My students were grinning, which I imagined was partly because he said words like “horseshit” in such an elegant accent. I hadn’t heard the story about the jeans before. If all the DNA showed was that Omar had once touched that swimsuit, well—if I were on a jury, I wouldn’t have found that compelling proof. I ticked off one more mental box. A big one.
“Then we have the confession. As soon as drug allegations are involved, my antennae go up. Because you know what they do: They say they’re handing you to the feds on drug charges, but if you cooperate in this local investigation maybe they can protect you. They say, Did you let her into the pool that night? You must have seen her, or how else did your DNA get there? They say, This looks bad, we’ve got you at the scene now plus the drug charges, your only hope is to confess.”
So he had actually dug into the case. Under other circumstances I’d have been overwhelmed with romantic hope, but my heart was pounding, instead, over Omar. The real Omar I’d known, not the guy in the mug shot. The real Omar, spending the rest of his life in prison. And while Yahav might not have been convinced yet of his innocence, Yahav didn’t know about you.
He said, “You’ve heard about these cases, yes? People so sleep-deprived they’ll sign anything, or people who believe lies about evidence or leniency or getting to go home. It gets worse from there. Actual violence, actual torture. Even in America.”
“This is amazing,” Britt said. “Can we, like—”
But Yahav was in lecture mode. “This many years later,” he said, “to appeal again, Mr. Evans would ideally have two things in place. One is a reasonable case for ineffective assistance of counsel, meaning he didn’t have adequate help from his legal team. They tried to claim this in his appeal in ’99, along with some things about the way the evidence was submitted, but it’s incredibly hard to prove IAC unless your lawyer actually fell asleep every day in court. He had a terrible lawyer, but that’s not the court’s problem.”
Britt had been talking just that morning about how Omar’s original attorney hardly did any independent investigation on the Granby campus. Omar’s uncle, his deceased father’s brother, had done well for himself as a commercial pilot, and insisted on hiring and paying for a friend of his, a high-profile Boston attorney.
New Hampshire’s public defenders are apparently excellent, and know everyone in the legal system of what is, after all, a very small state. They know the culture, and they don’t overdress for court. But the Boston attorney—I remembered him from Dateline—was a designer suit guy with thick black hair and a bright blue Miata that he’d park around the corner from the courthouse. He didn’t stay in Kern during the five-week trial but half an hour away at a nice hotel in Brattleboro. None of this had gone over well with the jury. The juror Lester Holt interviewed, the lady with big yellow hair, called him “that slick lawyer from Boston.” But more importantly: The man came in with enormous hubris, did as little work as possible, hardly raised any objections to hearsay testimony, then acted shocked at the conviction.
Yahav said, “So since that appeal failed, Mr. Evans’s best bet now is the appearance of new evidence. Not just any evidence, but evidence that would upend the case. New DNA, for instance. And if he can argue this was evidence his original lawyers should have found—if he can make a new, better claim for ineffective assistance of counsel—he might have a shot at a new trial. That’s the needle you’d have to thread.”
Britt said, “So, as you know, we’re high school students. But we are invested in this, and I plan to go to law school, and I kind of want this podcast to continue for however long, until we get some answers. Maybe we could at least stay in touch with you about it.”
He took a deliberative breath. He said, “I don’t have time to get too involved.” Then he said, “Post-conviction litigation is a nightmare. Unless you got a video of someone else doing it, the reality is they’re not letting Mr. Evans out. Even if you did get a video, it’s a long shot, believe me.” He laughed sadly. “But sure, we can talk again if you find something.”
After the kids left, I texted him my thanks. He wrote back: Most likely outcome after years of work will be more people know it was a crap conviction, but nothing gets overturned.
Three dots danced for ages as he typed. Long enough that I wondered if he was going to say he missed me, say he regretted Saturday.
But no. He wrote: As a matter of principle, I do think it’s worth pursuing. I’d just advise against getting hopes up. It could be horribly unsatisfying, to halfway unsolve a murder. He stays in prison, but now no one has closure, including the victim’s family. That’s all you ever get from this.
As I stepped out onto the quad, as the cold air punched me in the face, I let myself acknowledge several things.
For one, it had fully settled in my gut: Omar didn’t do this. Or at least: Every reason I once believed in his guilt had fallen away, and I no longer believed he was any more likely than any number of other people to have done it. （Whether or not you did it was, for the time being, irrelevant. You weren’t about to confess, and we weren’t about to find your fingerprints on the pool door after all these years. What mattered was the travesty of a case against Omar.）
Another thing: If I no longer had Starlet Fever, I had more time on my hands, not just this week but for the foreseeable future. This was still the kids’ project, but I had bandwidth to help. I could try to find them distribution. I could advise or consult or even produce. I could do that alongside other projects, like the book that I really did want to write.
And another: At the end of this week, there was no way I’d be able to let go of the spring of 1995, of the questions and people I needed to revisit.
And another: Didn’t I personally owe it, after all, to Omar?
55
When I returned to the guesthouse after dinner that night, Oliver was at the kitchen island with a bag of tortilla chips and a jar of salsa.
I sat on the stool next to his and resisted grilling him about Amber the Latin teacher, who I was pretty sure had slept over last night. Instead, I asked if he could believe our two weeks were almost done.
Oliver shook his head. He said, “I can’t get over it even existing. The kids, and the place. I want to hate it, but I don’t.”
This was when a text came through from Jerome: I quit Otis so they wouldn’t have to fire me. That’s better, right?
I managed to keep talking to Oliver, somehow. I said, “I mean, it’s an incredible school. And it’s way better now than it used to be. But—my grades in middle school were terrible.” I turned my phone facedown. “And they still took me. There are prep schools as selective as Harvard, you know? This was a place kids came when they couldn’t get in those places, or when they failed out. I didn’t know that when I got here. I thought it was full of the smartest kids in the world, and I was gonna flunk. I wasn’t a great student, but I passed my classes just fine.”
Oliver looked confused, and I could tell I was rambling. I was busy thinking that if I no longer had a job either, we could get by on Jerome’s sales—but it occurred to me that those might dry up, too.