But a few minutes later, Broadhurst came storming into the living room and said, “Where the hell’s Jeremy?” He announced that his car was missing.
The remaining guests came outside. The driveway from the Broadhurst home to the road was three fifths of a mile long, and crested a hill about a hundred yards from the house. Once a car passed that point, it was no longer visible.
But there was a reddish glow, and the sound of an idling motor, beyond the hill.
Bob and Broadhurst led the pack of people running to the scene, but everyone saw the same thing.
Sian’s bloodied, twisted body lay in the grass to the left of the road. About fifty feet beyond that, on the other side of the driveway, was the Porsche, nosed into a tree, the front end crumpled. The engine continued to race.
The door swung open.
Jeremy, his forehead bloodied where it had hit the steering wheel, stumbled out of the car. Being an older-model Porsche, it was not equipped with an airbag. He looked around, dazed, blinked several times at all the people staring at him.
“What the fuck?” he said.
Reece and Megan McFadden were hovering in horror over their daughter’s body. Megan had taken the girl into her arms and was screaming. Reece looked at Jeremy and ran at him full force.
“You son of a bitch!” he cried. He threw Jeremy up against the car and started hammering him with his fists. Bob, Broadhurst and another man had to haul him off before he killed the boy. (Gloria, perhaps not surprisingly, had wanted Reece McFadden charged with assault. And equally unsurprisingly, the prosecutor had opted not to.)
Jeremy was charged with aggravated vehicular homicide. The amount of alcohol in his system constituted recklessness, and he was facing up to twenty-five years in prison.
Grant Finch, lawyer to and friend of both Galen Broadhurst and Bob Butler — and, I believed, Madeline Plimpton — was brought in. Several defense strategies were hatched. The first was to spread the blame, highlight the mitigating circumstances. There was the easy access to alcohol at the party, coupled with Galen’s foolishness in leaving the keys in the car after Jeremy’s first attempt to make off with it. That struck me as astonishingly stupid.
But then Grant, fearing those points would not be enough to get Jeremy off, hit upon something grander. Jeremy’s mother, everyone said, had a history of micromanaging his life and making excuses for him when he did wrong. When he misbehaved at school, it was the teacher’s fault. The system wasn’t challenging him, so he acted out because he was bored, his mother would argue. If he got in trouble for fighting, Gloria would claim the other kid started it, even if she hadn’t seen what happened. Shortly after Jeremy got his driver’s license at the age of sixteen, he had backed into a lamppost and done several thousand dollars’ worth of damage to his mother’s car. The light on the post, she argued, was not bright enough, and she attempted to sue the town. Jeremy’s behavior could always be traced by his mother to something other than her failure to make him accountable for his actions.
Grant Finch, in attempting to explain Gloria’s parenting style and also garner her some sympathy, highlighted her own traumatic upbringing. She’d been raised by an emotionally abusive father after the death of her mother from cancer when Gloria was only five. By the age of eight, it was more like she was raising him. A real-estate agent with unpredictable hours, he expected Gloria to take care of the house, prepare meals and clean up after. He was relentlessly critical about everything she did, and punished her when she didn’t do well in school.
I jumped to several other stories, looking to fill in the blanks. Gloria’s father died in a car accident when she was eleven. Madeline Plimpton, it turned out, was Gloria’s father’s sister. She applied for legal custody of Gloria, and raised her from that point on.
Gloria’d always vowed that when she had children of her own, she’d never treat them the way her father treated her. All the love and attention her mother failed to share with her, she would lavish on her son. Enter the law of unintended consequence. Gloria so managed every aspect of Jeremy’s life — what sports he’d play in, what clubs he’d join, what course he’d take, what friends he’d play with, even what TV shows he should watch — that he began to lose the ability to make a decision of his own. And when he attempted to, he’d get it wrong.
When he was seven years old, he nearly burned the house down while playing with matches. Gloria, so the story went, blamed the manufacturer for making matches that were too easy to light.
Finch brought in other factors that could have had an impact on Jeremy. He played video games — something he managed to do without his mother’s approval — that might have made him unaware of the real consequences of reckless driving. His parents had recently split up and he was emotionally distraught. And, since they were throwing everything at the wall to see what might stick, the defense floated the idea that he had too much gluten in his diet.
The bottom line, though, was that Jeremy could not easily tell right from wrong after years of not being held responsible for his misdeeds. When he got into that car drunk, he would have had no idea that it could lead to something catastrophic.
Despite the humiliation it brought on her, Gloria Pilford went along with the defense strategy. But no one predicted how notorious it would become, or that Jeremy would end up being nicknamed the Big Baby.
Jeremy and his mother were mocked and ridiculed in TV news shows, even by the late-night comedians, as if there was anything about this story that was funny. Not that tragedy had ever stood in the way of comedy before. Back in the nineties, Jay Leno had his Judge Ito dancers during the O. J. Simpson trial, conveniently ignoring the fact that two people had been brutally murdered.
But the outrage didn’t kick in big-time until the judge waived a prison sentence for Jeremy and instead placed him on four years’ probation.
The fury was immeasurable. That part I was already up to speed on.
There were plenty of pictures accompanying the articles I’d found online. The accident itself; shots of Sian McFadden, who was a beautiful young girl and would have grown up to be a lovely woman; Jeremy dressed for his court appearances in a dark blue suit that always looked too big for him, and a matching tie.
There was always that same look in his eyes. Lost, and frightened.
When I looked at the pictures, I couldn’t help but be reminded of someone else. My son, Scott. Who, despite my wife Donna’s and my best intentions, went off the rails. And while the drugs he experimented with weren’t the reason for his death, he was headed down a road that could ultimately have killed him.
I sometimes envied my late wife, who no longer had to deal with the grief and the self-recrimination.
“A lot of it was just bullshit,” said a voice behind me.
I wondered how long Gloria had been standing there, watching me read the various news stories.
“Which parts?” I asked, shifting around on the cushion.
I extended a hand to the closest chair, inviting her to sit. She took me up on it, setting her refilled wine glass on the table next to it.
“A lot of it,” she said. “But there’s enough of it that’s true that people think the worst of me.”
“News stories don’t usually convey what people are like,” I said. “On TV, they try to sum you up in two-minute segments. In a newspaper, your whole personality gets reduced to a couple of hundred words.”
Gloria nodded. “It’s true I pampered him. That I basically smothered him with too much attention. I had a horrible upbringing.”
“I read about your father.”
“I know I probably seem like a crazy woman to you, but there are reasons I’m the way I am.”
I said nothing.
“But some of the stories Grant told the court — they were pretty much a fiction. The playing-with-matches tale, for one. That never happened.”