To the Bridge Page 14

  Tiffany had not seen much of Amanda after she returned from Hawaii. She was married to Shanon at this point, and in fall 2008 was preparing to have her second child. Amanda called in September, sounding like her old self, sounding happy; Tiffany was glad to hear her voice and said, come to my baby shower; it’s in two days.

  April gave Amanda a lift to the party. April was agitated when she arrived and took Tiffany aside. She told her, there is something really wrong with Amanda; on the drive here, I could not make sense of one thing she said. There was no direct line from what I was saying to her mind. And she’s too skinny, way too skinny.

  Tiffany was eight months pregnant, and it was her shower; she did not have a lot of time to take the situation in hand, if there was a situation. As the party coalesced, Tiffany and April tried to talk to Amanda, who was both amped up and spaced out, more than spaced out. Tiffany said, Amanda, wait, wait, wait, we are not following what you are saying. The people at the baby shower were noticing, and they later asked Tiffany, was that friend of yours high? Was she wasted? Tiffany did not know and could not devote the time she might have given the question in the past. In October, she delivered her second baby in 363 days.

  Tiffany did not see Amanda again until Christmastime. Tiffany and her daughters met Amanda, Eldon, and Trinity in Pioneer Courthouse Square. Eldon was in his stroller, and Tiffany had her three-month-old in a baby carrier on her chest. Trinity was the only child big enough to be awed by the square’s seventy-five-foot holiday tree. It should have been a festive occasion, but the weather was raw and the friends did not stay long. They promised to catch up soon.

  When Tiffany had her birthday dinner at a local restaurant in May, she did not invite Amanda. April was there and asked Tiffany if she had seen Amanda. Tiffany had not, not for a few months. April said she’d had a couple of messages from Amanda, and she sounded super out of it. Tiffany had her hands full but said she would try to call her. This had been on May 18. The next day, she and Shanon and another couple had driven to the Oregon Coast.

  By 2016, Tiffany would have three more babies, and sixty thousand followers on Instagram, where she posted about “mothering five miracles, saying yes & telling my story the only way I know how. Now is now.” She did not see her public devotion to her children in any way as a reaction to Amanda’s destruction of hers; Tiffany had, for the most part, put what Amanda had done behind her. She had decided the murder was not about revenge and that Amanda never said anything like that to Shanon. No, instead it was, “I had nothing left. I had nothing. I was completely broken. I’d rather have the kids be gone than be with Jason.” It was as simple as that.

  But Tiffany vividly remembered who Amanda had once been: a young woman who, at least for a time, had not been easily torn down; a woman who had a baby by a guy who committed suicide and still walked with joy in her step, and who found a good family for that baby. Tiffany at the time had asked her, was it so painful? And Amanda had said, my tragedy is someone else’s treasure.

  21

  I was in San Francisco at a friend’s party drinking wine when my cell phone rang.

  “You don’t know me, but I am going to do everything I can to make sure Trinity is not hurt any more than she has been,” the caller said.

  I took the call to an upstairs bathroom. Contrary to what the caller said, I did know who it was, and I told the caller so.

  “Okay,” he said, and that he was calling because he’d had “a couple of beers.” He was calling because he was mad—mad at me, mad at Amanda. She was “no angel” and stayed in her marriage only because “she was greedy, staying as long as there was money.” The caller was also mad at Jason.

  “I know a million bad things about Jason, but I am only going to tell you a few,” he said. “He currently has a lawsuit against him from a paraplegic he was taking care of. You should check that out.” Also, that some years back Jason had smuggled “thousands of opiates back from Mexico, on Gavin.”

  I asked if he was implying that drugs were packed into Gavin’s diaper bag or on his body. The caller did not know, or chose not to elaborate, or was making things up as he went along.

  “He told Amanda they would make so much money,” he continued, but instead Jason “became an addict” and stopped going to work, telling his bosses Amanda was having a rough pregnancy and that he needed to be home with her, but she wasn’t pregnant. I noticed my cell phone did not have as much juice as the call might warrant. It was after midnight and the caller still had a lot to say: Gavin and Trinity had been very close, Jason was a neglectful father, Eldon was small for his age. The caller said that no one close to the families would speak to me and that he did not want his name mentioned. He twice apologized for having driven past my house. Had I, he wanted to know, driven past his? I told him I had.

  It was twelve thirty. I listened to the caller breathing.

  “I’m a Christian,” he said, “and unfortunately, I think Eldon is in hell.”

  That the caller, that anyone, would add the concept of eternal suffering to the fate of a four-year-old boy murdered by his mother—what relief could this bring? Or was the point to extend the suffering of the living?

  We were not going to debate Scripture, me standing in a bathroom, him cracking another beer and saying again that no one would speak to me.

  “Listen, Jason is a heroin addict,” he said. “He used to score down the street from your husband’s business.”

  The caller knew my husband’s business?

  “I’ve been there before,” he said. I asked whether we could meet for coffee to talk further. The caller said we could “sometime,” but before we set that time, at 1:03 in the morning, my phone went dead in my hand.

  In the wake of Amanda’s sentencing, those who reached out to me had information they felt was substantive. Some of it was not. The offer of information was more about the need to tell the tragedy again and again. If a stranger on the other end of a phone line was all they were going to get, then okay. They would convey the doubts and distress they had carried about Amanda, about Jason, but they wanted it understood that they had their own troubles. It wasn’t the caller’s job, he let me know, to fix these mendacious people, and even when he’d tried—and he had tried—he’d been foiled. There was too much subterfuge, too many ways for what was happening, with the kids and the marriage and the drug use, to be hidden or explained away. How you lived with the outcome, or how the caller lived, was to protect his family, stick to his faith, and make one late-night, beer-fueled, not-for-attribution phone call. Then maybe he could sleep.

  “Where are you?” asked Molly. I was in Salem, Oregon, standing under the sky bridge of what I thought must be the ugliest shopping mall in America.

  “Oh, I see you,” Molly said. “Stay there.”

  Where was I going to go? I had driven from Portland to see Molly, whose emails had arrived intermittently for a year. She initially said our meeting was out of the question but had recently decided we needed to meet, which was why I was standing in the full sun of a mid-August day waiting for someone who did not want to be identified by her real name.

  Molly’s emails indicated she knew more than most people about Amanda and Jason. She had met both Trinity and Eldon, knew the Smiths, and knew the family of Jason’s new wife. She knew about members of the Stott family I had never heard of. And her anger with Amanda had not cooled, not in fifteen months. In one email, she imagined Amanda in her cell, where “she probably dwells more on the fact that the final—ultimate—revenge was poorly executed and only half successful. By her standards and to her dismay Jason won the battle that was to be hers.”

  The person who met me under the sky bridge wore a sundress and looked like a college kid, though she had told me she was closer to forty.

  “Let’s go inside,” Molly said. We took the escalator to the top floor. The food court smelled of Chinese fast food. A woman two tables over changed a baby’s diaper. I had barely gotten out my tape recorder when Molly started
talking. Her primary concern, she said, was for Trinity. Did I have any idea what was going on in her life? Did I know the Department of Human Services was not monitoring her? I told Molly I did not know much more about DHS’s involvement beyond what had been released in the CIRT report earlier in the month. Molly had read the report.

  While she had told me she worked with kids, Molly’s familiarity with the case struck me as unusual. Also unusual was what she wanted from me, which was “everything, please”—everything having to do with Amanda’s mental state at the time of the incident and everything I had learned from her attorneys. I had come to trust Molly, to believe she had legitimate reasons to be invested in Trinity’s safety. Still, I told her I could not give her documents but that, just as she had accessed the CIRT report, she could procure public records. I would be doing so myself later in the week in Eugene.

  “I’ll meet you there,” she said as a mall worker pushed a six-foot-high container of trash past our table.

  “Did you speak with Amanda yet?” she asked. When I said no, she looked let down, as though there were things at stake I might not fully appreciate.

  The number of people working their way toward me a year and more after the murder and the attempted murder told me that certain barriers—of propriety, of distance, of “not my problem”—had been breached. There was Samantha Hammerly, Amanda’s friend from junior high school, who felt the Lord had made sure she had been watching television the night Amanda’s mug shot was shown so that she might become reacquainted with her friend after seventeen years. There was Amanda’s college classmate who, having children the same ages as Trinity and Eldon, experienced such a transference after learning what Amanda had done that she questioned her own mothering, her own sanity, until her husband told her, “Get over it. It’s awful, but you don’t have anything else in common with her.” There was the late-night caller and his stories of Gavin as a drug mule and the fleeced paraplegic.

  There were many ways to ethically address the provocative arcana people offered. One was to be comfortable with a certain amount of uncertainty, to accept that the story of a murdered child had expanded to the point where more and more people would seek access points, and that some of these people might be conspiracy theorists, or stayed near the story because it gave their lives meaning, or because they could not let it go.

  Another way was to verify what they said.

  The paraplegic was named Brian Burr. He was born in 1973. He attended Milwaukie High School, where his senior year he was student body president and captain of the wrestling team. When Burr was seventeen, he fell off a ladder and broke his neck. Burr retained some use of his arms. He was able to drive his own van and live independently. Sometime around 2003, he met Jason Smith. Four years later, Jason began to do some work for Burr as a caregiver, helping him with light tasks, such as cooking and cleaning. Jason sometimes brought Amanda and the kids to Burr’s home.

  On November 7, 2008, Burr sent Amanda, via certified mail, a summons stating that she needed to “appear and defend the complaint filed against [her].” Both she and Jason were defendants in Case No. SC082908. Burr, the plaintiff, alleged the following:

  “On or around January 2008, Plaintiff loaned Defendant Jason Smith $3000.00. On or around April 29, 2008, Defendants issued Plaintiff a check (check number 1010) in the amount of $3000.000 as repayment for the original amount loaned to them.” The check did not clear. A photocopy of the returned check, issued from the Bank of Hawaii in Mililani and signed by Jason Smith, was included in the complaint.

  “On multiple occasions,” the complaint continued, “Defendants acknowledged owing the Plaintiff the original amount of $3000.00. On at least three occasions between April and July of 2008, defendant Jason Smith showed up unannounced at Plaintiff’s home and offered Plaintiff cocaine in lieu of payment. On at least one occasion, Defendant Amanda Jo Smith phoned Plaintiff and asked Plaintiff what she could do to settle the claim besides making payment.”

  Lee Burr, Brian Burr’s father, told me, “I was there when that guy called a couple of times trying to get Brian to leave him alone about the money. He wanted him to take drugs instead.”

  Burr told his father about Amanda asking what she could do besides repay the money. “But he said, ‘What else can I have her do? I have someone to clean my house.’” Lee laughed. “And Brian had a girlfriend!”

  The complaint continued:

  Since May 2008, Defendant Jason Smith consistently harassed Plaintiff by calling him up to four times a day. Defendant Jason Smith verbally abused Plaintiff by badgering Plaintiff and making Plaintiff feel guilty for suing Defendant. . . . Defendant Jason Smith threatened violence to Plaintiff if Plaintiff mentioned the money owed to any of Defendant’s family members. . . . Defendants’ acts consisted of some extraordinary transgression of the bounds of socially tolerable conduct and exceeded any reasonable limit of social toleration.

  The complaint asked for repayment of the original loan plus bank fees incurred, as well as relief and damages, plus court and attorney costs, for a total of $10,000.

  By May 23, 2009, Burr had yet to receive any money.

  “I was there when he first heard about the kids,” Lee said. “Brian saw it on TV and said, ‘They worked for me!’ He was really upset.”

  Lee remembered Jason contacting Burr afterward. “Jason called for relief, but I think Brian was going to go ahead with the case,” he said.

  Brian Burr’s mother, Patty Bacon, did not think Jason asked for relief from the debt after Eldon’s murder. He would not have needed to.

  “After the baby died, Brian didn’t have the heart to go through with it,” said Bacon. “Brian was brokenhearted. He knew those kids and Amanda; they came over and had hot dogs in the backyard.”

  Bacon did not know in what capacity Jason worked for her son.

  “He didn’t work for Brian very much . . .” She hesitated. “Look, Brian was on medical marijuana, and he [Jason] came over to smoke it.”

  She did not know how the two men met, and we could not ask Burr, who developed a blood clot and died in December 2010.

  I waited for Molly outside of Lane County Circuit Court in Eugene. Across the street, a gourmet farmers market was underway, with people wearing bike helmets and nibbling pesto-and-lamb empanadas.

  “I’m sorry about the mess,” Molly said, moving a soda cup from the passenger seat of her minivan. She wanted to take me on a tour; it would be easier for her to drive. She first asked if I had found what I was looking for at the courthouse: criminal records for Jason and Amanda. I told Molly I had. She asked if I would make her a copy. I told her no, but she could get the same papers I did; it was public information.

  “But let me ask you one thing,” she said. “Does he have any felonies?”

  I confirmed that this had been reported, and wasn’t I the one who was supposed to be asking questions? Molly smiled and took us out of town. I had found the address of where I thought Trinity was living with Jason and Keli. Molly thought she knew where it was and said it could be our first stop. We drove past broad fields, farmhouses, and barns until we came to the property. All we could see from the road was a long driveway leading uphill.

  “I think that’s Jason,” Molly said as a black SUV passed going the other way. I turned to look. The SUV’s brake lights blinked once. Molly made a sharp left up a rural road. She did not want on record how she knew Jason, and as she drove farther up unfamiliar roads until we hit a dead end, it seemed she did not want to run into him now.

  After Eldon was murdered, everyone had been angry with Amanda, for reasons that were obvious. Now, people seemed angry with Jason, for reasons that were sometimes opaque. The anonymous caller, and now Molly, made accusations they might have confronted Jason with but had not. Who was trustworthy here, whether there were sour grapes or guilt or fear, was not immediately discernable. I did not doubt, however, that these people were trying to get under the nub, to expose the root of how the crime happened.


  The tour’s next stop was a strip-mall pawnshop. Molly said Jason used to sell stuff here, that he habitually stole jewelry from the women in his life. I said I’d heard that. Molly asked if I knew that Jason and the woman to whom he was now married had dated in high school. I did not know that. As she put the minivan in reverse, she asked if I knew how Eldon got his name.

  Molly’s earlier claim that the Department of Human Services was not monitoring Trinity had me look over the DHS reports again. On July 6, 2009, DHS had opened a temporary “Child Welfare Case Plan” for Trinity, wherein the “Child (is) in the home, DHS has custody.” By October, with Trinity “still a current ongoing assessment,” a schedule of planned visits was enacted. Though the reports were heavily redacted, the schedule appeared to have broken down immediately. On October 9, 2009, a DHS caseworker received a call from Jason saying he needed “to reschedule the face-to-face today due to some things coming up.” The meeting was rescheduled for October 13. The caseworker canceled this meeting. She left phone messages for Jason on November 2, and again on November 5, to “set up a face-to-face.” Jason called back to say “that him [sic] and Trinity [redacted] are really not feeling well.” The meeting eventually took place on November 24. “Trinity was quiet but friendly during my visit,” the caseworker noted. The next meeting appears to have been on January 20, 2010. Despite the report’s redactions, the number of in-person meetings with Trinity between October and January, as noted in the reports, appeared to be two.

  Molly drove us into Coburg, a farming community whose downtown looked to be two blocks long.

  “If we see anyone, we used to work together,” Molly said. She mentioned that several of Amanda’s relatives lived here and that this was where Trinity went to school.