What I had initially considered yet another onerous duty had actually turned out to be an intriguing opportunity to take some of the abilities I had buried along the way and do a bit of investigative journalism. I had taken a class in college but the time limits journalists work under seemed too stressful, so I had turned to fiction as a hobby. But with Doc’s case, I wasn’t under any pressure to meet a deadline.
Along with all the newspaper coverage, Doc’s trial had been live-streamed and was available on YouTube. I couldn’t believe what was happening when I watched it. Gerald Gardner, the odd-jobs man who “found” Samira perjured himself more than once and contradicted the prosecutor’s closing statement despite being her witness. Dale Folsom, prison snitch, who Doc had supposedly confessed to, had a story with so many contradictions it should have been treated as dark comedy instead of taken seriously.
Doc had supposedly struck his wife with a golf club in their bedroom, causing her to fall to the ground unconscious. He had left her there and had returned later, thinking that he had killed her. So he had put her in the family swimming pool to frame someone else, make it look like an accident, hide the time of death. Folsom put forward this assemblage of ideas while his leg tapped non-stop.
Had there been a golf club? Yes, there had been. And it had even had Samira’s DNA on it. But the golf club that had supposedly been used as a weapon was found in the house a year after Samira’s death and after the house had been emptied out and put on the real estate market to be sold. The DNA had been the kind you would expect on a club that had once been handled by Samira when she had pulled it out of her golf bag.
And the medical examiner’s testimony should have demolished any possible remaining credibility Folsom might have had. Samira had still been alive when she had been put in the pool, because death had been by drowning. This contradicted Folsom’s story. Before that, she had suffered a blow that had knocked her to the ground. According to the medical examiner, that initial blow would not have been caused by a golf club and the fall had been onto a hard surface, like a poolside, not a carpeted bedroom.
The medical examiner’s evidence should have been favourable to Doc. Instead, with some sleight of hand and misdirection, she was used by the prosecution to create a picture of a domestic abuser who had lied to the police. Doc had mentioned there being two empty champagne bottles on the kitchen counter when he left that final morning. In a lengthy interview on the day of his wife’s death, he recalled that she had been drinking the day before and had opened a second bottle of champagne when they had gotten home that night and had continued to drink right up until about 4 AM. Seemingly misunderstanding him, investigators had asked him if she had consumed two bottles of champagne between midnight and 4 am. “Right,” Doc had said, affirming that it had been two bottles. The time frame had been slipped under the radar and now it seemed as if Doc had said his wife had consumed two bottles of champagne in that short time. The toxicology report came back saying she had no alcohol in her system and at the trial, the prosecutor put the question to the medical examiner, if Samira had consumed two bottles of champagne in those early morning hours, would there still have been alcohol in her system when her body was found at 11 AM? Well, yes, under those conditions, there would have been.
It became apparent to me that Cappleman’s winning strategy had been to put the marriage on trial and distract the jury from the hard evidence that would have brought back a verdict of not guilty. Furthermore, as the trial continued, there was more evidence that should have kept Doc from even being charged in the first place.
At no point did I have to take Doc’s word for anything. It was all online: the trial, the documents, the media coverage, the witness interviews, the police reports, at least five documentaries. Which all made it even more astounding that Assistant State Attorney Georgia Cappleman was able to put an innocent man in prison.
This was a story that I wanted to tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment