To the Bridge Read online

  I could not tell, standing at my kitchen counter, holding the morning’s first cup of coffee. What did I expect a mother who had just dropped her children off a bridge to look like? “Wrecked” was the best answer I could come up with.

  I went online. While there was some compassion in the comments that accompanied the news stories, prayers for the children and pleas to understand mental illness, Amanda was largely vilified. People suggested that she be hanged from the Sellwood Bridge and lowered slowly so as not to break the neck right away, that “child killer” be tattooed on her forehead before releasing her to the general population. The reactions were frustrated, angry, a group censure so we might agree to move on, if to where was not specified.

  I looked at the photo again. Amanda was attractive; she looked her age, thirty-one, nearly the age I was when my daughter turned four, the age Amanda had determined for her son to die. What had brought her to the bridge, to a place where she thought the right decision was to murder her children?

  On Tuesday, May 26, Amanda Stott-Smith was arraigned at Justice Center in downtown Portland. Two cameramen were the only people in the gallery when I arrived. We wondered whether Amanda would appear facing forward or looking down. We talked about other parents who had murdered their children in Oregon: Christian Longo, who strangled his wife and baby, then threw his two other children off a bridge; Diane Downs, who shot her three children inside of her car.

  By 2:10, the room was filled with twenty-two people on four rows of benches. I did not know whom the spectators were here for but thought maybe the young man in the back row, the one snuffling loudly and pressed between what appeared to be his mother and sister, might be related to Amanda. If he was, I wanted to speak with him.

  As the female clerks and court reporters talked and laughed and booted up computers that made the Windows chime, I looked at the young man. I gave him a small, respectful smile. He gave me one back.

  At 2:27, Judge Julia Philbrook entered. We all rose. The district attorney told her she would see three defendants in addition to Stott-Smith. They called the young man in the back row. My snuffling boy got up and stood before the judge. He was accused of third-degree assault. He pled not guilty. He was ordered to come back on June 3, and then he left, his tear-tracked mother looking back at me before joining her son in walking out.

  The judge was informed that Stott-Smith was not yet ready to appear. Instead, a young man was called next; he wore prison blues and was tall and lanky with rocker-boy hair. He was accused of possessing heroin. The judge asked if he understood this.

  “’K,” he said.

  He was told he could go to the STOP program. He did not appear to be listening. He asked his attorney, “Will I be released today?” She said he would be.

  “Cool,” he said.

  Next up was another young man, charged with second-degree assault. The judge asked whether he could afford a lawyer.

  “It depends on how much it costs,” he said.

  “Do you have a bank account?” asked the judge.

  “Yes.”

  “And how much is in it?”

  “Well, it’s overdrawn,” he said. The judge assigned him a lawyer.

  All three were dispensed within eight minutes.

  Two guards led Amanda in. She wore a padded pine-green vest, the prison-issued “turtle shell” given to those on suicide watch. She looked Native American, maybe; her skin was a creamy coffee color, her cheekbones high and wide. Her thick dark hair was loose and not untidy. She was not, as the TV cameramen had guessed, looking at the floor. She kept her face up and stared straight ahead, but her eyes landed nowhere in the room.

  The judge read the charges: one count of aggravated murder, one of attempted aggravated murder. The “aggravated” designation carried heavier penalties and, in this instance, indicated that the crimes were committed intentionally. If Amanda’s case went to trial, she would face the death penalty.

  Amanda’s attorney mentioned he was here as a courtesy to the family. It was unclear what this meant. I could not stop staring at Amanda, whose gaze remained unfixed. She looked as though standing were an effort, as though a weight on her shoulders was dragging her forward and down. The judge asked, “Do you understand the nature of the charges against you?”

  Amanda did not answer. The judge asked again, “Do you understand the charges against you?”

  This time, Amanda looked toward the judge. She appeared to move her lips. Everyone in the courtroom was waiting to hear what she said.

  What came out was, “Muh.”

  At this, a syllable later interpreted in editorials, by police and politicians, as “No one will ever understand how this happened” and “No one could ever have seen this coming,” Judge Philbrook issued her orders: Amanda Stott-Smith would remain in custody until she reappeared on June 3.

  A guard took Amanda’s elbow to escort her from the room. Amanda did not appear to understand the gesture. Another guard turned her, and she moved out the door as if moving through deep water.

  2

  May 23, 2009, Milwaukie, Oregon

  Jackie Dreiling heard the police car roll up to the house just before 7:00 p.m. Jackie had not dared leave the duplex she shared with her daughter and son-in-law, Kathy and Mike Stott, not since finding out about the children. She would not make a spectacle of herself for the news trucks idling at the curb, the reporters waiting in ambush. To her dying day—which at this point she hoped was not far off—she would not understand why such a thing had hit this family. They were law-abiding citizens!

  Jackie opened her front door. Detectives Steve Ober and Jim McCausland walked past the photos in the vestibule—a four-generation shot of Jackie, Kathy, Amanda, and Trinity; another of Jackie’s younger daughter, Hildy, in her police uniform—and into the living room. The officers did not make note of Jackie’s walking stick, which looked like something out of Lord of the Rings. Jackie asked the detectives if they wanted coffee. They declined. The men looked huge perched on the edge of the couch, but at least they were battening it down. Keeping what Amanda had done out of your mind was like trying to hold back the ocean.

  Jackie sat in her recliner across from the TV and answered the detectives’ questions: her granddaughter Amanda had been living next door with her parents on and off all spring. She had not seen her children much the past few months. Suicide? Amanda said one time that she was going to jump off a bridge, but Jackie had not taken her seriously, and Amanda never insinuated she would hurt her children.

  To that point, Jackie initially had a theory: Amanda had parked her car on a boat ramp, the brakes had failed, and the car had rolled into the river. This almost happened to Jackie fifty years earlier when she and her husband drove their children to the waterfront. They had parked nose-down on a slope, and Jackie thought she felt the brakes slip. She had said to her husband, “This scares me. This scares me,” and he backed up. Maybe Amanda had not been able to back up; maybe she had been trapped while the children managed to float free. Until Amanda’s arrest, Jackie believed this might have been what happened.

  Detectives Ober and McCausland knew this was not what happened. As homicide investigators, they were familiar with the narratives people create to avoid the obvious answer. The Stott household was the picture of middle-class placidity, but it didn’t matter how ordered your life was; murder flew in like a brick through a window and no one was ever ready. The detectives’ boilerplate questions—did Amanda drink alcohol? Did she do illegal drugs?—were as much about fact-finding as measuring out for people what they were facing, introducing them to the new now.

  How new, Jackie was not sure. A few weeks earlier, Amanda had left her favorite ring on Jackie’s mantel. Jackie had long admired this ring, cloisonné with sapphire and green topaz. Later, she mentioned to Amanda that she’d forgotten her ring, but Amanda had simply picked it up and put it back down. Jackie had not considered at the time that people who are going to commit suicide sometimes give away their posses
sions. But Amanda had not killed herself; she had chosen to kill her children, and detectives may have judged Jackie capable of holding competing truths in her mind when she told them that Amanda was the number-one most self-centered and selfish person she knew.

  Kathy and Mike Stott returned home shortly after 7:00 p.m. Ober and McCausland interviewed them in Jackie’s living room. They were, the detectives noted, “very emotional” and apologized for what their daughter had allegedly done. Kathy Stott said Jason and Amanda had a long history of domestic violence. She said he was seeing another woman and had gained custody of the children. Amanda had been upset all spring about the dissolution of her life; at her mother’s urging, Amanda had entered treatment three times for depression and an eating disorder. Still, Kathy Stott insisted Amanda had been excited to see the children this weekend. She had talked about buying their favorite cereals and made up three beds in the room where they would sleep.

  Jackie did not interject that at seven that morning she had gone over to Kathy’s side of the house because she saw on the news that two children had been found in the river. She had looked into the bedroom with the made-up beds, seen they had not been slept in, and thought, it couldn’t be; it couldn’t be.

  Until May 23, 2009, the Stott family appeared close knit and unexceptional. Mike and Kathy had been sweethearts since high school. He worked for a company that made commercial paper products. She’d been a property manager when her girls were young, and she later became a registered nurse. The couple raised Amanda and Chantel in the side-by-side ranch house in Milwaukie. Jackie lived on the west side of the home. Both sides were neat and inviting, with carpeting freshly vacuumed and boxed mini-muffins on the kitchen counter. Mike could fix anything: the children’s bikes, the family cars; the girls said, “Daddy, fix!” so often it became like a song. The Stotts worshipped at a small nondenominational Christian church two miles from their home; Jackie did secretarial work there for years. As the children grew and had children of their own, the families would sometimes caravan to Lincoln City on the Oregon coast. The Nordic Oceanfront Inn featured suites with efficiency kitchens, others with in-room Jacuzzis facing the sea.

  Within days of the children falling from the bridge, the Stott family learned they would not be permitted to visit Trinity in the hospital. They learned they were not yet permitted to visit Amanda in jail. They received word that Christine Duncan had taken out a court order against the family, forbidding them to show up at Eldon’s funeral. Authorities were granted search warrants and took into evidence computers and cell phone records belonging to Amanda’s immediate family.

  Before the week was out, the Stott family packed their cars and drove to the Nordic. They put ninety miles between themselves and the wreckage in Portland. They did not talk about what they began to call “the incident.” They left their rooms only for meals. Jackie wondered if what Amanda had done was a form of suicide and if she was taking parts of them with her. Kathy Stott spent the days on the telephone speaking with attorneys. Jackie distracted herself with a stack of paperbacks but often wound up staring at the ocean.

  3

  I went to the Sellwood Bridge three days after the arraignment. I told my husband I was going to buy watermelons, but instead I drove to the bridge. I had to see where Amanda took her children and, so far as we knew, threw them over.

  The Willamette River cuts Portland in half, east from west. In 2009, ten bridges spanned the river within city limits. To get to the Sellwood Bridge from the city’s eastside, I drove along Tacoma Boulevard, past one-story homes with fenceless front yards. I parked across from Riverside Corral, an old sailors’ bar-turned-strip club, and wondered if Amanda had, too.

  I walked the long block to the bridge’s entry and saw the sort of memorial spontaneously set up for children who have died in public: stuffed bunnies and teddy bears, one Mylar balloon that read, “We’ll miss you,” a whiteboard onto which people had written their good-byes and God blesses. Some of the writing was in a child’s large wobbly script (“To the bravest girl in the world! We are sorry to hear about your brother.”). Tucked amid the wilted bouquets were notes, including one that read, “I hope your new birthday life goes well.”

  I continued onto the bridge. The walkway was about four feet across. Approaching cyclists rang their bells; people could not easily pass one another. The bridge had one traffic lane in each direction. There was no walkway on the south side.

  I thought perhaps Amanda did not park and walk. Maybe she stopped the car on the roadway. This seemed unlikely. Had she stopped the car, other cars would have jammed up behind her, and people driving from the opposite direction would have seen what was going on. Even on a dark night on the poorly lit bridge, someone would have noticed her taking children from the car and thought, what the hell?

  Consider the size of four- and seven-year-old children. They are usually small. You can lift them from beneath their arms and pass them over a waist-high rail with little trouble. Two would be more trouble, especially if they were kicking and screaming. They would have been dead weight had she taken them warm and sleeping from the car.

  But I did not think the children were sleeping, because I did not think Amanda could have parked, gotten them out, thrown them over, and driven away without being seen. It was too busy and too tight a roadway. There would have been little time to pause after dropping one child, then another, over the rail and into the river seventy-five feet below.

  Did she look down? Did she see them in the water? Did she hear her daughter’s cries? I could not know how long she waited on the bridge after she dropped her children, or if she waited at all. If she parked her car on the roadway, she could not have waited. She would have had to get back in the car and drive.

  I thought she might have walked the children onto the bridge. Is it possible she made a game of the walk? This seemed an unlikely scenario, that she had the largeness or smallness of heart to tell her children, “We are going to play a game.” I did not want to see the children skipping at one in the morning along that narrow walkway. It was scary enough in daytime for an adult to feel the velocity of the passing cars, your waist brushing the too-low rail. Looking at the water, you feel your groin seize with the electric jolt that comes when looking down from a dangerous height.

  I did not think the children experienced this. It was dark; it was late, past most young children’s bedtime. Their adrenaline would have been pumping for different reasons: How mad was Mommy? What was happening? They were too small to see over the rail, to see how far down the water was. What could they know of their fate? To be thrown off a bridge in the middle of the night was out of the purview of what four- and seven-year-olds needed to know.

  Did Amanda make the children stand with their backs against the concrete railing, with its wide, church-window-shaped cutouts? Eldon was possibly small enough to crawl through one of these cutouts. The children may have stood with their backs to the rail, the breeze of passing cars pushing them against it. They must have been extremely frightened. Perhaps their mother had to wave cars on, to say, “We’re okay, we’re fine,” and the children would have wondered, are we? Or maybe there had been no cars.

  I did not know if Amanda had been ranting or silent before the children were forced off the bridge. I thought the latter would be scarier to a child. Perhaps she was in a mood so bad, a mood the children could not hope to navigate, that all was chaos. Perhaps she told them what she was going to do. Perhaps she made them stand together atop the rail and told them to hold hands. Maybe she told them, “We have to do this.” While it seemed heartless to inflict this information, I preferred this scenario to seeing them tossed in their sleep. This way, they knew their fate and were, in Trinity’s case, able to gird for it.

  Eldon had no chance. How at four years old in a moving river in the middle of the night do you survive? You don’t. You take in some water, and you take in some more. I imagined his sister would have been holding on to him. I imagined everyone who heard abo
ut the children wished they could have helped, that we all could have lined up on the banks of the river in the dark and offered Eldon one more breath. He had only his sister in the water with him. She did the best she could. She screamed.

  And where was their mother? Can we imagine her standing on the bridge, watching her children drift north, wondering when they would stop crying? Was she afraid someone would hear her children? Was that what got her back in her car and gone fast, the fear of capture being broadcast with each of her daughter’s screams?

  Or did she sleepwalk back to her car? Or did she run? Was she crying? Was she yelling? Was she white and cold? Did she feel victorious? Was her heart pounding? Did she turn around? Did she call her children’s names?

  So far as we were aware, only two living people knew what happened on the bridge that night. No witnesses had come forward; no one had seen or heard anything, on or off the bridge, before the children were in the water.

  On this Friday—two days after Trinity was released from the hospital in good condition, two days before her brother’s funeral—the weather was glorious. There were barely ripples on the Willamette; the air was soft, and the trees on the west bank were in full leaf.

  As I stood midspan beside a second, smaller memorial of bouquets tied to a lamppost, a motorboat passed beneath. It slowed. The driver turned back to look up at the bridge. He looked up for a long time. Maybe he was thinking, that’s a long way for two little kids to fall. Then he looked at me, and in the seconds before he motored south, I had the impractical thought to shout to him, to connect his concern with my own.

  4

  May 22, 2009, Tualatin, Oregon

  Jason Smith was going to a barbecue as soon as he dropped the kids off with Amanda. He and his mother, who was driving them up Interstate 5 from Eugene, were running late. Jason called Amanda to say he’d be at the house a little after eight. She told him she wanted to spend more time with the kids, that she never got to see the kids. It was the same conversation they’d been having for months. She wanted Jason to pay for an apartment in Eugene so she could be nearer to him and the children. Jason said if she wanted to move she could get a job and pay for a place herself.