The Life We Bury (7 page)

I wasted the better part of a week and eight phone calls trying to pry Carl Iverson's criminal file from the public defender's office. Initially, the receptionist struggled to understand my request, and when she finally did understand, she gave me her opinion that the file had probably been destroyed years ago. “Regardless,” she said, “I have no authority to hand over a murder file to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who asks for it.” After that she simply passed my calls on to the voice mail of Berthel Collins, chief public defender, where my messages seemed to fall into an abyss. On the fifth day of no return call from Collins, I skipped my afternoon classes and caught a bus to downtown Minneapolis.

When the receptionist told me that the chief was busy, I told her I would wait and took a seat close enough to her desk that I could hear her as she whispered into her telephone. I read magazines to kill time until she finally whispered to someone, telling them that I was lingering. Fifteen minutes later she broke down and ushered me into the office of Berthel Collins, a pale-skinned man with a mop of uncombed hair crisscrossing his head and a nose as big around as a ripe persimmon. Berthel smiled at me and shook my hand as if he wanted to sell me a car.

“So you're the kid that's stalking me,” he said.

“I take it you got my phone messages,” I said. He looked flustered for a second then motioned me to a chair.

“You gotta understand,” he said, “we don't get calls all that often asking us to dig up a thirty-year-old file. We store all that stuff off-site.”

“But you do still have the file?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, “We have it. We're mandated to keep murder files indefinitely. I had a runner bring it in yesterday. That's it right there.” He pointed to a banker's box sitting against the wall behind me.
I hadn't expected that much stuff. I thought I'd have maybe a binder full of paper, not a box. I calculated the number of hours it would take to read the file and watched as those numbers filled a bucket in my head. I then factored in the homework from my other classes and the tests and the lab projects. I suddenly felt dizzy. How would I ever get this all done. I began to regret my decision to get the file; this was supposed to be a simple English assignment.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out the release, and handed it to Mr. Collins. “So, I can take that with me then?” I asked.

“Not all of it,” he said. “Not yet. We have some files ready to go. We have to cull out the notes and work product before we let it go out of this office.”

“How long's that gonna take?” I shifted in my chair, trying to find a position where the cushion springs didn't grind into my butt cheeks.

“Like I said, we have a couple files ready today.” He smiled. “We have an intern working on it. The rest of the file should be ready fairly soon, maybe a week or two.” Collins leaned back in his cushy Georgian wingback chair, which I noticed sat a good four inches higher than any other chair in the room and seemed far more comfortable. I shifted again in my seat, trying to keep blood flowing to my legs. “What's your interest in this case anyway?” he asked, crossing one leg over the other.

“Let's just say I have an interest in the life and times of Carl Iverson.”

“But why?” Collins asked with genuine sincerity. “There wasn't much to this case.”

“You know the case?”

“Yeah, I know it,” he said. “I clerked here that year; it was my third year of law school. Carl's lead attorney, John Peterson, brought me on to do his legal research.” Collins paused, looking past me to a blank spot on his wall, recollecting the details of Carl's case. “I met Carl in jail a few times and sat in the gallery during his trial. It was my first murder case. Yeah, I remember him. I remember the girl, too, Crystal something or other.”

“Hagen.”

“That's right, Crystal Hagen.” Collins's face grew cold. “I still see the pictures—the ones we had in the trial. I'd never seen crime-scene
photos before. That was my first time. It's not peaceful like you see on TV with their eyes closed, looking like they simply fell asleep. No, it's not like that at all. Her photos were violent and gut-wrenching. To this day, I can still see her.” He shuddered slightly, then continued. “He could've gotten a deal you know.”

“A deal?”

“A plea bargain. They offered him second-degree murder. He could have been eligible for parole in eight years. He turned it down. The man's facing a mandatory life sentence if he's convicted of first-degree, and he turns down a second-degree plea offer.”

“That brings up a question that's been bugging me,” I said. “If he gets sentenced to life in prison, how can he ever get paroled?”

Collins leaned forward and rubbed the underside of his chin, scratching a day's worth of scruff. “Life doesn't necessarily mean until you die,” he said. “Back in 1980 life in prison meant that you had to do seventeen years before being eligible for parole. Later, they changed that to thirty years. They changed it again so that a murder committed during a kidnapping or a rape gets life without possibility of parole. Technically, they convicted Iverson under the old statute, so he was eligible for parole after seventeen years, but forget that. Once the legislature made it clear that they want murdering rapists locked up for good, Iverson's prospects for parole pretty much evaporated. To tell you the truth, when I got your call, I looked up Iverson's record on the Department of Corrections website and about fell on the floor when I saw that he was out.”

“He's dying of cancer,” I said.

“Well that explains it,” he said. “Prison hospice can be problematic.” The corners of his mouth tipped downward, his head nodding in understanding.

“What did Carl say happened on the night Crystal Hagen died?”

“Nothing,” he said. “He said he didn't do it—said he drank that afternoon until he passed out and couldn't remember a thing. Honestly, he didn't do much to help with his defense, just kind of sat there and watched the trial like he was watching television.”

“Did you believe him when he said he was innocent?”

“It didn't matter what I believed. I was just a law clerk. We put up a good fight. We said that Crystal's boyfriend did it. That was our theory. He was the last to see her alive. He had all the opportunity in the world, and it was a crime of passion. He wanted to screw her—she said no—things got out of hand. It was a decent theory: a silk purse from a sow's ear so to speak. But in the end, the jury didn't believe it, and that's all that matters.”

“There are some people who think he's innocent,” I said, thinking of Virgil.

Collins lowered his eyes and shook his head, dismissing my comment as if I were some gullible child. “If he didn't do it, then he's one sorry bastard. She was found dead in his shed,” he said. “They found one of her fingernails on the steps to his back porch.”

“He tore her fingernail off?” I said, shuddering at the thought.

“It was a fake fingernail, one of those acrylic things. She had her nails done up for her first homecoming dance a couple weeks earlier. The prosecutor argued that it broke off when he was dragging her dead body to his shed.”

“Do you believe Carl killed her?”

“There was no one else around,” Collins said. “Iverson simply said he didn't do it, but at the same time, he said he was too drunk to remember anything from that night. It's Occam's razor.”

“Occam's razor?”

“It's a principle that says that all things being equal, the simplest conclusion is usually the correct one. Crimes like murder are rarely tricky, and most murderers are far from clever. Have you met him yet?”

“Who? Carl? Yeah, he signed the release.”

“Oh, yeah,” Collins furrowed his eyebrows, displeased at missing that obvious conclusion. “What did he tell you? Did he tell you he's innocent?”

“We haven't talked about the case yet. I'm easing up to that.”

“I expect he will.” Collins ran his thick hands through his hair, scratching loose some dandruff that fell to his shoulders. “And when he does, you'll want to believe him.”

“But you don't believe him.”

“Maybe I did—back then. I'm not sure. It's hard to tell with guys like Carl.”

“Guys like Carl?”

“He's a pedophile, and nobody can tell a lie like a pedophile. They're the best. There's no con artist alive who can lie like a pedophile.”

I looked at Collins with a blank expression that urged him to explain.

“Pedophiles are the monsters walking among us. Murderers, burglars, thieves, drug dealers, they can always justify what they've done. Most crimes occur because of simple emotions like greed or rage or jealousy. People can understand those emotions. We don't condone it, but we understand it. Everybody's felt those feelings at one time or another. Hell, most people, if they're honest, would admit to planning a crime in their head, committing the perfect murder, getting away with it. Every person on a jury has felt angry or jealous. They understand the base emotion behind a crime like murder, and they'll punish a guy for not controlling that emotion.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Now think of a pedophile. He has a passion to have sex with children. Who's gonna understand that? You can't justify what you've done. There's no explanation for them; they're monsters, and they know it. Yet they can't admit it, not even to themselves. So they hide the truth, burying it so deep inside that they begin to believe their own lies.”

“But some can be innocent, right?” I asked.

“I had a guy once…” Collins leaned forward, plopping his elbows on his desk. “He was accused of perping on his ten-year-old kid. This guy had me convinced that his ex-wife planted the story in the kid's head. I mean I believed him completely. I'd prepared a scathing cross-examination to tear that kid up. Then, about a month before trial, the computer forensics came back. The prosecutor called me to his office to show me a video that this dumbass made of the whole thing, exactly what his kid said happened. When I showed the video to my client he cried his eyes out, bawled like a frigging baby, not because he raped his kid and got caught, but because he swore it wasn't him. The prosecutor had the son-of-a-bitch on tape, his face, his voice, his tattoos, and he wanted me to believe it was some lookalike.”

“So you assume all your clients charged with pedophilia are lying?”

“No, not all.”

“Did you assume Carl was lying?”

Collins paused to give my question some thought. “I wanted to believe Iverson at first. I suppose I wasn't as jaded back then as I am now. But the evidence said he killed that girl. The jury saw it, and that's why Iverson went to prison.”

“Is it true what they say about pedophiles in prison?” I asked. “That they get beat up and stuff?”

Collins pursed his lips and nodded. “Yeah, it's true. Prison has its own food chain. My drunk-driver clients will ask ‘why are they picking on me? It's not like I robbed somebody.' The thieves and the burglars say ‘it's not like I killed somebody.' The murderers will say ‘at least I'm not a pedophile; it's not like I raped a child.' Guys like Iverson have nowhere to go. There's no one worse than them, and that puts 'em on the bottom of that food chain. To make things worse, he did his time at Stillwater Prison. That's about as bad as it gets.”

I had given up trying to get comfortable in the piece-of-crap chair, realizing that the chair was probably uncomfortable by design—a way to encourage short office visits. I stood up and rubbed the back of my thighs. Collins also stood and walked around the desk. He picked two files out of the box and handed them to me. One was tagged
jury selection
and the other was labeled
sentencing
. “These are ready to go,” he said. “I guess I can let you have the trial transcripts, too.”

“Trial transcripts?”

“Yeah, first-degree-murder cases get an automatic appeal. The court reporter prepares a transcript of the trial, everything that was said, word for word. They'll have copies of that at the Supreme Court, so you can have our copy today.” Collins walked to the box and pulled out six softbound volumes, stacking them one-by-one in my arms, creating a pile of paper well over a foot thick. “That'll keep you busy for a while.”

I looked at the books and files in my arms, feeling their weight, as Mr. Collins ushered me out. I turned at the door. “What am I going to find in these books?” I asked.

Collins sighed, rubbed his chin again, and shrugged. “Probably nothing you don't already know.”

On my bus ride home, I thumbed through the six volumes of transcripts and cursed under my breath. I had managed to create more reading for this one assignment than I had in all my other classes combined. It was too late to drop the class without screwing my GPA. My interview notes and opening chapter for Iverson's biography were due soon—this on top of all the other homework I had to do—and I could see no way to get through all this material in time.

After the long trek from the bus stop to my apartment, the transcripts in my backpack seemed as heavy as stone tablets. I pulled out my keys and started to unlock my door, but paused when I heard the silk of Spanish guitar music coming from Lila's apartment. The transcripts gave me an excuse to stop in and say hi. They were, after all, her contribution to this quixotic project. Besides, I really wanted to see her again. There was something about her leave-me-the-fuck-alone attitude that hooked me.

Lila answered her door, barefoot, wearing an oversized Twins jersey and shorts that barely showed below the tails of the shirt. I couldn't stop my eyes from going straight to her legs, just a quick glance, but enough that she noticed. She looked at me and raised an eyebrow. No “hello.” No “what's up.” Just a single raised eyebrow. That flustered the hell out of me.

“I…uh…went to the attorney's office today,” I stammered. “I have the transcripts from the trial.” I reached into the backpack and showed her proof of my deed.

She remained planted in her doorway, looking up at me, not inviting me in or responding beyond the raised eyebrow. Instead, she studied me as if to size up my intrusion, shrugged, and walked into her
apartment, letting the door creak open behind her. I followed her into her apartment, which smelled faintly of baby powder and vanilla.

“Have you read them yet?” she asked.

“I just got 'em.” I dropped the first volume onto her table, letting it slam down to show its heft. “I have no idea where to begin reading these things.”

“Start with the opening statement,” she said.

“The what?”

“The opening statement.”

“That should probably be near the beginning, right?” I asked, grinning. She picked up one of the transcripts and began flipping pages. “How do you know about opening statements and stuff? Are you pre-law?”

“Maybe,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “I was in mock trial in high school. The attorney who coached us said that the opening statement should tell the story of the case—tell it like you're sitting around the living room with friends.”

“You were in mock trial?”

“Yeah,” she muttered, licking her fingers and flipping more pages. “If all goes well, I wouldn't mind going to law school someday.”

“I haven't locked into a major yet, but I'm thinking journalism. It's just that—”

“Here it is.” She stood up, creasing the pages back so she could hold the transcript in one hand. “You be the jury. Sit on the couch, and I'll be the prosecutor.”

I sat in the middle of her couch, spreading my arms out to each side, placing them on the backrest. She stood in front of me and read a few lines to herself to get into character. Then she drew her chest up, pulled her shoulders back, and started to speak. And as she spoke, I watched the pixie in her disappear, and from its shadow stepped a woman with the confidence and poise to command a jury's attention.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the evidence in this case will show that on October 29, 1980, the defendant,” Lila waved her arm with the grace of a game-show model, pointing toward an empty chair
in the corner, “Carl Iverson, raped and murdered a fourteen-year-old girl by the name of Crystal Marie Hagen.” Lila paced slowly in front of me as she read, looking up from her script as often as she could, making eye contact with me as if I were an actual juror.

“Last year, Crystal Hagen was a happy, vivacious, fourteen-year-old girl, a beautiful child, loved by her family and excited to be on the cheerleading squad at Edison High School.” Lila paused and lowered her voice for effect. “But, ladies and gentlemen, you will learn that not everything was wonderful in Crystal Hagen's life. You will see excerpts from her diary where she writes about a man named Carl Iverson, a man who lived in the house next door to Crystal Hagen. You will see, in her diary, where she calls him ‘the pervert next door.' She wrote that Carl Iverson would stare at her from his window and watch her as she practiced her cheerleading routines in her back yard.

“From that diary, she will tell you about an incident when she was with her boyfriend, a young man she met in her high-school typing class, a boy named Andy Fisher. One night she and Andy were parked in the alley that passed behind both Crystal's house and Carl Iverson's house. They were parked at the end of the alley, away from prying eyes, making out, as kids will do. That's when the defendant, Carl Iverson, walked up to the car like a monster in a slasher movie and glared into the window at them. He saw Crystal and Andy…well let's just say that they were experimenting…sexually. Just a couple of kids goofing around. And Carl Iverson saw them; he watched them.

“Now that may not seem all that bad, but for Crystal Hagen, it was like the end of the world. You see, Crystal had a stepfather, a devoutly religious man named Douglas Lockwood. He'll be testifying in this trial. Mr. Lockwood didn't approve of Crystal being a cheerleader. He didn't like the idea of her dating at the age of fourteen. So he set out some rules for Crystal—rules to protect the family's reputation and Crystal's modesty. He told her that if she did not live up to those rules, she would not be allowed to continue as a cheerleader. And if the infraction were serious enough, he would send her to a private, religious school.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, what she did in that car that night with Andy Fisher broke those rules.

“The evidence will show that Carl Iverson used what he saw in the alley that night to blackmail Crystal, to get her to…well…do his bidding. You see, shortly after that night in the alley, Crystal wrote in her diary that a man was forcing her to do stuff she didn't want to do—sexual stuff. He told her that if she did not do what he wanted, he was going to expose her secret. Now, Crystal doesn't expressly say that Carl Iverson was the man threatening her, but when you see her words in that diary, it'll leave no doubt in your mind who she's writing about.”

Lila slowed the cadence of her speech, lowering her voice to little more than a whisper, giving it a dramatic effect. My arms moved from the back of the couch to my knees as I leaned in to hear her.

“The afternoon of her murder, Andy Fisher drove her home after school. They kissed goodbye, and Andy left. Crystal was all alone in an empty house next door to Carl Iverson. After Andrew drove away, we know that Crystal ended up in Carl Iverson's house. Maybe she went there to confront him. You see, Crystal Hagen met with her school counselor that afternoon and learned that what Carl Iverson was doing to her would send him to prison. Or maybe she went there at the point of a gun because on the morning of Crystal's death, we know that Carl Iverson bought an army-surplus handgun. We're not sure of exactly how she came to be in Iverson's house, but we know that she was there because of evidence that I'll get to in a minute. And once she was there, we know that things went terribly wrong for Crystal Hagen. She had a plan to turn the tables on Iverson—send him to prison if he didn't stop the threats and the abuse. Carl Iverson, of course, had other plans.”

Lila stopped pacing, no longer pretending to be the prosecutor. She sat down on the couch beside me, her eyes fixed on the transcript. When she continued, she spoke as if she were struck by some profound sadness.

“Carl Iverson raped Crystal Hagen. And when he was finished with her—after he took everything else he could take from her—he took her life. He strangled her using an electrical cord. Ladies and gentlemen,
it takes a long time to strangle a person to death. It is a slow, horrible way to die. Carl Iverson had to wrap that cord around Crystal Hagen's throat and pull it tight and hold it there for at least two minutes. And as every second passed, he had the ability to change his mind. Instead he continued to pull on that cord, keeping it tight around her throat until he was sure that she was not just unconscious, but dead.”

Lila stopped reading and looked at me with a pained expression, as though I were somehow an extension of Carl, as though some seed of his monstrous deed lived in me. I shook my head. She went back to reading.

“Crystal fought for her life. We know this because one of her false fingernails broke off during the struggle. That fingernail was found on the steps leading out of Carl Iverson's house. It fell there as Carl Iverson dragged her body to his tool shed. He dumped her body onto the floor of that shed as if she were just a piece of garbage. Then, to try and hide his crime from the world, he set his shed on fire, believing that the heat and the flames would destroy the evidence of what he had done. After he touched a match to that old shed, he went back in his house and drank from a bottle of whiskey until he passed out.

“By the time the fire trucks got there, the shed was completely engulfed in flames. After police found Crystal's body in that smoldering rubble, they knocked on Mr. Iverson's door, but he didn't answer. They assumed nobody was home. Detective Tracer returned in the morning with a search warrant and found Iverson still passed out on the couch, an empty whiskey bottle in one hand and the 45-caliber pistol near the other.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you're going to see pictures that will turn your stomach. I apologize in advance for what you're going to see, but it's necessary so that you understand what happened to Crystal Hagen. The fire burned the bottom half of her body so badly that some parts of her were barely recognizable. The tin from the roof of the shed fell on her, covering her upper torso, protecting that part of her from the worst of the fire. And there, tucked under her chest, you'll see her left hand—unburned. And on the left-hand you'll see the acrylic fingernails that she was so proud of, the nails she had done up for her first homecoming
dance with Andy Fisher. You'll see that one of the nails is missing, the nail that broke off during her fight with Carl Iverson.

“Ladies and gentlemen, once you've seen all the evidence in this case, I'll be coming back here to speak with you again, and I'll be asking you to return a verdict of guilty for murder in the first degree against Carl Albert Iverson.”

Lila put the transcript on her lap, letting the echo of her words fall silent. “What a sick bastard,” she said. “I can't believe you can sit with this guy and not want to kill him. They should've never let him out of prison. He should've rotted away in the darkest, dankest cell they have.”

I leaned slightly toward her, imitating her posture and resting one of my hands on the cushion next to her leg. If I had spread my fingers I could have touched her. That thought erased all others in my head, but she took no notice.

“What's it like…talking to him?” she asked.

“He's an old man,” I said. “He's sick and weak and thin as a whip. It's hard to see him in that stuff you read.”

“When you write about him, make sure you tell the whole story. Don't just write about the weak old man dying of cancer. Tell them about the drunken degenerate who burned a fourteen-year-old girl.”

“I made a promise to write the truth,” I said. “And I will.”