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She had forgotten the Quarter Pounders.
“I couldn’t. He said he would hurt me.”
“But he was in the car. With Holly.”
“Yes, because she couldn’t be trusted.”
“And you could?”
“When I was good, he was nicer to me.” She looked to her parents. Her mother nodded, encouraging her, although she looked slightly stu
“How did you earn Walter’s trust?” the prosecutor asked, and her parents could no longer contain themselves.
“Really-” her mother began. “Why must you-” her father said, trying to use what Eliza recognized was his professional voice, but not quite controlling it as he usually did.
“What do you think Walter Bowman’s lawyer is going to do with this information?” The prosecutor’s ma
“So don’t put her on the stand at all,” her father said. “You’ll get no argument from us.”
“I need her testimony about the cash box, and how Walter refused to let Holly go. I have to establish the kidnapping or another felony to ensure he gets the death penalty, and we can’t prove rape.”
Eliza pondered that, then realized: He meant Holly. They couldn’t prove Walter raped Holly. What he had done to her didn’t count.
“Eliza’s behavior is consistent with dozens of hostage cases,” her mother began.
“Stockholm syndrome, I know.” The prosecutor’s voice was bitter, belittling. “That worked so well for Patty Hearst.”
“No, not Stockholm syndrome, not exactly. She didn’t sympathize with her captor. But Elizabeth ”-her mother had trouble remembering the new name-“is a young girl and she believed he had the power he claimed he had. He threatened her. He threatened us.”
The prosecutor looked to Eliza. She nodded, then realized he would not be satisfied with a nod. “He told me all the time that he would kill me and my family if I tried to get away from him. He said he would kill them while I watched.”
He looked down at his notes. “Back at the roadside, where you first met Holly-why did you get out of the truck and let her sit in the middle?”
“Because that’s what Walter wanted.”
“Did he say that?”
“No, but I understood. He gave me a look, and I realized that he wanted the new girl to sit next to him.”
“The new girl?”
“Holly. But she wasn’t Holly yet. I didn’t learn her name until she was in the truck.”
“You were the new girl, once.”
Eliza didn’t understand his point. “Not really. There wasn’t another girl, when he took me.”
“You saw him with a shovel, digging a grave.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know that. I just saw a man digging.”
“A grave for Maude Parrish.”
“That’s who you found there, right?”
The prosecutor didn’t always answer her questions. Apparently, he owned the questions. “So you were the new girl, after Maude. And you knew that when Walter switched girls, he got rid of the old one.”
“No…” It was different, not at all the same.
“ Elizabeth, why do you think Walter kept you alive? Why did he kill every girl but you?”
“I think,” she said, “it was because I always did what he told me to do.”
The prosecutor asked her to leave, so he could speak to her parents privately, but her parents refused. She was sixteen, she was going to testify in court. She should be part of every discussion.
“Okay, I’m going to lay it out for you. The prosecutor in Maryland is scared to go for the death penalty in his county, precisely because he has no evidence that Maude was kidnapped. Walter Bowman refuses to confess to any other homicides, although there are quite a few missing person cases that seem plausible. The murder of Holly Tackett is our only chance to put this guy to death, and I can’t afford to give the defense anything to play with.”
The Lerners were united in their mystification, staring at this young, pompous man in bewilderment.
“A smart defense attorney is going to go to town with this. Suggest Elizabeth wasn’t a victim at this point, but an accomplice. And once you let that idea worm its way into the courtroom, you’ve got all sorts of reasonable doubt. What if Elizabeth was the one who pushed Holly into the ravine, out of fear, or even jealousy? What if Elizabeth was really Walter’s girlfriend?”
“That is offensive beyond belief,” Inez said.
“A good attorney isn’t going to worry about giving offense. He’ll be playing for big stakes. He’s playing for Walter’s life.”
“And you’re playing,” Ma
The prosecutor studied Eliza’s parents. “You’re enlightened types, right? Don’t want to see the guy die. Don’t want to see anyone die. But then, you’ve got your daughter. Two other families, probably a lot more, weren’t so lucky.”
“As a father,” Ma
“The Tacketts don’t feel the same way. Fact is, that’s who the commonwealth of Virginia represents in this case. Not your daughter. Holly Tackett and Virginia. I hope you haven’t let your own”-he paused for a minute, seeming not so much to search for a word, as for the spin he wanted to place on it-“altruistic ideas influence your daughter. I hope this story about McDonald’s, which I’m hearing for the first time, isn’t something you’ve cooked up to create enough confusion about events that a jury will be reluctant to consider the death penalty.”
Inez put a hand on Ma
“The only thing we’ve instructed our daughter to do,” Inez said, “is tell the truth. Tell the truth, and not look for reasons this happened to her, because there are no reasons.”
“That’s a nice thing to tell your daughter and probably very helpful,” the prosecutor said, trying to scoot back to their side, reunite the team. Yea, Eliza! Boo, Walter! Only he had slipped, revealed his true loyalties, and Eliza knew she could never trust him again. “But jurors will want reasons. I’m trying to anticipate the worst-case scenario. I’m sure things will work out.”
Things did, at least as far as the prosecutor was concerned. Walter’s defense attorney was far from expert, and he treated Eliza with an almost bizarre politeness, as if she had a condition that should not be referenced directly. No, it was the prosecutor who asked her about the trip to McDonald’s, and made her tell, in excruciating detail, what Walter did to her the night after Holly died. It was Jared Garrett, a few months later, who devoted a large section of his book to the theory that Elizabeth Lerner might have been Walter Bowman’s girlfriend and coconspirator, whom he decided not to implicate for reasons known only to him, given that he never testified. If Elizabeth had been raped, why was Walter allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of kidnapping and assault? Garrett cited no sources for his theories, asserting only that there was a “school of thought” that Elizabeth Lerner may have evolved into something more than a hostage. “School of thought!” Vo
It didn’t matter. By the time Garrett’s book was published, the sordid imaginations attracted to his kind of journalism had moved on. A serial killer known as the Night Stalker was terrorizing Los Angeles; two dead girls in the Mid-Atlantic simply couldn’t compete. The crimes of Walter Bowman had been eclipsed even in Virginia, where a high-achieving college student had enlisted her German boyfriend in the murder of her parents. Elizabeth Lerner was Eliza Lerner, enrolled in a new high school in a new county, her hair back to its natural color and curly disorder. Nobody knew her past, nobody cared.