And here I didn’t think I could feel any worse. I know all of this, of course, but hearing it in such a tidy, withering summary, from my own cocounsel no less, lights a tiny bomb in my stomach.
“That’s going to be a pretty hard thing to sell to the jury,” says Bradley. “Don’t you think?”
“Maybe so,” I say.
Or maybe not. I know more than Bradley about what happened that night, but far, far less than Jason. To varying degrees, our client has kept us both in the dark.
We’re all going to find out together.
PEOPLE VS. JASON KOLARICH
TRIAL, DAY 6
Tuesday, December 17
100
Jason
Standing room only in the courtroom again today, the gallery seats full and people jammed all along the walls. The press requests for this trial, previously modest, tripled over the weekend, including now correspondents from national media outlets. The media’s favorite story of the summer, the North Side Slasher, has returned for an encore.
They all showed up yesterday, Monday, and formed a line that snaked up and down the hallway outside the courtroom, only to learn that Judge Bialek had decided to delay the resumption of trial for another day. She didn’t say why. In the typically mystical ways in which judges often operate, she simply instructed the court clerk to notify everyone outside that there would be no trial testimony today. The spectators all left, disappointed and disgruntled. The reporters, of course, stayed, wondering what this all meant, smelling something big. It wasn’t long before Twitter feeds and Internet blogs were full of speculation, and Shauna and Bradley were ambushed with feverish questions when they came to court this morning.
“What did the detectives find this weekend?” “Why did the police visit Jason Kolarich’s house yesterday?” “Why was Alexa Himmel’s body transferred back to the medical examiner’s office?”
Shauna’s face is drawn. Her movements are a beat slower than usual. She has hardly slept the last four nights since my cross-examination on Friday. She has a habit of doing that, anyway, when she’s on trial, and with everything that’s happened in this case since Friday, I can hardly blame her.
“Ms. Tasker,” says the judge, “is the defense prepared to call its next witness?”
“Yes, Your Honor. The defense calls Detective Vance Austin.”
Vance Austin strides to the witness box in a decent gray suit and black tie. He is a rugged, cop-handsome guy who, according to Joel Lightner, comes from good stock. He looks like an alpha male, a guy to whom others turn. He smooths his tie as he takes his seat in the witness chair after swearing his oath.
“Vance Austin,” he says to Shauna, spelling his last name, as if anyone wasn’t sure how to spell it. “I’m a detective, first grade, here in the city.”
“Detective, at some point this year, approximately in May of this year, did you become involved in the investigation of the murder of a woman named Alicia Corey?”
“That’s correct.”
“Her murder took place within your jurisdiction at Area Three headquarters?”
“That’s correct.”
“Did you subsequently become the lead investigator in a series of homicides involving young women on the north side of the city?”
“That’s correct. I led the task force.”
“And the killer was known in the media as the North Side Slasher?”
“Some reporters called him that. I didn’t.”
Shauna pauses. “What did you call him?”
“I’m too much of a gentleman to repeat it here.”
That gets an unusually hearty laugh from the spectators, all of them hyped up, eager.
Shauna smiles. “Right. But-five women were murdered on the city’s north side within approximately a one-month period this past summer, correct?”
“Five confirmed women,” says Detective Austin.
“Yes, thank you. Five confirmed women. Alicia Corey, Lauren Gibbs, Holly Frazier, Nancy Minnows, and Samantha Drury. Are those the women?”
“Yes.”
“And those murders have now been solved, is that right, Detective?”
“Those five have been, that’s correct.”
“Who killed those women, Detective?”
“A man named Marshall Rivers.”
Shauna nods. “When did you solve this case?” she asks.
His head inclines from side to side. “Well, we confirmed it on that Tuesday. . it would have been the first full week of August of this year.”
Seven days after Alexa was murdered.
“Would Tuesday, August sixth, sound right?” asks Shauna.
“Yes, that sounds right. It took us a couple of days with some lab work to make it official, to confirm things. We probably knew we had our guy the previous Friday, but I think we went public on the following Tuesday afternoon.”
I would have loved to have watched that press conference. But by then, I’d been in county lockup for a full week for Alexa’s murder. Shauna, who visited me as often as she could as my attorney of record, had given me tidbits for several days, rumors that the police thought they had solved the case, the killer was believed to be named Marshall Rivers, there were a lot of details that had to be confirmed, et cetera.
“Do you have any doubt whatsoever that Marshall Rivers was the man who killed those five women this past summer?”
“None,” Austin answers, his jaw high. “Zero.”
“Without going into too much detail,” Shauna says, “can you give us an idea about the evidence you built against him?”
“Well, we-we found the murder weapon in his apartment, first of all. He used the same knife on each victim, a folding lockback knife with a partially serrated blade. The blood and DNA of each of the five victims was intermingled on that knife’s blade and handle. We had an eyewitness description, a decent one, from one of the murders that matched Marshall Rivers. We brought the witness in and showed her a photo array that included a recent photo of Rivers, and she picked him. We have Rivers on a security camera at Citywide Bank in the Commercial District branch, where one of the victims, Lauren Gibbs, worked, on two different days, never doing any business in the bank whatsoever, just looking in the direction of Ms. Gibbs, who was a bank teller. And we reviewed his Internet searches. He had done extensive research on most of the victims. He’d looked at their Facebook pages, he’d found their home addresses in some cases-things like that.” Austin nods at Shauna. “Then, there’s something that we’ve kept confidential that I think you’re planning on asking me about. .”
“That’s fine, Detective, we can stop there,” says Shauna. “I’d like to talk a bit more about Marshall Rivers, specifically.”
101
Jason
“Detective Austin,” says Shauna, “Marshall Rivers had a criminal record, did he not?”
“He did. Three felony convictions.”
“Do you have those committed to memory, Detective? Or would you like me to take you through them?”
“Oh, I know them,” he says, sporting a wry grin. “By now, I know Marshall Rivers pretty darn well.”
I’m reminded of Joel Lightner here. For him, it was Terry Burgos, the college janitor who killed a half dozen women and stowed them in an auditorium basement. Joel worked that case so hard, from start to finish, that he developed some sort of bizarre connection with the guy, some nostalgic affinity as time passed. That’s how Vance Austin is feeling toward Marshall Rivers. Not that Vance Austin can credit outstanding police work to his solving of the murders, but human beings are remarkably adept at cherry-picking the facts most favorable to their egos.
“His first conviction,” says Austin, “was about thirteen years ago, when he was twenty. He tried to coerce a woman into an alley at gunpoint. He pleaded the case down to simple assault in state court. With the plea, he avoided prison. He was arrested on a sexual assault nearly six months later, but the charges were dropped when the victim refused to testify. Another six months later, he was convicted of possession of a firearm and possession of a Schedule One controlled substance, and he served just over three years. Most recently, he was convicted in federal court of possession of a firearm under similar circumstances as his first conviction; he tried to force a woman and her child into his car by threat of a firearm. He got seventy-five months on the weapons charge, or about six and a half years in federal prison. He attacked a prison psychiatrist, a woman, while inside and got another eighteen months added to his sentence. Prison psychiatrists said he was capable of violent and impulsive behavior, that he had no sense of remorse or right versus wrong-so he was pretty high up on our list.”