they saw the partially submerged form of a young girl. Haag jumped in the water and grabbed her. He was swimming her back to the boat when Robb called out, “My god, there’s another one!”

  Haag went after the other child, a boy. The girl, who had been in the fifty-six-degree water for more than thirty minutes, was sobbing. The boy was not. He had been facedown in the water and was not breathing when Haag got him into the boat. The boy was still not breathing by the time Haag motored the boat to a yacht club on the river’s eastern shore.

  It was now 2:10 a.m. Officers were waiting. Sergeant Pete Simpson administered CPR to the boy, who was blue and cold. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The girl was rushed to the hospital. Police initiated a homicide investigation.

  Authorities first had to ask, who were these children? Did they fall off a boat? Were they kidnapped? Were there others in the river still? The water beneath Portland’s southernmost bridge was now cut by rescue boats, lit by searchlights, beaten by helicopters, the river’s banks trampled by police and residents who could not or did not want to go back to sleep.

  Two miles downriver in Milwaukie, twelve-year-old Gavin Stott could not sleep. He had decided to stay home when his mother went to pick up his two younger half siblings. At midnight, and again at twelve thirty, he woke his grandparents, asking why his mom was not back. Kathy and Mike Stott called their daughter Amanda. She did not answer their calls. Shortly after one o’clock, they called Amanda’s younger sister, Chantel Gardner, and asked if she had seen Amanda. Chantel had eaten dinner with her the night before at a Mongolian barbecue restaurant but had not heard from her since. Amanda had told Chantel she would be taking the children to the downtown waterfront to see the fireworks. It was a Friday night, the start of the Memorial Day weekend, and the opening celebration of Portland’s annual Rose Festival. Knowing that Amanda had previously driven drunk with her kids in the car, Chantel and her husband got out of bed and drove around looking for her.

  At 1:33, Kathy Stott called Amanda’s estranged husband, Jason Smith, asking if he had spoken with Amanda. Jason had not, not since he left their two children with her at around eight o’clock the previous evening. Because Jason’s license was suspended, his mother, Christine Duncan, had driven them the hundred miles from Eugene, where he and the children were staying in one of Duncan’s rental apartments. Amanda met them at the house on Southwest Cayuse Court in Tualatin, where she and the children had lived with Jason before he moved out the previous June. Though she was staying with her parents, the Tualatin house was where Amanda preferred to meet the children for their visitations every other weekend.

  Amanda had in fact phoned Jason at 1:22 a.m. He had not picked up her call. But after speaking with Kathy Stott, he tried calling Amanda back. For more than an hour, she did not answer.

  At 2:49 a.m., Amanda answered.

  “Help me,” she said.

  “Are the kids okay?” Jason asked. “Where are the kids?”

  “Why have you done this to me?” she said. “Why have you taken my joy away?”

  Jason again asked where the children were. Amanda would not say.

  Christine Duncan called 911 and filed a missing person report, stating she believed her son’s children were in immediate danger.

  At 3:25 a.m., Jason spoke with the police. He told them that he did not know where his
children were, that they had been with their mother, that he had checked the Cayuse Court house and found it empty.

  Around 7:00 a.m., Chantel heard a news report: two children were found in the river. She called her mother, who said Amanda and the children had not come home. Kathy Stott again phoned Jason, who again called the police. He told them the kids in the river might be his. He and his mother headed to the Portland Police Bureau. As they were speaking with detectives, they received confirmation that the children found in the river were Jason’s. His daughter, Trinity Christine Kimberly Smith, age seven, was in the hospital in serious condition. His son, Eldon Jay Rebhan Smith, had drowned. He was four years old.

  At 10:25 a.m., Portland police officers approached a battered blue 1991 Audi parked on the ninth floor of a downtown Portland parking garage. The car matched the description of the one they were looking for. A woman’s hand, holding a cigarette, rested on the open driver’s-side window. Officer Wade Greaves climbed a retaining wall to get a better look. The woman spotted him and opened her car door. She bolted. Officer Greaves ran after her. The woman made it to the garage’s outer wall, climbed through an opening, and dropped. Greaves grabbed her. He and another officer hauled Amanda Jo Stott-Smith back up and placed her under arrest.

  News of the incident dominated the front page of the Sunday Oregonian, though only the barest details were available. The children had been in the water more than thirty minutes. Because of their ages, they were not initially named. Onlookers shared disbelief and grief. A woman who lived along the river recalled a man who jumped from the Sellwood Bridge to evade police. But children thrown into the river “just makes my heart sick,” she said. “And it’s so close to home.”

  The article included Amanda’s mug shot. Her forehead was creased with tension, but except for her dark hair in disarray, she looked . . . How did she look? Dazed? Spent? In surrender?

  Amanda’s mug shot, 2009