The April Goss murder was a sleeper. First reported as a suicide, then an unsolved murder in a week of heavier-than-usual carnage, it took on stature in direct proportion to the twists and turns in the evidence, along with the amount of attention brought to it in the legal arena.
On a typically raw, gusty morning in mid-March, a fellow female student living across the hall entered Goss’s unlocked apartment to find the tenant sprawled naked in a tub full of water, tinged pink with her blood; both wrists were slashed and the posterior tibial artery was nicked behind one knee. Complete desanguination would have taken place in a couple of hours, well after the victim had drifted into unconsciousness. Warm water and a slow trickle; it was the McDonald’s menu-meal choice of most suicides. When a background check discovered that she’d been diagnosed bipolar and prescribed anti-depressant drugs, that initial impression seemed confirmed.
Then the forensics team filed its report.
The room was on the second floor of a house on Livernois not far from the university, the ugly brainchild of a stoveworks baron of the Taft era with tons of business sense and not an ounce of taste. It had been off-campus student housing for decades. April Goss’s was a studio apartment, once a child’s schoolroom. It was there the original theory started to go sour.
Smudges on the bloodstained razor blade resting on the edge of the tub might or might not have been the victim’s; it’s rare to lift a print off one that would pass a coroner’s inquest. But even the most fastidious self-destructive types didn’t wipe their doorknobs their last time through. The ones on the hallway and bathroom doors contained only those left by the neighbor who’d discovered the body. Then the specialist who’d identified Goss’s condition reported that after three years on mild anti-depressants and a trial period without, the patient demonstrated no symptoms of bipolar disorder; not an unusual occurrence among young adults.
“Teenage angst,” he was quoted, shaking his head. “Like acne, most outgrow it.”
Whether or not the doctor remembered his own adolescence with any clarity, his statement on top of the physical evidence made the case homicide. After the girl from next door was cleared of any possible motive, the investigation proceeded to the next likely suspect: the boyfriend.
In every investigation, there’s an outward silence while the detectives run down every spore; but in our microwave, Instagram, zip-and-seal society, patience is on life support. Goss’s father, a mid-level executive with some local media company, and her mother, a legal secretary, pressed for action, through the hellcat attorney Mrs. Goss worked for. He was a high-profile character who ran advertising on all the local TV stations throughout prime-time, a snarling, cage-rattling predator based on his image, taped on courthouse steps cherry-picking questions from squads of on-air personalities; so of course there was an arrest in short order.
Forensics had bagged an empty box from a home pregnancy kit in Goss’s bathroom wastebasket, along with a treated plastic stick that according to the instructions turned blue when urinated on by an expectant mother. It was blue, and the first impression was that this supported the suicide scenario; when that collapsed, Dan Corbeil became a suspect. When it comes to motives, cops love the Big Three: Fear, greed, and wrath, simple emotions you can sell a jury without confusing it with a lot of explanation. Nothing frightens a young man on the cusp of a promising future like the prospect of being tied down with a family.
An autopsy turned up trace amounts of Seconal in the corpse, and a bottle with her doctor’s name on the label. It was the same doctor who’d treated her earlier; he told detectives she was an insomniac, and since she’d tested clear of bipolar, he considered it safe to prescribe a low dosage of the sedative. While the amount in her system wasn’t sufficient to put her out entirely, she’d ingested enough to make it difficult to put up a fight. Anyone of ordinary strength could have overpowered her, stripped her, placed her in the tub, and made the fatal cuts, holding her down until she was too weak to climb out.
Dan Corbeil had been seeing Goss for several months. According to the witness who’d found her body, there were no other men in her life. He didn’t help his case when he said he’d been pulling an all-nighter with a study group at the time of her death. The other members of the group admitted they’d been drinking and smoking pot, and everyone was too wasted to say just when Corbeil left. With no one to support his alibi, and enough medical training to know which veins to pierce, he was arrested and charged with murder.
He swore she’d said nothing to him about even taking the test, but after fudging about his activities at the time of her death, his testimony on the stand fell apart under cross-examination. The jury took less than three hours to convict.
The kicker was she wasn’t pregnant. The autopsy confirmed that. The packages containing home pregnancy test products all carry warnings of false positives; but neither Goss nor Corbeil could know the truth.
“It’s circumstantial,” I said, when Chrys Corbeil finished bringing me up to speed on the twenty-year-old investigation; “but then most murder cases are, even the smoking guns. Nothing makes a cop happier than when somebody decides to get cute and rig a crime scene to look like something else. They’ve seen the same TV shows.”
“The—cops—seemed happy, that’s for sure,” she said.
“You’ve talked with them?”
“My parents did, when they tried to bail him out. Of course that was out of the question, and they knew it, but they never stopped talking about how pleased the—the cops—were that they’d tied everything up so soon, with a big white bow. They gave no thought to Eric and Elaine, or even the poor Goss girl, as human beings; they were just pieces in a game, the way patients are just gall bladders and compound fractures to surgeons.”
“Eric and Elaine?”
“Our parents. They insisted we call them by their first names. They considered Mom and Dad ‘emblems of patriarchal-matriarchal slavery.’ Their words.”
“I’m getting a real picture of them.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, Mr. Walker. They were good people. They taught us right from wrong. That’s one of the reasons I know Dan didn’t kill anyone.”
“It’s also the legal language for rejecting a plea of insanity. If killers never knew right from wrong, the prisons would have rooms to rent.”
But her upbringing explained something I’d noticed earlier: her hesitation in using the word cops. It was almost spinsterish. I could picture dear Eric and Elaine batting around words like “fuzz” and “pigs”; self-consciously, being second-generation flower children: kids trying on grown-up words the way an earlier generation stole cigars and smoked them behind the barn.
Then again, that was too much to try to get out of one phrase dropped into the middle of a few minutes’ acquaintance.
She’d lapsed into a sullen silence. I said, “You said they were good people. They’re dead?”
“My mother is. Her doctor said it was from an accidental combination of sleeping pills and alcohol. My father—”
“Seconal?”
“No!” More heads turned. Her hands on the table were clenched into fists. Her throat worked as she tamped herself down. “No,” she said, in her usual tone. “It was over-the-counter. Personally I’m not sure it was accidental. I’m not sure it was deliberate, either; maybe a little of both. Dan was twelve years into a life sentence. By then she’d lost all hope.”
“What about your father?”
“I don’t know where he is. He didn’t come home after the funeral, just left all his stuff in the house. I was sixteen. It was all too much for him or he’d never have done it; but he didn’t leave me stranded. All our names were on my parents’ joint savings account. When months passed and he hadn’t touched it, I began drawing on it. With that and a string of jobs I paid my bills, finished high school, and put myself through college: Wayne State.”
“Must’ve been a pretty good chunk to start.”
“My parents were partners in a hydroponics farm they founded. In ten years they made enough to sell the business and retire on their investments in sustainable energy corporations; Dan’s and my names were on those accounts too. They don’t pay as well as they once did, but my salary at the bank covers the rent. I can pay your fee, if it’s not unreasonable.”
I sidestepped that for the time being. “Eric and Elaine did right by you, despite what happened at the end. I don’t just mean what they left you.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
I sipped coffee. It was lukewarm. I’d forgotten it was there. I pushed away the cup and rested my forearms on the table. “There are organizations that specialize in reopening old investigations. Have you tried that route?”
“The ones that bothered to look into it weren’t encouraging. They cited the reason all of Dan’s requests for an appeal were denied. There was nothing wrong with the procedure in the courtroom, you see.” Her fists on the table were as tight as square knots.
“That’s the system. In real life, Dr. Richard Kimble would’ve had to jump through a couple of dozen hoops to get his conviction reversed, even after he’d found the one-armed man.”
The lunch rush, or what passed for it, was over; we were the last ones still seated. The bussers were getting busy and a vacuum cleaner whined across the room. I told her my day rate and what I needed up front; I didn’t know if it was reasonable, but I don’t own shares in eco-friendly corporations or any other. She frowned, doing the math in her head like a good cashier. Then she winched the handbag back up onto her lap, took out a checkbook bound in black imitation leather, and picked up the pen from the police department.