“I have a story for you,” I told Carl.
Carl listened while I spelled it out. Police incompetence, at a criminal level, that had led to two deaths and three beatings here in Florida.
“He escaped twice under Colorado’s watch,” I stressed. “We know how it happened in Aspen, but how do they move him to a so-called higher-security prison and let it happen again? It’s malfeasance, and you could be the one to expose it.”
Carl put his hand over the mouthpiece and spoke to someone in the background, asking for a pen so he could write down my flight information. I found myself straining to make out if the voice that responded Here you go was female. You are engaged, I reminded myself. Practically.
* * *
“This is a fashion statement,” Carl said as we buckled our seat belts for takeoff.
I looked down at what I was wearing. I’d come straight from my externship at the Capitol Building in my page uniform—navy wool skirt, tights, starched white button-down, loafers swapped out for white sneakers. I’d known I’d have to race back to The House to grab my bags and make the flight. Only a few years later, this look would become popular among professional women with a commute, immortalized in the movie Working Girl, but on that January afternoon in 1978, I suppose I just looked weird.
“My externship is Wednesday and Friday mornings,” I explained.
“It’s not even been two weeks. You’re already back at that?”
I gave him a sideways look. “I never left.”
Carl did a double take. “Not even the week it happened?”
“That was a Saturday night,” I said.
Carl was staring at me, his eyes roving back and forth, like he was waiting for me to break. Surely I had to be pulling his leg.
“So by Wednesday…” I trailed off, figuring the point had been made. So by Wednesday, things had settled enough for me to get back to work.
Carl rested his head on the back of the airplane seat, closing his eyes. “You’re pretty incredible, Pamela. All you girls are.” His voice was sincere but immeasurably sad.
Tina was seated across the aisle from us, her head bowed over a marked-up map of Colorado, but at this she looked up, cocking her head curiously at me. Carl sounded like he was about to cry.
“Oh,” I said unsteadily. “I guess. I mean, we’re just doing what anyone would do in our situation.”
“No,” Carl said forcibly, “not what anyone would do.” He exhaled hard, his nostrils flaring like he was remembering something unpleasant, and opened his eyes. “I served. And when I came back, I wasn’t okay for a long time.”
The airplane was gaining speed, bumping and skidding along. I always hated this part. It never felt like we were moving fast enough, for long enough, to actually lift into the air. We hit a pocket of something as the plane nosed into the sky, and Carl’s hand flew to my wrist.
“Sorry,” he said, giving the back of my hand an apologetic pat.
Across the aisle, Tina was studying the map again, but she was also chewing her lower lip like she was trying not to smile.
* * *
On the way to Glenwood Springs, the site of The Defendant’s second escape, we drove by the Pitkin County Courthouse, the site of his first. We wanted to see for ourselves the window from which he leaped during a recess in his pretrial hearing for the murder of Caryn Campbell. Over the years, I’ve read accounts that claim it was the third floor from which he daringly absconded. But I was there, and it was the second floor. People always want to make him more than he was.
“It’s nine? Ten feet?” Carl estimated as he wrote it down.
“I would have fucking jumped too if I got the chance,” Tina said. “What were they thinking, leaving him alone in there?”
In just a few months I’d be in law school, where I would be warned against exploiting my knowledge to make the weaker argument strong, taught that was a technique only sophists employ. From that introductory course of civil procedure onward, I’ve nurtured a slow-burning contempt against every member of law enforcement and the legal profession who went on to suggest that The Defendant’s move to represent himself was all a part of his master plan. That he had worked out his argument to the judge—free rein at the law library as a constitutional right—ahead of filing the pro se motion. That he was always ten steps ahead.
There is substantive evidence that points to no plan at all, points to nothing but ego as his predominant guiding force. Representing himself was always about the appearance of education, of calibrated, strategic thinking. The opportunity to escape arose as a by-product of the status-obsessed actions of a man who failed out of the only third-rate law school that would take him, and then, instead of working harder, he cheated and lied his way back into the classroom, taking a spot from someone who actually deserved it.