Play Dead

“Various people had sighted it along the way. It was always pretty far out there.”

“And it was stormy that night?” I ask.

She nods. “Yes. That’s why it was boarded in the first place. If not for that, Evans would have died from the pills he took.”

“And the theory was that he threw the dog into the ocean at the same point he threw his fiancée?”

“That was the theory, although it was never that important to the case. If anything, it got in the way.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Everybody who knew him talked about how much he loved the dog. Killing him therefore didn’t make much sense.”

“So how was it explained away?”

She shrugs. “This was a murder-suicide. Not the most rational of acts.”

“Was the dog’s body ever discovered?” I ask.

“Not that I know of.”

I decide it’s time to pose the key question. “Is there any likelihood that the dog, once it was thrown overboard, could have swum to shore?”

She thinks about it for a moment, considering the possibility. “No,” she says. “No chance. Not from half that distance, not in that weather.”

I don’t respond for a moment, and she says, “You think the dog is alive?”

I turn the question back at her. “What if it was?”

She thinks again. “Then that would be a very interesting development.”

Yes, it would.

* * * * *

FOR EVERY LAWYER, in every case, there comes the time to make a key decision.

It’s usually strategic: how to plead, the thrust of the defense, or perhaps whether to have the defendant testify. Because of my bank account, and my aforementioned work-ethic deficiency, my key moment always comes much earlier. It’s when I decide whether to take the case.

I think about this on the way home from Asbury Park. At the moment it’s premature, since I don’t know enough about the case, have never met the defendant, and, obviously, he has not sought my help. All that is keeping me interested is a devoted sister and a golden retriever.

For now that’s plenty.

I call Kevin and ask him to assemble all the information and material he can find, and once again I’m pleased to learn that he is way ahead of me. He’s already gotten his hands on the transcript of the trial, as well as the contemporaneous news reports. We don’t yet have standing to get discovery information, but for now this will do fine.

Kevin meets me at my house with the material, and we go into the den to go through it. Tara sits with me on the couch, and Reggie sits at Kevin’s feet under the desk. I have taken to calling the dog Reggie instead of Yogi, which reflects my confidence that Karen Evans was telling the truth.

A couple of the tabloids around the time of the murder have pictures of the dog, and the distinctive cut marks are very much in evidence. There is much less white in his face, which goldens accumulate as they get older, but the dog certainly looks like the one snuggling against Kevin’s leg.

The newspaper stories at the time were informative but not terribly lengthy. This was not a murder that captured the public consciousness as a select few do. Ironically, the facts as stated were somewhat similar to the Scott Peterson case, yet that one became a media obsession, while this one stayed basically under the radar.

Richard Evans had met Stacy Harriman almost a year before the fateful night. She had just arrived on the East Coast from her Minnesota home, though there is no mention about why she had moved. At the time of her death, she and Richard had been engaged and living together for six months.

Most of the neighbors, when questioned by the local newspaper reporters, did not have any knowledge of problems between the couple. Of course, the most collectively oblivious group of people in the world are neighbors. “Gee… I had no idea he was a serial killer. He was always so quiet… All I ever heard from his house was the chain saw…”

One neighbor did testify that Stacy had confided in her that she and Richard were having some problems and that she was a little worried about his temper. It was damaging testimony, but not the evidence that carried the day for the prosecution.

The transcript of the trial provides little help. Evans was competently defended; his lawyer was simply up against too much evidence. He had no way to explain away Evans’s suicide attempt, the bloodstains, or Stacy Harriman’s body washing up on shore.

The prosecutor did not spend too much time talking about Reggie except in his opening and closing arguments, when he used him to portray Evans as particularly heartless. The point was clear: No matter what might have been the cause of the violence between Evans and his fiancée, the dog was certainly an innocent. Killing the dog, he pointed out, was gratuitous and indicative of the callous nature of the defendant.