Defending Jacob (36 page)

“No, Your Honor.”

“I didn’t think so.”

Things did not improve much for Logiudice the rest of that day. He had organized his witnesses into logical groups, and today was devoted to the civilian witnesses. They were passersby. None had seen anything especially damning from Jacob’s point of view. But then, it was a weak case, and Logiudice was right to throw everything he had into the pot. So we heard from two more people, a man and a woman, who each testified they saw Jacob in the park, albeit not near the murder scene. Another witness saw a figure running from the general area of the murder. She could not say anything about this person’s age or identity, but the clothes roughly matched what Jacob was wearing that day, even if jeans and a light jacket were not exactly a distinctive uniform, especially in a park filled with kids walking to school.

Logiudice did end on a harrowing note. His last witness was a man named Sam Studnitzer who was walking his dog through the park that morning. Studnitzer had a very short haircut, narrow shoulders, a gentle manner.

“Where were you going?” Logiudice asked.

“There is a field where dogs can run around off the leash. I take my dog most mornings.”

“What kind of dog is he?”

“A black Lab. His name is Bo.”

“What time was it?”

“Around eight-twenty. I’m usually earlier.”

“Where in the park were you and Bo?”

“We were on one of the paths through the woods. The dog had gone on ahead, sniffing around.”

“And what happened?”

Studnitzer hesitated.

The Rifkins were in the courtroom, on the front bench behind the prosecution table.

“I heard a little boy’s voice.”

“What did the little boy say?”

“He said, ‘Stop, you’re hurting me.’ ”

“Did he say anything else?”

Studnitzer slumped, frowned. Quietly: “No.”

“Just ‘Stop, you’re hurting me’?”

Studnitzer did not answer, but clamped fingers over his temples, covering his eyes.

Logiudice waited.

The courtroom was so dead quiet, Studnitzer’s sniffly breathing was clearly audible. He took his hand away from his face. “No. That’s all I heard.”

“Did you see anyone else around you?”

“No. I couldn’t see very far. The sight lines are limited. That part of the park is hilly. The trees grow thick. We were coming down a little slope. I couldn’t see anyone.”

“Could you tell which direction the cry came from?”

“No.”

“Did you look around, did you investigate? Did you try to help the little boy in any way?”

“No. I didn’t know. I thought it was just kids. I didn’t know. I didn’t think anything of it. There are so many kids in that park every morning, laughing, fooling around. It sounded like just … roughhousing.” His eyes fell.

“What did the boy’s voice sound like?”

“Like he was hurt. He was in pain.”

“Were there any other sounds after the cry? Pushing, sounds of a struggle, anything at all?”

“No. I didn’t hear anything like that.”

“What happened next?”

“The dog was alert, hyper, strange. I didn’t know what his problem was. I kind of pushed him along, and we kept on walking through the park.”

“Did you see anyone as you were walking?”

“No.”

“Did you observe anything else unusual that morning?”

“No, not until after, when I heard the sirens and cops started streaming into the park. That’s when I found out what happened.”

Logiudice sat down.

Everyone in the courtroom was hearing those words in a loop in their heads:
Stop, you’re hurting me. Stop, you’re hurting me
. I have not gotten them out of my head yet. I doubt I ever will. But the truth is, even this detail did not point to Jacob.

To underscore that fact, Jonathan stood up on cross to ask a single perfunctory question: “Mr. Studnitzer, you never saw this boy, Jacob Barber, in the park that morning, did you?”

“No.”

Jonathan took a moment to shake his head in front of the jury and say, “Terrible, terrible,” to demonstrate that we too were on the side of the angels.

There it stood. Despite everything—Dr. Vogel’s awful diagnosis and Laurie’s shell shock and the hauntingly ordinary words of the boy as he was stabbed—after three days we were still up, way up. If this were a Little League game, we might be talking about the mercy rule. As it turned out, it was our last good day.

Mr. Logiudice: Let me stop you there for just a moment. I understand your wife was upset.
Witness: We were all upset.
Mr. Logiudice: But Laurie in particular was struggling.
Witness: Yes, she was having a hard time handling the pressure.
Mr. Logiudice: More than that. She was clearly having her doubts about Jacob’s innocence, especially after you all spoke with Dr. Vogel and got the full diagnosis in some detail. She even asked you point-blank what you two ought to do if he was guilty, didn’t she?
Witness: Yes. A little later. But she was very upset at that moment. You have no idea what this sort of pressure is like.
Mr. Logiudice: What about you? Weren’t you upset too?
Witness: Of course I was. I was terrified.
Mr. Logiudice: Terrified because you were finally beginning to consider the possibility Jacob might be guilty?
Witness: No, terrified because the jury might convict him whether he was actually guilty or not.
Mr. Logiudice: It still hadn’t crossed your mind that Jacob might actually have done it?
Witness: No.
Mr. Logiudice: Not once? Not for a single second?
Witness: Not once.
Mr. Logiudice: “Confirmation bias,” is that it, Andy?
Witness: Fuck you, Neal. Heartless prick.
Mr. Logiudice: Don’t lose your temper.
Witness: You’ve never seen me lose my temper.
Mr. Logiudice: No. I can just imagine.
[The witness did not respond.]
Mr. Logiudice: All right, let’s continue.

T
rial day four.

Paul Duffy on the stand. He wore a blue blazer, rep tie, and gray flannel pants, which was about as formal as he ever managed to dress. Like Jonathan, he was one of those men it is easy to imagine as boys, men whose appearance almost forces you to see the boy inside. It was nothing particular about his physical features, but a boyish quality in his manner. Maybe it was just the effect of my long friendship with him. To me, Paul remained twenty-seven years old forever, his age when I met him.

For Logiudice, of course, that friendship made Duffy a slippery witness. At the start, Logiudice’s manner was tentative, his questions overly cautious. If he had asked, I could have told him that Paul Duffy was not going to lie, even for me. It just wasn’t in him. (I would have told him also to put down his ridiculous yellow pad. He looked like a goddamn amateur.)

“Would you state your name for the record, please?”

“Paul Michael Duffy.”

“What do you do for work?”

“I’m a lieutenant detective with the Massachusetts State Police.”

“How long have you been employed by the state police?”

“Twenty-six years.”

“And what is your current assignment?”

“I am in a public relations unit.”

“Directing your attention to April 12, 2007, what was your assignment on that date?”

“I was in charge of a special unit of detectives assigned to the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office. The unit is called
CPAC
, for Crime Prevention and Control. It consists of fifteen to twenty detectives at any given time, all with the special training and experience required to assist the ADAs and local departments in the investigation and prosecution of complex cases of various kinds, particularly homicides.” Duffy recited this little speech in a drone, from rote memory.

“And had you participated in many homicide investigations prior to April 12, 2007?”

“Yes.”

“Approximately how many?”

“Over a hundred, though I was not in charge of all of them.”

“Okay, on April 12, 2007, did you receive a phone call about a murder in Newton?”

“Yes. Around nine-fifteen A.M. I got a call from a Lieutenant Foley in Newton informing me there had been a homicide involving a child in Cold Spring Park.”

“And what was the first thing you did?”

“I called the district attorney’s office to inform them.”

“Is that standard procedure?”

“Yes. The local department is required by law to inform the state police of all homicides or unnatural deaths, then we inform the DA immediately.”

“Who specifically did you call?”

“Andy Barber.”

“Why Andy Barber?”

“He was the First Assistant, which means he was the second in command to the district attorney herself.”

“What was your understanding about what Mr. Barber would do with that information?”

“He would assign an
ADA
to run the investigation for their office.”

“Might he keep the case for himself?”

“He might. He handled a lot of homicides himself.”

“Did you have any expectations that morning as to whether Mr. Barber would keep the case for himself?”

Jonathan lifted his butt six inches from his chair. “Objection.”

“Overruled.”

“Detective Duffy, what did you think Mr. Barber would do with the case at that point?”

“I did not know. I suppose I figured he might keep it. It looked like it might be a big case right from the get-go. He kept those sorts of cases a lot. But if he put someone else on it, that would not have surprised me either. There were other good people there besides Mr. Barber. To be honest, I did not really think about it much. I had my own job to do. I let him worry about the DA’s office. My job was to run
CPAC
.”

“Do you know whether the district attorney, Lynn Canavan, was informed right away?”

“I don’t know. I presume so.”

“All right, after telephoning Mr. Barber, what did you do next?”

“I went to the location.”

“What time did you arrive there?”

“Nine thirty-five in the morning.”

“Describe the scene when you first arrived.”

“The entrance to Cold Spring Park is on Beacon Street. There is a parking lot at the front of the park. Behind that there are tennis courts and playing fields. Then behind the fields it is all woods, and there are trails leading off into the woods. There were a lot of police vehicles in the parking lot and on the street out front. Lots of cops around.”

“What did you do?”

“I parked on Beacon Street and approached the location on foot. I was met by Detective Peterson of the Newton Police and by Mr. Barber.”

“Again, was there anything unusual about Mr. Barber’s presence at the homicide scene?”

“No. He lived pretty close to the location, and he generally went to homicide scenes even if he didn’t intend to keep the case.”

“How did you know Mr. Barber lived near Cold Spring Park?”

“Because I’ve known him for years.”

“In fact, you two are personal friends.”

“Yes.”

“Close friends?”

“Yes. We were.”

“And now?”

There was a hitch before he answered. “I can’t speak for him. I still consider him a friend.”

“Do you two still see each other socially?”

“No. Not since Jacob was indicted.”

“When was the last time you and Mr. Barber spoke?”

“Before the indictment.”

A lie, but a white lie. The truth would have been misleading to the jury. It would have suggested, wrongly, that Duffy could not be trusted. Duffy was biased but honest about the big questions. He did not flinch as he delivered the statement. I did not flinch at it either. The point of a trial is to reach the right result, which requires constant recalibration along the way, like a sailboat tacking upwind.

“All right, you get to the park, you meet Detective Peterson and Mr. Barber. What happens next?”

“They explained the basic situation to me, that the victim had already been identified as Benjamin Rifkin, and they walked me through the park to the actual scene of the homicide.”

“What did you see when you got there?”

“The perimeter of the area was already taped off. The M.E. and crime-scene-services technicians had not arrived at the location yet. There was a photographer from the local police there taking pictures. The victim was still lying on the ground, the body, with nothing much around it. Basically they froze the scene when they got there, to preserve it.”

“Could you actually see the body?”

“Yes.”

“Could you describe the position of the body when you first saw it?”

“The victim was lying on a hill with the head at the lower end and the feet farther up the hill. It was twisted so the head was looking up toward the sky and the bottom half of the body and the legs were on its side.”

“What did you do next?”

“I approached the body with Detective Peterson and Mr. Barber. Detective Peterson was showing me details about the scene.”

“What was he showing you?”

“At the top of the hill, near the trail there was a good deal of blood on the ground, cast-off blood. I saw a number of droplets that were quite small, less than an inch in diameter. There were also a few larger stains that appeared to be what is called contact smears. These were on the leaves.”

“What is a contact smear?”

“It’s when a surface with wet blood contacts another surface and the blood transfers. It leaves a stain.”

“Describe the contact smears.”

“They were farther down the hill. There were several. They were several inches long at first, and as you went farther down the hill they became thicker and longer, more blood.”

“Now, I understand that you are not a criminalist, but did you form any impressions at the time, or theories, about what this blood evidence suggested?”

“Yes, I did. It looked like the homicide had taken place near the trail, where there were blood drops that had fallen, then the body fell or was pushed down the side of the hill, causing it to slide on its stomach, leaving the long contact smears of blood on the leaves.”

“All right, so having formed this theory, what did you do next?”

“I went down and inspected the body.”

“What did you see?”