To the Bridge Read online

  “I’m trying, but it’s hard,” she told him.

  Jason did not know whether she had been trying. According to her mother, Amanda had been moping around and not in a state to do much of anything. He told Amanda what he always told her, that she needed to get her life back on track.

  Amanda had known for months she needed to be out of the house in Tualatin by May 31, that the rent would no longer be paid. Christine Duncan had footed much of the bill for Amanda and the children since the previous fall, when Jason entered rehab. Amanda had asked Duncan to pay for her to go to rehab as well. Amanda had read that 70 percent of marriages fail when only one partner goes through treatment, and she wanted her marriage to succeed. She thought Duncan would want this, too. Duncan believed Amanda’s parents should take care of whatever help their daughter needed. Soon, none of Amanda’s problems would be Duncan’s to solve. Jason had provisional custody of the kids, and he had been in touch with a divorce attorney; it was time for the marriage to be over.

  Trinity could hear her dad on the phone telling her mom she needed to get a job. When they all lived in the same house, she sometimes heard her parents yell in their bedroom. Her dad didn’t like her mom because she smoked cigarettes. He said he paid all the bills and that her mom did not help. Trinity sometimes did not think her dad liked her either. She was crying when she asked her grandmother, her mom’s mother, why her dad did not love her as much as he loved Eldon, whom he carried around all the time. But her father also sometimes told Eldon he smelled like a bowel movement. This would make Eldon mad. Sometimes he threw his Transformers down the toilet on purpose, which would make their mom really, really mad, and then she’d try to get them out with chopsticks.

  Jason got off the phone and told the kids that he was going to a barbecue but they were not to tell their mother. The barbecue was at his friend Ryan’s house. Did the children understand? Don’t tell their mother because she was not invited. Trinity listened to what her father said. Four-year-old Eldon was beside her on the back seat. He was wearing the clothes of an American boy his age: a yellow T-shirt with a bulldog logo, a pair of Marvel Comics underwear.

  5

  On May 29, 2009, James Gumm took his two adopted children on a hike in a Portland-area park. The children, a boy and a girl, were ages seven and six. Gumm was recently divorced; it was his weekend with the kids. They hiked a path called the Otter March Loop before Gumm used a 9 mm handgun to shoot the children. Then he shot himself in the mouth.

  “We have the second-highest unemployment in the nation. Social services are stressed to the breaking point or failing altogether,” went one comment on the Oregonian’s website, in reaction to the Gumm murders. “People are free-falling through the cracks. Unfortunately, stuff like this is going to happen more and more. . . . We are in for a long, hot, dangerous summer.”

  Unlike readers insisting Amanda be hung from the Sellwood Bridge, or those who thought the right thing to do was “just hurry up and give her the needle in the arm,” this commenter was searching for context, asking why these murders were happening in Portland now.

  It was a valid question in the summer of 2009. While places like Las Vegas and San Diego were seeing their local economies run off the rails, Portland appeared to be hitting its stride. Popular Science magazine had named it America’s “top green city.” The restaurant scene was nonpareil. Portland was dubbed “the new Brooklyn” and was attracting, according to the Wall Street Journal, “college-educated, single people between the ages of 25 and 39 at a higher rate than most other cities in the country.” There was editorial space available for idealized Portland stories, and the message that through some confluence of bike paths, pinot noir, and progressive politics, Portland was producing citizens with the sort of decency more cynical cities lacked.

  The day classmates of the Gumm children released memorial balloons to the sky, twenty-one-year-old Heather Snively, who had moved to Portland three weeks earlier, went to the home of Korena Roberts. Roberts, who had told family and friends she was expecting twins, had responded to the ad Snively placed on Craigslist asking for used baby clothes. Snively was more than seven months pregnant when Roberts sliced through her womb and removed the baby, which was transported to the hospital and pronounced dead. Snively’s body was found stuffed in a crawl space at Roberts’s home. The day this story hit the papers, a migrant worker named Araceli Velasquez-Espain delivered her newborn into the waste tank of a portable toilet. She told authorities she had seen the umbilical cord and the placenta; that she “knew her baby was underneath . . . but she saw the blue water was disgusting and did not want to reach into it.” An autopsy of the baby showed he had been alive as he submerged in the blue septic chemical.

  If Portland’s murder rate had declined over the decade, the child murders this summer nevertheless felt like a sickening trend. The local papers could barely keep up. Too many children needed attention; you could not properly take care of one before you had to look after another.

  I wondered, after reading about Baby Boy Velasquez-Espain, if the press outside of Portland would take a moment to look away from the city’s food carts to focus on child murder. I asked a stringer for the New York Times if the paper was going to devote more than the 113-word wire service item it had to Amanda’s story.

  “It’s not what they want from Portland,” he told me.

  A half hour before Amanda’s second arraignment on June 3, the landing outside of the second-story courtroom was mobbed. A dozen reporters and two TV crews scoped out each new arrival coming up the steps. They were waiting for Ken Hadley, Amanda’s new attorney, who barely made it off the top step before he had a microphone in his face.

  Hadley looked a bit like Jon Voight, with broad, flat cheekbones, no visible eyelid crease, and fine gray hair worn longish over his ears. Reporters shouted over each other: What could Hadley tell them about Stott-Smith? What was her emotional state?

  Hadley appeared to give each question his full attention. He had a way with pauses, casting his eyes toward a midpoint on the floor, curling his hand in a loose fist, pressing the knuckle of his forefinger to his lips. He kept his answers brief: He had just been assigned to Stott-Smith’s case so could not say much about her emotional state. He could not discuss legal particulars. He could confirm she was on suicide watch.

  Hadley broke away.

  The courtroom was packed, people hip to hip on benches and standing against walls. There were cameras and laptops and different people crying in the back row. If there were any family members in attendance, they were not making themselves known. An Oregonian crime reporter asked a cried-out woman in a flowered dress whether she knew Amanda. The woman nodded but would not say more.

  Amanda’s case was not first on the docket, yet she was the first brought in. Her hair was in a neat braid. She looked hyperalert, her eyes wide and the whites of her eyes very white. She wore a curious What are we going to do today? expression and looked more polished than I might expect a woman in her position to be.

  Judge Philbrook read the indictment against her. A grand jury had convened and come back with additional charges. Amanda was now facing five counts of aggravated murder, two counts of attempted aggravated murder, and one count of assault in the second degree, this last because of bruises on the children’s bodies. Hadley acknowledged the charges. The judge asked how Amanda pleaded; Hadley’s cocounsel said, “Not guilty.” There was no immediate reaction from anyone in the courtroom. Amanda herself had no reaction. People filed out as she was led away, this time under her own steam.

  A press conference took place within the hour, on the fourteenth floor of the Justice Center in downtown Portland. TV cameras were set up behind two dozen reporters. Conversations were of layoffs and buyouts. One retirement-aged man floated the idea of going into radio. Another went through the receipts in his wallet. No one commented on the bank of windows to our right, offering a full view of the Sellwood Bridge.

  A spokesperson for the Portland Poli
ce Bureau stood at the lectern and told us how it was going to go: We would get a timeline of the Stott-Smith case; detectives and the chief of police would appear. Representatives would be available to answer some questions.

  Police Commissioner Dan Saltzman was up first. He had the build of a weekend basketball player and a clammy complexion. “I’m here really to express the profound regret that I feel—and all of us on the city council feel, and I think every citizen in Portland feels—the profound sense of grief over the tragic drowning of Eldon Smith. This type of death shakes us all to our core. We’re here today to learn more about it and help us to try to understand something that is perhaps not capable of being understood.”

  He ceded the stage to Police Chief Rosie Sizer, who repeated Saltzman’s sentiments and reminded us how deeply this sort of crime affected not just the public but her officers, many of them parents of young children. Later, during a discussion of whether Officer Wade Greaves had “made a heroic effort” to save Amanda, Chief Sizer said, “My reading of the reports was, she was dangling over the side [of the parking garage] and he grabbed hold of her wrist and kept her from falling to the sidewalk and dying.”

  Sergeant Rich Austria explained that any records pertaining to the children—before, during, or after the incident—would not be provided. He gave us the timeline of Amanda and the children’s whereabouts for May 22 and May 23, offering almost nothing that had not already been reported. When asked for additional details, he said he would not comment, that the 911 tapes would not be released, that he was going to “hold off” as far as giving any information as to how Amanda had been found, though it was obvious to everyone in the room that she had been tracked by her cell phone. The press conference was pro forma, and I wondered at the point of doling out scraps and what we were expected to make from them. Then time was called and everyone was thanked and pads were folded and good-bye.

  I approached Chief Sizer. I told her I wanted to interview Officer Greaves, that I thought what he had done was an incredible feat, something out of the movies, but beyond that, he must have found it psychologically tough, knowing what this woman was accused of doing to her kids and yet—of course, of course—doing his job and saving her life. It was a heroic act and a complicated one, and Sizer said yes, yes, yes, and that Greaves would be honored the following week in a ceremony, and I said, that’s well deserved, but what I really wanted was to interview him, and how did the department feel about that?

  “We encourage our officers to speak with the media,” she said, and all I had to do was arrange it with the department’s spokesperson, who did a yeoman’s job of avoiding my calls and throwing up bulwarks before saying no, I could not have the interview; Officer Greaves was not interested.

  The pieces in the next day’s papers carried stories by reporters who had done their best with what they had. They quoted neighbors. Two articles included the declaration that Amanda had sought to hurt her husband, though the reason why she wanted to hurt him was not advanced. The narratives were dutiful but did not answer the central questions of why and how.

  Hadley was not distressed by the papers providing so little information, by cops staying tight-lipped. He preferred it this way.

  “I like the media. I read gossip pages, and I watch enough news that my family members get bored,” he told me the next morning at Elmer’s Restaurant, a diner located off the interstate. “But the media can also really hurt us because the more publicity, the more you’ve got the public excited about it. . . . The judge doesn’t want you tried in the newspaper, and I don’t, either.”

  Before he agreed to meet with me, Hadley said I needed to appreciate how little he could say at this time. While the police may have all but finished their investigation, he was just starting his. It was a hermetic process, the pretrial gathering of evidence, and he could not reveal anything about a client that might affect her case.

  Hadley was as high profile as one could be as a public defender in the state of Oregon. For the last twenty years, each of the people he represented was charged with aggravated murder, the state’s only capital offense. Hadley knew the job did not make him popular. He was used to being called “an SOB” and “a bleeding heart” and meeting people at parties who asked, “How can you do what you do?” He believed the job he did was an important one, and he did it well: out of thirty clients, only two had received the death penalty, and only one of those sentences—that of family killer Christian Longo—had stuck. I had seen a photo of Longo as the guilty verdict was read. Hadley stands beside him, head hinged toward his chest, eyes closed, thumb and fingers gripping the bridge of his nose.

  Longo, against Hadley’s advice, had pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder in two of the four killings, implying that his wife had killed their two older children before Longo killed her and their baby. Hadley did not think the jury would buy Longo’s half-truth. The jury had not.

  Amanda, too, had pleaded not guilty. If her case went to trial, the death penalty would be on the table. Hadley seemed unperturbed by this possibility, sunny even, as our breakfasts arrived, as though having a person’s life in his hands was as much a part of the day as eggs and toast.

  6

  May 22–23, 2009, Tualatin, Oregon

  Ryan Barron was totally stoked to see Jason. It had been a crazy, crazy couple of years, last summer particularly; man, he didn’t even want to think about it. Jason said he would be over as soon as he dropped off the kids; his mom was driving him. They’d swing by Ryan’s around eight. Jason got there a little late, but that was normal.

  Ryan gave his buddy a man hug. He hadn’t seen the guy in two months. They were getting to be two middle-aged white dudes. Each had less hair and more gut than when they met in 2001, but today Jason looked good, not all freaked and scraggly like he’d been the summer before, when he was living with Ryan and his fiancée, Sara. Maybe “living” was a little strong; Jason had been staying with Ryan. It had been bad, just bad news. Too much junkie business. Seeing Jason looking all sharp, dressed preppy like he liked, even Sara commented on how he had filled out. It was refreshing to see him looking clean and healthy.

  Ryan and Jason took off for Whole Foods. Ryan was an amateur chef, something he planned to capitalize on, since he’d been canned from his job. Jason loved good food, too. He had a thing for French cheese, the kind that was as big as your thumb and cost $25. At the store, they went wild buying things for the grill: rock shrimp, halibut, flanken ribs, and sweet corn; they were going to make a giant feast. Man, it was good to see his friend, especially considering how last summer had ended, with Ryan ratting Jason out, having to tell their boss, listen, Jason’s got a serious drug problem.

  That had been in September. Ryan knew some of what had happened to Jason since then, was pretty sure the guy had stayed clean and that his marriage was over. It was hard to know a lot more. Jason could be sort of calculating; he would gravitate to people weaker than he was because, as Ryan saw it, Jason was addicted to being in charge. Whatever. Tonight Jason was totally chill. They drank beers and grilled, didn’t start eating until nine, ten o’clock. It was a nice night, clear and warm, and Ryan decided to tease his buddy, to ask, “Bro, when are we going to head back out to the desert?” It was something they used to do—take off and look for arrowheads. Then one time, maybe five years ago, Jason said he’d brought along some coke, said he’d never tried it but maybe they should do some. Ryan had never done coke, either. He totally loved it, becoming so focused he could hunt artifacts for days. It had been a fun, fun trip, and when Jason said they should do it again sometime, Ryan was down for it, though he did kind of wonder. Jason was superorganized; he had a binder with a piece of glass and all this stuff tucked in, razor blades and cards and some snooters. It seemed like he knew way more than a dude doing blow for the second time would know.

  They started heading out to the woods a lot, camping and rock hounding in the Columbia Basin, out at Burns in eastern Oregon. Vancouver Lake was less than twenty mi
les from Portland; they’d head out there for the day and swim and hunt for agates when they were supposed to be working. Ryan knew he shouldn’t have been screwing up like that or doing so much coke with Jason, but hell, Ryan was enjoying himself. Even when it got hairy, he kept at it, staying up all night, sleeping in his car during the day when he was supposedly on the clock. The job he and Jason did, running mail room operations for Ricoh, wasn’t hard. It was easy to bullshit your way through—until it wasn’t, until the mistakes piled up.

  That was all over now. Ryan had stopped doing drugs completely, Jason had gone through rehab, and here they were, full bellies under a night sky. The only interruption was Amanda calling and calling Jason’s phone. Jason ignored her calls and suggested to Ryan, as far as camping, how about they go tomorrow? Jason was staying overnight at his aunt’s a few blocks away; he and Ryan could meet up in the morning and head to Kalama, explore this old Indian encampment Jason knew about. Ryan was totally down for it, though he was sort of surprised when Jason said, yeah, I got all my stuff with me. Ryan knew Jason had pawned or sold anything he could the summer before, and he knew because sometimes he went with the guy.

  One time, they went by the Tualatin house when Amanda and the kids were still living there—what a disaster that place was; every house Jason and Amanda lived in turned into a shithole. Jason took all the DVDs that time, so many that the guy at the pawnshop said it would take a while to tally up, that Jason and Ryan should come back later. When they returned, the guy said he couldn’t give Jason any money because there were no DVDs in the boxes. Ryan thought Amanda was a certifiable nutjob on top of being an alcoholic—he had once seen her wing a fifteen-pound tub of laundry detergent at Jason’s head—but he had to give it to her: she knew Jason was stealing their stuff and took the DVDs before he could.