Kids who are raised in hostile environments are seven times more likely to become violent perpetrators as adults, and I’ve been given the unique opportunity to disrupt that pattern. For the small curve in the road where I get to stand, holding my traffic sign that indicates a better way, I have no choice but to feel belligerent gratitude.
I remind myself of this, all these years later, when the response from an old law school friend at the Justice Department who fast-tracked my FOIA request lands like a coldcock. The reason the original request could not be completed back in 1996 was not because the file didn’t exist; it was because the file didn’t exist where I’d told them to look—in the records taken by the Seattle detectives who visited The Defendant in his Aspen jail cell after his first escape. I had no idea at the time about the second confession Carl had obtained, that in the midnineties, the recording was still part of an active investigation into the Lake Sammamish case and not eligible for public release. Nor did I know that when they closed the case and the file should have become available, someone else got their hands on it and requested all copies be destroyed—a woman by the name of Rebecca Wachowsky from Issaquah, Washington.
* * *
Rebecca is still married to Ruth’s brother. Their two children are grown now—Allen’s kids go to UDub, Rebecca tells me when she finds me taking the chronological tour of their lives as displayed by the pictures on the mantel. Little League games and dance recitals, prom dresses and graduation gowns, weddings and babies for both.
“Mine is thirty next month,” I tell Rebecca, accepting the glass of lemon water she’s offered me. It scours my throat, the liquid acidic from a rind she let soak too long. I have told her I am an attorney representing a family member of one of The Defendant’s long-ago victims, working through a checklist of evidentiary items that the state has not been able to locate. There was an affidavit in my purse in case she did not invite me in, but she did, warmly, telling me that when Ruth’s mother died in 2001, she had discovered a notice from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in a pile of old mail, alerting her to the release of her daughter’s belongings from evidence and laying out instructions on how to request the items. Rebecca continued to clean out the rest of the house, assuming she would find a box of Ruth’s things somewhere, but it was only after all the shelves in all the closets were down to sawdust that she realized her mother-in-law had likely never done anything but read the notice and cast it aside.
“Shirley had difficulty acknowledging things that were… unpleasant,” Rebecca tells me as she leads me down the carpeted basement stairs. “After Ruth died, we rarely spoke her name again. It was so sad, like she never existed in the first place. I couldn’t stand the idea of her things just sitting in storage somewhere, so I was the one to put in the request.” She hits the light switch, revealing a basement that is half TV room, half junkyard of decorative Bed Bath & Beyond storage boxes.
“I knew right away that some other poor girl’s things got mixed up with Ruth’s,” Rebecca says. “I always wondered who they belonged to.”
Rebecca sits on the flat gray carpet and removes the lid of a faux-leather bin with a hexagonal design. I think I own the same one.
She begins to separate the items she doesn’t recognize as Ruth’s from the ones she does: a halter top with yellow flowers, a white plastic barrette, a paperback with the cover torn off. The first line reads, Beneaththe suede brim of his cowboy hat, his gaze was piercing blue. She bows her head over the box, eyes flicking back and forth, and goes to close it back up.
I take a step forward, arm outstretched as if to say, Halt right there. “Would you mind if I looked through myself? In case you missed anything.”
Rebecca’s smile is protective and vaguely threatening. “That’s it. That’s everything that wasn’t Ruth’s. You can have it. Hopefully, the family recognizes it. Who are they, if you don’t mind me asking?”
There is a beat when I wonder if I should push harder to rummage through that box before coming clean. But she asked point-blank, and I’d have a hard time regaining her trust if she looked back on this moment and realized I didn’t answer honestly when she gave me the chance.
“Martina Cannon,” I answer.
Rebecca’s cautiously friendly face turns panicked. She wraps all her limbs around the box, anchoring it to her person in a wrestler’s hold. “Get out of my house before I call the cops on you.” She is reaching for menacing but it’s a stretch. She is far too afraid of losing Ruth.