Ollie Clark—Friday, June 28, 2019
Ollie tried a deep breath. “Are you supposed to get him a lawyer?”
“No. He specifically said not to. Only if the court appointed can’t ram this all through, but we’re supposed to just sit and wait for someone to call and tell us we can pick Randy up.”
Cindy shook her head. “They don’t have to let Randy go just because they believe Jared.”
Eli raised an eyebrow at her.
“You heard of Making a Murderer?”
“Heard of. Never seen it.”
“They put two different people on trial for the same murder, with two different stories about how the murder happened, and both of them are still in prison.” Then, at Ollie’s frown: “Seriously. I don’t know if the uncle actually did it, but the kid certainly didn’t.”
“But the kid confessed, right?”
Cindy shrugged. “He did. It should’ve been thrown out. It was coerced. The point is, they used the kid’s confession to nail the kid, but they didn’t bring it up at all in the uncle’s trial. If they think they’ve got something on Randy, they might still arrest him and say they worked together but Jared’s trying to save Randy by saying he did it alone. Jared confessing doesn’t mean Randy will be released, and it certainly doesn’t mean they’ll believe him.”
“Even though they believed the kid?” Eli prodded.
“You’d better hope whatever Jared says doesn’t go like that interrogation. The two guys doing it fed the kid the information. If Jared’s going to convince them, he’s got to tell them stuff he could only know because he was there. Nothing they tell him first and nothing someone like Len could’ve found. And then whatever he says should line up with the evidence, which didn’t happen in the show.”
Ollie pinched the bridge of her nose because she wasn’t sure her brain was doing a good job of keeping real life separate from Cindy’s description of the show. That was also real life, but not real life here, and not real life with people she actually knew. She either needed more coffee or a very long nap, and right now a nap seemed out of the question.
“Jared’s stupid,” Cindy declared, getting up and carrying her mug over to the coffee maker. “I don’t think he’s telling the truth, anyway, and even if he is, he didn’t think this through. They’re just going to both end up in custody, and he doesn’t even want a lawyer? Stupid.”
Eli’s lips pressed together but he just looked at Ollie instead of trying to protest, and hey, they’d known each other since they were five. Without saying a word, he told her She only thinks that because she never saw him before.
Although, truth be told, Ollie herself had almost forgotten Jared Before. Prior to dating Birdy, Jared was just an upperclassman, two grades ahead, a God on the football team and not too shabby in his other sports, either. It was Serena more than Jared who put Eli up—or put up with him—when he needed the escape, and Eli stopped trying to tag along with his older cousin before he was out of diapers. It was clear Jared didn’t want him, so Eli got used to plunking down somewhere with his book and coming to the dinner table when called but otherwise not being an annoyance. In his formative years, Eli was trained not to be an annoyance.
Eli closed his eyes. “Damn.”
“What?”
“I just thought to myself that I’d like to know how much Len thinks he knows because then it would help us try to figure out what else Jared would have to say to convince them.” He shook his head. “There’s no evidence. That’s the whole problem. There wasn’t any back then, and what’s he going to say now to convince them? There’s nothing to check it against. The entire living room’s been redone, your mom and Birdy were cremated …”
Ollie shuddered and waved away his apology. Dad took care of all that without consulting her, although it wasn’t like Birdy could’ve had an open casket funeral, anyway. Anyone who’d seen Birdy’s body wouldn’t have been able to tell for sure it was Birdy. All the Clark women looked so much alike. They knew Mom, because that shot got her in the chest, but, until they saw Ollie still whole and walking around, everyone just knew she was the other dead body. There were plenty of reasons her brain shrouded that time of her life in mist.
Cindy shook her head. “Jared needs a lawyer.”
“It’d be on your own dime,” Eli cautioned. “And you’re already paying for Deborah.”
“So your cousin’s panicked and delusional and maybe drunk and you just want to leave him in jail?”
Eli shook his head. “If he’s drunk and delusional, they won’t believe him. They think it’s Randy, so they’ll be focused on that. The only way they’d believe Jared, whatever the breathalyzer shows, is if he can tell them things only the killer would know, and even then they’d have to be sure he didn’t find out just because Randy told him. I guarantee that right now they’re sitting there thinking Jared’s wasting their time to distract them from whatever they’re putting together about Randy.”
“Wait, so then I need to call Deborah and tell her …?”
“To tell Jared to keep up the good work?” Eli suggested. “If he’s distracting them, let him distract them, right?”
Cindy frowned. “You think Jared did it.”
“I think it’s one possible explanation for stuff we’ve been giving him the benefit of the doubt over for the past decade, yeah.” He shrugged. “Everyone’s been all oh, you poor thing, you lost your girlfriend, but Jared spiraled hard. Birdy was pregnant when she died, okay, that’s an extra blow, but …” He spread his hands. “Jared ended up killing his pregnant girlfriend by mistake and only afterward learned any other perspective about her family? That’s plausible.”
“You think your cousin committing a double murder is plausible?”
He just shrugged again. “Everyone was convinced it about me. It’s amazing how your mind can work to connect the dots.”
Cindy shook her head again, this time disgusted. “I’m calling Deborah.”
Excerpts from Jared Chapman’s interview with Lieutenant Samuel Johnson and Sergeant Parker Dennis, June 28, 2019
JC: I bought a gun in Wisconsin. You won’t be able to trace it—that was the point. It was outside a gun show, so not one of the people who actually paid to be there, and the guy made sure the license plate of his truck was covered up. With a confederate flag. He didn’t offer his name, I didn’t give mine, and I paid him cash. I didn’t even haggle. I didn’t want to Google a bunch and have you all suspicious of my search history, so I picked a shotgun because I figured the whole scatter thing would mean I didn’t have to aim all that well.
SJ: So you can’t prove—
JC: I took that day off from work. It was a Tuesday. Not the Tuesday the same week—the week before.
PD: So … June 9th.
JC: Sure. Check with them down at Econo. I pissed them off enough. I think Brock was gearing up to fire me when it happened, and instead I got a whole bunch of bereavement leave. More than I was supposed to get, and I didn’t really go back, anyway, but Brock’s got a long memory. Even if they don’t have the paperwork anymore, he’ll tell you.
PD: Go on.
JC: I hid it under my mattress. I didn’t even want to test fire it, because I figured I’d get caught doing that, and then I couldn’t help her. I’d take it out whenever I was alone and just try to get used to it. Dry firing, I think you call it. And then, each time, I’d wipe the whole thing down, you know? Like someone would find it under my mattress and believe I didn’t know it was there if it didn’t have fingerprints on it. Stupid, you see? I was so stupid back then.
SJ: So you planned it all for the nineteenth.
JC: Yeah. Yeah, even though—yeah. The previous weekend was Ollie’s weekend, so I couldn’t do it then, hey? And … shit, okay. That day, after lunch?
PD: June 19, 2009?
JC: Yeah. Birdy stopped by and asked me to go for a walk with her, and she told me … she told me she was pregnant. She waited until we were out in the woods a bit, nobody else around, and broke down. Started crying, and I was, like, worried she was breaking up with me or something, right? Like maybe her mom finally worked on her and told her to break it off. But it was just hormones, I guess, because she said it, told me she was pregnant, and then kind of … well, left it open for me to figure out what was next.
PD: What do you mean?
JC: I mean she said “Jared, I’m pregnant,” and then just stared at me. Face all blotchy. Snot coming out. A total wreck. She didn’t know what to do, okay? It was … it was weird. She’d spent all this time being a little spitfire about how unfair things were and listing off what she’d do if she could, but then … I mean, it wasn’t the end of the world. Not entirely in the plans, but come on, everyone knew Wendy was pregnant when she married Randy. I guess she only turned Puritan after having two kids in two years, you know? Because I didn’t—okay, Birdy told me she was pregnant.
PD: Yes.
JC: And I was already thinking about how to help her, right? And I’d already planned for that weekend, anyway. Birdy would go off with her dad after dinner, Ollie and Wendy would sit around eating chocolate covered cherries or whatever and gloating how they were both better than Birdy, so on and so forth. So I start reassuring Birdy that we can still do it. She can still do college in California, get in the fall semester at least, take spring off, I’ll get a job and we’ll have an apartment. And she’s calming down, so I ask her to marry me, and she bursts into tears again. Which I guess a lot of women do in that situation, anyway, but she also has to get back for dinner. That’s fine, because that’s what I need: Birdy to go off with Randy so Wendy and Ollie are alone, you know?
SJ: With you so far.
JC: I get back to my mom’s place and Eli’s there, but whatever. He doesn’t say anything to me, like usual, so that’s fine. Mom’s got dinner, we all grab plates, it’s fine. I go into my room at the normal time, and that’s fine, too. Mom goes to bed early. Eli didn’t come in, which had me nervous, but when I got up and looked out, he was passed out on the couch. Snoring. The works. So I took the gun out from under my mattress, slipped into my shoes, and left.
PD: What were you wearing?
JC: You say that like I had a huge wardrobe. My sneakers, blue jeans, black t-shirt, my gray windbreaker, and those cheap thin knit gloves you can get at Walmart. Basically normal except for the gun. I thought about trying to put it up my sleeve or down my leg or something, but I figured I’d rather be able to run if I had to. And I wanted to look normal—just me, going for a walk and carrying something. It wasn’t dark dark, but it wasn’t light, and I could avoid the streetlights. You know where my mom lived back then, right? Other side of the highway, kind of across from where Eli lives now?
SJ: Yes.
JC: Avoid the streetlights, hang back until there’s no one on the highway … then I went all the way up the hill first, Trimountain as far as it goes and then over to 1st. I’d thought it all out, you know? So even though my heart was pounding so hard I couldn’t hear anything else, I had the plan. Up to the top of the hill, then down the alley to their house. I should back up—you know they had that motion sensitive light on the garage? Earlier in the week I’d nudged the sensor. To me it looked like the thing was way off, but nobody fixed it by Friday night, so I could go from the alley to the garage and get in the normal door without setting the light off. I left the gun there, just propped up inside, and circled back the same way to the alley. Then I went back up to the top, using the alley, and took a stroll down 2nd just to make sure. If there was anything suspicious … but there wasn’t, so I got to the bottom, went over to the alley, and came up again.
PD: But the light would’ve caught you in the driveway.
JC: I didn’t use the driveway. I was overcautious, maybe. Get the gun out of the garage, close that door again, back up enough so I could get around the house without activating the light, and come around the uphill side to the door. It didn’t go on at all while I was there. All those people who said they saw it? They added that in later. Whoever said he saw someone running downhill got into everyone else’s head and they all added in the light, but I did the whole thing in the dark.
SJ: So you circled the house on the uphill side …?
JC: And then I rang the doorbell.
Bury the Dead 28 – coming April 28
Rebecca Frost 