What people forget, or rather what the media decided muddied the narrative, is that although The Defendant would go on to represent himself at his murder trial, he was never a lawyer. Any Joe off the street can fly pro se, litigate their own case, without graduating from law school or passing the bar. But it made for a more salable story if he was portrayed as someone who did not have to kill to get his kicks, who had prospects in his romantic life and his career. To this day, I revere that scrubbed-faced court reporter, younger than me by only a year, because she is one of the sacred few who did her job without so much as a sliver of an agenda. The truth of what happened lies in those transcripts, where he is The Defendant and he is full of bullshit.
On the Wanted poster I held in my hands that dingy afternoon in Tina’s rental car, The Defendant peered back at me with black vacant eyes. They are scary eyes, don’t get me wrong, but what frightens me, what infuriates me, is that there isn’t anything exceptionally clever going on behind them. A series of national ineptitudes and a parsimonious attitude toward crimes against women created a kind of secret tunnel through which a college dropout with severe emotional disturbances moved with impunity for the better part of the seventies. Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist. This story is not that. The story is not that.
“That’s the man you saw,” Tina said. “Four years ago, he killed my friend Ruth.”
RUTH
Issaquah, Washington
Winter 1974
I don’t like the idea of you going to a stranger’s house,” my mother said when I pointed out the advertisement in the post office. The Complex Grief Group met every Thursday evening, six to eight, out of a counselor’s home in the Squak Mountain neighborhood of Issaquah. No Men was underlined twice in red ink.
“It’s all women, though,” I said somewhat longingly.
“That girl was living in a house with all women too,” my mother reminded me, hitching the strap of her purse higher on her shoulder and starting for the door. “Let’s go, Ruth. I need to get to the dry cleaner before it closes.”
I started to follow her out, then doubled back and tore off the tab with the counselor’s phone number, just in case.
“What if you drove me,” I suggested on the way home from the dry cleaner. We’d made it before closing, and the tailor was in that day. Things were going her way, which （according to my mother） was rare, which, rarer still, made her pliable. “We could check it out together. Make sure it is what the flyer says it is.”
“What is complex grief, exactly?” she wanted to know, sounding dubious that such a thing could exist.
I shrugged. “I guess they tell you once you get there.”
“But what if it turns out you don’t have it? Then you went all the way over there for nothing.”
I couldn’t tell you what complex grief was, only that I was sure I was suffering from it.
* * *
Squak Mountain was mere minutes from my parents’ house in Issaquah, where I’d been living since my father passed away the previous summer. Issaquah itself is located about twenty miles from downtown Seattle, tucked into the base of three mountains that make up the Cascade foothills. Evergreens umbrella the neighborhood, insulating each home and forming a natural sound barrier. Even on the populated streets with smaller lots, there is a hushed sense of isolation that I guess is part of the appeal.
“You never know what you’re going to get over here,” my mother commented as she navigated a tight, steep right. Squak is supposedly one of the hardest neighborhoods to price because there are so many kinds of homes, everything from ticky-tacky ranches to Queen Anne mansions, properties with steely gray views of Lake Sammamish and ones that don’t even have yards. The counselor’s home was somewhere in the middle: a traditional Northwest Regional offering a forest panorama. There were several cars parked in the driveway and young women waving and hugging one another on the front porch. I’d had to miss the first two sessions because my mother needed more time to think about whether I could be trusted to attend a complex grief group without a chaperone, and now I felt like a girl who had transferred to a new school in the middle of the year. If I wanted to make any friends, I had my work cut out for me.