The Murder Trial: An Excerpt
PROLOGUE
Let me tell you what happened. Everybody got it wrong.
I was moving slowly, walking with baby steps. The Justice Center deputies who flanked me — saul jennings and dolores gaines, their name tags read — were talking hockey. Squabbling over some player with the St. Louis Blues. They were so involved in their debate, it was like I wasn’t even there.
Like the trek through those hallways had nothing at all to do with me.
I shuffled along in my leg cuffs, struggling to keep pace as they marched me through the so-called “Justice Center.” That’s a misno- mer, a bogus name for the facility that houses the St. Louis County Jail: During the ten months I’d been locked inside, it had provided me zero justice.
We turned a corner and reached the entrance to the skyway stretching over the street below. Confronted by the long span of the green- glass skywalk that connects the jail to the St. Louis County courthouse, I froze.
Stopped dead. My mouth went dry, and my throat closed up.
This was really happening. To me.
My abrupt halt interrupted the officers’ sports talk. Deputy Gaines gave my arm a painful squeeze, just above the elbow.
“What’s your problem? Move!”Deputy Jennings was more patient with my paralysis. He said, “The skywalk’s safe, Janelle. You got a thing about heights?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t afraid of heights. I was afraid of what awaited me at the other end of the path.
Deputy Gaines amped up the pressure. She jerked on my elbow, then yanked my arm. As I stumbled, the belly chain that secured my handcuffs caught on the fabric at my waist. Instead of the standard- issue jail scrubs, that day I’d chosen a burgundy sweater dress that used to be my favorite outfit for debate tournaments. Looking down, I saw that a link of the chain had snagged on the knit material and pulled out threads. My bare skin peeked through the hole the chain had made. No way I could fix it.
Deputy Gaines brayed, “That’s your own fault. Nobody to blame for that but you.”
She tugged me forward and onto the skywalk. Through the panels of green glass, I could see the activity on the street below.
TV news vans, emblazoned with network logos and topped with satellite dishes, were double- parked on Clayton’s South Central Avenue. Reporters armed with cameras were filming the crowd of protesters — dozens of them — who had gathered in front of the courthouse. Some brandished signs, colorful posters on wooden sticks, all showing the same image.
When I caught sight of the picture of my family, my feet quit moving again.
They’d mounted enlargements of a familiar photo — the one my dad had used in his political campaign for the Missouri state senate.
Something about my father’s campaign poster had always troubled me. Posing me in the center, squeezed in between my mom and dad, felt like he had put me on display to prove his broad- mindedness: Look, we’re blue- eyed, red- state Republicans, but we adopted a kid from the inner city!
The TV cameras had energized the protesters. They were shouting and chanting as they shoved their posters before the cameras. The noise penetrated the glass walls of the skywalk as they yelled, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” One high- pitched voice soared above the others.
“She’s a murderer! She has to pay!” Deputy Jennings tapped my shoulder. “Come on, Janelle. Don’t look down.”
He sounded like he almost felt sorry for me. Maybe it was because he was Black, too. Or maybe it was because Saul Jennings didn’t work in the county jail. He was regularly assigned to the courthouse staff.
As I started moving, he cleared his throat and said, “That’s right, almost there. You don’t want to be late for your trial.”
I didn’t argue with him. But I knew that court couldn’t start without me. I was the one on trial, accused of murdering my parents, Senator Ted Thompson and May Thompson, with my father’s gun.
We finally reached the courthouse side of the skywalk. Once I was inside, the door shut behind me, silencing the voices from the street. Still, I knew they were out there. I wished I could shout back at those people, to make them understand: I loved my parents. They adopted me when I was a tiny kid, plucked me out of foster care when my birth mother couldn’t handle being a mom. We were a happy family. I never wanted to hurt them.
That’s what I kept telling everybody — the cops, the detectives, my lawyer. But nobody listens to me.
When the deputies escorted me up to the courtroom and opened the door, I saw my attorney sitting at the defense table. Public Defender Becca Kelly was worried about the weight of the evidence against me. She’d said it’s overwhelming. Like the state’s case was so convincing that my own lawyer was giving up hope before the trial began.
But the last time we talked, she told me I was lucky: The county prosecutor was not seeking the death penalty. Instead he was asking the jury to lock me up in prison for the rest of my life, without the possibility of ever being released on parole.
Lucky? Really?
Maybe I should have been used to that. For the last fifteen years — ever since I was three years old — I’d heard over and over again how lucky I was.
