My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (31 page)

Byron was too poor to hire his own lawyer and was represented in court by a public defender named Horton Lance. While many public defenders are known for their seriousness and effectiveness, they’re also notoriously underfunded and overworked. One of my close friends, a public defender in the Bronx, often complains of being stretched too thin, without adequate resources to research cases or the time to properly prepare for a trial, and worries that his most skilled colleagues burn out quickly, while the incompetent ones are rarely weeded out. Perhaps these factors explain some of the crucial mistakes Horton Lance made during Byron’s defense, as revealed in the case’s 1,290-page trial transcript.

Now, I’m no courtroom pro, but I’ve spent enough time around trial lawyers to know that although defendants are meant to be presumed innocent, with the burden of proof in the hands of the prosecution, things often don’t play out that way. At Byron’s trial, the prosecution offered a single, compelling, and vaguely plausible explanation for Anastasia’s death, and made up for their lack of material evidence with convincing, emotional witnesses, especially Kelly Moffett. Horton Lance, on the other hand, failed to present any alternative scenarios for the defense. He said only that the cemetery was bordered by sketchy neighborhoods, the oblique implication being that Anastasia might have been the victim of a stranger’s act of random violence. (Indeed, in the years before and since Anastasia’s death, other random shootings have dotted that stretch of Truman Road close to the cemetery.) Lance never delved into the fact that Anastasia’s boyfriend, Justin, had purchased firearms in the past, while Byron had never even held a gun in his life. And he did little to highlight the inconsistencies in Kelly’s account or to reflect on what motivations she might have had for lying about Byron’s involvement.

At one point, Kelly blurted out from the stand that she’d passed a lie detector test, which was highly misleading. First of all, polygraphs are rarely admissible in a courtroom because of their unreliability, and the truth was, she hadn’t taken a polygraph, she’d taken an even less reliable voice stress test, and in that conversation she’d actually attested to Byron’s innocence. Although the judge cautioned the jury to disregard Kelly’s remark, the damage was done—in a case that depended largely on one person’s word against another’s, Kelly had gained the upper hand. Here, Horton Lance could have moved for a mistrial; he failed to do so. Byron, who’d proclaimed his innocence since day one, then testified on his own behalf, but when he took the stand, Lance had no cohesive plan for what to ask him, and Byron’s sullen, disengaged testimony may only have marred the jury’s perceptions of him.

The trial had been short, just three and a half days. After each side gave a closing statement, the jury deliberated for a couple of hours and came to a decision—Byron Case was guilty of murder, they said. His sentence: life in prison.

*

The magazine I run,
Found
, collects notes, letters, and pictures found on the ground and on the street by readers across the country and around the world. In the early days of the magazine, I used to personally open every found item we received, and often, if it was a particularly captivating or intriguing find, I’d write back to the person who’d mailed it in.

Byron Case was an early reader of the magazine, and he’d regularly send us to-do lists and love letters and other fascinating scraps he’d plucked off the floor of his favorite coffee shop in Westport, Kansas City’s quaint hipster neighborhood, or had discovered in a used book, or come across in his old job as a front desk clerk at a motel. He always wrote short, funny letters to accompany his finds in distinct, carefully printed handwriting, and before long I found myself trading letters back and forth with him.

After a period where I hadn’t heard from Byron for a couple of years, I sent him a copy of the latest issue of
Found
, which included a couple of finds he’d sent to me long before. Two weeks later, I got a note from his mom, Evelyn, explaining that Byron was in prison, the result of a wrongful conviction. She gave me his new address, and referred me to a website built by friends of his outlining the details of his case. I remember the shock of logging on and seeing that he’d been handed a life sentence. I spent all night poring through trial documents online, horrified that someone could be locked up on the basis of such flimsy evidence. Like all of life’s massive strokes of misfortune—fatal car accidents, plane crashes, spinal injuries, testicular cancer, Lou Gehrig’s disease, or losing both arms or both legs in an IED blast north of Mosul—it’s never a surprise that these kinds of things happen, it’s only a surprise that it’s happened to someone you know. As dawn light filled my bedroom, I imagined Byron waking up in his bunk in prison, and having to register again, each morning, that this Kafkaesque nightmare was real.

The next night, I settled down again at my computer to research his case some more, when I came across another site, created by friends and family of Anastasia WitbolsFeugen, partly as a memorial for Anastasia, but mostly, it seemed, to refute the claims on Byron’s site. This opposing site painted Byron as a coldhearted killer who was brilliant and sophisticated, full of dark menace and masterful cunning. For every question raised on Byron’s site that seemed to point toward his innocence, Anastasia’s memorial site had laid out a convincing rebuttal. Each site also had a guestbook page, and on these pages a furious feud had broken out between supporters of Byron and those who believed he’d been convicted justly. The same was true in the comments sections of the articles about Anastasia’s death and Byron’s trial and conviction on the websites of the
Kansas City Star
and the
Pitch
, a local alt-weekly. A short blurb about the case on the site of a community college’s school paper would be followed by hundreds of comments, condemning the courts, the cops, the prosecutors, and Kelly Moffett—Byron’s accuser—and, in immediate response, condemning Byron himself. Many of the commenters had resorted to back-and-forth name calling, but a lot of them also dug into the facts of the case right down to the most infinitesimal minutiae, arguing about evidence presented during trial, as well as evidence that was never presented. People who’d personally known Byron, Kelly, Anastasia, and her boyfriend, Justin Bruton, offered anecdotes attesting to either Byron’s guilt or innocence, and to the idea that Kelly had lied on the stand, or that she’d been telling the truth.

In the week that followed, I found myself talking about the case to anyone who would listen—and for as long as possible—until they’d leave the room to get away from me. At night, I lay awake, turning things over in my head, trying to pierce the knot of contradicting stories. The more and more I read, and the more anonymous, wild accusations I sifted through online, the further I felt from getting a sense for what had really happened to Anastasia that night. From a distance, the case was impenetrable. The only way I’d be able to sort it out in my own mind, I decided, was to reach out personally to those involved, and hear the story in their own words. For that sole selfish reason, pretty much, I decided to leap right in.

I e-mailed Evelyn, Byron’s mom. The next day we spoke on the phone for two hours. She had a strong German accent, and explained that she’d come to the States at the age of twenty, just to explore for a few months, but had met Byron’s dad, Dale, fallen in love, and remained in the country ever since, though she and Dale had eventually separated. She was friendly, gracious, smart, tough, and clear minded, with a mother’s absolute (if predictable) faith in her son’s innocence, but also a detailed grasp on the mistakes that had been made during the trial. At one point, she began to choke up. “If only I had more money,” she said, her voice breaking. “We wouldn’t have had to go with that—that crummy defense lawyer. I just figured it was all a big mistake and they’d get everything figured out and it would quickly be over with. Oh boy, was I wrong.” She allowed a short laugh. “It’s okay. We’re gonna keep working till Byron is home.” Evelyn seemed to have channeled the bulk of her grief over her son’s predicament into an energetic, protracted campaign to fight for his freedom. She worked as a language tutor and a pet-sitter and sold vintage furniture and housewares she turned up at estate sales, and her limited income was funneled almost entirely into paying the lawyers who were working on Byron’s appeals. When possible, she traveled the country to attend conferences for the Innocence Project and other wrongful-conviction groups, bending the ear of anyone who might be sympathetic to her son’s plight.

Finally, she told me, “Look, the biggest expert on Byron’s case is Byron. Why don’t you come for a visit? You can talk to Byron himself.”

A few weeks later, in early December, I was on a late-night DC-10 shuttle from Detroit, looking out the window as the twinkling lights of Kansas City came into view, surrounded by desolate prairie blackness. Was I making this trip as a journalist? A self-styled criminal investigator? A friend of Byron’s? I wasn’t really sure, but I felt nervous and excited, eager to penetrate the mystery.

*

At midnight, I wound my rental car through quiet neighborhood streets in Kansas City’s deepest southeast corner, toward Evelyn’s house—she’d offered to put me up while I was in town. The homes on her block were perched close together, tiny but well kept, with Christmas wreaths on the front doors and old, weather-beaten Fords and Pontiacs in the driveways. I pulled up in front of her house. It was a strange feeling, after my earlier correspondence with Byron, the recent calls with his mom, and a fanatical month of immersion into his case, to suddenly find myself walking up the front steps and ringing the bell. This, I knew, was the house that the cops had raided when they’d come to arrest Byron a couple of years before.

Evelyn greeted me warmly and helped me carry my bags inside, and we sat sipping hot chocolate at her kitchen table, and chatted for an hour. She was in her mid-fifties, with dyed blond streaks in her hair and a nose ring. Her bohemian vibe and affable intelligence reminded me of an old friend of mine’s mom, who was an art professor from Stuttgart. Evelyn was excited by my visit—it wasn’t often that someone from another part of the country took such an interest in Byron’s situation, and the fact that I sometimes wrote for national magazines and appeared on public radio was appealing to her. The most important thing she could do, she felt, was to get word out about the details of her son’s case. I was careful not to promise anything—for all I knew, Byron was guilty. I wanted to meet him before I offered to get seriously involved.

Evelyn brewed another round of hot chocolate, and asked about my work and my family, and if I had a girlfriend. There was a part of her that seemed to luxuriate in having a young man in her kitchen roughly the same age as her son, someone she could tease, scold, flatter, and fuss over. At one point, I heard a toilet flush in another part of the house. Evelyn saw my curious look and explained that it was her boyfriend, Napo. She called him into the room, and he sat with us for a few minutes—a kind, soft-spoken Ecuadorean in his forties who worked as a housepainter and played soccer on the weekends. “Byron is a dear friend to me,” Napo said. “I visit him every week. I go there thinking, ‘I will keep his spirits up,’ but it’s always him that keeps my spirits up. God has chosen him to walk a very unusual path. But I know He has a plan for Byron.”

Evelyn said to me, “You must be beat. We’ve all got an early morning tomorrow. I like to head out around seven thirty so we can be the first in line when visiting hours start. Come on,” she said. “I set you up in Byron’s room.”

She showed me into a small bedroom at the end of the hallway and said good night, and I slowly moved around the room, gazing at Byron’s Victorian novels and punk rock CDs and all of his little knickknacks lining the shelves and windowsills. I imagined that at some point Evelyn had straightened up a bit, but that she’d otherwise left the room mostly untouched since the day of Byron’s arrest, as though any day the world might right itself and Byron would come ambling through the front door.

I turned off the lights and got under the covers. Byron, I knew, had spent many nights in his bedroom during high school hanging out with his best friend, Justin, and their girlfriends, Kelly and Anastasia, devouring pizza and guzzling Mountain Dew, listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees records, watching Monty Python flicks, and bad-mouthing their narrow-minded teachers and classmates with other friends in AOL chat rooms. It was heartbreaking to picture them lounging here—on the bed, in the kneeling chair at Byron’s desk, flopped on the giant bean-bag chair on the floor—caught up in their ordinary rebellious and playful teenage banter, and then to consider all of the chaos that followed: Anastasia in the cemetery grass, blood leaking from the holes in her face and the back of her head; Justin, sitting behind the abandoned warehouse south of town, shotgun in his lap, his head blown clear off; and Byron, in an orange Jackson County prison jumpsuit and ankle chains, being hauled away after his sentencing hearing. Beyond the bedroom door, I could make out the tones of Evelyn and Napo talking softly, teasing each other, as they brushed their teeth and headed to bed. I lay there for hours, listening to trees creak and sway in the wind, and staring into the darkness, exhausted but unable to sleep.

*

In the morning, we drove up to Cameron, Missouri, in my rental car, Evelyn keeping me company up front while Napo dozed in the back. In college, and again a few years after, I’d taught creative writing classes at prisons in Jackson, Michigan, and Lorton, Virginia, so when we arrived at Crossroads Correctional Center and went inside, the place already had a familiar feel—familiar lighting, even a familiar institutional odor. All U.S. prisons, I’ve come to believe, order the same sour buff-and-wax floor soap and the same bluish, buzzing fluorescent bulbs.

Evelyn knew each guard’s name, and they acknowledged her with measured politeness, leading us through the security doors, past the Plexiglas waiting room and into the visiting room, where Byron stood in his prison grays, a smile on his face. He was a bit shorter than me, and stockier than I’d imagined—most of the pictures of him on the Web were from high school, so it made sense that he’d filled out a bit, especially after a couple of years working out in prison weight rooms. He had a wide face, friendly brown eyes, and the kind of thin, black mustache that had been making a comeback in hipster circles, though Byron told me later that he’d grown his not for style points, but on the advice of other inmates who’d told him it would help ward off unwanted sexual advances. “Thanks for coming so far to see me,” Byron said, shaking my hand vigorously. He swept an arm through the air. “Hey, come on in, grab a seat. It’s not much, but we call it home.”