Authors: Maggie Nelson
The Red Parts (6 page)
The list could have ended there, and perhaps explained something. But it went on:
Looking over this list, I realize I cannot include it in
Jane.
In fact, I can barely share it with my friends, much less with strangers. I learn quickly that it does not make good cocktail conversation. Not only that, but it explains virtually nothing.
In all the permutations of murder mind that I had experienced, I had never imagined a scenario involving a child. Now I found myself pacing the Ponderosa Room in my bathrobe late at night with my thoughts swirling strangely and dreadfully around the question of how a four-year-old boy might have “come into contact” with Jane’s body. Or more specifically, how a drop of his blood could have ended up on the back of her hand.
I read this story yesterday and I’m still banging my head against the wall
, writes a blogger on a criminal law Web site, responding to an article announcing the double DNA match in Jane’s case.
At a hearing in May 2005, a judge will ask Hiller how the state plans on explaining the presence of Ruelas’s blood in trial.
There’s a world of possibilities
, Hiller will say.
Name one
, the judge will snap back.
THE BIG MOVIE playing all season at the theater in downtown Middletown is
Seed of Chucky
, the fifth installment of a string of slasher comedies about a killer doll. Daily I pass by its poster, which features a bloodstained toddler in a striped shirt and white overalls, his demented face held together by stitches. I almost want to go see it.
EVENTUALLY other bloggers, some as far away as Australia or the U.K., start to weigh in:
Perhaps the 4 year old was indeed at the crime scene somehow. Or, perhaps the profile identification is a false hit. In the former case, it is spooky and tragic; in the latter it is, perhaps, a crack in the idea that DNA (done right) is infallible.
Interesting, and ultimately depressing, story … As for what could be an apparent 4 year old co-murderer, that might almost make an interesting anthology. Here’s the scenario, what is each writer’s solution? The fact that it’s twisted enough for me to even have that thought depresses me even more.
Something does not seem right in this reopening of her murder.
The defense agrees. It will argue that the reason why there is no discernible link between Leiterman, Ruelas, and Jane is that there is none—save the fact that genetic samples from all three people were being processed in the same DNA laboratory over the same period of time in early 2002. It’s true: bloody clothing from Ruelas’s 2002 murder of his mother was being tested in the Lansing lab on at least one of the same days that an analyst was working on the blood droplet scraped off Jane’s hand in 1969. And individual samples from Leiterman and Ruelas were both brought into the lab in early 2002 under a new Michigan law that went into effect on January 1, 2002, which required all convicted felons—violent and nonviolent alike—to provide DNA samples to CODIS.
One too many coincidences
, Leiterman’s lawyer will say.
All spring I meticulously cut out articles from the
New York Times
about DNA lab scandals in Houston, in Maryland. In the Houston lab some evidence was stored so poorly that one observer saw blood leaking out of a cardboard evidence box after a heavy rain. Laboratory contamination seems a more likely—not to mention a more wholesome—scenario than any of the others I can imagine.
The boy was forced to watch. The boy witnessed it, inadvertently. Somehow the boy was forced to take part in it. He was forced to cause harm. The boy shed blood; maybe there was a fight. Maybe the boy was hurt and bleeding before he arrived at the scene. Leiterman knew his family, and he killed her at their house. For some reason the boy was in his car. The boy was wandering, on his own, and came across Jane’s body in the cemetery. The boy stood above her dead or dying body, horrified, confused, uncomprehending, as a single drop of blood dripped from his nose onto her hand.
Eventually I make a rule that I can only think about “the Ruelas question”—sometimes referred to as the “lost boy theory”—while swimming laps in the university pool. It seems right to think about it underwater.
Here’s the scenario, what is each writer’s solution?
Something does not seem right in this reopening of her murder.
At my mother’s and stepfather’s, up the dark hill. Emily and her much-older boyfriend are making out in the basement. He yells upstairs to my mother, “I’m finger-fucking your daughter”—my mother doesn’t make him leave. I yell something about there being more discipline in the home. But I yell too loudly, and Mom is frail—she has a heart attack in Emily’s room. I yell to Emily, “Call 911.” Mom’s on the floor now, I’m cradling her. Instead of calling 911, Emily asks her, “Do you want to go out to a club?” She thinks this is hilarious; I’m furious that she isn’t helping. I know her boyfriend is violent, I know he’s hit my sister, so I let him punch me in the face, just to prove I’m not afraid. “You don’t scare me,” I say, then do some aikido on him, which shrinks him into a little boy.
E
MILY LEFT FOR her freshman year of boarding school pregnant. Our mother did not know this, nor did Emily herself, until she was throwing up with regularity in her morning chemistry class. We discussed the situation on the phone—she from the pay phone in her new dorm, me still in the basement.
Imagine how surprised Mom would be if the baby came out white instead of black
, she laughed roughly. Her nineteen-year-old boyfriend was black, but she figured that the responsible party was more likely the oldest son of a (white) friend of our mother’s—a good-looking, skinny kid who had purportedly punched his equally skinny, glassine mother in the stomach on more than one occasion. One night over at their house for dinner, while my mother and her friend exchanged confidences over wine upstairs, Emily had sex with the boy on the lower bunk bed in his bedroom while, in the adjacent room, his younger, much less good-looking brother threw frogs from his frog collection at my legs in an attempt to stun them.
That means he likes you
, their mother winked at me when the four of us finally surfaced for dinner, Emily rumpled, me with mud-spattered calves.
I found the secret of Emily’s pregnancy hard to keep. She seemed to be hoping that within time the problem would just go away. She was also dropping a lot of acid, and I worried that the fetus was becoming a kind of spangled, brain-damaged alien.
Eventually she told our mother; eventually there was an abortion. I don’t remember anything about that weekend except that when they got home from the doctor Emily bolted out of the car holding her stomach, ran into the house and straight to her bedroom, her face red and bloated from tears.
By the spring she had been expelled, having racked up three “major incidents” at a school with a three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy.
It turned out that my mother and her husband could also keep a secret, for just a few months later, they ambushed Emily and sent her to a “lockdown” institution in Utah called the Provo Heritage School for Girls. It was a decision my mother now admits may have been a mistake. PHS was a Mormon outfit, replete with surveillance cameras and forlorn inmates who were disallowed forks and knives at mealtimes but permitted to spend hours teasing one another’s hair and corrupting one another with outlandish stories of what they’d done to land themselves there. We visited Emily there once, and I came home thoroughly spooked by the image of a tribe of girls in garish makeup and pajamas trotting around the parking circle for exercise under the shadow of the pink and blue Rockies, which stood in a ring around the school like a final, majestic corroboration of their imprisonment.
Emily spent two years at PHS, came home “reformed,” enrolled in a local high school, and got a job scooping ice cream. All the while she was making plans to run away with two bad-seed girls she’d hooked up with in Provo. One afternoon about two months later, when Emily was sixteen, they stole my mother’s light blue Honda Accord, spray-painted TO HELL OR BUST in black on its side, shaved their heads bald, and hit the road.
First they made a failed, halfhearted attempt to liberate the other girls at PHS, which mostly involved driving around the parking circle, honking in celebration of their freedom. Then they pushed east, hoping to make it as far as the East Village in New York. But they ran out of money in Chicago and had to hole up there for some time, living as skinheads out of my mother’s car and on the streets. Eventually a private investigator named “Hal” my mother hired to track them down apprehended them at a Chicago Dunkin’ Donuts popular with runaways. “Hal” accompanied them in handcuffs on the plane back to California and delivered them straight to juvenile hall.
While driving to see Emily in juvenile hall at Christmastime, I felt anxious but excited. I hadn’t seen her for months, and I had desperately missed our camaraderie, our alliance against our mother’s new marriage, our sworn fidelity to our dead father.
There was a lot I didn’t miss too. The slammed doors, the covert washing of sex-stained sheets, the
get-away-from-me-you’re-not-my-fucking-father
scenes. And while there were certain movies Emily and I both loved and watched obsessively together—
Liquid Sky, Suburbia, Repo Man
—she also had a taste for darker things. For a time she and her friends were into a series of snuff/pseudo-snuff films called
Faces of Death
, which played in the TV room in our shared basement whenever she passed through the house. Just one frame of a
Faces of Death
film was enough to turn my stomach and rot my mind for weeks.
One might think that as fledgling teenagers we would have found ourselves more interested in sex than in death. But we had—or at least Emily had—seemingly exhausted of sex movies, probably from a year or so of unlimited softcore on Showtime at our father’s house. Those movies didn’t rot my mind, but they still made me feel guilty and scared. I would crawl to the bottom of Emily’s bed while she watched them with friends or babysitters, becoming a small lump under enough covers to ensure that I wouldn’t be able to see any of the action or hear any of the cries, even though I knew, or at least suspected, that they were cries of pleasure. It felt important to be there, to be in the room. I guess I didn’t want to be alone.
In juvenile hall I first saw Emily behind glass, playing pool with a red bandanna wrapped around her bald head. Her eyes looked bombed-out and vacant. I barely recognized her. After we were buzzed in, she pretended not to see me.
This moment inaugurated a sea change. I came home that night and made my own promise, which I recorded in my diary: I would never care about my sister again. I would never care where she was, if she was lost or found, if she lived or if she died.
I remained grateful, however, for some simple, practical things that she had taught me. How to French-inhale, where to buy bidis, the thin, eucalyptus-leaf cigarettes that I loved, how to draw eyeliner along your inner lids. Emily had told me that all you had to do to get on the pill was complain to a gynecologist that your periods were “irregular,” so I did that. I liked my freedom and my anonymity. I had no interest in being shipped away. I got good grades and flew under the radar. Eventually I thought my sister was crazy, or just stupid, to have done so many bad things in plain sight. Even stealing my mother’s car seemed too close to home.
