While the City Slept (20 page)

A flawed human system was nearing its worthy aim: a fair public trial for the accused, now days away.

O
n Wednesday, June 1, 2011, Judge Hayden swore in sixteen citizens. Twelve of them were actual jurors. Four were alternates. None knew who was who. It was now coming up on two years since the South Park attacks.

The following Monday, the trial began.

Isaiah watched remotely from the empty jury room on the floor above. Teresa’s family sat in the front benches of Judge Hayden’s eighth-floor courtroom, next to Jennifer and her family, and they embraced and supported one another. They had followed the pretrial proceedings loosely, mainly focused on the question of whether the trial was still happening or not. Now it was, and Carley Zepeda settled in, too, determined to watch every single day of testimony. “It was just something that I had to do,” she said. “I felt like Teresa would have done it for me.” She had a new tattoo on the inside of her forearm in honor of her friend, an exploding firecracker stamped with the letter
T
.

Not everyone could come. Norbert Leo Butz was on Broadway performing in
Catch Me If You Can
. Others came and went, like Isaiah’s mother, who arrived to watch when she could and when her presence was required for testimony. Deborah came as well, wanted badly to hug Jennifer, but didn’t, couldn’t. The witnesses from South Park testified: the woman who put her newborn daughter to bed, heard screams, stood on the edge of her bathtub, and called 911; the young people who ran down the street—Israel Rodriguez, Diana Ramirez, and Sara Miranda-Nino.

Each day, Detective Duffy drove Jennifer to the courthouse. “I just wanted to offer that,” Detective Duffy said. “So she didn’t have to worry about parking, or how to get there, or what floor.” Another friend of Jennifer’s, a producer at a local television station, acted as a liaison between Jennifer and the media, making it known that Jennifer couldn’t speak to reporters and, for now, didn’t want her name used in public. “It was something I could do,” the friend, Erica Hill-Rodriguez, said. Police officers testified: Thomas Berg, the first responder; Melissa Wengard and Nilo Dela Cruz, the first officers into the red house, the ones who walked the walls to determine the scene was clear; Brian Downing, from the canine unit. Carlos Valdivia and Les Davis, the paramedics who treated Jennifer at the scene, testified too. As it happened, Davis had just had shoulder surgery, so Detective Duty drove him to court.

One morning, Tim Butz was called to testify about the last time he saw his sister. It was during a trip Teresa and Jennifer took to Chicago just a few days before Teresa was killed. On the witness stand, Tim was shown a picture, State’s Exhibit 10, and a prosecutor asked him to identify it. “That’s my sister, Teresa,” Tim said. He then spoke about the “chance meeting” they’d had in Chicago. Teresa was there for a Cards-Cubs game and to visit Rachel. Jennifer was there for work. When it turned out Tim was in town, too, he and Teresa met for coffee. He’d been planning to visit Seattle the following week with his wife and two kids, so they talked about that, and when they were done talking he said, “See you next Monday.” Outside the café, they hugged good-bye. “She grabbed me really tightly,” Tim told me later. “I was like, ‘Jeez, Terese.’”

That afternoon, Jennifer was called to the stand. Like others, she had mainly followed the pretrial maneuvering to find out whether the trial would actually be going forward or not. Now she, too, felt something required of her. “My job was to tell the truth, and testify, and make sure that this man had just punishment for his crime,” Jennifer told me. “It was that simple to me: this is what I have to do.”

T
he prosecutor wanted to know about window coverings. He asked Jennifer, which windows in the house on South Rose Street, the house where you woke up to him standing over you with a knife that night—which windows had curtains that blocked out the rest of the world and which did not?

Jennifer answered the prosecutor’s questions, pointing to a map of the small South Park home she used to share with Teresa. When the two of them lived there, it was red, a bit run-down, much loved, filled with their lives together. Now it was a two-dimensional schematic, State’s Exhibit 2, set on an easel next to the witness stand. She narrated with a red laser pointer for the prosecutor and the jury: These windows had curtains that couldn’t be seen through. These windows had just a sheer fabric.

Would your silhouettes have been visible through that sheer fabric at night?

Probably. Jennifer didn’t know for sure. When she and Teresa lived in the house, she noted, “I didn’t spend a lot of time staring in my own windows.”

Everyone in the courtroom laughed a small laugh, a laugh of nervous relief, because here was a woman testifying about her own rape, and the rape and murder of her partner, and yet she was smiling at the current line of questioning, at the weird perceptual cul-de-sac to which it led. She appeared to understand why people might need to hear these answers, though. What happened to her and Teresa in that house in the early
morning hours of July 19, 2009, is difficult to comprehend. Even when one knows the history of the man accused of these crimes, it is difficult to comprehend, and Jennifer did not know his history as she sat on the witness stand. Nor did the jurors, who by design were encountering his actions for the first time.

The question about window coverings, then, offered a possible beginning, a way to ease into the reality of what occurred, a way to imagine how he might have picked them. At least then there’d be some sort of arc to the story. Maybe the man had stalked them, looked in their windows, decided they would be his victims. Diana Ramirez had already told the court the man looked familiar. “His eyes,” Ramirez said. She thought she might have seen him roaming the neighborhood on a bicycle. The prosecutor also pointed out that the red house had only a partial fence around its backyard, the yard where Teresa and Jennifer liked to sit on warm evenings, staring at the sky above the South Park Community Center and the trees in the large surrounding park. It would have been easy for the man to approach their home, unseen, through this park at night.

Maybe he’d noticed the women around the neighborhood during the day, both attractive, both shorter than he was, working in their front yard, or attending a local festival, or heading to and from Loretta’s. It had been unusually hot that July. Teresa, recalling hotter summers in St. Louis, had thought it ridiculous to install air-conditioning in Seattle, the court was told. Maybe the man saw that these women, like others in the neighborhood, were keeping windows open at night.

—

It could not now be suggested because of the defense strategy, and because legal routes to discussion in open court were lacking, but there were other possibilities, too.

Perhaps he was the man who had been turned away from Nickelsville, the homeless encampment named after the mayor, earlier that evening. Perhaps he was the reason the grass was found matted down beneath a
tree behind their house, the reason a small branch of that tree had been snapped, as if to screen someone from view. Or maybe he saw them from a bus he was riding, perhaps one of the lines that ran from neighborhoods he used to inhabit, through South Park, and onward into downtown Seattle. Maybe he was circling the paths of his past and stumbled upon them.

He was homeless. Maybe he felt hungry, out of control, furious, saw himself as abandoned and alone with demons to fight lest he lose. Maybe he wandered this neighborhood beneath the neighborhood where he had been abused, beneath the neighborhood where his parents had fought and been arrested, beneath the bedroom he destroyed after he learned of his mother’s rape at knifepoint, and as he was wandering smelled food being grilled and heard the name Teresa in the hot, still night. Maybe he thought of his former defense attorney, Theresa Griffin, the last woman to tell him she could no longer defend his actions.

Or, maybe he saw two women together, and his mind, a blurred memory drawing, saw two other women who could no longer defend him, his mother and his aunt. Maybe, past and present sliding together, he saw the twins who had tormented him in elementary school. Or maybe he was just twisted by twenty-three years of steady twisting, darkly desirous, decompensating, vulnerable, searching for a way to feel in total control. Maybe he just wanted to be with his father.

And then, maybe he saw their love for each other, noticed it in silhouette or on a sidewalk, a love that was exploding that summer, making the women inseparable, a love that had grown into plans for their commitment ceremony that September. It was a love containing promises he had not known. Maybe he realized he could turn that love against them, mercilessly, use it to control them in their own home, each subdued by the threat that he would kill the other.

They were two, and he was one. But maybe he saw that in a sense they were one. He was six feet tall, two hundred pounds, muscled. He would have two knives with him. Maybe he thought that if it did become a fight, the numbers would be on his side.

—

Jennifer understood, sitting up there on the witness stand, why people might need to imagine her window coverings. But this was not what she had come to talk about. The mechanics, both psychological and practical, of how the attacks might have come to pass were now well beside the point.

So she sat before the packed and sweltering eighth-floor courtroom at the King County Courthouse on June 8, 2011, nearly two years after she lost Teresa, wearing jeans and a short-sleeved black blouse, hands clasped over knees, a jury of strangers taking notes, a crowd of family and friends and strangers observing, a bunch of media recording, to say what was true: This happened to me. You must listen. This happened to us. You must hear who was lost. You must hear what he did. You must hear how Teresa fought him. You must hear what I loved about her. You must know what he took from us. This happened.

She was thirty-eight then, and she held the room with a transfixing emotional frankness. She cried at times. She set her jaw and pressed on when it got exhausting, the reliving of an ordeal that probably lasted around ninety minutes but took close to six hours over two days to retell in court. She showed regret and terror and humiliation and grief and fury. She showed that she appreciated how awful, really absurdly awful, this all was, and she welcomed opportunities to laugh—at herself, at odd things Teresa had done when she was alive, at an inelegant, unintentionally impolite question from the prosecuting attorney about a trip she’d made to Weight Watchers with Teresa on their last morning together, as part of their plan to get in better shape before their commitment ceremony.

The prosecuting attorney asked something like, how’d it go at Weight Watchers? Without missing a beat, without shame, Jennifer framed her body with her hands, moved them up and down, and said, “Well . . .”

As if to say, Look at me. Go ahead, look at all of me. It’s okay. And laugh at the awkwardness of this, as everyone in the courtroom is doing right now, if that’s what you all need to do. It’s okay. Really. Look at me.
And thank you for being here to look, because later in this trial the prosecutor will step up to the witness stand and pull my straight black hair back from my neck so that I can more easily point out, for all of you who are looking, the four slashing scars that run from below my left ear toward my throat, the scars from when the man cut and stabbed me with his knife. I am not scared. I have nothing to hide here. Not anymore. Not for something as important as this, the opportunity to prevent him from doing it again.

—

She spoke of the perfect ordinariness of their last days together. How, the Friday before the attack, she stayed late working at her office in downtown Seattle and got an impatient call from Teresa: “Are you coming home?” She went home and saw Teresa sitting on a red couch in their little red house in South Park, the house that back when they first met by happenstance during that downtown Seattle workday in 2007, Teresa had brought up before almost anything else. How there was lots of weeding to do. How it wasn’t the nicest “but she loved it.”

On this Friday, Teresa was sitting on the red couch, and, Jennifer recalled, “she had a pen and paper.” Teresa was excited. She had gone through all their finances. They had the money they needed for the commitment ceremony.

They decided to go to Loretta’s, the place with the converted Airstream and a Ping-Pong table out back. The second booth in from the door was theirs. It always seemed to be free for them. Teresa ordered a bourbon and water, Jennifer a margarita. They ate the tavern steak and a salad. They felt great.

“We had one of the deepest conversations that we’d had in a long time,” Jennifer said on the stand. “She’d always had this dream of—I think she always wanted to work for herself. And she had this dream of owning a café-slash-movie theater. She wanted to call it the Reel Café. We were talking about it, what it would mean, what it would take . . . We
came to this decision that we would work at our corporate jobs for as long as it took to make that happen, and then she would do that.”

They talked about children. Teresa, who was thirty-nine that summer, who had never been the one they thought would carry the child, announced, “Maybe I’ll have the baby.”

The prosecuting attorney asked, “All of this happens at Loretta’s?”

Jennifer laughed. The crowd in the courtroom laughed. It did seem remarkable.

“Yeah,” she said. “We were there for a few hours . . . It was our place.”

They drove home through South Park, through faint cones of streetlamp light and long stretches of darkness. They stopped at a gas station along the way, and Teresa bought some Bud Light. She wasn’t a regular smoker, but she was craving a cigarette. She knew Jennifer hated the smell, so she asked, “Is that okay?” Jennifer replied, “Do what you need to do.” They sat in the backyard of the red house, staring at the trees, the community center, the sky above. “It was really hot that night,” Jennifer recalled on the stand. “Probably like in the eighties or nineties.” They drank. Teresa, it turned out, had come away from the store with three or four cigarettes. She smoked them all.

“It was just one of those nights,” Jennifer said. “I remember thinking, ‘In this moment, my life may not be perfect, but I am so happy.’”

—

The next day was Saturday, July 18, 2009. Weight Watchers in the morning. Then a fun thing a friend had gotten them into: a double-decker bus tour of microbreweries in the South Park area. Teresa played bartender on the bus. A friend took pictures of them together. “I remember the sun was shining,” Jennifer said. “It was really hot. And I remember a few times I glanced at Teresa, and she had her face up. She loved the sun. She was in heaven.”

There was a late-afternoon trip to a dressmaker who was working on a custom wedding gown for Jennifer, who is not a $70 wedding dress kind of woman. The dressmaker wrapped her in a muslin cutout of the pattern.
“I felt so beautiful,” she said. They were invited to a friend’s party up north of Seattle that night, a sleepover kind of thing so that people wouldn’t have to worry about driving home. But they were both feeling tired. They decided to go back to South Park instead.

They bought steaks and potatoes—“stuff that she loved”—and while Teresa grilled the steaks outside in the backyard, Jennifer made the rest of the meal inside. There was a phone call from Teresa’s mom. “This beautiful, amazingly connected call with her mom, who she loved so amazingly much,” Jennifer recalled. It sounded as if Dolly, who they knew had some reservations about their commitment ceremony, would indeed be coming. “While they may not have agreed with our choice,” Jennifer said on the stand of some members of the Butz family, “there was no question that they loved Teresa, and there was no question that they loved me.”

Dinner. Then a movie that had been lying around the house for a while, a musical that made them both cry. It was around midnight. Teresa checked the locks multiple times, like always; she brushed her teeth multiple times while flossing in between, like always; she took the left side of the bed, like always, right next to her water and her lip balm. Jennifer took the right side of the bed, like always. They said good night.

“I kind of leaned in to her and said, ‘I love you so much,’” Jennifer said.

“She said, ‘I know you do.’ And that was it. We went to sleep.”

Jennifer doesn’t know how long they slept.

“I woke up to a start,” she told the court. “There was a man that I could see was naked, standing over the bed with a knife in his right hand . . . And the knife immediately went to my throat.”

She gasped. She thought, “This is a dream.”

“And then,” she told the court, “it’s just processing that there’s a person here and something’s going to happen.”

She didn’t know whether Teresa was awake with her, but she didn’t want to take her eyes off the man in order to find out.

“He said, ‘Be quiet, be quiet.’ Because I made that noise or whatever. And he said, ‘I don’t want to hurt you. I just want pussy.’”

Teresa was already awake, and Jennifer remembers her saying, “Sir, I’m on my period.”

The man’s response: “I don’t care.”

Neither of them knew who he was. He told them to take their clothes off.

“So she took her pants off, and her shirt as well, and he got on top of her,” Jennifer told the court. “He started raping her.”

The man held on to the knife the whole time, kept it ready. Whether it came from the kitchen of the red house or elsewhere was never definitively established, but prosecutors brought the alleged knife to court as evidence. It was more than a foot long from tip to handle.

“I was as still as humanly possible,” Jennifer said. “I feel like I tried to put my arm as close to her as possible so she would know that I was there. I was terrified. I thought he’d kill us with the knife. I’d already had it to my throat. Already it was clear, you know—the energy was, if you don’t do what he says, he’ll kill her . . . It wasn’t just our own lives that we were worried about.”