SIX

The threads of the accusations against Mark Mangelsdorf finally came together on April 4, 2005, in Pelham, New York. On this inordinately cold spring night, only a week before Melinda’s trial was scheduled to begin, Mark was up late doing his taxes in the large, dark wood-paneled dining room. His home had more than doubled in value during the housing boom. The house could probably have been put on the market in the morning and sold by dinnertime.

It was around 10 P.M. when Mark’s phone rang. John Hynes, a detective from the Village of Pelham Police Department, was on the line.

“Could you come outside, please?” asked Hynes, who had a direct way of conducting business. He was one of two detectives working out of a brick building headquarters, once the home of the Pell family that founded Pelham in 1654. Murder investigations were not exactly Detective Hynes’s stock in trade. Hynes and his department primarily concerned themselves with the rather orderly work of chasing boozed-up teenagers. This was something new, and Hynes wanted to make sure Mark’s arrest was done by the book.

Mark hung up. “I have to go,” he told Kristina, who was pregnant with their second child.

He stacked some receipts into a pile, neatened a folder of bank statements, then went to the front door where, over twenty-three years after that fateful day in Kansas, he was put in handcuffs and formally arrested for the murder of David Harmon. There was no time for a good-bye to his wife, not even a farewell kiss. Kristina shook as she watched Mark unceremoniously taken away. She stood in their doorway as if shackled to the doorjamb.

Mark was formally indicted on a breezy morning two days after his arrest, in the sleek Westchester County Criminal Court. It was no secret that Morrison’s intention was to indict Mark in the early April lead-up to Melinda’s trial. His status as an un-indicted co-conspirator would furrow the brows of the jury especially if, as expected, he was called as a witness. As Mark’s lawyer, Mickey Sherman, put it at the time, “It’s not like he was indicted because the FBI phoned to say they found a bloody print. It’s not like they found a smoking gun in the past week or month.” Without Mark’s indictment, the theory that Mark and Melinda killed David to be together would sound half-baked, and Melinda would probably walk, which meant Mark wouldn’t even be brought to trial.

At Mark’s arraignment, he was brought into the courtroom with a group of other men from a holding cell. When one of the men’s indictments for child molestation was read aloud, Kristina buried her hands in her head.

Once his turn finally came, Mark waived his right to challenge extradition to Kansas. His handcuffs were removed and he rubbed his wrists before signing the document allowing for extradition. A legal challenge would have only delayed the inevitable. Mark was then ushered out of the courtroom and later onto a plane sent specifically by the state of Kansas to take him back to Olathe. He was supposed to be flown to Kansas on Friday, April 8, where he could make bond then quickly return to the comfort of his home. Sherman wanted him back with his family for the weekend. When Kristina brought clothes to Mark at the Westchester County lock-up, she did not bring enough for an extended stay.

By the time Mark’s plane landed and a van took its sweet time bringing Mark back to Olathe for the first time since May 1982, it was almost precisely 5 P.M., too late for his court hearing. Mark, wearing a green polo shirt and khakis, his hands shackled in front of him, had to be taken to the brown brick Johnson County jail to stew over the weekend.

After posting $300,000 bond on Monday, Mark left Olathe immediately, catching a commercial flight back to New York, leaving his team of lawyers behind to attend the jury selection for Melinda’s trial.

Jury selection began on Tuesday, April 12, and as spectators gathered for what seemed the dark reunion of everyone related to the case, one question loomed over the proceedings: Where was Dr. Wilmer Lambert?

John Harmon had seen Lambert only once since the terrible days surrounding David’s funeral. He had always held Lambert accountable—for strong-arming the police, and for casting Sue and him out of the family the moment David was killed.

“If it were not for Lambert and the hierarchy of the church running interference,” John would say years later, “David’s murder would have been solved back when it happened.”

In the years since, John had run into Superintendent Lambert at a regional Nazarene event, and the two had not spoken; but John had caught sight of Lambert and Lambert of John. John saw the wear in his face. Some bit of conscience, it consoled John to think, must be at play.

But how could a good Christian man take comfort in another man’s psychic pain? John’s soul was at stake here—bitter, lasting hatred was not a Nazarene option, and despite his suspicions, John remained devoted to his local church and a devout Nazarene. He knew he had to push himself toward forgiveness, or the crime would have another victim.

Lambert never showed up at Melinda’s trial, but in his place Melinda’s husband, Dr. Mark Raisch, maintained a daily vigil, never missing a court appearance. He was undeterred in his support for his wife despite the brutality of the crime, the ridicule the case brought on his children at school, or the fact that his thriving dental practice took a hit after the allegations broke. Also maintaining a daily vigil at the trial was John Harmon; however, his wife, Sue, could not be with him. A few days after Melinda was officially held over for trial, Sue passed away from her struggle with diabetes and heart trouble. The end had come suddenly. Sue had once dearly loved Melinda. Now Melinda was on trial for the murder of Sue’s only child. John was convinced that the shock of Melinda’s indictment, all these years later, was the final blow for Sue.

Joy Hempy, the queen of the Patron’s Bank circle of women who had looked after David, was a fixture at the trial. This group of women had been gathering for lunch each year on the anniversary of David’s death to remember him and reconnect with each other. Joy had not missed a single hearing date leading up to the trial, out of respect for David’s memory and, partially, due to her obsessive interest in lurid murder cases. She was quite taken, in particular, with Mickey Sherman, a man she had seen countless times both on Court TV and as a commentator on the latest real-life murder drama to make its way into American living rooms. She would often send Sherman trivial emails, complimenting his tie, for example, and he would respond. It may have been Sherman who tipped Mark off that Hempy, as the most visible of David’s non-family members in the courtroom, might also be the most vulnerable to his charms.

When Joy’s nose was buried in a book during a break in one of the endless series of court hearings, she felt a gentle tap on her shoulder. She looked up to see a man all but blocking out the overhead lighting.

It was Mark. The man who had given much of Olathe nightmares for years was standing right there, all smiles, as if Hempy and he were old friends.

Mark introduced himself, extending his hand. It was a gesture, thought the bookish Hempy, pulled right out of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. It happened so quickly, though, that she could do nothing but play along.

“And this is Kristina,” he said, pushing his pregnant wife forward.

“You look wonderful,” was all Hempy could manage to say to Kristina. She was too polite and startled to say anything meaningful—or hateful—to Mark, a lapse she regretted.

Another daily fixture at the trail was Andy Hoffman, who had, in a series of annual columns in the Olathe News appearing on each anniversary of David’s death, repeatedly called for the case to be reopened and solved. Now he was reporting as a correspondent for the Columbus Dispatch, Melinda’s hometown newspaper, and noted that on the days he did not file a story, both Melinda and Dr. Raisch sought him out and thanked him profusely—on account, they said, of their children, who were eleven and fifteen at the time of their mother’s trial.

Melinda’s jury was composed of five women and nine men, including alternates, all of whom were white. This was somewhat of a mixed blessing. Whites on Kansas juries tended to be conservative, almost immovably inclined to convict. Then again, considering Melinda’s original story, maybe it was best for the defense that no African Americans were called to serve.

To some of the locals packing Judge James Leben’s courtroom for the three-week trial during the spring of 2005, Melinda’s only redemptive quality was the fact that she had clearly suffered the ravages of time. Whether she lay in bed night after night tormented by guilt or was just genetically predisposed to aging badly seemed beside the point. She had left town a beautiful young woman and returned worn and bedraggled, confirming their notion that even those who evade the law cannot escape from the long arm of the Lord.

The two men hired to keep Melinda from ever facing overt punishment were Tom Bath, a hotshot lawyer, and Randy Austin, a handsome, elderly man who had been her original attorney. Brought in by her father in 1982, Austin had told District Attorney Moore after Lambert had his run-ins with police that Melinda would only answer questions if they were first submitted to him in writing. Austin was called back to the case these two decades later; though Bath, more active and current in the law, did nearly all the work.

A graduate of University of Kansas Law School, Bath had played a role in some of the most notable murder cases involving privileged suspects in eastern Kansas, including that of a beloved music professor charged with staging his lover’s death as a suicide by wedging his neck into the base of a decorative wrought-iron bird cage. A typed suicide note was found later on the dead man’s computer. Bath was also involved in the case of Thomas Murray, a linguistic expert who stabbed his wife to death in the neck a dozen times, also beating her in the head with a club, later telling police: “There’s no such thing as the perfect murder . . . the bad guy always gets caught.”

Murray, proper and urbane, sat at the defense table reading In Other Words: A Language Lover’s Guide to the Most Intriguing Words Around the World, as the jury filed in to declare him guilty.

In the normal course of life in Olathe, people’s paths often crossed several different ways, and Bath and District Attorney Paul Morrison, who were once colleagues, were now adversaries. Bath, like Morrison, had worked as an assistant district attorney in the Johnson County office. Both young lawyers had excellent conviction records and were held in high regard by their colleagues. Several years younger than Morrison, Bath was affable and slight, often standing at an angle with a hand on his hip, as if to keep his suit pants up. He liked the rough-hewn nature of state criminal court and had an uncompromising nature that served him well in court. By 1992, he had been named Prosecutor of the Year in the Johnson County office and wasted no time in leveraging the public service award into a lucrative private practice.

The Lambert family could afford the best possible representation for Melinda. They chose Bath because many of Bath’s Johnson County murder cases came from the upper echelons of society, at least more so than the casework of most criminal lawyers in eastern Kansas. In that sense he was an easy pick for the Lambert family. His soft-spoken demeanor, his accommodating presentation—no one could genuflect for a judge as well—were a marked contrast to the tactics Melinda’s father had employed in protecting her during the first go-around. Bath could sometimes lull the other side into a false sense of security. On bad days, his manner had been known to lull a juror or two into slumber.

Paul Morrison employed a different approach, both in life and in the courtroom. Tough and pugnacious when questioning witnesses (he was periodically admonished by judges for examining witnesses too harshly), Morrison was a gut player, a man with high moral aspirations. And while he did have his sights set on higher office, Morrison did not seem to be the typical duplicitous political player, but a Kansan with a loyalty both to the truth and common decency.

Melinda’s trial came at a complicated point in time for Morrison. Long established as the district attorney of Johnson County, his political future was suddenly in flux.

Precisely as Morrison was preparing for Melinda’s trial, his arch nemesis, Kansas attorney general and Republican Phill Kline, a crusader against abortion rights, went a step too far, even by Kansan standards, and subpoenaed the complete medical files of scores of women who had had late-term abortions. Kline claimed the measure was meant to root out crimes like statutory rape, but many, even those who considered the teachings of Darwin heresy, saw this as a ploy to embarrass and intimidate women who had had or were considering an abortion. To make matters worse, a Wichita abortion practitioner who’d contributed $150,000 to Chris Biggs, Kline’s 2002 general-election opponent, saw his patient file particularly hard hit by the subpoenas.

Kline, once seen as an immovable force, was now viewed as vulnerable in the coming year’s race for attorney general. Democrats in the state approached Morrison about switching parties in order to take Kline on with the backing of the Democratic Party.

Few thought Morrison would do it. A law-and-order Kansan was unlikely to drop the Republican affiliation that had served him so well. But in the end, he did just that. With this as the background, against the advice of every peer and political prognosticator in the state, Morrison brought murder charges against Melinda and Mark, two successful, wealthy, white Christian citizens in a highly circumstantial cold case and vowed to prosecute both himself.

Morrison had a sensible precedent for his actions. Employing the often risky strategy of trying big and particularly challenging cases personally, Morrison had lost only a small fraction of the cases he had tried as an assistant district attorney and had a perfect record as a district attorney. He won against Richard Grissom, Jr., convicted of three first-degree murders of young, beautiful women even though none of the victims’ bodies could be found. He also won a high-profile conviction against John Robinson, Sr., a fifty-nine-year-old grandfather who posed as a magnanimous adoption broker but was in actuality a serial killer, one of the first to troll internet chat rooms to find his prey.

Yet a loss in the Harmon case would be an embarrassment, ranking among one of the biggest acts of political self-sabotage in state history. It would kill any possibility of a victory over Kline in the coming election. To Morrison, though, pursuing these convictions was a simple case of concluding unfinished business, fulfilling promises he made to himself when he’d first visited the Harmon crime scene over twenty-three years ago. Only one thing could validate the risk: a guilty verdict. And he would go to trial armed only with Melinda’s two contradictory stories, the fact that she was the only one definitely at the scene of the crime, and a series of chaste love letters. There was still no murder weapon, no definitive confession, no DNA linking her directly to anything but the scene.

For a man with high aspirations, it was quite a gamble.

During opening arguments, Morrison spun a yarn for the jury about how Melinda, a member of such prominent standing in the Nazarene church, saw widowhood as preferable to the condemnation she would face for divorcing David. “In her twisted world, it was better to be Widow Harmon than Divorcée Harmon,” Morrison said. Bath countered that the Harmon marriage was strong, and that even if it hadn’t been, divorce, if not encouraged, was tolerated—at least more so than murder—in the Nazarene community.

“Back then, all it took was a fifty-four dollar filing fee and a fifteen minute hearing,” Bath said, scoffing at the prosecution’s contention that divorce was problematic in any way, shape, or form.

Melinda watched the court proceedings slouched at the defense table, only whispering to her lawyers on the odd occasion. No lawyer in his right mind would put Melinda on the stand. Her conflicting descriptions of the crime scene implied guilt, and she would be easily susceptible to Morrison’s technique of roping people in with soft questions, then hitting them with full-throated destruction when they tripped up. Mark, though, was considered by the defense to be an even match for Morrison, and had publicly stated his willingness to testify for either side.

Until Mark was called, the trial seemed to be biding its time. Neither the defense nor prosecution could draw up the perfect case.

It was not as if there were no evidence. There were, at least from an instinctive gut level, plenty of circumstances that did not quite add up for the defense. Melinda’s dueling stories, for example—one as half-baked as the other. And the love letters. And Richard Bergstrand’s account of having spied Mark and Melinda kissing. Melinda’s blood-spattered pillow, too, didn’t sit right when she claimed to have been sound asleep, presumably with her head resting atop it, as the attack began. Instead, Melinda had blood on the lower portion of her nightgown, as if it had been splattered as she had stood to watch some of the attack from a safe distance. That mattered little, though, in terms of imposing the burden of proof, especially at a time when jurors tended to demand exhaustive physical evidence.

The trial featured a hit parade of old witnesses. LaRue, grown heavy, had fled Olathe after retirement because he found it too bustling, and had taken refuge with survivalists out on the far side of Pomona Lake, due south of Olathe. He retold his story to the jury, testifying that Melinda had claimed she and David were in the careless habit of leaving the back sliding glass door open and that nothing was stolen from her home but the bank keys.

Gayle Bergstrand, still elegant and trim, told about that night and the sounds coming through the wall, and of how Melinda never seemed to lose her equilibrium. And never even asked after David, even with all those EMS workers attending to the scene.

There were new witnesses too—among them DNA experts who shrugged and said that the blood samples were not copious enough, not to mention too degraded, to determine a match with David’s blood with more than 98 percent certainty. Absolute certainty—the benchmark for modern jurors conditioned by CSI—was absent.

On the same day that LaRue took the stand, a pair of doctors testified for the prosecution. Dr. Andrew Kaufman, a neurologist, and Dr. Richard Dubinsky, another neurologist who also taught at the University of Kansas, both stated that there was no way that Melinda could have been knocked out for an hour and then recount perfectly the events that led up to the strike.

“It does not happen,” said Dubinsky, who was qualified by training and life experience, having once been hit by a car while riding his bicycle. It was almost like being hit by a pipe wrench. Dubinsky lost six hours of memory to an abyss.

Two days later, Gary Dirks, who was at the murder scene collecting samples for the Johnson County Crime Lab, confirmed that tests on the shower curtain in Melinda and David’s bathroom indicated blood, more prevalent lower on the curtain he tested. This implied that the killers may have taken the time to clean themselves, though Sally Lane, who conducted the modern-day tests for Johnson County, was unable to make a precise DNA identification due to the age of the sample and the fact that it had been unfortunately stored at room temperature.

Dirks could not remember if there were towels or any other evidence of a cleanup, details that might shore up his theory.

The next day went along similarly. The apparent blood found on the rug inside Mark’s apartment, which had been seized by the police in 1982, was determined then with 98 percent certainty to have come from David. Modern investigators could do no better. According to Shawn Weiss, who did advanced testing at a laboratory all the way in North Carolina at great cost to Johnson County, they weren’t even certain if the DNA sample came from blood or sweat, which could bolster Mark’s contention that David, heavy and overworked, must have innocently dropped sweat on his rug while helping him move.

Neither side had achieved any sort of terminal velocity. The verdict could go either way. Confident in the impression he’d make and how he would mount the final—and meticulously stated—effort to tilt the proceedings in Melinda’s favor, the defense did what everyone had been waiting for all along. Roughly two weeks into the trial, the defense called Mark to the stand.

Over the course of Melinda’s trial, dozens of witnesses testified as to the worth of the physical evidence, the possible state of her marriage, and the combative behavior of her father, but, for most trial watchers, Mark was the only witness that mattered.

Bath’s aim was simply to poke at the prosecution’s contention that something more than a friendship existed between Mark and Melinda. Mark was happy to oblige. If Mark came across as tame and reasonable instead of a dark spirit capable of gale force anger, the prosecution’s story would automatically drop a notch in the jury’s eyes. And speaking of the prosecution, another part of the subtext that day was whether Morrison’s characteristic grilling of witnesses would lead to him lashing out at Mark in a public scolding. Which man with a catalogue of accomplishments might crack or stumble first—Mangelsdorf or Morrison?

An even bigger question that day was just how Mark and Melinda would react upon seeing each other. For all anyone knew, this was the first day they had been in each other’s presence since a sobbing Melinda had leaned her head on Mark’s shoulder at David’s funeral, when he was seen whispering something inaudible, but widely speculated upon, into her ear. What would their reactions be?

In the moments before Mark’s appearance, Kristina took a prominent seat along the aisle in the front row. Then Mark strode confidently in, his eyes on the witness stand to what seemed the exclusion of all else. At the front row, he bent down to give Kristina a short, almost perfunctory kiss. He then made his way to the stand where he was sworn in to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Mark didn’t look in Melinda’s direction once during his testimony. A few moments after he settled into the witness box, Melinda whispered something to her lawyers but did just as admirable a job ignoring Mark completely. Whatever secrets these two former devout Nazarene Church members had to share with each other, they would not divulge them now, not even under an oath sworn before God.

After Mark had given the ages and names of his children, Bath asked him about his employment at Parmalat. Mark had been brought in as a senior vice president, with the charge of creating the international beverage giant’s carbonated beverage division.

“Parmalat,” said Mark, “is a global consumer product company that focuses principally on dairy products.”

“Such as?” asked Bath.

“Such as milk. It’s principally milk, shelf-stable milk, some fluid refrigerated milk. And then through Canada, it’s a lot of cheeses, yogurts, other kinds of dairy products.”

The testimony was interrupted by the blast of a train whistle. This was typical Olathe, the way conversations, transactions—really life itself—would come to a temporary halt because of whistle noise. It was an irony that whenever a Morrison trial was stopped cold, it just might be his brother Jack driving one of the 120 trains now coming through the town daily. Like their father and grandfather, Jack had become a railroad engineer, continuing a family tradition that from time to time gave Paul literal pause in his own job.

Bath then began a gentle round of questions about Mark’s academic performance in college. Mark would be hard pressed to make an irreversible mistake with this line of questioning, which suited Bath’s aims just fine. The more the jury liked Mark, the more they would think of the prosecution’s theory as a lark.

Bath went on to question Mark about his meeting Melinda, letting Mark describe the platonic nature of their friendship. Mark also attempted to explain away the sometimes charged emotions displayed in Melinda’s letters. For example, Mark said that one letter’s reference to frustration at the guarded expression of feelings was in fact about his impatience over Melinda’s refusal to dish on exactly how and why she got Dean Smith fired. Bath grazed over the topic of the other women Mark was dating at the time before trying to neutralize several of Morrison’s anticipated lines of questioning, including why Mark had moved off campus, to the opposite side of Olathe, just before the murder. Mark described it as a prudent financial decision; one in which David had played an advisory role.

After Mark recited a list of denials, including his having never kissed Melinda in any capacity other than as a friend, he made an empathic declaration. “Let me be very clear,” he said. “I was not in love with Melinda Harmon.” Mark hit the witness stand with the side of his balled fist. He probably intended it as a gesture of emphasis—it had a prepared quality to it—but perhaps he hit the wood harder than planned or mistimed the distance his hand had to drop. Several in the courtroom jumped.

“I did not have a romantic relationship with her, none of that,” he said. “Melinda Harmon was my friend.”

“And how about David Harmon?” Bath asked.

“David Harmon was also my friend,” Mark said.

Bath wrapped up by leading Mark toward his favorite topic, the gentlemen’s deal that district attorney Dennis Moore had offered him over two decades earlier. Mark had told everyone from his Pelham neighbors to Kristina about it. Moore wrote that if Mark came in with Hugh Kreamer, his lawyer and Moore’s predecessor, and spoke honestly about the case, there would be no charges, and Moore would “consider the matter closed.”

No one else was at that meeting, but Mark said that when asked point blank by Moore, he said he did not kill David.

“And did you kill David Harmon?” Bath asked.

“I did not kill David Harmon,” Mark said.

Now it was Morrison’s turn. In questioning witnesses, Morrison usually took one of two paths, depending on which might yield better results. The first was a casual approach, addressing a witness as if they had run into each other by chance and he hadn’t given much prior thought to his line of inquiry. A witness did not have to make a grave error, however, for Morrison to dial his voice down to a guttural tone. That was the start of the second path, when his voice would begin to turn churlish, revealing a quick change artistry that owed more to his Irish ancestry than his Midwestern upbringing. He was never aggressively sarcastic, though—Morrison had too much Kansas in him for that.

For cross-examination, Morrison had several avenues of attack to choose from—Mark’s platonic take on the letters, or the way he shat himself, for example—but he opened with Mark’s oft-mentioned claim of a pseudo-deal. The only piece of paper evidence even tangentially related to the offering of a deal came from Moore in an October 13, 1983 letter to Scott Kreamer, in which he offered immunity for Mark if he took and passed a polygraph test. Kreamer wrote back the next day. “We are declining your offer,” he said, because Mark had no confidence in lie-detector tests and therefore would not take one. Morrison and Mark went back and forth about what sort of offer was made and when, but neither gained headway.

Next, Morrison tackled Melinda’s letters, asking Mark if when she spoke about deep, shared feelings that went beyond surface level, if that was the sort of chaste voicing one might use with a sister. Mark said it was.

“What does it mean when she says, ‘I really don’t ever want to suffocate you?’ What does she mean by that?”

“Again, I’m not sure exactly,” Mark said, in what was becoming a familiar refrain in regard to Melinda’s letters. “I don’t remember all of the details at the time, but I think she was just trying to be a good friend.”

Morrison ran his tongue beneath his mustache and looked at him. “You have a lot of friends that suffocate you?”

“Pardon?”

“Have you had friends that suffocated you in the past?”

Mark managed a smile. “Probably occasionally, but not generally.”

Morrison made some headway in cracking Mark’s claim that the note about communication in his relationship with Melinda related to the Jim Smith firing. There was less traction when Morrison tried to frame his courtship of Kristina as an inappropriate office affair. Finally, he ended with a flourish concerning Mark’s soiling himself on the night of the murder.

“We all know,” Morrison said, letting his words drag out, “that diarrhea is a condition that when it hits you, you’ve got to go, don’t you?”

“You probably need to, yes,” Mark agreed.

Morrison brightened. “I mean, unless you’re wearing a diaper when you got to go, you got to go, right?”

Mark agreed.

“And it can result in bad things happening to you and your clothing and all that stuff, right?”

Mark agreed again, before Morrison got Mark to also agree to the fact that he did not play floor hockey the day of the murder because of the diarrhea.

“And while you’ve got this diarrhea problem then, you decide that you are going to go on a big old walk?” Morrison asked, his voice now low and conspiratorial. He was referring to the walk Mark took with Melinda on the day of the murder while David was off playing floor hockey. The walk Mark had at first neglected to mention to detectives in 1982, a walk that was interrupted by a stopover at his apartment with Melinda.

“What,” Morrison asked, his inflection mocking, “were you going to do? Were you just going to go behind a bush or something when you were out walking with her if you needed to?”

Mark said he never thought he’d be far from a restroom, but Morrison was setting a trap. “You would have probably been closer to a restroom if you would have been in a gym in a school playing hockey, wouldn’t you?”

Mark allowed that this was a possibility and Morrison moved in for the kill. “In fact, when you went for that walk, Mr. Mangelsdorf, you stopped by your apartment with her, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did,” Mark answered and Morrison promptly accused him of lying to police.

“I—I believe in reviewing the reports, that—”

“Yes or no, sir,” Morrison demanded.

“—that’s what I said on that day.”

“What do you call somebody that doesn’t tell the truth?” Morrison asked.

“I—I reviewed the—,” Mark stammered, before Morrison cut him off.

“What’s the word for that, Mr. Mangelsdorf?”

“I reviewed the events—”

“What’s the word for somebody who doesn’t tell the truth?”

“Forgetful.”

“What else—what’s another word? It starts with an ‘L.’”

Mark shrugged meekly. “I don’t know.”

“Boy that’s convenient, isn’t it?” Morrison asked, not expecting an answer. He complimented Mark’s memory in other aspects of life before ending his cross-examination.

Mark left the stand with the same confident, purposeful strides with which he walked into the courtroom. Later, Mark, Kristina, and his attorneys high-fived each other in the hallway outside the courtroom, apparently pleased with Mark’s performance. Such enthusiasm seemed misplaced. At least the cross-examination hadn’t led to a confession, though that thud heard as punctuation to his denial of loving Melinda seemed a poor move, a gesture eerily reminiscent of the crime of which he and Melinda were accused.

The jury foreman would later say that, like the rest of the jurors, he found Mark somewhat robotic and rehearsed. Outside of his errant reflex, Mark didn’t let emotion divert him to the point of anger on the stand, but he was measured and modulated to a degree that seemed almost artificial. He aimed to elicit the perfect response, even if it meant not even uttering the word “liar” to the point of near absurdity. Yet there are far worse crimes than misplaced pride, and far worse fates than not appearing as perfect as the Divine.

The verdict came down on a Monday, May 3, 2005, after little more than eleven hours of deliberation. There is an invisible crescendo before a big verdict is handed down. In that one moment, and often after long hours of dreary testimony, the courtroom almost exists in another dimension, a state of suspended animation where the only breaths taken are shallow and the only sounds heard are nervous twitter and the clearing of dried throats. Melinda’s husband Mark Raisch sat tensely in the gallery, betraying no emotion. John Harmon looked drained, pale, and aged. Melinda, too, looked unmoved, not even betraying a sense of anticipation, though in a departure from her routine, she hadn’t gone home for the weekend, either because she was confident she would be going home for good soon, or because she did not want to deal with the burden of a “final” good-bye to her children and home.

Melinda Raisch, the former Melinda Harmon, did not flinch when the jury declared her guilty of both first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Dabbing at her nose with a tissue, Melinda was immediately taken into custody. Her sentencing was scheduled for July 8, when she faced a stark fifteen-years-to-life sentence.

Mark, who had only flown in for his testimony, had already left Olathe when Sherman informed him of the verdict. Along with Mangelsdorf ’s team of attorneys, Sherman had been in attendance when the verdict was announced, taking notes.

“I don’t believe it’s doom and gloom on Mark’s case,” Mickey Sherman said in a statement outside the Olathe courthouse, a less than ringing endorsement of his client’s predicament. “I think Mark will get a fair trial. This was the trial of Melinda Raisch. It’s a different trial.”

That Melinda was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder did not bode well for Mark. Implicit in the verdict was the fact that at least this jury believed the prosecution’s version of events, that Mark and Melinda had killed David in order to be together. Sherman could herald Mark’s chances, but those chances had now narrowed considerably.

On the prosecution side, with Melinda convicted, the state’s investigation was hardly in the end game. Quite to the contrary—it was, in some ways, only just beginning.