Nancy Rommelmann

Evening's Empire

My review of Zachary Lazar's memoir, Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder, appears in the Sunday Oregonian. It's about vice and real estate, the awakening to the rot that was the early 60s, about getting away with murder. Lazar had to have a steady hand to still what he needed to long enough to get it down on paper, to wit:

Beneath it all runs the blood that brought Lazar to his task, blood and purpose exposed as he recalls watching his mother the moment she is told her husband's body has been found:

"(S)he was sitting on the couch, bowing and rising like a marionette, or as though someone was shoving her from behind, only to yank her back upright with her blouse in his fist. When she looked at me, she screamed, her face distorted. The scream was angry, personal, insane."

Profile of a Defense Attorney

Hi! Remember me? I remember you, and fondly, and think about you more than you know, and how remiss I have been. I have no good excuse, but for work, and travel for work, and making travel plans for Panama, and Tulsa. Oh, and I do have swine flu right now, which might cut me a little break.

Anyway.

As readers know, I have been writing for some time about Amanda Jo Stott-Smith, the mother accused of forcing her two young children off the Sellwood Bridge here in Portland on May 23. I am in the process of putting together a book about this incident, and the people I have come into contact with, by design and though kismet, is extraordinary. One of whom I've pursued, spent a great deal of time with and will spend more time with, is Stott-Smith's defense attorney Kenneth Hadley, whose only clients are those facing the death penalty. Some job, huh? While I know Hadley will have good deal more room in the book, in the meantime, I have written a profile of him for the Oregonian. It runs tomorrow, cover of the Sunday Metro section, which, as my editor said, is the second-best piece of real estate in the paper, after Sunday A1.

The Monstrousness of Empathy

Two weeks ago, a colleague’s seventeen-year-old daughter was found murdered in her car in downtown Los Angeles. At first, the police said death occurred from head trauma; that someone or something had caused Lily Burk to slam her head into the inside door panel with such forced that it killed her. People read this within hours of Lily being found, both because bad news travels fast and because Lily’s father is a well-known Los Angeles journalist, and other journalists, myself included, were pushing the story forward. We passed on this information nearly as soon as we heard it, via email, blogging, the web, editorials, Twitter and telephone. The people to whom we transmitted this information could be expected to do something with it.

But transmission was not the first thing I did. The first thing I did was say, no. No, this did not happen, in broad daylight, to the child of someone I know, a child who’d attended school with my daughter; a child I saw walk for six years through the school parking lot with her mother, no. Then I got into the shower and cried. I cried for any fear Lily faced and told her how sorry I was she’d had to, and I cried for her parents, knowing the floor of the world had dropped from under them; that they were now falling through space or doing their best to not fall through space but what was there to hold on to? I imagined them wanting to reel back a day, to when their daughter was safe, or even to the time of their panic of not knowing where she was, the time of action, of phoning (we would learn) the cellular company, the credit card company, the police, trying to draw a bead on Lily, seeing she was moving further east. I imagined they would choose to stay within that panic forever rather than learn what they learned the following morning: that during much of their time of action, their child was dead. Though I don’t imagine you’d want to live in the place of not knowing very long; since becoming a parent I’ve thought it would be worse to not know what was happening to your child, to be suspended in that terror. We’ve all seen the TV news shows where the mother’s voice breaks; the five-year-old was just playing in front of the house, she says; she was just riding her bike and we never saw her again, that was twelve years ago.

I did not, in those first minutes, think of vengeance, and did not think Lily’s parents would be. I thought: there’s no room yet to include others. The wound, for a very short time, was only theirs.

And then it was ours, the wound was spread open and disseminated and, later, torn open by as many people who wanted to be part of it. This was for me where the problem began.

I was part of the problem. I do not well enough know how to sit on my hands, and shortly after reading about Lily, posted a short piece, a few paragraphs, on a well-read media website in Los Angeles. I had qualms not about the writing, but the posting. I felt as though I were barging into the room of a patient who’d suffered third degree burns, moving close to the bed despite knowing my touch might infect him, even one breath. I had not seen Lily or her parents in years; I had not known them well. What was I doing here?

I posted it anyway.

People started to forward what I’d written. I received acknowledgment. I received an email from a writer, a woman extremely friendly with the family who said she was thankful I’d written because she couldn’t express what she was feeling; that what happened to Lily “makes me want to put my own daughters back inside my body.”

I passed along that sentence to three people. I may have used it, later, in a blog post. But I stood back from writing anymore about Lily; I didn’t think it was my place; within a day there were so many people writing about her, classmates, local publications, national, international. Her death was on the TV news.

An excellent local Los Angeles crime reporter within the week gave us hard facts, very hard facts to swallow. Lily had spent several hours with the killer; she had called her parents twice asking how to get cash from an ATM machine with her credit card, and when they asked her why, she said she wanted to buy shoes. They told her the card wasn’t set up that way, and to come home. Videos taken at the ATM machine show her nonetheless trying to get money, the killer beside her, and other customers coming or going. Lily does not shout. She does not grab a bystander’s arm. She does not say, “Help me.” There was speculation online that the reason she did not do these things is because her mother is an attorney who’s done work on behalf of the homeless. That Lily, a National Merit scholar, a thespian, a writer, was herself to work this summer with the homeless, and that she was not scared of the things, the situation, the person many of us would be scared of.

She met this man near the campus of the law school where her mother is a professor; her mother had asked her to pick up some papers she needed. Lily picked them up, and while leaving, was approached by the man, at around two in the afternoon. By five, we learned, he’d driven her car, with her in the passenger seat, to a downtown LA parking lot. By 5:30, the police picked up Charlie Samuel several blocks away, for drinking a beer in public and having on his person a crack pipe. He also had the keys to Lily’s Volvo, and her cell-phone. Lily was found the following morning in the car. Her throat had been slit.

This is when I started to think of vengeance. I lay in bed for two nights, not sleeping very easily, trying to come up with what I would do with Charlie Samuel. I came up with taking him up in a small plane, flying him over the ocean, twenty or thirty miles offshore. And then opening the door and pushing him out; I accounted for his trying to take with him the person doing the pushing by harnessing the person to the inside of the plane. Samuel would not survive the fall, but if by some miracle he did, it would be pleasant to think of his terror in knowing, he had no chance to get back to shore. He was there alone. Maybe he would cry. And shortly, he would drown, or be eaten; in any event, he would eventually be eaten, and I surmised that in this way, Samuel, who’d been arrested ten times and had recently been released from prison, would be doing something beneficial. He would be feeding the fish.

This is a twist on the penal colony in the middle of the ocean fantasies I often have. And these penal colonies, I learn a few days later after mentioning my plane-drop solution to an attorney, exist today. But the attorney disagrees with my slapping culpability on Samuel, not because he, Samuel, might be innocent – the police charged him with the crime within 48 hours – but because he thinks, Samuel could not help himself.

This puts me in an uncomfortable position. I am uncomfortable with the idea of taking the teeth out of what I see as justice. I know about sociopaths; I write about them, I read about them; I’ve interviewed them. I dated one. I know about people who break, whether it’s a psychotic break, or they are beaten down, and then commit horrible acts that, when whole they would not have committed. And I understand what the attorney is saying: that if no one shows you how to live, you don’t know how to live.

But, I tell the attorney, I must believe in free will. That Samuel made a choice, and if this is the choice he makes – to slit the throat of a young girl, and within twenty minutes stand on a street corner drinking a beer – then I have no use for him, and I don’t see that anyone else will, ever. The attorney, who defends misdemeanor cases and lesser felonies, says something along the lines of my needing to believe in free will because it helps me organize the world into good and bad, but that the foundation is faulty. And that, he does not believe Samuel had any experiences to tell him not to do as he did.

 I like the attorney, I like him a lot, but I think he’s wrong.

I come home and look at the story I am writing, about a mother who threw her two children off a bridge in the middle of the night. Her four-year-old drowned. I have not yet met this mother, a woman one might say, today, is the opposite of Lily’s mother. This, though both have been pilloried and pitied in the press. Do you think Lily’s mother was not blamed for her child’s death? Do you imagine there was not, within hours of the story breaking, an anonymous woman online blaming Lily’s mother for asking her daughter to run an errand? When I read this comment, I wanted to find the woman; I wanted to pin her with my eyes and ask, in a menacing way: this is your solution? To smack the parent who has just found out her daughter has been murdered? I wanted the woman to feel shame.

I found myself wanting to shame a woman I had never met, wanting to kill a man, because within days of Lily’s murder, I was one of a great many people who caused themselves to feel impacted by her death. Many of these people felt grief, and impotence; they wanted a place to go. A Facebook page dedicated to Lily’s memory has, today, 2,758 members. The ripples spread exponentially, people feeling personally involved, writing on blogs and such that they did not know Lily or her family, but they have kids; they live in LA; they drive by the law school, and they were just so, so sorry. People needed to move a little closer to the incident, to more feel the impact of her death. As I type this, an email comes through from a mother touched by Lily’s tragedy; can I help her get a message to Lily’s parents? I send her to the Facebook page.

Meanwhile, Lily’s parents say nothing after that first day, after they expressed their love and loss, nothing until yesterday, at a gathering in memory of their child.

“She could see right into our souls without even thinking about it, and she loved us anyway,” said her father.

“Her absence empties the world for me,” said her mother.

I knew this; knew it upon hearing of Lily’s murder. Knew because, for several years after my daughter’s birth, I would infrequently wake in the night weeping uncontrollably, waking with what seemed to be cobwebby star-stuff still around me, as though I had just been transported from deep space, where the truth had been revealed: the only important thing, the only endless thing, was my love for my child. I’d been imprinted with the information that she had placed me on a continuum, a cable I previously knew nothing about, could know nothing about, but which I now knew was infinite.

The day Lily’s parents found out their child was gone; I knew the cable in their hands had gone slack. They were holding it but it didn’t lead anywhere. I didn’t know how they could go on, or how we were supposed to support them.

I thought I would send coffee. My husband is a coffee roaster and when people are sick or hurting, I sometimes give them coffee beans. I printed a shipping label. I tried to write a postcard expressing my condolences; I tore it in half. I tried again. I asked my daughter to sign it, and to include the year she graduated from the school she and Lily attended. She did, but I saw she didn’t like doing it; she knew it wasn’t meaningful.

The label and postcard sat in the same place for a day, two days. It sat there for a week. I decided I could not send the coffee, because every time her father drank the coffee, he might think, I am drinking this only because my child has been murdered. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t impose myself.

Last week in Newsweek, James Ellroy wrote about Lily, whom he’d met once. Ellroy is a very good writer; he knows how to memorialize, and because I thought his piece showed some truth, I tweeted it. More than any other piece I’ve linked, others picked this one up; again, Lily’s story was spreading; again, people were moved, if not everyone.

“It’s madness and blather,” emailed a friend, of the Ellroy piece. She thought he had intruded on Lily’s death, for his own reasons. I saw it her way. I have read Ellroy’s books; know of his mother’s murder; know how he ingests other tragedies, other murders, and regurgitates them as narrative. That he might be said to be greedy for grief, and at this point, I don’t think he can help it, or would want to.

I think about tattooing on my arm, “It’s not about you,” because I am afraid I do the same thing; that I’ve done it just now.

Unthinkable *

I received an email this morning alerting me to the murder of Lily Burk, 17. I thought, Lily, Greg's daughter? No, no...

Yes. I am not going to detail it. I am going to say that I got in the shower and wept. I was not very close with Greg, but he was on staff at the LA Weekly, where I was writing, and we interacted. I also saw him or his wife, who I never saw not smiling, nearly every weekday morning for five years, because our daughters were schoolmates in Hollywood. Lily was two years younger than my daughter, petite, a smiler like her mother, with waist-length hair and a bouncy step.

I wrote an email this morning to a dear friend, a mutual friend of Greg's and mine, and said, it's as though we -- LA journos with kids the same age -- are part of the same fishnet, and this has come along and ripped out part of it, irrevocably. It's wrecked people's lives, and the rest of us look at what's happened in horror, but there's nothing we can do to fix it, we can only say how sorry we are and also, that Lily is remembered.

*An arrest has been made

Janet Malcolm on Journalists

The opening and close of The Journalist and the Murderer (which I realize is twenty years old, but I just read it yesterday):

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse... on reading the article or book in question, he [the subject] has to face the fact that the journalist--who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully,  remarkably attuned to his vision of things--never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own."

“What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self-absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists… human nature guarantees that willing subjects will never be in short supply. Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses—the days of the interviews—are over. And still they yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.”

To which I must say, yes; what she says is true. The only defense I can muster is also true: I nearly always walk into a story with no or very little set opinion about the subject, and so can say, when I am talking with him, interviewing him, hoping he will trust me with his story, I am in empathy with him; I am trying to see it his way, because thus far, it's the only view I am getting. I do not lie and say, to the murderer, "Oh, yes; I'd have done the same thing," but I can often in truth say, I see why you did it and why it made sense to you. It is later, I think, once you have finished the interviews, once you start to look around at the parts he has not told you, when you start to breathe life into the piece, that the betrayal, and I think that is the right word, can and often does begin.

From what I've read, when Malcolm published this (first in the New Yorker, then as a book), other journalists went ape-shit, saying they would never act in the way she claims. More honest writers, however, knew just what she meant, amongst them Susan Orlean, who "endorsed Malcolm's thesis as a necessary evil." Yes.

The Mom Next to You

Part IV about Amanda Jo Stott-Smith and her children. Part I here; II, here; III, here.

In the early hours of May 23, Amanda Jo Stott-Smith forced her two young children off the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon. Her seven-year-old daughter Trinity survived the 75-foot fall and, after more than a half-hour in the water, was rescued by two Good Samaritans.

Eldon Smith, her four-year-old brother, did not make it. By the time rescuers found the boy, he had drowned. This very public death has had public repercussions; newspaper editorials wonder what could have been done and what might be done now. Portland flew its flag at half-staff in honor of Eldon, and there’s debate amongst city commissioners as to how to pay for a new rescue boat.

Eldon’s former preschool did not acknowledge his death, or not more than sending home an email to class parents. Perhaps the administration was trying to protect the kids; perhaps the silence was a bid at self-preservation; maybe they felt they should have known more. But I am looking at pictures of the kids in Eldon’s class, seventeen smiling four- and five-year-olds, and Eldon is smiling, too, showing his baby teeth, and there is no way to tell, from this photo, that he will be the child that’s soon murdered.

“There hung an awkwardness in the air today, as adults gave fake half-grins to each other, slowly greeting each child to the last day of preschool.” 

This comment posted to my blog at 10:40 PM, the day after my first piece about Stott-Smith and her children. It came from a woman whose son had been Eldon’s best friend. The woman, who I will call Sarah, was disturbed by what she’d seen at preschool. Also, at the treatment Stott-Smith was receiving on blogs and in the press, people calling for her public execution and branding her a monster.

“She has stood right next to me. If she is so evil, why couldn’t I tell? And if she’s not evil, what ‘broke in her’? ‘Broke in her’ are the words my homicide detective-friend used to try to help me make sense of it all (everyone should have one of these kids of friends) …  As disgusted, and horrified, and frightened as I am by what she did, I can’t bring myself to believe she was evil. That seems too easy.”

I wrote to Sarah, to say I agreed it was too easy, and we became, via email, two women going down to the river, literally and figuratively, to better make sense of it all. It hurt, Sarah especially, to read random cruelties from people who did not and who did know Stott-Smith, including one from another mother at Living Savior Preschool, posted to an Oregonian blog and claiming that she “got an immediate gut feeling that she [Stott-Smith] was a very bizarre woman - her behavior was very strange.”

“At the church, any parent out of a particular box, that would have been noticeable,” said Sarah, of her fellow parent’s comment. “All these people can write these comments after she’s done this thing. Well, if they felt she was evil and creepy, why didn’t they go and intervene beforehand? They should have been concerned for the kids if they thought she was that bad.” 

Before Sarah, blond with watchful eyes, leaves for summer vacation with her two children – a 12-year-old daughter and five-year-old Stefan (not his real name) – we meet for coffee. We talk about coffee. We talk about restaurants. We are both on our feet to rush after a two-year-old who’s slipped from her mother and run out the front door.

“My mom was a teenage mom, and I guess I look at it from the perspective of what my childhood was like, and think of Eldon that way,” says Sarah, when we re-seat ourselves. “I had the mom who was very immature, and sporadic, and violent, and screaming, and trying to keep me from my dad when they divorced. And I keep thinking, my god, my mom was probably not much more different than Eldon’s mom. And I could have been, maybe under a different circumstance, thrown off a bridge.”

Sarah’s voice is even; she is not asking for special consideration. The steadiness of her eyes, the stillness of her hands in her lap, says she is on to the next part of her life; I know she lives a good life, with her husband, in Lake Oswego. She will ask, later, that I do not make her mother out to be a villain; that those times have passed.

“My mom’s grown-up now, and she’s wonderful and an amazing grandmother,” she says. “But as a teenager, having a little kid – she was ostracized by her parents, and my dad left her, and I’m sure I wasn’t always easy and she had no money – you kind of wonder what all those pressures can do.”

Perhaps those pressures are what the mother on the Oregonian blog referred; maybe she saw the cracks. Sarah doesn’t think so.

“She [Stott-Smith] sat in those meetings just like a normal parent,” she says. “There was a picture of her with him [Eldon] in her lap, on the first day of school. Just like, normal. It was just normal.”

I say to Sarah, she was the mom next to you.

“Yes,” she says. “She was like every parent, suburban mom, driving a station wagon.”

I ask how her son and Eldon became friends. “Stefan didn’t talk about anybody for maybe the first week or two, but then it was clear: he always talked about Eldon,” she says. “You can go into a preschool class and you can observe the boys, and there are those boys that throw themselves on the floor and they make loud noises and they’re jumping all over the place. And then you have boys who are really rules-oriented and quiet and much more reserved and not as rambunctious. My son and Eldon were very much the same, not rambunctious, very calm; very rules-oriented.”

Sarah’s smile loses some of its warmth. “He [Eldon] was so quiet and rules-oriented, it made me wonder if he wasn’t just a classic example of a child who…” She pauses. “You know, when you’re around a parent who’s so incredibly volatile, or you’re being hit, you always try, you walk a very tight and narrow path, and you have to read people quick. So every time he saw his mother, he probably had within an instant to read whether or not this was going to be a good moment, or a bad moment. I’m not surprised about any hitting or any of that, [but] I never saw marks on him or anything like that.”

She takes from her bag a photo of Eldon and Stefan in the Christmas pageant, standing over a cradle holding the baby Jesus, in this incarnation, a Cabbage Patch doll

“So, he’s four,” she says, of Eldon. “His birthday is in August... There were talks about having all the boys over in April, for my son’s birthday, but it never happened.”

Never happened because in the midst of the divorce proceedings with her husband, Stott-Smith pulled Eldon out of school. “That was March,” says Sarah, and that she did not see Eldon again.

And again, she reaches into her purse and takes out a copy of the children’s class pictures. “He was the most adorable, out of the whole class. He’s a cherub,” she says, running her finger over Eldon’s face. “He looks a lot like [his mother]. She has that American Indian or Hawaiian or Polynesian look, and she has that beautiful hair. I still remember what his hair feels like because he had one of those, I wouldn’t say a buzz cut necessarily, but it was… clipped. And I just remember running my hands over his head and he’d have the prickly little feel but it was still soft. I remember doing that because I was so happy to meet him.”

She smiles at the photo, of a boy with big dark round eyes and the apple cheeks of a young child. “Very, very sweet,” she says. “Quiet, very quiet.”

Sarah told her son about Eldon’s death just after she received, as did all the parents in Eldon’s class, an email from the school, informing people what had happened.

“Unfortunately, my husband was leaving for Europe within half an hour of us finding out, and he didn’t want me to tell Stefan, but I didn’t want Stefan to find out at preschool,” she says. “So I waited, and as soon as my husband got in the town car and drove away, I sat down and told Stefan what happened.

“I made it so simple. I said, ‘I have some bad news.’ And he said, ‘Is that why you were crying?’ And I said, ‘Yes. And I just want to let you know that Eldon died and he’s up in heaven’ – because I honestly didn’t know what to say. I said, ‘And he can’t come back.’

“Stefan started crying and he asked what happened, and I said that Eldon drowned in the river. And I didn’t go any further than that; it just seemed pointless… I actually never heard him cry like that. It was so mournful. And he said, ‘Can we write a letter to his mother? I want her to know how much I liked Eldon.’ And it just broke my heart.

“After he’d had a little bit of time to mourn, I said, ‘Did you know, people can get mail in heaven?’ I really didn’t know what I was talking about, but we went and bought roses, and then I walked Stefan to the bridge, and we wrote him [Eldon] a letter, and we released it on these three balloons, and as luck would have it, it went straight up, and looked as if it had just been plucked out of the sky. And then Stefan said, ‘My sadness flew away with the balloons.’

“But I know he is angry, too, because he said, ‘Why did his mom let him swim in the river?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ He goes, ‘Well, why wasn’t she watching him?’ It was very much like: she wasn’t doing her job. And there was nothing I could say.”

Sarah says she does not know how many parents in the class have told their children about Eldon’s death, and does not know because “no one’s ever talked about it or brought it up.” 

“We went to graduation and they had a little carnival for everybody. This was on a Friday [six days after Eldon was killed],” she says, her voice taking on a little steam. “Eldon’s name was taken off the graduation list for the class; there was no mention of it, nobody said anything. When the pastor spoke, there was no mention of, ‘Let’s remember all those who aren’t with us.’ I can see them not mentioning it to the children, but there had to have been at least subtle ways to at least honor the fact that he had been at that school.”

She pauses, seeming to summon some patience before she continues. “At the carnival, I went specifically looking for the photos of Eldon, because I knew we could take whatever photos [from the more than two hundred] we wanted off the wall,” she says. “I thought, there have to be some – because I had seen them before – pictures of Eldon and his mom and other photos of him in the classroom.”

She stops, her eyes asking, can you guess what’s coming? “They had all been removed. He’d been gone, not even a week, and he was erased. Like someone had taken a little eraser and he never existed.”

What prompted such action, what they were afraid of, Sarah has no idea. “It’s not the way I live my life,” she says.

We talk about what I previously wrote; how I thought Stott-Smith had walked the kids onto the bridge. Sarah disagrees.

“I don’t think she walked her children down that bridge,” she says. “I walked my son down that bridge, and it took a long time, dragging a five-year-old. I couldn’t imagine taking him if he were tired. I think she was screaming on the phone with her ex-husband; I think she snapped, I think she just stopped the car right there, and just, in a very short amount of time…”  

She does not finish the sentence. And though it will not be released in the news for ten days, Sarah is correct; Stott-Smith was on the phone with her estranged husband, to whom she’d recently lost custody of the children, crying and telling him, “You’ve taken my joy away” and “Why have you done this to me?” – just before or after the children were forced off the bridge.

“You have to wonder why would anybody throw… what would make that break?” Sarah asks. “Whether it was a series of poor choices, or bad parents, or whatever; she got driven to a point of desperation. And I just feel so sorry for her, because she can’t take it back. And I bet you she has these moments of panic when she opens her eyes in the morning and she just wishes she could backpedal and that it’s not real. But it is real. And she just can’t change it.”

Sarah does not think the murder premeditated. “She [Stott-Smith] didn’t wake up that morning and say; she was going to kill her kids,” she says. “There’s no way she woke up and thought that.”

I tell her, I agree and I don’t. I think, somewhere, the seed of doing what she did took root; she may have been able to ignore it, maybe for a long time, but that day, through the convolution, it was the option that made sense. That this has to be the case, because it happened. Yes, Sarah says, but can there be any other reason except that Stott-Smith sought to destroy herself?

"I don’t think that Eldon’s mom believed that anybody loved her, and I think everything that she loved she threw off the bridge,” she says. “That’s what I really think. She punished herself; she punished her soon to be ex-husband, she punished her parents, she punished life. It’s almost like she threw all her anger, all her sorrow, all her joy, everything; everything that was her; that she actually had. There was nothing left for her but these kids.”
 
I tell Sarah what I learned a few days earlier: that Stott-Smith was over the rail of the ninth-floor parking garage when she was apprehended; that she was falling when a cop grabbed her wrist and dragged her back from where she wanted to go.

"I really believe she had no other choice," says Sarah, as we gather our things. "That's the hair between life and death, and obviously it wasn't meant for her to die. Why? That's what we're hopefully going to find out."

Honeymoon's Over

My first piece for the Oregonian's Sunday Opinion section, "Honeymoon's Over," runs today. When I referred to it last night as "Part 3" of my writings about the Stott-Smith case (part 1, here, part 2, here), my husband said, "But comparatively, light." The lead:

Among Oregon's top news stories in 2003 were those about men who'd killed with such indifference to human suffering, the physical shock of their actions threatened to blow the citizenry right off its pins.

First, there was Christian Longo, convicted of murdering his young son and daughter by tying pillowcases filled with rocks to their ankles, stuffing them into a sleeping bag and throwing them, while still alive, into an inlet on the Oregon coast; his strangled wife and toddler's bodies were found in a nearby bay. Then, there was the ongoing case against Ward Weaver, who eventually would plead guilty to the rape and murder of two adolescent girls, whose bodies, one entombed in concrete, he hid in his yard in Oregon City.

I hadn't read a thing about either of these crimes until I bought a house in Portland that same year. Where, I wondered, was I moving?

On the Bridge

This is part II of a series of writing about Amanda Jo Stott-Smith. Part I is here

I went on Friday to the Sellwood Bridge. I told my husband I was going to buy watermelons, but instead I drove to the bridge. I wanted to see where Amanda Jo Stott-Smith took her children last week and, so far as we know, threw them over. I wrote about this. Today, Sunday, they buried the little boy. I did not attend the funeral because it was private.

But I did go to the bridge. To get there from the east side, you must drive on SE Tacoma Street, and then, lest you wind up going over the bridge, turn north. The closest cross street is Sixth; I parked there and wondered if Stott-Smith had, too.

I walked the long block to the east end of the bridge and saw the sort of memorial that is spontaneously set up for children who are murdered. There were stuffed bunnies and teddy bears and one Mylar balloon that read, “We’ll miss you.” There was a white board, onto which people had written their good-byes and god blesses. Some of the writing was in children’s large wobbly script, “To the bravest girl in the world! We are sorry to hear about your brother.” Tucked amongst the wilted bouquets were notes, including one from a little girl that read, “I hope you new birthday life goes well.”

I continued on the bridge itself. The walkway is narrow, perhaps four feet. Approaching cyclists do and must ring their bells; two people cannot easily pass. The bridge has two traffic lanes, one in each direction. There is no walkway on the other, south side of the bridge. If Stott-Smith walked her children onto the Sellwood Bridge, where I was walking is where they walked.

I don’t know what happened on the bridge that night. Only two living people do, the little girl, who’s been released from the hospital in good physical condition and who has been interviewed by police, and Stott-Smith. I have no idea whether she’s given any details. I can tell you different versions of what I think happened, and you’re not going to like any of them. I am telling you now: you may not want to keep reading. It’s going to make you mad and very sad and perhaps angry with me for letting my mind go where it’s gone. As I wrote last time, I am trying to understand. Saying Stott-Smith is “the definition of evil”; suggesting, as someone did on the Oregonian’s website, that the thing to do, the thing that would make us feel better, is bind Stott-Smith’s hands and feet and throw her over the bridge, doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t explain anything.

As I walked the bridge on Friday, I thought, maybe Stott-Smith did not park and walk. Maybe she stopped the car on the roadway. This seems unlikely. Had she stopped the car, she would have caused cars to jam up behind her, and been seen by cars coming from the other direction. Even on a dark night on the poorly lit bridge, someone would have seen her taking children from the car and thought, what the hell? I don’t think she could have taken that chance.

The next time you are out, or perhaps you can do this in your own living room, look at the size of four- and seven-year-old children. They’re very small. You can lift them from beneath their arms and pass them over a waist-high rail with no trouble. Two would be more trouble if they were kicking and screaming. They would have been dead weight had she taken them warm and sleeping from the car.

But I don’t think the children were sleeping, because I don’t think she could have parked on the roadway, gotten them out, thrown them over, and sped off without being seen. It’s too busy and too tight a roadway. I am not even taking into consideration that she might pause for a moment after throwing her two children over the rail and into the river seventy-five feet below.

Did she look down? Did she see them in the water? How long did she wait? She would have heard them, not merely because we know the girl, at least the girl, was crying and moaning, but because a mother, whether she wants to or not, recognizes her child’s cry. I had this happen in a hospital full of squalling newborns. Under orders to walk, I was on the other side of the building when I heard crying and knew it was my newborn and, as fast as the stitches allowed, got back to my room to see she’d been brought there, where she waited, screaming for me, for someone.

We have no idea yet how long Stott-Smith waited on the bridge after she threw her children down, or if she waited at all. If she parked her car on the roadway, she could not have waited. She would have to have gotten back in the car and driven off.

But as I said, I don’t think she did park on the bridge. I think she walked the children onto the bridge. Is it possible she made a game of the walk? This seems an unlikely scenario; that she could have had the largeness or smallness of heart to tell her children, we’re going to play a game. One does not want to see the children skipping, at one in the morning, along that narrow walkway. Though one is inclined to think, there would be no skipping. It’s scary enough in the daytime, for an adult, feeling the velocity of the passing cars, walking astride the waist-high rail. It’s too easy to go over that rail. Even when you know you have no intention of going over. Looking at the water below, I experienced the hot, wavy feeling you get in the backs of your thighs when you look down from a great height.

It’s unlikely the children experienced this. It was dark. It was late, past young children’s bedtime. Their adrenaline would have been pumping for other reasons – how mad was mommy? What was happening? And in any event, they were too small, too short to see over the railing, to see how far down the water was. What could they know of their fate? They couldn’t have known. Being thrown off a bridge was out of their purview, out of their range of experience, outside the parenthesis of what four- to seven-year olds need to know.

I am having a difficult time thinking their mother told them what she was going to do. But I have read the following, and it makes me very unhappy to know it:

“A massive search was launched about 1:20 a.m. when 9-1-1 calls started coming in from people who heard the screams of children and an adult woman coming from the river.”

So she was yelling at them. Where were they? Did she make them stand together, with their backs against the concrete railing, with its church-window-shaped cutouts? It is possible the boy was small enough to crawl through one of these cutouts. Certainly, neither of the children stood as high as the rail. They may have been stood with their backs against it, facing their mother, the wind of the cars pushing them against it. They have to have been terribly frightened: what were they doing here, with the cars passing, perhaps people honking? Perhaps their mother had to wave cars on, to say, “We’re okay, we’re fine,” and the children would have thought, are we?

I think it is more likely the mother was ranting. Perhaps she was holding the boy, squirming and crying, and pulling the girl by the hand. Perhaps she was in a mood so bad, a mood the children could not hope to navigate, that all was chaos. Perhaps she told them what she was going to do. While it seems even more heartless to inflict the information on them, I prefer this to seeing them tossed in their sleep, or being made to jump. They knew their fate, impossible as it was, and in the case of the girl, was somehow able to gird for it.

The boy, who drowned, had no chance. How, at four years old, in a moving river, in the middle of the night, do you survive? You don’t. You take in some water, and you take in a little more. I imagine his sister would have been holding onto to him; that’s what I would have done for my little brother; it’s your job. We have no idea how she held onto him; we do know they were found right next to each other. We know this from the two people who went out on their boat and found the children.

“We speculated that she had ahold of her brother because they were so close, right next to each other in the water,” David Haag told the Oregonian.

Haag and his companion Cheryl Robb are being called heroes, and I think they did act heroically, no doubt. I think everyone who has heard about what Stott-Smith did to her children wishes they could have helped; perhaps, in our minds, we are lined up on the bank of the river in the middle of the night, each offering Eldon, the little boy, one more breath. He had only his sister in the water with him. She did the best she could. She screamed. She yelled. We know this from the TV news:

 “Pati and Dan Gallagher, both 50, live in a town home near the Sellwood Bridge. They were sitting on their patio, they said, when they heard a splash, and then screams.”

A splash. One splash. They went in together.

Where was their mother? Can we imagine her standing on the bridge, watching her children drift north, wondering when they would stop crying? Was she afraid someone would hear her children? Was that what got her back in her car and gone, the fear of being caught being broadcast with each of her daughter’s cries?

Or did she just walk back to her car as the children drifted north. Or did she run? Was she crying? Was she yelling? Was she white and cold with shock? Was she pleased? Did she feel victorious? Was she afraid? Did she think twice and then say to herself, well, too late now? Did she call their names?

And would they have heard her? It was a windless night, the only reason, David Haag said, that he was able to hear the girl's screams. As I am sure her mother did.

Part III, "The Mom Next to You," is here

Amanda Jo Stott-Smith Arraignment

This past Saturday morning, at around 1 AM, Amanda Jo Stott-Smith, 31, apparently threw or otherwise caused her two children to fall off the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon. The children, four-year-old Eldon Jay Rebhan Smith, 4, and a 7-year-old girl landed 75 feet below in the Willamette River. People living along the water heard moans, and at about 1:30, residents David Haag and Cheryl Robb took their boat onto the river, and found the children. Haag jumped into the water and retrieved the boy, who was dead, and the girl, still alive despite having spent up to 30 minutes in the 56-degree water. She was taken to the hospital, where her condition continues to improve.

Stott-Smith was found later that morning, around ten, on the ninth floor of a downtown Portland parking garage. When the police confronted her, she threatened to jump, but was talked out of it and taken into custody.

Today at 2 PM, she was to be arraigned. I arrive at 1:30, and walk in just behind a photographer for the Oregonian. Doug Beghtel and I are the only two people in the gallery. When one of the women working on the other side of the divider ask if we're with the Oregonian, Doug says yes and I say, "Not yet." I am there simply because I am compelled, as well as having been urged by a friend to write about Stott-Smith.

Doug and I are joined by James, a cameraman for Channel 12. We talk about whether Stott-Smith will appear with her face down or facing forward; what her condition might be and what caused her to do this; we talk about other cases, other murders. We talk about the helplessness of schizophrenics, and the coolness and calculation of psychopaths.

"When they start letting people in, it's going to get really crowded," says Doug, which is when I realize, I'd ridden his draft; I am not supposed to be in the room yet at all; that they let in the photographers early in oder that they might secure good angles.

At 2:10, the room fills, with 22 people on four rows of pew-like benches. Someone from the Tribune hands Doug his card and says, "Make sure we get a photo, too." One of the deputies in city-park-green uniform tells people, no cells phones, no cameras, or we'll be asked to leave. I see only one laptop. There are perhaps four reporters there, tops. I am not sure who the other people are. But I think perhaps the young man in the back row, the one flanked by two women and snuffling loudly, is related to Stott-Smith in some way; he looks as though he's been crying. If he is here because of her, or is some relation to her, I think, I want to speak with him. I glance back. He meets my eye.

There are a dozen people on the other side of the divide, women filing and talking and using computers. Something one of them says makes them laugh, and I think, this seems an affront, in light of what's happened; it seems almost cruel, but then I think, it's another workday for them, and how, in fact, I'd like to write about one of them, perhaps the heavy-set one drinking a diet Shasta. I'd like to know how she lives through her days.

I look back again at the young man. I give a very small, hopefully respectful smile. He gives me one back. I think now, if I can get him in the hall later, I will say, do you want to talk? And then we will talk, or I can walk him over to the Oregonian; I can stand in the lobby with him and his mother and who I think is his sister, and I can ask the receptionist to call George Rede, the Sunday Opinion editor, and I can say, George, can you walk this young man upstairs to talk with whomever is writing about Stott-Smith? I will do this not for glory, but for the story.

A DA comes in and reads off ten names of people who are not facing criminal charges right now. I don't know what this means. The young woman next to me audibly exhales.

At 2:27, Judge Julia Philbrook enters. We all rise. The DA tells her, she will be seeing three defendants today, whom I will call AH and NJA, in addition to Stott-Smith. They call AH. The young man in the back row, my snuffling boy, gets up -- he is AH. He's accused of third degree assault. He pleads not guilty. He's ordered to come back on such and such a date and then, he leaves. His tear-creased mother meets my gaze before she joins her son, and they all walk out. I think, they have no idea who they were on the docket with.

Next, from the back of the room and led in by a guard, is NJA, in prison blues. He's charged with murder. The judge asks if he can afford an attorney; he answers in the affirmative, but it seems he has misunderstood the question. She appoints him an attorney and instructs that he will reappear on June 3rd,9:30 AM.

The judge is informed that Stott-Smith is not yet ready to appear. Instead, it's W, also in prison blues, tall, lanky, with rocker-boy hair. He's accused of possessing heroin; the judge asks if he understands this.

" 'K," says W.

He is told, he can go to the STOP program, and then come and report back to her. W says to a woman near him, who speaks for him to the judge, "Will I be released today." She says, he will.

"Cool," he says.

Next is another young man, charged I think with second degree assault, though some priors may move it up to a felony. The judge asks whether he can afford a lawyer.

"It depends on how much it costs," he says.

"Do you have a bank account?" asks the judge.

"Yes."

"And how much is in it?"

"Well, it's overdrawn," he says. The judge assigns him a lawyer.

All four have been dispensed within maybe eight minutes.

Stott-Smith is led in by two guards. She is wearing a sleeveless forest-green top; it's hard to tell, because she's in the corner and flanked by the guards as well as a tall attorney, if this is prison issue. She is not looking down. She has a wide, coffee-with-cream-colored face, and her thick glossy hair is loose and not untidy. Her expression is unreadable from this distance, besides to see, she is not smiling, nor is she crying. What she is going through, where she finds herself now, is as yet unnameable. I imagine it's like being pinned in chaos, no release, no relief, no hope of being let go.

The judge reads the charges: aggravated murder and attempted aggravated murder. She asks the lawyer to speak.

"I am James McIntyre, M-C-I-N-T-Y-R-E," he says, and adds some sort of ID number, and that he is here as a courtesy for attorney somebody Gray; I wish I had heard the first name but I am too busy looking at Stott-Smith. She looks worn. She looks as though standing is taking some effort, as though the weight of her shoulders is dragging her forward and down.

"Do you understand the nature of the charges against you?" the judge asks. Stott-Smith does not answer. The judge says again, "Do you understand the charges against you?" This time, Stott-Smith appears to move her lips, but all that comes out is a syllable that sounds like, "Muh."

The judge orders Stott-Smith to remain in custody until she reappears on June 3rd, 9:30 AM. Stott-Smith is physically turned by the guards, and moves back out the door as though she were moving through deep water.

To be continued.

Part II: On the Bridge