To the Bridge Read online

  Early 2010 and still no word from Amanda, to whom I wrote letters I hoped were not heavy. I told her that if she agreed to place me on her visitors list, we could talk about anything she wanted; we could talk about cooking or clothes, or we could sit in silence. I sent her subscriptions—the Oprah Magazine, Vanity Fair, periodicals that the penal system mandated come directly from the subscription service. She would not know whom they were from, but I did not care. Amanda did not write back. Her parents, to whom I wrote an extremely careful letter, had not written back. I did receive one letter, sent to my home with no return address. It was respectful but clear: the rest of the media had gone away but I had stayed and continued “to pour salt into a wound that so very badly needs to be healed.” The sender did not think anything I wrote about Amanda could have value, only its opposite, and that it would “continue to hurt many people but will hurt Gavin and Trinity throughout their long lives.” It was signed “Mandy’s aunt.”

  In March, I was one of two people in a room at the Multnomah County Courthouse for Amanda’s third or fourth settlement hearing. It was 8:20 in the morning, still dark out, a cold rain ticking the windows. The other person and I sat on opposite ends of the front bench. She was tall and very fair, with pale-red hair. She wore glasses. She did not look my way. We sat in silence for maybe fifteen minutes, the room so quiet I could hear the gears of a truck shifting five stories below.

  John Casalino, the prosecutor in Amanda’s case, came from judge’s chambers. I knew Casalino specialized in prosecuting those who harm and kill children. He shook my hand and asked whether I had spoken with Amanda. I told him not yet. He said it would not happen today, either, not until the case was settled. The defense and prosecution had not been able to reach a plea agreement. Anything that happened today would happen in judge’s chambers, and no, Casalino said, I would not be allowed inside.

  The woman stood. She was nearly Casalino’s height. She introduced herself as Amanda’s Aunt Hildy.

  “I wish you could have known her before,” she said.

  Casalino nodded. “I don’t know if the judge will want to speak with you today, but she appreciates you’re here,” he told her, and went again into chambers.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” Hildy said when I asked if we might speak in the hall. We went back to our spots on the bench, back to waiting. And then two sheriff’s deputies walked Amanda into court. She wore blue pants and top, like doctor’s scrubs. A bit of coral shirt peeped at her collar. Her hair lay in a thick braid down her back. She was perhaps thirty pounds heavier than she had been in June and chained, wrists to waist, ankle to ankle. The deputies seated her at the defense table and left the room. Amanda looked at her aunt and began to cry; she cried with her mouth open as Hildy strained without speaking to tell her that it was going to be okay. Amanda calmed. She slumped. After a few minutes she cut her eyes at me, sharp enough that she might have been asking, Who are you, and are you here to further destroy me?

  Hadley came from judge’s chambers to collect Amanda. Hildy followed them inside. Twenty minutes later, Hadley came back alone. Amanda, he said, had left by a back way. I would not see her again today.

  In The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale wrote of the murder of a boy Eldon’s age, “Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional—to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away.”

  This seemed exactly right. The murder of Eldon Smith and the attempted murder of his sister by their mother were puzzles. Lawyers, detectives, and the medical personnel who cared for Trinity when she was rushed to the hospital with hypothermia and a broken sternum were all charged with putting the pieces together. Hildy, who was retired from the sheriff’s department, believed what peace could be found would come from these sectors, whereas my writing could “only cause more pain.” I questioned how I could make things worse than what was before us: a murdered child, two more children traumatized, a mother in prison, and families blown apart. Was tragedy compounded or relieved by not speaking of it? Was it possible to hold open the wound with one hand and stitch with the other? I thought it was more than possible. I thought it was necessary.

  “I guess you heard Amanda has decided to change her plea.”

  This was Hadley the morning of April 13. I told him I had not heard. There had been nothing in the newspaper, and my Google Alert had not surfaced anything.

  “It’s going to be a tough day in court,” he said. “It’s going to be a media zoo.”

  Amanda had agreed to plead guilty and thus avoid a jury trial, which might have sentenced her to death. What her punishment would be, per protocol, had been determined in judge’s chambers; the defense and the district attorney bargained over a period of months until they reached an agreement. There had been input, as required by victim’s rights laws, from Jason and his family, who I expected would be in court today.

  I arrived to find reporters, still photographers, and TV crews set up to the right of the courtroom doors, lawyers and investigators to the left. Amanda’s family floated in the center. Kathy Stott wore a gray A-line skirt, and her long hair was loose. She looked like a schoolgirl. Hildy was with her, as was Amanda’s sister, Chantel, who had darting dark eyes, a petite, hyperalert version of her sister. Chantel’s husband, Daryl Gardner, looked as though he had not thought much of the occasion when getting dressed, or maybe a grubby shirt and trousers were his comment on the occasion. He saw me watching him and started pacing in a semicircle so close to me I could hear him breathing.

  There was movement behind the legal teams: Amanda was being walked down the hall. Today she was dressed as if for a party, in a black velvet top and pants, her hair cascading down her back, a small smile turning up the corners of her mouth and eyes. These were striking differences from the hunched, bloated woman of two weeks earlier. The larger difference was the serene, even stoned look on her face. Maybe she was stoned; Hadley had told me she had been taking “a raft of pills” prescribed by doctors when she committed the crime and was now on antidepressants. Whether it was medication or the decision to change her plea, whether the suppleness of her features was for protection or for show, Amanda looked remarkably at peace.

  The bailiff told us in what order we would enter the courtroom: cameras first, then family, then press. The legal teams took their respective tables. Reporters had settled on a bench behind the defense table when four late arrivals took seats immediately behind us.

  Jason Smith was wearing the same cantaloupe-colored tie he had worn the last time I had seen him in court. His divorce attorney, Laura Schantz, was with him, as were two women with highlighted blond hair, one around thirty years old, the other maybe twice that. Jason had not seen Amanda since he left their children with her for the weekend visitation in 2009. Now he was sitting three strides from her, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. The muscles along his jaw did not relax.

  When he leaned back, I heard him mention to the two women some plans he had for the weekend, and that he had washed his hair that morning. The casualness with which he said these things felt like a slap, considering the reason we were here. How could he be concerned with how clean his hair was? I looked at the reporter on my left, to see whether she was startled by the comment. She was texting with her newsroom and had not become distracted by what might have been deemed an offhand comment, an attempt to impose some equilibrium on an otherwise horrible day. It did not register to me this way; it said that despite the grave reasons for being here, Jason was bored.

  Circuit Judge Julie E. Frantz took her seat. District Attorney John Casalino explained that Amanda was changing her plea to guilty on count one, aggravated murder, and on count six, attempted aggravated murder. There would be a judgment of dismissal on counts two through five, seven, and eight. The sentence would be life with the possibility of parole in thirty-five years. Casalino said that he, Jason, and two detectives in attendance supported this sent
ence.

  Judge Frantz spoke directly to Amanda: Had she read the petition against her?

  “Yes,” said Amanda.

  Was that her signature on it?

  “Yes.”

  Had her attorneys explained the implications?

  “Yes.”

  Did her taking the prescription medication Abilify in any way hamper her ability to proceed?

  “No,” she said.

  Judge Frantz determined that Amanda was making a “clear-headed, reasoned decision.” She asked Amanda to rise. How did she plead to count one?

  “I am guilty,” Amanda said.

  How did she plead to count six?

  “I am guilty.”

  Her voice did not crack, she remained composed, and because she was facing away from the room, I did not until the next day see, on video, that she kept her eyes closed as the judge recounted the date of the incident, the children’s names, their ages. It was only when the judge asked, in conclusion, whether Amanda had done these things that she opened her eyes and said, “Yeah.”

  In the run-up to Amanda’s settlement hearing, Hadley had drawn a gruesome case. Angela McAnulty was accused of systematically torturing, beating, and starving to death her fifteen-year-old daughter, Jeanette Maples.

  “That case,” Hadley told me, “is not going well.”

  No matter how much his team looked into the mother’s background—and he knew her upbringing was “hellish, something out of Deliverance”—they could find nothing that might mitigate what she had done.

  “I saw photos of Jeanette,” he said. “They are about the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  They had taken a toll. Hadley had recently gone to the emergency room with chest pains. And Amanda—whom he felt, without elaborating why, was “a very good person”; whose family members he respected and thought were kind—would be going away essentially for life. Her final sentencing would be next week.

  As it would turn out, Angela McAnulty would be sentenced to death in 2011. This was highly unusual. No other woman was on death row in the state of Oregon. Only sixty-one women faced execution in the United States at the time, fifteen for killing their children. The reasons why McAnulty might have received the sentence undoubtedly included the duration and severity with which she tortured and murdered Jeanette, but there might also have been something else at work. At forty-three, McAnulty was more than a decade older than the average mother who kills her child, two decades older than the average perpetrator of neonaticide. She did not fit in the narrow window of conventional beauty and was not seen smiling in any photo taken after her arrest.

  Contrast this with Diane Downs, Oregon’s most infamous filicidal mother, who shot her three children in 1983. During trial, Downs swanned and made doe eyes for the cameras, and her attractiveness was often cited when discussing her crimes against her children. A jury did not sentence Downs to death but to life in prison plus fifty years. Farrah Fawcett played her in a TV movie about the case.

  Further, contrast McAnulty with Casey Anthony. During her 2011 trial for the murder of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, Anthony often came to court in makeup, her long hair nicely styled. Despite overwhelming evidence of her guilt, Anthony was cleared of all murder charges. She was twenty-two and, during and just after her trial, appeared on the cover of People magazine five times.

  While we assume it is the primacy of the mother-child bond that makes us go easier on mothers who kill their children, McAnulty’s sentence made me consider how looks might come into play, as they do in nearly every other aspect of American life in the twenty-first century, perhaps in any country during any century. While we might believe that pretty is as pretty does, on some level we want to see youth and beauty as signs of goodness, of innocence. The attractive woman is given a pass. The ugly one gets the chair.

  Court was not a zoo on April 22, 2010. One still photographer, one TV camera, the gallery half-filled. Amanda’s family took seats in rows closest to the door; reporters sat where we had last time. Space was made in the front row for Jason’s family, who arrived carrying poster-board photos of Eldon. Deputies set the posters on easels at the front of the courtroom: Eldon close-up and smiling; Eldon pouring water into a tub of rubber ducks.

  We heard Amanda approach, the chains around her ankles making a shee-shee sound, like a ghost dragging down a hall in an old movie. She shuffled through the door. She wore the same velvet outfit as the week before, but today it sagged. There was nothing festive about her appearance except, maybe, her handcuffs, which were red and taken off once the guards seated her beside Hadley.

  The courtroom was silent but for people crying. One of those crying was Jason. He was curled in on himself. His mother, Christine Duncan, rubbed the back of his neck. His grandmother leaned from one row behind and said in Jason’s ear, “Be strong; be strong.” The Smiths did not turn to look at the Stotts. The families had not seen each other except in court since before the crime.

  Judge Frantz entered. The crying quieted. Casalino announced that several people wanted to speak about how Amanda’s crime had undone their lives. Jason went first. He wore a button of Eldon pinned to his T-shirt. He looked at Amanda before he started speaking.

  “I wanted to start by bringing in pictures of Eldon, recent pictures taken before he was murdered,” he said. He voice was deep and resonant. “I wanted to bring them to show the magnitude and gravity of the situation at hand. Eldon was a human being; he lived a life of pure love. He was a bright, wonderful, happy boy. . . . I would whisper in his ear, he was my favorite person in the world. I would whisper in my daughter’s ear, she was my favorite person in the world.”

  Amanda was crying without sound. Hadley placed his hand on her wrist. She did not respond to his quietly asking, “Are you still on your medication?”

  “The nature of this crime will never be known to me, and no thoughts of the murder will ever make sense to anyone,” Jason continued. “Trinity and I talk about her brother every day. She is doing better than anyone would ever have dreamed. She is a beautiful, sweet, gentle girl.”

  Jason looked again at Amanda. She would not meet his eyes.

  “[Trinity] will be free of the bondage of having to think of the person who murdered my son,” he said. “And she has a new mother she can love and put behind her the horror.”

  Several days earlier, Jason had married Keli Townsend, the younger of the blond women who accompanied him to court the week before. I wondered at the timing of the marriage, if telling Amanda in open court that she was disposable had been a pain Jason wanted to inflict, and if anyone would have blamed him.

  Jason continued. “As the years go by and Amanda sits in prison, watching her life day by day pass on, I hope she realizes that her suffering pales in comparison to the suffering that my daughter and my son went through the night she threw them from a bridge in Portland into an icy-cold river in the middle of the night.” He sat down.

  Christine Duncan spoke. She remained composed. She thanked those who had come to her grandchildren’s rescue, and she thanked her son “for taking the high road,” which we took to mean for not pushing for a jury trial, for sparing Amanda a possible death sentence. She turned to Amanda.

  “Amanda, Eldon is in a better place now,” Duncan said. “It’s unfortunate those of us on this earth don’t have more time with him.”

  Chelsea Beck cried as she explained that Gavin was supposed to go with his mother that night but decided not to. He was now haunted by the idea that he could have stopped his mother from throwing his brother and sister in the river.

  “Our family has been forever changed. We worry in a different way,” Chelsea said. “Gavin faces a life of knowing he didn’t go. If he had been there, could he have stopped her? Amanda did throw Gavin away that night, too.”

  I waited for other people to speak. Now was their chance. There would be no trial, no other opportunity to be part of the official record, to speak of condemnation or forgiveness. Only one person seized t
he moment.

  Amanda stood. She looked at the posters of Eldon. She looked, and her features softened. She did not cry as she spoke.

  “I just want to say to all those I’ve hurt, especially my children, I am deeply sorry,” she said. The words had an odd, loose quality, as though the hinge of her jaw had broken. “And I’m thankful for everyone that came today, and I’m thankful for the words expressed, and I hope that someday you can all forgive me.”

  She sat down.

  Judge Frantz called Amanda’s actions “truly incomprehensible.” She said Amanda’s decision to plead guilty spared the ordeal of a trial and the risk of a more severe sentence. Under Oregon Revised Statutes 163.105, Amanda Jo Stott-Smith was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison before the possibility of parole, with lifetime monitoring afterward should she be paroled in 2045. Amanda would then be sixty-seven years old. I wondered who in the courtroom would be alive when she got out. There was a good chance her parents would be dead. Would her sister meet her as she walked out of prison? Unlikely as it seemed, would it be Trinity or Gavin, or both? Would the media remember her? Amanda’s case had moved slowly, and now it was over. As her mother’s and sister’s cries reached a crescendo, as her ex-husband slipped the posters of Eldon into plastic, Amanda was handcuffed and led out the back way.

  I joined Hadley in the hall.

  “How did you like that?” he asked. I said it was brutal. He nodded.

  “Not a good outcome,” he said. “For anyone.”

  Hadley found Amanda’s sentencing troubling for reasons that had to do with her, and those that had nothing to do with her. He believed she had been over-medicated in the months leading up to the crime. He believed, perhaps because she told him she did, that Amanda loved her children. He thought there was something to the revenge theory, but there were mitigating circumstances, circumstances that the courts would never consider, because Amanda’s family had feared she would receive death. Her parents and her aunt had been influential in convincing Amanda to change her plea. As Hadley well knew, it was never a bad idea to get death off the table.