To the Bridge Page 9

  In her petition to the court, his mother wrote in part:

  The respondent [Jason] suffers from alcohol and drug addiction (the drug addiction goes back to age 15). As a result, the respondent is unable to manage his financial resources and is financially incapable. Respondent has a history of not paying his bills. . . . The respondent has fallen victim to an abusive relationship with a “girlfriend,” which has resulted in the respondent being financially exploited, which is ongoing. The respondent’s “girlfriend” continues to blackmail him into giving her large sums of money, including $8,100 given to her in the month of August 2000. “Girlfriend’s” mother reported to petitioner [Duncan] that she heard her daughter blackmail respondent over the phone. Additionally, more than $5,000 was spent by respondent and “girlfriend” at Nordstrom in September 2000. The respondent has spent nearly $25,000 or more in each of the last three months. The respondent is vulnerable to being taken advantage of financially due to his alcohol and drug addiction.

  Where Amanda’s friends saw her as resourceful—getting state assistance to keep Gavin fed, and bearing up under the suicide and adoption—Christine Duncan saw a woman preying on her son. She had seen scapegoats before. In her letter to the judge after the 1994 theft of jewelry from her home, Duncan cited her divorce from Jason’s father when Jason was nine, how Jason “became quite angry with his father as time passed, because of his [father’s] lack of interest.” There was the friend Jason made in eighth grade, “a black youth, John, who was sent to Eugene to live with his grandparents to get away from the L.A. gangs. . . . It wasn’t until some time later that I learned John had introduced Jason to marijuana, and that the group of friends that John eventually introduced Jason to were regular users.”

  Jason was sensitive, in other words. He was swayable; others might share the blame for his addiction and its consequences. That other was now Amanda, who merited neither a name nor a straightforward appellation, always mentioned as “girlfriend” in quotes. Amanda’s influence had triggered Jason’s latest downfall.

  Maybe they were triggering each other. Between May 2000 and May 2001, police were called at least three times to intervene between Jason and Amanda. On May 21, Jason was arrested and charged with assault IV, menacing, and interfering with making a 911 call after Amanda told police he had “held her by the wrists to prevent her from leaving.” On June 14, Jason claimed Amanda vandalized her own car by puncturing its right front tire. A police report further indicated Jason was seeking a restraining order against Amanda. On July 6, Jason again called police and said he was “having problems getting his ex-girlfriend to leave” his apartment. He told police that Amanda “had been violent” on several occasions and showed them a bite mark on his left torso and two large bruises on his upper arm. Amanda told police one of the reasons for the fight was that “in the past [Jason] had caused her emotional pain.” Amanda was arrested that night and charged with domestic assault IV. Eighteen days later, she was arrested for shoplifting at a suburban mall.

  A Department of Human Services report in August 2000 “indicated that J.S. strangled A.S. in front of the child. When A.S. was finally released, she attempted to call police from a pay phone, but J.S. hung up the phone and took her money. A.S. managed to get inside a store with her child where she called the police. When police arrived, they found the tires of her vehicle had been punctured, and J.S. had left the area on foot. . . . One of the witnesses who was interviewed reported seeing J.S. puncture the tires with a knife.”

  In January 2001, Amanda called police to say that Jason had thrown her car keys, pushed her to the ground, and then locked himself in his apartment. Police documented scrapes on Amanda’s elbow, hands, and knees. They made “numerous attempts to contact Mr. Smith, but he refused to answer the door.” Whether police had more than Amanda’s word that Jason was inside the apartment was not specified.

  In May 2001, DHS received a report that Jason had left Gavin, who had recently turned four, unattended in a vehicle. Paramedics responded. A report stated that “when the child was removed from the car he was reported to be in poor condition—sweating, lethargic, and confused” and at one point “collapsed to the ground.” Jason was cited by police and allowed to leave with Gavin. Many of these incidents occurred while Jason and Amanda were spending $25,000 a month, before Jason’s mother stepped in and tried to stop her son’s latest slide, in which Amanda was seen as complicit.

  Amanda might at the time have seemed an easy mark: two pregnancies out of wedlock; shoplifting; the willingness to be treated like a princess. I wondered whether Jason chose Amanda for these reasons and how cognizant each was of exploiting the other’s needs and fantasies.

  The conservatorship ended in December 2001. There was nothing left to conserve. Of the $167,597.15, nearly all had been used to pay debts and taxes (more than $60,000) and to subsidize Jason’s living expenses. Of his personal property, only the Audi and $2,020.34 remained. By this time, Jason had a job in the mail room of a copier company, and Amanda was expecting their first child.

  April dug out her wedding video. She had not seen it since shortly after the wedding in 2002. Christian music welcomed guests to the outdoor ceremony. There was April, swaddled in yards of bridal puff, and five-year-old Gavin, wearing a tiny tuxedo and holding the rings aloft on a satin pillow. Later, the camera moved among tables, asking guests to offer best wishes. Amanda and Jason were last to speak. She wore a clingy low-cut hostess gown in a tropical print. Her skin glowed, and her hair shone. She took the microphone and in her singsong voice said, “Thank you so much. Happy wedding! Weddings are lovely. We’re going to be a married couple hanging out so, yay! To the married couples hanging out.”

  Jason did not glow. His hair was thin on top, and he spoke without conviction as he offered congratulations. He came off as more uncomfortable than parsimonious. If you were to assess the couple from this tableau, you would say he was in thrall to Amanda, that she was the one with the power. Trinity had been born five months earlier. Jason was running mail rooms for the company that would become Ricoh; maybe he was tired, or maybe he didn’t like April. He had told Amanda he did not want April and Tiffany coming over or hanging out with Amanda.

  The married couples did not hang out, either. April quickly divorced. She started teaching high school and studying for the first of what would be two graduate degrees, in English and education, on her way to a PhD. She still saw Amanda, in one or another of the cheap apartments she, Jason, and the kids moved to. Amanda always seemed cheerful, never mentioned anything was wrong. She was still la-di-la, the kind of mother who nursed Eldon for fourteen months and slept nuzzled up with him, as she once had with Gavin.

  Then the family moved to Hawaii for a couple of years, for Jason’s job. April and Amanda barely stayed in touch, though April did tell a good friend of hers to look up Amanda when she went to Oahu. The friend had done so and found Amanda to be more than gracious. She insisted the friend stay with her, Jason, and the kids. The friend wound up leaving after a few days. She couldn’t take the situation in the house, Jason berating Amanda, Amanda trying to keep a smile pasted on. The friend went on excursions with Amanda and the children to the International Market Place in Waikiki and to the beach; she took photos of the children, tanned and smiling. Eldon had just turned two; his baby hair was fine and blond and nearly to his shoulders.

  The last time April visited Amanda was spring 2008. Ricoh had transferred Jason back to Portland, and the family was living in Tualatin. Besides Jason’s pot, which he had lined up neatly in jars, the house was chaotic and really, really messy. Eldon was running around in his underpants. Trinity was yelling, there’s no toilet paper! Jason shouted that she knew where it was. Gavin was in a corner reading; he no longer remembered April.

  How’s your walk with Jesus? Amanda asked.

  April gave a noncommittal answer to the Jesus question. Amanda sounded like a robot or as though all the air had gone out of her. She did not look well; she was too thi
n, her lushness gone. April did not know what to say, especially with Jason one room away. The tension in the house was such that she was afraid anything she said might set off a confrontation. She bought some pot from Jason and left. Amanda called her not long after to ask whether April had any friends in Eugene she and the kids could stay with. It was an odd request, and it wasn’t. April had always known Amanda to be spontaneous, to put her kids in the car and go. But that was ten years ago; there were three kids now, and April did not feel comfortable calling her friends and asking if this woman they didn’t know and who was frankly acting a little strange could stay with them.

  April stopped returning Amanda’s calls, including the last call in early May 2009, when Amanda left a message saying, “I really wish I would hear from you. Things aren’t going so well.”

  16

  By November 2009, the flow of details from Hadley about Amanda’s case had more or less stopped. Whether she would change her plea to guilty, if the case would go to trial, if the prosecutor would ask for the death penalty—everything was up in the air. But was I interested, Hadley asked, in meeting someone who had escaped execution? Greg Cook’s case would not be going to trial; Hadley had convinced him to accept a plea bargain. His sentencing for the triple murder of three meth buddies in mid-July would take place this month.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet Cook. There seemed to me no mystery in what he had done or the brutality with which he killed. Maybe it was that I wasn’t willing to unpack that mystery. Hadley had told me several times how Cook was determined to turn his mistakes, if you could call murder and dismemberment mistakes, into a cautionary tale, to talk about his meth problem in hopes of helping people not do what he did. This sounded to me like Cook shoveling garbage in order to save his own ass, or as Hadley had once put it, “They call convicts ‘cons’ for a reason.” Nevertheless, Cook’s ass had been saved by Hadley, who was tasked with doing the same for Amanda.

  “You have to get inside the heads of some very disturbed individuals; you have to find the humanity and bond with the humanity,” Hadley’s sometime cocounsel Steve Krasik had told me about the job of the capital defense attorney. “And you can never lose sight of the pain of the victims, 90 percent of whom think you’re prolonging their agony and that the accused should be taken outside and shot with a dirty bullet.”

  There were ice crystals in the air when I pulled into the eastern Oregon town of La Grande, where Cook’s sentencing would take place November 9. La Grande had a wide main street and not much going on. The Royal Motor Inn was central and looked less depressing than the Super 8. I pressed zero on the front-desk phone. A curtain behind the desk parted. The woman’s nameplate said Rudy. She had an accent I could not place.

  “Let me see if it’s available,” she said when I asked for a room. There was only one car in the lot besides mine. I would interview Greg Cook’s mother later in the day. If Kathy Stott had not responded to the letters I sent asking to speak about Amanda’s life, about her own life, Cook, Hadley told me, was enthusiastic about having his mother speak for him.

  Edith Mitts had a white streak in her fluffy copper hair. She was seventy-one, but if she had told me sixty, I would not have questioned it. Her kitchen had a low ceiling and several cases of Campbell’s soup stacked against one wall. A Jack Russell and a miniature schnauzer made a loop of sliding on the linoleum floor and into Mitts’s ankle.

  “You better get getting,” she said, hitting at them with a flyswatter. When she wasn’t swatting the dogs, Mitts kept her hands atop several hundred letters and handmade cards from her son, Greg Cook. She spent two hours reading aloud from the correspondence he had sent her since age thirteen, when she put him in a boys’ home near Baker City. She did not want many details of those early days on record, not more than that she’d been twenty-seven with five kids when she met Cook’s dad, who was seventeen at the time. The family had been poor, moving “sometimes two, three times during the school year,” living in the woods in winter, living in tents. Cook had no friends other than his dogs. He did not do well in school. At times, his dad had been violent with him. On top of this was her drinking.

  Mitts turned over and over the cards, with colored drawings of bears and birds, but mostly of roses, dozens of roses. She kept reading words of love from Cook: he could have no finer mother, and he was so proud of her. She was proud of him, too—proud that he’d told police where he hid the bodies, proud that he’d told her in detail what he’d done. He’d walked Shannon McKillop into the woods and made her take off her shoes so she could not run. When she said her feet hurt, he squatted down and had her get on his shoulders because he did not, he told his mother, “want her to have to walk with her feet sore.” This, before he cut off her feet, head, and hands. He also told his mother how he’d had the two other victims dig their own grave and said a prayer with them before he shot them.

  “I’m not angry at all,” Mitts said when I asked whether she was angry with her son. “He’s sorry that he did what he done, that he can’t undo it.”

  It was past 9:00 p.m. when we finished talking. I encouraged Mitts to eat a can of soup—she had nearly fainted when she stood up from the table. She went through the motions of heating it but did not eat; she wanted to show me family photos in the entryway. She explained how she had once gotten drunk on beer and “shot the head off a rooster because it crowed too much.” She told me to be careful on the drive back to La Grande; it was elk season, and sometimes they wandered onto the road, out of the forest. That’s where Cook’s dad was now, in the woods, hunting.

  The temperature outside was in the thirties, and the two-lane road to La Grande was unlit. I worried that a drunk driver, or a driver high on meth, would cross the yellow line. I thought about the advice that if a car (or an elk) is heading toward you, you do not look at it; you look where you want to go, and that is where you will go. Mitts saw her son as semiheroic for telling the police what he had done; his telling her he was sorry served as proof that he was. She wasn’t going to change lanes now.

  Back at the motel, I ate takeout and watched the last minutes of a movie called The Green Mile, where a good man is sent to the electric chair. There were a lot of tears and violins. I slept badly, dreaming all night of spinal columns, freshly removed, small ones and long ones, one of them framed.

  Men’s voices woke me at dawn. Three feet from my window, two men in camouflage loaded rifles into a pickup. Every parking spot in the lot was filled this morning, nearly all with trucks being readied for the hunt.

  By 8:40 a.m., at least forty people were waiting on the steps of the Union County Courthouse. Men were dressed mostly in dun-colored clothing. Some mentioned they had taken the morning off from work. We were let into the courthouse just before nine. We moved in a mass down the narrow hall and were let into the courtroom one by one. The room was overly warm. People shed their coats and looked like hell, trembling or blotched from crying. A broad-shouldered man on the bench next to me sat as rigid as if his spine had been made of rebar.

  Hadley spoke to a bailiff near the front of the courtroom. He looked relaxed. In the months leading to today’s sentencing, he had convinced Cook to change his plea to guilty and accept a sentence set by the judge rather than face a trial for triple murder. It was a smart move. While it was unlikely Amanda would be sentenced to death should her case go to trial, given the state’s history of being loath to impose the death penalty on female killers, juries had no such qualms about men: nearly three dozen awaited execution in Oregon in November 2009. Next to Hadley, on the DA’s table, was a binder thick with papers. On its cover were four mug shots, one of Cook and one each of those he had murdered. Many of the people in the courtroom today were related to one of the victims.

  At nine thirty, word came that Hadley’s cocounsel had suffered an attack of vertigo on the drive in. A ten-minute recess was called. Most people headed outside to smoke. A few went to the ladies’ room. A heavyset woman with curly hair leaned against the wa
ll by the hand dryer. She was panting. I asked if she was going to be sick.

  “No. I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe sick on the other end.”

  Cook was led into court at 9:40. His feet were manacled, his hands chained to his waist. Edith had told me three stories of different women finding her son attractive. I did not see it. He had sunken cheeks, prominent front teeth, a long forehead, and forearms corded with muscle. The charges against Cook were read, including three counts of aggravated murder, one count of abuse of a corpse, and one count of felony possession of a firearm. The district attorney acknowledged that Cook had supplied them with information “several times,” including where to find the backpack containing Shannon McKillop’s head. The woman from the bathroom made a heaving sound. The DA elaborated on the other two victims’ deaths, how Cook had convinced the men to dig a grave and lie in it “like Siamese twins.”

  The judge announced it was time for families of the victims to speak. McKillop’s oldest daughter said that despite her mother’s “illness and addiction,” she was a good person. She kept her house spotless and taught her children to grow things “just from a bean or a piece of popcorn.” Cook nodded thoughtfully as she spoke. He let us see his tears as she said she could not rid herself of the image of her mother gasping for air and Cook “hacking into her flesh.”

  McKillop’s younger daughter needed help to get to the microphone. She told the court she’d had a baby girl two weeks before her mother was murdered. Her mom had been her “biggest support,” and she still wanted to call her.

  “She was beautiful, and you brutalized her and threw her away like a piece of trash,” she told Cook. “And she wasn’t trash. She was my mom.”