Nothing about your case has produced any big surprises. You were determined fit to stand trial. The forensic psychologist who did the assessment wrote that you were manipulative, clever, quick-witted, and potentially quite dangerous.
Hard to disagree there.
The court ordered you hospitalized at Edgewater for your psych evaluation for twenty days, and that got extended another twenty, as the law allowed.
Your shrink at Edgewater was a guy named Dr. Dennis Palumbo, who we all despised. Well, maybe all but Ryan, because Palumbo thought the same thing he did: that you didn’t have DID. According to Palumbo, DID wasn’t even a real condition, and didn’t belong in the DSM. Turns out that what you have （or I guess allegedly have） is quite the polarizing diagnosis. There are no lab tests to confirm a case of DID, no genetic or hereditary component to use as a marker, and some experts believe the amnesia barrier, those vast memory gaps of yours, belong to the world of fiction, not fact. It’s thought that DID is just a variant of a borderline personality disorder, or in your case an antisocial personality disorder, and that the appearance of your alters is akin to fantasy play rather than a verifiable neurological state.
In short, Palumbo thought you were an expert liar.
You did take a polygraph test and passed. Later, I found out that those tests aren’t indicative of anything in your case. In your deluded mind you might believe, and hence convey it as truth to the machine, that you have no memory of killing Rachel Boyd. You’re lying, but you believe it, so it’s true to you, even though it’s really a lie.
It’s enough to make your head spin. Or at least mine. I guess you’re used to it.
When it came to your chances in court, Navarro wasn’t nearly as gloomy and despondent as Mom. Juries have believed the DID defenses before, he told us.
He was right, too. I’ve studied those cases, a few examples at best. The highest-profile and most recent was the murder trial of Thomas Huskey, which ended in a hung jury. According to Huskey’s public defender, an alternate personality named Kyle had done the killings, not Thomas, who Kyle claimed to hate. Huskey was convincing too, employing different voices, mannerisms. Even his dominant hand varied depending on the personality. Kyle was left-handed, Thomas right A if it had been Mom or me on that particular jury in Tennessee, undoubtedly we both would have believed him, for his condition was chillingly similar to yours.
You were facing fifty years in prison, maybe more, and that, Penny, is only because of your young age at the time of the murder. Navarro, to his credit, understood his job wasn’t to add weight to Mom’s worry.
“We’re taking things a day at a time,” he kept telling us.
One day turned into another, and eventually it became a year and a half of your life spent in Edgewater State Hospital, locked up with the crazies, the violent offenders who didn’t belong in a regular prison. That didn’t make them any less dangerous, though.
While Edgewater may have been an ailing institution, a deplorable place to be, you asked to stay there, and Mom agreed. At least Edgewater had the veneer of a hospital, and you could receive consistent psychiatric care there.
That’s why Mom had Navarro petition Ruth Whitmore, the facility director, to allow you to continue your care and treatment there while the proceedings against you were still pending.
It was the lesser of two evils, Mom concluded, but I’ve visited you, Penny, and five minutes inside is five minutes too long. How you’ve survived all this time in that hellhole is beyond me. I guess you have Eve to thank for that.
Aside from your defense, the biggest worry we had was money. Navarro was good, but he wasn’t cheap. Not to make you feel worse, but Mom had to take out an equity loan on the restaurant to afford the forty-thousand-dollar retainer. And that was not nearly going to cover the rest of the charges she’d accrued. I’d offered to drop out of school, but Mom put her foot down.
Ryan, though, he didn’t give her a choice.
That August, a few weeks after your arrest, Ryan was supposed to go back to Northeastern for his senior year and start taking those law school classes he’d been dreaming about since his high school days as a star on the debate team. Getting accepted into the PlusJD program—Northeastern’s prestigious fast track to law school—was no easy feat, and I thought he couldn’t wait to begin. Instead he dropped out, quit, no word of warning, just announced that he wasn’t going back for his last year of school. He wouldn’t say why.
Mom had a meltdown, of course. It was hard enough having you living in Edgewater, but add to that a son working the pizza ovens at Big Frank’s, following Dad’s footsteps instead of his own dreams—it broke her heart. But Ryan’s an adult, he can make his own decisions, and Mom wasn’t about to deny him employment. The restaurant is a family business, after all. Since he’s been working there, Ryan’s become the general manager, and he’s done a good job of it, too, though business is down because of the notoriety around your case.