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Even before I got confirmation from Hank, I knew Deslon was the one. I could have kicked myself for not having figured it out sooner. I’d spent so long going down blind alleys, that I’d almost given up hope. But when he showed up in Gulfport, there was no question in my mind. His name said it all.
Once I knew who he was, the only question that remained was what I was going to do about it.
I imagined kidnapping him and forcing him to tell the truth, while taping everything so I could take it to the police. But I always knew that was more a fantasy than a real option. I wasn’t the kind of person who could kidnap someone, and even if I did, I certainly wasn’t going to be able to force him to talk. If this were a horror flick, I would be a vicious torturer who would do unspeakable things to him until he couldn’t take it anymore, and with the blood dripping from his toothless mouth and thumbless hands, he’d gasp out what he’d done. But this wasn’t a movie, and I wasn’t the type who could mistreat anyone, let alone torture them. Breezy could have done it. To defend people she loved, I could imagine she’d do almost anything. She’d work herself up into such a rage that no one would be safe. Maybe in the back of my mind that’s why I hadn’t confided in her. I knew she was capable of all the things I wasn’t, and that if I let her unleash her anger, she might be unable to rein it in. I had to figure it out. I wasn’t going to be the grand inquisitor. I had to be creative and resourceful instead. I had to be as smart as he had been when he duped poor Hank.
Not that I thought of him as poor Hank back then. I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. I didn’t feel anything because I was completely numb with shock.
Five years ago, when the doorbell rang and I opened the door to two uniformed police officers, I knew right away something terrible had happened. I knew it had to do with my parents, but in that blink of an eye before they started speaking, I imagined a car accident, some bad injuries—something, anything, that didn’t mean they had been brutally murdered and I would never see them again.
The small-framed black man and large white woman, both in blue brassy uniforms, wanted to come in, but I wouldn’t let them. I thought I could control how I felt if I controlled how they told me. In those seconds before I allowed them to speak, I imagined that keeping them outside my front door would keep all my feelings out there too. That in time to come I would be able to sit on the sofa and watch TV without seeing the male officer standing there, stroking his mustache, as if the rhythm would soften my screams. I thought that if I didn’t let the large-boned white woman into my kitchen, I wouldn’t see her eyes full of the compassion I didn’t want every time I made a cup of coffee. So I let them stand outside in the corridor while they told me. I didn’t realize that where I heard the news was irrelevant. The trauma would bury itself deep in me, like a vole burrowing into my soul.
“We’re so sorry, dear.” The female cop tried to step forward to embrace me, but I backed away. I hated her. Hated her for the story she was telling me. Except it wasn’t a story. It was my parents she was talking about. But it couldn’t be true, I thought. That kind of thing doesn’t happen to a school vice principal and his wife living their mundane lives in their middle class, leafy home outside Atlanta. When the cops said it was Hank, I started to laugh, because then I knew for sure it was all made up.
“Oh, no. You have it all wrong!” I giggled. They probably thought I was hysterical, and perhaps I was. But I thought if they could tell me that our beloved family friend, Hank, had stabbed my parents to death, then obviously the whole thing was some major error. Hank could no more be guilty of that than I could.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, there’s no mistake. He was still standing over your father, the knife in his hand, when the police arrived there.”
“But if he did it, why would he have waited for the cops?”
“He was the one who called it in. Said he’d found them like that. But we know it was him. The blood on his clothes...and he admitted the knife was his.”
Against everyone’s wishes, I went to see Hank in jail. At first, he couldn’t look at me. Just sat there and sobbed. Said he didn’t understand any of it, that he wished he’d died instead. But at the end of the visit, he stopped sobbing long enough to look me right in the eye and without flinching he said, “I’m not the one responsible for all this.” He sounded so completely sane and sincere that I believed him at once.
I came home and said, “They’ve got the wrong guy.” Then I told the police the same thing. Everyone thought I was crazy.
“The killer’s behind bars, love,” Uncle Bert assured me. “You saw the evidence. They have the right guy locked up.”
But they didn’t. Bert and Mary thought I was in denial, that I couldn’t accept what had happened. But it wasn’t that. I’d always been able to trust Hank, and I still did. He was a lovely man and one of our dearest family friends.
The more I insisted Hank wasn’t responsible, the more people around me started to get upset. The police gave me a pamphlet directing me to the victim advocate program and encouraged me to get counseling. Uncle Bert and Aunt Mary veered between feeling sorry for me and getting exasperated.
“If he were guilty, how could he look at the daughter of the people he murdered—his good friends—and keep his expression so pure and heartbroken?” I asked Uncle Bert once.
“Psychopaths can do that, sweetheart, they’re master manipulators.” He shook his head in frustration and massaged his temples. It was during the sentencing phase. Hank’s lawyer had wanted to enter a plea of temporary insanity because Hank had no memory of the event. The judge didn’t allow it, so Hank took a plea, bringing the charges down from first degree murder to voluntary manslaughter. He said he took it to spare the family—which was basically me—the agony of a trial. But I think it was also because his attorney persuaded him he had no case. Hank couldn’t deny he’d done it; there was too much evidence against him.
Hank had rented an office and invited my parents there to talk. When the police asked him why he didn’t just go to their house, he said he thought a neutral place would be better. They pointed out that he chose an office suite at the very end of the corridor which boasted excellent soundproofing. They said he’d done that so nobody would hear if there was a struggle or yelling. The police reckoned Hank’s plan had been to walk away and assume they’d never figure out it was him. They considered him an amateur because he hadn’t realized that the CCTV would show him paying the receptionist for the office space that afternoon. Hank and his lawyer argued that if he’d planned on walking away, he wouldn’t have stayed and called in the crime. They thought he’d panicked. Hank always insisted he must have been temporarily insane because he couldn’t have done it if he’d been in his right mind. His lawyer said he never should have been charged with first degree murder. Surely, he argued, this was the archetypal heat of passion crime: his wife had been sleeping with my dad and Hank had found out a few days earlier.
The problem with that defense was that he’d killed not just Dad, but Mom as well. He’d booked the office where it happened, and brought a knife to do it, which showed it wasn’t done in the heat of the moment. And Hank wasn’t a heat of the moment kind of guy. He was a careful, methodical professional.
Hank was a quiet, unassuming man with an unblemished record. People spoke up for him at the sentencing. His friends from church said it was completely out of character. His real estate clients all testified that he was honest and had treated them well, and even his real estate rivals said Hank was the model of a perfect realtor. He didn’t push people into purchases they’d later regret, didn’t try to jack up prices, or manipulate customers into making offers by suggesting there were already some on the table. But when pushed further, many of them said they didn’t really know Hank that well. They didn’t think he had a dark side that had been hidden away from them, but they couldn’t know for sure. People who had admired and respected him for decades found themselves looking at the man they thought they knew and wondering.
There was one character witness Hank’s attorney hoped would carry the most weight of all. Me.
I’d known Hank and Laura ever since I could remember. He was like a dog-eared, familiar teddy bear, the kind you could drag around like Christopher Robin dragged Winnie the Pooh. Hank and Laura didn’t have kids. Laura couldn’t have them and wasn’t interested in adopting, so Hank used me as the surrogate child they never had. He was there for me in ways my parents couldn’t be. They wanted to be supportive, but in truth, they mostly got it wrong. When kids bullied me for preferring to stay in the library instead of watching the school football team, my dad would say things like, “Maybe you could at least go watch some of the games?” When they made fun of me for looking like a boy, Mom would say, “Well darling, you could wear a dress occasionally.” But when I confided in Hank about those things, he would give me a bear hug, reassure me things would get better, and then ask if I wanted ice cream.
I told Hank’s lawyer I wanted to speak on Hank’s behalf, even though it cost me my relationship with my uncle and aunt. They said I’d regret it for the rest of my life. They thought I still hadn’t dealt with the shock of my parents’ murders and that I was seeing Hank as the old family friend he had been, instead of the psychotically jealous cuckold who knifed his two dear friends to death. Hank’s wife wouldn’t speak on his behalf. In fact, Laura spoke for the prosecution. She suggested I was so angry at Dad for being unfaithful that speaking up for Hank was my way at getting back at him. She was wrong. My parents hadn’t been perfect, but I’d loved both of them dearly and always would. I stood up for Hank because I’d always liked and respected him, and, despite the fact that the police found him in an office rented by the hour, holding a bloody knife over my parents’ dead bodies, I refused to believe he was guilty.
Hank had hoped that by agreeing to the plea bargain the sentencing judge would show some leniency. He was wrong.
“Do you know what an Indian Red Scorpion is?” the judge, a former prosecutor for sex crimes, asked, as Hank stood, shriveled and pale, awaiting his sentence. Hank stared at her.
“Do you?” she prodded. He shook his head.
“It’s one of the most innocent looking scorpions on the planet, a tiny thing. And yet it’s said to be the most lethal in the world. When it stings, its victims die a hideous death, just as yours did. I may have to accept the plea, but I don’t like it. Therefore, I sentence you to the maximum penalty: twenty years for each killing, to be served consecutively.”