1
Most of the media had already made up their minds. They were calling Wyatt Butler the worst serial killer in decades. Depraved. Evil. A twisted, calculated madman who had preyed on innocent children. News vans and angry members of the public packed Foley Square outside the New York County Courthouse on this, the final day of jury deliberations. A heavily guarded police line held the swarm at bay.
Somewhere in the depths of the granite-faced court building, Maria Fontana approached the drab refreshment table at the end of the deliberation room, carrying a small folder. She poured herself a stale black coffee. The hum of a struggling air conditioner and a quiet ticking clock filled the room. Her eleven fellow jurors were seated around a long, rectangular table, silently sifting through the horrific evidence.
Emotional and physical exhaustion had set in long ago. Most jurors slumped in their chairs, elbows propped up on the table. Jackets off. Ties removed. Top buttons unfastened. The sense of formality from the first week had slowly but surely ebbed away. They’d been here for three weeks, deadlocked after two secret ballots. Gone through the same debates again and again. Now the judge had given everyone a final chance to reconsider before declaring a mistrial.
Maria knew that her decision would potentially send a gruesome killer to prison for the rest of his life. Or free an innocent man who had the misfortune of being assumed guilty in the court of public opinion, based purely on circumstantial evidence. Either way, the choice would be made in less than five minutes during the final ballot.
Then, I can forget all this horror …
The sights and sounds of the evidence she was subjected to made her stomach churn. She guessed it would take years for her nightmares to end.
Maria sipped the coffee and grimaced at the bitter taste. She would have thought that good coffee was a requirement for jury duty that took this long. She was wrong.
Guilty or not guilty. The decision, for her, boiled down to a few basic facts.
Wyatt Butler—an antique watch restorer—stood accused of brutally murdering eight children in several different states. For sure, he was a narcissist. Maria’s career as a psychologist told her that. He was outwardly self-centered and arrogant, without an apparent shred of empathy for the victims in this case. He had more than a hint of a superiority complex in the way he constantly sneered at the prosecution’s claims. He was immaculately dressed in a sharp suit, lean, and clean shaven with a perfect buzz cut. His strong Brooklyn accent had filled the courtroom as he denied everything with an air of indifference, and openly mocked the police for wasting time pursuing the wrong person.
He was most definitely an asshole.
But none of this necessarily made him guilty.
The legs of a chair scraped against the polished stone floor.
Fellow juror Ashlyn Berry—who looked like Rihanna, only twenty years older—rose from the table and headed over toward the side of the room. None of the other jurors batted an eyelid as she made her way to the refreshment table.
All twelve of them had stayed in a hotel throughout the monthlong trial and deliberation to avoid outside influences. An impossible task because the proceedings were covered on every news channel around the clock. No phones. No laptops. No connection to their friends or families. And the less-than-luxurious hotel they’d chosen to house them in didn’t help with the crushing boredom.
Nevertheless, over the course of the lingering month, Maria had struck up a friendship with Ashlyn. They frequently had dinner together in the dingy hotel lobby, trying to unwind from the horrors of the case. The older juror had been overwhelmed by their task. And with the clock ticking down to the final ballot, the frown lines and nervous look had returned to Ashlyn’s face.
“Which way you think it’ll go?” she whispered.
“I’m not sure,” Maria replied. “We each have to do what we think is right. It’s hard to get past the lack of DNA and the eyewitness problems.”
“I hear you,” Ashlyn said. “But he sure does look guilty, don’t he?”
Maria nodded in agreement. She set down her coffee and opened her folder. She flipped from page to page, showing the police sketches from a few of the eyewitnesses from various investigations. Each of the drawings looked different and—more importantly—none looked like the man on trial for the crime.
How could every witness describe a different suspect when the crimes were nearly identical?
It just made no sense.
That said, two pieces of evidence were particularly persuasive in connecting Wyatt Butler to the crimes. In every location of a murder, he’d stayed in the same town. On the same night. In the same chain of motels. An intrepid detective noticed the odd fact when cross-referencing motel guest lists in each city, assuming the killer traveled from town to town committing the crimes. Butler’s alibi was that he was there to sell antique watches, a fact that was backed up by his buyers. But still, the odds were fairly astronomical that this was mere coincidence.
Secondly, police found a pair of freshly bloodied pants belonging to an unidentified child in Butler’s attic in Bay Ridge. But the man had no children of his own, nor any explanation for where the clothes came from. The blood did not match any of the victims, so the evidence—while massively incriminating—simply wasn’t bulletproof.
The decision, for Maria, rested on opinion rather than hard evidence. Yes, most in the room had already decided his guilt. In spite of this, the unpalatable fact remained. Butler had a modicum of plausible deniability.
“I just want this damned thing over,” Ashlyn muttered.
“Same here.”
“I wish they never selected me.”
Copyright © 2021 by Impractical Productions, LLC, and Darren Wearmouth
