Angie and Matt had spent Morgan’s first night in jail weeping inside their condo. Toward the end of Morgan’s five-hour-long interrogation, someone had finally told them about the stabbing. They had immediately demanded to see their daughter. But the Waukesha PD was under no obligation to let them. So Angie and Matt had spent the rest of that day and the next morning making calls to everyone they knew, trying to track down legal counsel. Matt’s sister, Elizabeth—the aunt who’d given Morgan the black fingerless gloves worn during the stabbing—phoned back with a lead.
Elizabeth worked at a bank in Waukesha. As part of her training, she had gone on several police ride-alongs. She told Matt and Angie that one of her police contacts had said, “If my child was in trouble, I’d call Tony Cotton.”
Tony was expensive but his résumé inspired hope. Avvo, a lawyer rating company akin to Yelp, had awarded him its 10 out of 10 “Superb” criminal defense score. According to his legal profile on the Kuchler & Cotton website, he had personally secured not guilty verdicts even in cases where his clients had confessed or where the evidence against them was “overwhelming.”
The Geysers had never been rich. But Angie’s stepdad, Bob, had a good amount of money in retirement funds. As a former police chief, Bob admired public defenders—they were hardworking people, just as capable as private lawyers. But the system was flawed. It worked public defenders too hard. They juggled more than a hundred cases at a time, and sometimes they dropped the ball. Bob didn’t want his granddaughter to be one of those cases. When Tony and Donna asked for a $20,000 retainer fee, Bob withdrew it from his police pension.
Framed thank-you notes from happy clients adorned the walls of Tony’s office. Behind his desk hung a painting of the scene from To Kill a Mockingbird when the honorable Atticus Finch loses in court, despite being in the right.
Angie stared at a bookshelf of legal texts, while Matt sat in his chair and wept. Morgan was his ballast, the emotional anchor that routinized his days and quieted his mental illness. He needed her more than was fair to any child, and many would later wonder what life in unit J had really been like. Angie, the family breadwinner, drove hundreds of miles every week, often returning from work after dark and leaving again before sunrise. For days on end, it was just Morgan and Matt—a stay-at-home dad with unmedicated schizophrenia, charged with watching a little girl who was presenting with similar symptoms—living in an echo chamber of hidden illness.
Without Morgan, Matt’s world was now falling apart, and the idea of losing in court, like Atticus does, sent him into a tailspin. He cried.
When Tony joined the Geysers in his office, he was horrified to find Matt weeping. Over the course of his career as a criminal defense attorney, Tony had represented a lot of cases that were, in some way or another, extremely depressing—yet he’d cried only that one time, and when he did, he’d excused himself and done it outside, where nobody could see him. Like Matt’s parents, he believed in stoicism. So he offered Matt a piece of advice:
“Get your shit together.”
Tony’s command stunned the Geysers into temporary silence. Matt choked back his tears.
Angie heard herself say, “At least Morgan is only twelve.” She assumed that a twelve-year-old girl would have her case tried in juvenile court—that, worst-case scenario, they would have her back home by the time she turned seventeen.
But Tony brushed aside her optimism. Wisconsin was a tough-oncrime state. Morgan would be tried as an adult. She faced sixty-five years in prison.