Part V about Amanda Jo Stott-Smith and her children. Part I here; II, here; III, here, IV, here
Two weeks ago, I received emails from both Ken Hadley, defense attorney for Amanda Stott-Smith, and John Casalino, the DA who is prosecuting the case against her. Both wanted to let me know Amanda would be in court that morning, for another settlement hearing. For those who have not followed the news, or the story here: Amanda is charged with aggravated murder and attempted aggravated murder, stemming from her forcing her two children off Portland's Sellwood Bridge last May 23; her son, four-year-old Eldon, drowned; his seven-year-old sister survived. The aggravated murder charges meant, if the case went to trial, Amanda would face the possibility of the death penalty.
"There probably won't be much to see," Hadley told me. I told him, I wanted to go anyway. I have been writing steadily about Amanda since May 24 of last year, but had not seen her since her last court appearance, in June. That time it had been a zoo, of cameras and reporters and people needing to meet that day's deadline. They've all been gone for months. I've stayed. I have no idea if Amanda will be in court today but I will go anyway.
I get to the courtroom a little early. There is no one there but the attorneys; an investigator, and a woman with pale red hair. We sit quietly in the courtroom, beneath magisterially high ceilings, and walls hung with oil portraits of Alexander Hamilton, of George Washington. It is so quiet, we can hear all the gears of the trucks passing five stories below. I know the investigator, casually, and say hello. I ask the woman with red hair, whom I realize is Amanda's aunt, if I may speak with her in the hall. She will not face to me; says only, "I have nothing to say to you." I tell her, I don't want to interview her; I'd only like to give her my card. "I don't want it," she says.
I go back to my row. We sit in the quiet some more. The door to the courtroom opens. Two sheriff's deputies enter, holding Amanda by the arms. She is wearing French blue pants and top, like doctors' scrubs, a bit of coral-pink peeping at her shirt collar. Her hair is past her waist, and worn in a thick braid. She passes within five feet of me, a woman who has been on my mind every day for nearly a year. She is walked past; she sees her aunt; she begins to cry. The deputies lead Amanda to a seat, on the other side of the partition, behind the defense and prosecutor's tables and in front of us. She turns once to her aunt, who quietly gives Amanda her support.
Amanda faces forward. She has chains around her waist, her ankles, her wrists, but if there is a person who does not present a flight risk, it is the 32-year-old woman before us. Her body, heavier now than it was in June, appears to be trying to hunch in on itself; she looks pitched between deflation and anxiety, and very docile. She meets my eye, briefly. There is very little room, figuratively, to transmit anything. I am doing what I have always said I want to do; what I have told Amanda in my letters I want to do: just sit with her. That's all we can do, as humans, I think, when it comes to death, or at least all we can do for a while, just sit quietly with the bereaved.
Ah, I hear it - I hear you. She is the bereaved? Yes. I believe that. More on that later.
Ken Hadley is right; very little happens. The lawyers walk in and out of judge's chambers; they confer together and separately in every possible combination. Amanda's aunt is brought to judge's chambers. I speak for 15 minutes, in low tones, with the investigator. I tell her, it's always hard for me to get certain types of information, such as medical records and previous court record. I commend the investigator's fat sheaf; I tell her, I am jealous...
"You'll get to hear a lot of this in the future," she says, and also that, I must remember, she works for the defendant, who signs off on confidential information being released.
Forty-five minutes after the hearing began, it is over; nothing, so far as I can see, has transpired. But as I walk out with Ken Hadley, I feel his heaviness and sense his distraction.
I come home and stare all afternoon at a few pages I've been trying to write. They should have taken 45 minutes. All they have to say is, "This book is about; here's the thrust, here's the outline." This, to insert into the 75-page book proposal I have written about Amanda and what happened on May 23; what happened in the micro, and the macro; what it means. A friend who read the manuscript says I need this "definitive statement of purpose," so that is what I am trying to do. And the reason it has not taken 45 minutes; the reason what I have before me is the opposite of Orwell's window pane, is that the writing keeps slipping from why everyone else should be transfixed with this story, to why I am; to why I have stayed. I keep pushing open the door, and back it springs. I see myself as inside the calla lily; it's not open yet.
In her 2008 nonfiction book, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, about the murder investigation of a Victorian boy Eldon Smith's age, Kate Summerscale writes:
“Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional – to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes from us the presence of death.”
To me, this seems exactly right. It is a puzzle, one that unlikely people have pieces to. Some find you and they know the most amazing and generous things. Some people have pieces and will not give them to you, because they are so wounded, they want it all to go away. And how dare you, how dare you seek to bring this all out? Haven't we had enough? Don't you realize you are hurting us? They do not say this out loud, but you hear it. I have also been told, on this blog, that I might find the grace to leave this story alone. My response to that is unwavering: is is better for this boy to have died and that no one learn anything? That people, in their impotence and rage, call Amanda "evil, pure and simple" (and much worse) and wish her dead and then walk away? Who does this help? And how have we honored anybody? So no, I don't think it is better not to examine what's happened; to not relieve of us uncertainty. I think we have had one tragedy; it ought not be compounded by never speaking of it again.
Yesterday morning, I received another email from Ken Hadley. Amanda, he said, was switching her plea, from "not guilty" to "guilty"; she would be in court a little after two; he predicted it would be a media zoo.
It is. The hall, in contrast to two weeks before, is packed, with Amanda's family, with the press; with many members of both legal teams. I watch Amanda's mother, in a pretty gray A-line skirt and black boots, her long hair loose; she looks like a schoolgirl, or perhaps someone who teaches schoolgirls. The red-haired woman is there, other family members. I approach no one. The cameras are let into the courtroom first. Then the family, then the press. Four of us are moved into a row on the other side of the partition, just behind the defense table. I sit next to the Oregonian's lead crime reporter, a woman who files something like three stories a day. I express my admiration; tell her, it's the first time the press has been back on Amanda's story since last summer.
And then, without warning, Amanda is brought in. She barely resembles the woman of two weeks earlier. Today, she looks as though she were going to a party, in a black velvet top and pants, with her hair loose and shiny. But that is not the striking difference. The striking difference is her face, which today is calm. Her face last time was blotched, and bloated. Today, she glows. Her almond eyes are at rest. I think, she's done what she needed to do, she needed to admit it.
As soon as Amanda is seated, Jason Smith and several family members and his lawyer enter. They sit just behind us. I have met them before, in a different courtroom, an encounter I might characterize as a debacle but will not write about here except to say, despite the bizarre and volatile nature of our first meeting, Jason had been cordial to me, and I appreciated it. Today, there will be no communication. It is a terrible day. I will learn, later, that he has had no contact with Amanda since she killed their son, and tried to kill their daughter. He, they, the families find themselves in a nightmare that no family can anticipate, and from which there is no waking up. There may be moving on, if in increments, and we are all grateful to hear, his daughter is doing very well. I know this from people who know her, and have told me, she is an amazing child, full of courage and friendly and beautiful. Yes.
As Amanda sits between her attorneys, as the gallery stays nearly silent, the lawyers disappear into various rooms, whisper to Amanda, to Jason, to each other. We again listen to the trucks outside; watch a tunnel of sunlight appear, brighten the floor, recede. And then it is four o'clock, and we are told to all rise.
The judge enters. Casalino explains that Amanda is changing her plea; that she is pleading guilty to Count 1, aggravated murder, which means she will serve a life sentence, with the possibility of parole after 30 years. Pleading guilty to Count 6, attempted aggravated murder, carries a sentence of ten years, five of which will be served concurrently. Casalino says that he, Jason, and the two detectives in attendance support this plea. Amanda's attorneys concur. Then it is time for the judge to ask Amanda: did she read the petition?
"Yes," says Amanda.
Is that her signature on it?
"Yes."
Did her attorneys explain the implications?
"Yes."
Does her taking of the prescription medication Abilify in any way hamper her ability to proceed?
"No."
t is determined that Amanda had made a "clear-headed, reasoned decision," and that her lawyers are proceeding with "no reservations." The judge explains to Amanda that she does not have to plead guilty and thereby give up her right to a jury trial, and the opportunity to or not to testify; that she has "rights and options." At every turn, Amanda calmly replies, she is aware of what she was doing; she knows that by pleading guilty and forgoing a trial (also, the possibility of being sentenced to death), her recourse is "very, very limited." She knows, yes.
The judge asks Amanda to rise; this, though formal sentencing will not be until next week. Amanda rises. Asked how she pleads to Count 1, she says, "I am guilty." To Count 6, "I am guilty." Her voice does not crack, she remains composed, and because she is facing away from us, I do not until the next day see, on video, that she closes her eyes when the judge recounts the date of the incident, the children's names, their ages. The judge asks, in conclusion, whether Amanda has done these things. Amanda opens her eyes. "Yeah."
And then Amanda is on her feet, being walked by a deputy to judge's chamber, she was walking right past me, taking tiny mincing steps like a geisha, and I see it is because she is wearing black shiny high-heeled sandals, the silver chains around her ankles looking like jewelry, and then she is gone.
The courtroom clears, Jason's attorney telling him as they leave, "You don't have to talk to anyone." The room empties quickly, so quickly, except for one woman in the back row, smiling as she comes towards me, and it is such an odd occurrence, to be in a courtroom on this story and have someone smiling, but I can't place the woman, perhaps because I am trying not to cry.
"It's Pati," she says, and I throw my arms around her. She is the woman who called 9-1-1 when the children landed in the water, so close to her patio. I have spoken to her many times; we have gone out with our husbands. She is part of this story, part of how I am trying to tell the story, how a story like this tentacles out and affects us all, if we let it, and how do we not let it?
By six that night, the Oregonian writer has written and posted her story. I'm amazed. But then, I know, we are writing different stories.
Today, this morning, is a hard day. I cry intermittently. I know that in the year I have spent thinking and writing about Amanda, of talking to people whose lives were impacted if not ruined by what she did, who were there that night and who knew Eldon, I have paved a way to Amanda. Not yet in person, but beyond the vale; that somehow our membranes have eclipsed. This, though what she did is to me so ghastly; just the thought of my having done this to my child when she was four, makes me feel as though the world has no floor.
And still I think, as I walk throughthe morning, look at all this space all around me, all this air, how high the sky; Amanda has none of this. She will never have it again. I walk into my bank. My banker asks, "How are you?" and I start to cry. She takes a tissue box from a shelf, which makes me wonder whether a lot of people cry in her office; she is a very sympathetic gal. And then I try to explain, that I know how horrific this story is, but how can it be better not to tell it? How can we do that? How can we let the act, Eldon's death, how Amanda got to where she did, just be put away?
"And then people don't learn anything," she says. "They just learn to hate more because they understand less."
I drive to CostCo -- because you see, my life goes on -- and I know, I know from the way she closed her eyes, that Amanda has already lived through the worst anyone can. She broke her own heart, she broke it and smashed and stood up and let the world hate her. What else can we do that she has not done to herself?
I may be a fool. I may not have the skill, or the fortitude, or the creative mind to take what I have found, and have sought, and continue to be given, and put the pieces together so that it hurts less, but I am going to try.
Part VI, here
