Regardless of any personal opinion he might have about Lola Daggette’s guilt, he’s not trying to force on others what he perceives as justice. Based on the girth of the files he’s left for me to peruse, he’s doing quite the opposite. He hasn’t vetted much, if anything, including records one might argue he shouldn’t disclose, and that thought leads to others. He wouldn’t be this generous without getting the approval of Chatham County District Attorney Tucker Ridley, and I wouldn’t have expected Ridley to budge an inch beyond his legal obligations as mandated by the state’s open-records act. I could have been offered nothing more than the most basic medical examiner reports when what I’m most interested in is the rest of it.
Police, incident and arrest reports, even criminal or medical histories or witness statements—it could be absolutely anything that might find its way into a decedent’s case record because the detective happened to hand over copies to the medical examiner, and if the ME is like me, every scrap of paper, every electronic file, is preserved. All such documents I assumed would be excluded. When Colin walked me to this conference room, I anticipated finding very little to review and within the hour wandering back down the hall to his office so he could fill in the blanks if he was so inclined.
“Anything that goes on around here, I know about it anyway.” Mandy has taken off her earphones again.
“That right?” Marino blatantly flirts. “What do you know about Barrie Lou Rivers? Any rumors about her floating around? You involved in her case?”
“I did the histology, was in and out of the autopsy room collecting tissue sections while Colin was doing her post.”
“You must have come in after hours,” Marino says, as if he’s investigating Mandy O’Toole for something. “And you weren’t listed as an official witness. Some prison guard named Macon and a couple other people. I don’t remember seeing your name.”
“That’s because I wasn’t an official witness.”
I rearrange my chair to face a view of tall, spindly pines and buzzards floating high above them like black kites, and I decide it could be argued that the Jordan case is no longer active and all direct litigation is final. This might explain why the district attorney made a calculated decision not to impede me in any way. When an investigation is terminated, its documents are subject to disclosure, and as I follow my reasoning a little further, it occurs to me that Tucker Ridley might very well be done with Lola Daggette. Despite Jaime’s retesting of evidence, in Tucker Ridley’s mind and maybe in Colin Dengate’s, the investigation was terminated when Lola Daggette’s appeals were exhausted and the governor refused to commute her sentence to life.
“He always this difficult?” Mandy says, and I realize she’s talking to me about Marino.
“Only if he likes you,” I reply, as I think about public perception.
For the sake of it alone, the district attorney isn’t going to get in the way of someone of my rank and reputation, so he’s opened up the country store and invited me to help myself. Why? Because it doesn’t matter anymore. As far as Tucker Ridley is concerned, Lola Daggette has an appointment with death on Halloween. He has no reason to believe she won’t show up. Or maybe the opposite is true, I consider.
Maybe the new DNA results have been leaked and it doesn’t matter what I look at because Lola’s sentence will be vacated soon, and maybe my other fear is legitimate, too. Dawn Kincaid knows she’s about to face new murder charges in Georgia, where, unlike Massachusetts, she could get the death penalty. So she’s orchestrating something, possibly an escape from a Boston hospital that can’t possibly offer the level of security a forensic facility like Butler has.
“I’m just trying to figure out who was around when her body came in,” Marino continues to badger Mandy O’Toole. “Because the case bugs me. You ask me, there’s something not right about it. It’s a little unusual for a histologist to be working at nine o’clock at night, and that’s bugging me, too.”
“The night Barrie Lou Rivers died, I was working late in my lab, on deadline for a journal article about types of fixatives,” she says.
“I thought that’s what old people use to keep their dentures glued in.”
“The advantages of glutaraldehyde for electron microscopy, and the problems of mercurials.”
“I don’t like mercurial people, either. They’re a pain in the ass.”
“Disposing of the tissue is problematic, since mercury is a heavy metal.” She’s toying with him, too. “You know, maybe better to use Bouin’s solution if what you’re after is nuclear detail. Course, when I work with Bouin’s I end up with yellow fingers for a while if I forget and touch something without gloves.”
“Bet that’s hard to explain on a date.”
“When Colin got the call from the prison I was still here, right down the hall,” she gets back to that, “and I told him I’d hang out and get his table set up, help in any way needed. But I wasn’t a witness.”
“What about rumors,” Marino again says. “What was the word about what happened to her?”
“Originally it was thought that Barrie Lou Rivers choked on her last meal. But no evidence of that. No rumors I’ve heard in recent memory. Nobody was talking about the case anymore until Jaime Berger started looking into it. I would offer water, coffee, but I can’t leave the room. You want something, just tell me and I’ll make a call.” She directs this at me. “If you want something,” she says, smiling at Marino as she puts her headphones back on, “get it yourself.”
“Suze mentioned one thing kind of interesting about Barrie Lou Rivers’s CO level,” Marino tells me, as his attention continues drifting back to Mandy. “It was like eight percent. She says normal’s maybe six at most.”
“I don’t know if it’s interesting or not,” I reply, as I go through the transcript of a clemency hearing for Lola Daggette in which Colin Dengate testified, and also GBI investigator Billy Long. “I’ll have to look at her case. Not an unusual level for a smoker.”
“You can’t smoke in prisons anymore. None I know of. Not for years.”
“Yes, and drugs, alcohol, cash, cell phones, and weapons aren’t allowed in prisons, either,” I reply, as I review the factual history of what happened in the early-morning hours of January 6, 2002. “Guards could have given her a cigarette. Rules get broken depending on who has power.”
“But smoking could explain her CO, and if so, why would someone give her a cigarette?”
“We certainly can’t know if anybody did. But it’s true that carbon monoxide and nicotine from cigarettes put a strain on the heart, which is further exasperated by the narrowing of the arteries from heart disease, which is why I keep reminding you not to smoke.” I slide pages in Marino’s direction as I finish with them. “Her heart’s already working hard if she’s stressed, and then an exposure to smoke and her heart works even harder.”
“So maybe that’s why she had the heart attack,” he persists.
“It could have been a contributing factor, assuming someone gave her a cigarette or cigarettes while she was awaiting execution,” I comment, as I read about Liberty Halfway House, a nonsecure, not-for-profit treatment program for girls located on East Liberty Street, just blocks from Colonial Park Cemetery, very close to the Jordan house, maybe a fifteen-minute walk from it, I estimate.
At approximately six-forty-five the morning of January 6, a Liberty Halfway House volunteer on the healthcare staff had begun making rounds of the residential facility to collect urine specimens for a random drug screening. When she arrived at Lola Daggette’s room and knocked on the door, there was no answer. The volunteer entered and heard the sound of running water. The bathroom door was shut, and after knocking and calling out Lola’s name and getting no response, the volunteer became concerned and walked in.
She discovered Lola naked on the floor of the shower stall with hot water running. The volunteer testified that Lola was frightened and excited and was using shampoo to wash items of clothing that appeared to be very bloody.
The volunteer asked Lola if she had hurt herself, and she said no and demanded to be left alone. She claimed she was doing laundry because she didn’t have access to a washing machine and to “just leave the fucking cup by the sink and I’ll pee in it in a minute.”
At this point, according to the transcript, the volunteer turned off the hot water and ordered Lola to step out of the shower. On the tile floor were “a pair of tan corduroy pants, women’s size four, a blue turtleneck sweater, women’s size four, and a dark red Atlanta Braves Windbreaker, size medium, all of them extremely bloody, and the water on the shower floor was pinkish-red from all the blood,” the volunteer testified, and when she asked Lola whose clothing it was, she replied that it was what she’d had on when she was “checked in” five weeks earlier and was issued uniforms. “They were what I was wearing on the street, and since then they’ve been in my closet,” Lola explained to the volunteer.
Questioned about how blood could have gotten on the clothing, at first Lola said she didn’t know. Then she offered, “It’s that time of the month” and claimed she’d had an accident in her sleep, the volunteer testified. “I got the distinct impression she was making things up as I was standing there, but Lola was known for that at the LHH. She was always talking big and saying whatever would impress someone or keep her out of trouble. She’ll say and do pretty much anything for attention and to protect herself or get a favor and never seems to realize how it’s perceived or any possible consequences.
“Unfortunately, she’s like the boy who cried wolf around here, and it couldn’t have been more obvious the blood could not have come from her having her period,” the volunteer said under oath in the hearing. “It wouldn’t make sense for menstrual blood to be on the thighs, knees, and cuffs of a pair of pants and on the front and sleeves of a sweater and a jacket. Quite a lot of it hadn’t washed off yet, because there was so much of it, and my first thought was wherever it came from, the person must have hemorrhaged, assuming it was human blood, of course.
“I also don’t know why Lola would sleep in street clothes, which the wards aren’t supposed to wear while they are in residence.” The volunteer continued a testimony that was damning. “They wear them when they get here and when they’re released. The rest of the time they wear uniforms, and it didn’t make sense why Lola would have been wearing the clothing in bed. Nothing she said made sense to me, and when I told her that, she kept changing her story.
“She said she’d found the bloody clothes in a plastic bag in her bathroom. I asked to see the plastic bag, and she changed her story again and said there was no bag. She said she’d gotten up to use the bathroom and the clothes were on the floor, in there, in the bathroom, just inside, to the left of the door. I asked if the blood was wet or dry, and she said it was sticky in spots and other stains were dry. She claimed she didn’t know how the bloody clothes got there but was scared and tried to wash them because she didn’t want to be blamed for something.”
The volunteer reminded Lola that what she was suggesting would mean someone had gone into her closet and removed the clothing, gotten it bloody somehow, then reentered her room while she was asleep and left the clothing in the bathroom. Who would do such a thing, and why didn’t Lola wake up? The person who did it “is quiet like a haint and is the devil,” Lola reportedly said to the volunteer. “It’s payback for something I done before I got stuck in here, maybe someone I used to get drugs from, I don’t know,” she said, and she got angry and began to yell.
“You can’t tell no one! You can just fucking throw them out but can’t tell no one! I don’t want to go to jail! I swear I didn’t do nothing, I swear to God I didn’t!” the volunteer testified Lola said, and the more I read, the more I understand why no one at the time considered any suspect other than Lola Daggette.
18
Marino does little more than glance at what I slide over to him, handling the pages with a casualness and lack of curiosity that makes me suspect he’s studied them before.
“You’re familiar with this transcript?” I ask.
“Jaime’s got it in the records she’s been collecting. But she didn’t get it from him.” He means she didn’t get it from Colin Dengate.
“I wouldn’t have expected him to turn this over, because it wasn’t generated by him. She would have to get it from Chatham County Superior Court.”
“She figured he’d let you look at everything.”
“Apparently she figured right. But what I’m seeing so far doesn’t exactly help her case.”
“Nope,” he says. “Makes Lola Daggette look guilty as hell. No big surprise she got convicted. You can see how it happened.”
“I’m confused about the uniforms,” I add. “Jaime mentioned that Lola was in and out of Liberty House on job interviews, visiting her grandmother in a nursing home, that Lola could come and go rather much as she pleased as long as she had permission and was present and accounted for when they did a bed check at night, I assume. What did she wear when she went out?”
“The way I understand it, the uniforms looked like regular street clothes, like jeans and a denim shirt. That’s what the wards—and they called them wards—wore all the time.”
“You’re talking in past tense.” I take a sip of the water Colin gave me in his office, my black field clothes damp from sweat, the air-conditioning chilly.
“Lola Daggette wasn’t good for business, especially a place that depended on private donations,” Marino says. “Rich people in Savannah weren’t exactly eager to write checks to Liberty House anymore after Lola was convicted of murdering Clarence Jordan and his family. Especially since one of the things he was known for was helping out in shelters, clinics, helping people who had problems, people who had nothing and couldn’t afford going to the doctor.”
“Did he ever help out at Liberty House?” I get up to adjust the temperature in the room.
“Not that I know of.”
“Liberty House is gone, I assume. Let me know if you get too warm in here.” I sit back down, noting that Mandy O’Toole is ignoring us, or appears to be.
“A homeless shelter for women run by the Salvation Army. Nobody from the old days there anymore, and it doesn’t look the same, either,” Marino says. “You read this stuff, and what goes through your mind is Lola Daggette wasn’t smart enough to kill anyone and get away with it.”
“She didn’t get away with it. But we don’t know that she killed anyone.”
“The devil wore her clothing and then left it in her bathroom after the fact,” he says. “And she won’t tell anybody who the devil is except the name Payback?”
“Seems she started thinking about paybackwhen she was caught in the bathroom literally red-handed, washing the bloody clothing,” I reply, arranging more paperwork in front of me. “Someone was paying her back, someone from her drug days on the street. Seems she might have been thinking that she was set up, and maybe Paybackis how she began to refer to whoever is responsible.”
“You really think she had nothing to do with it and doesn’t know who did?”
“I don’t know what I think. Not exactly, not yet.”
“Well, I sure as hell know how it sounds,” Marino says. “Sounds the same now as it did at the time. Makes no friggin’ sense. Plus, you’ll see when you get to the DNA part that it’s everybody’s. Lola’s clothes have the blood of the entire Jordan family on them, so I’m telling Jaime from day one, I don’t know how you explain that away.”
“It gets explained away by Jaime the same way it was by Lola’s original defense team. Lola’s DNA wasn’t recovered from the Jordan house or from their bodies or whatever clothing they had on when they were killed,” I reply, as I come to a section in the transcript that includes photographs. “Her DNA was recovered from the clothing she was washing in the shower, and nowhere else. Only from the corduroys, sweater, and Windbreaker, but so was the DNA of the victims. To a jury, that’s quite incriminating, although scientifically it raises questions.” I don’t s
ay what questions.
Not in front of Mandy O’Toole, who gives no sign she can hear us or is interested as she types on her BlackBerry with headphones on, purportedly listening to music.
“She’s naked in the shower, washing the clothing,” Marino says. “Seems like she’d leave her DNA on it just from that. She’s touching everything. And her DNA probably was on the clothing to begin with, since they were the street clothes she had on when she first arrived at Liberty House.”
“Correct. So no matter where the clothing came from, she’d certainly contaminated it with her own DNA by the time she was ordered out of the shower,” I agree. “That her DNA was recovered from her own clothing isn’t necessarily significant. Now, if another individual’s DNA was recovered in addition to Lola’s, that would have been a different story,” I add, as I think of Dawn Kincaid, whom I’m not going to mention. “If another individual had worn her clothing, and that person’s DNA was recovered from the pants, sweater, and Windbreaker left on the bathroom floor?” I’m careful what I say as I probe for information.
I won’t take the chance that Mandy O’Toole might overhear any allusions to new DNA results. According to Jaime, Colin Dengate doesn’t know. Scarcely anybody does, and I don’t understand how she can feel so sure of that, unless it’s what she wants to believe and her wish is her reality. In my opinion she should have filed a motion to vacate Lola’s sentence weeks ago. Then the truth would be known and there would be nothing to leak. It would have been safer for the case but not safer for Jaime. She couldn’t have hoodwinked me into coming to Savannah if I’d known about her new career and her big case down here.
She wasn’t off the mark last night when she doubted I would have volunteered to be her forensic expert if I’d had time to think about it, if she’d been up front with me instead of lying and manipulating and setting me up to be sitting where I am right this minute. The more I’ve mulled over everything that’s happened, the more certain I am that I would have said no. I would have referred her to someone else, but not because I would have worried about Colin’s response to my reviewing his findings and possibly second-guessing him. I would have been worried about how Lucy would react. I would have felt that anything I did with Jaime would be tainted by an unpleasant past and would be a bad idea for almost every reason imaginable.