The Scarecrow

“Good. Then, if you want a statement from me, I would say that I believe that my client-and, by the way, I am not at liberty to identify him by name-is almost as much a victim here as Denise Babbit. It is true that she is the ultimate victim because she lost her life in a horrible manner. But my client’s freedom has been taken from him and he is not guilty of this crime. I will be able to prove that once we get into court. Whether that will be in adult or juvenile court doesn’t really matter. I will vigorously defend my client because he is not guilty of this crime.”

It had been a carefully worded statement and nothing short of what I expected. But, still, it gave me pause. Meyer was crossing a line in giving me the flash drive and I had to ask myself why. I didn’t know Meyer. I had never written a story involving him and there was none of the trust that builds between reporter and source as stories are written and published. So if Meyer wasn’t crossing the line for me, who was he doing it for? Alonzo Winslow? Could this public defender with the briefcase bursting with his guilty clients’ files actually believe his own statement? Did he really think Alonzo was a victim here, that he was actually innocent?

It dawned on me that I was wasting time. I had to get back to the office and see what was on the stick. From the digital information I held hidden in my hand I would find my direction.

I reached over and turned my digital recorder off.

“Thanks for your help.”

I said it sarcastically for the benefit of the other lawyer in the room. I nodded and winked at Meyer, then I left.

As soon as I got to the newsroom I went to my cubicle without checking in at the raft or with Angela Cook. I plugged the data stick into the slot on my laptop computer and opened its contents. There were three files on it. They were labeled summary.doc, arrest.doc and confess.doc. The third file was largest by far. I briefly opened it to find that the transcript of Alonzo Winslow’s confession was 928 pages long. I closed it, saving it for last, and suspected that because it was labeled confess instead of, say, interrogation, it was a file that had been transmitted to Meyer from the prosecutor. It was a digital world and it was not surprising to me that the transcript from nine hours of questioning a murder suspect would be transmitted from police to prosecutor and from prosecutor to defense in electronic format. With a page count of 928 the costs of printing and reprinting such a document would be high, especially considering it was the product of just one case in a system that carries thousands of cases on any given day. If Meyer wanted to print it out on the public defender’s budget, then that was up to him.

After loading the files onto my computer, I e-mailed them to the in-house copy center so that I would have hard copies of everything. Just as I prefer a newspaper you can hold in your hand to a digital version, I like hard copies of the materials I base my stories on.

I decided to take the documents in order even though I was familiar with the charges and the arrest of Alonzo Winslow. The first two documents would set the stage for the confession that followed. The confession would then set the stage for my story.

I opened the summary report on my screen. I assumed this would be a minimalist account of the movements of the investigation leading to the arrest of Winslow. The author of the document was my pal Gilbert Walker, who had so kindly hung up on me the day before. I was not expecting much. The summary was four pages long and had been typed on specific forms and then scanned into a computer to create the digital document I now had. Walker knew as he typed it that his document would be studied for weaknesses and procedural mistakes by lawyers on both sides of the case. The best defense against that was to make the target smaller-to put as little into the report as possible-and from the looks of it Walker had succeeded.

The surprise in the file, however, was not the short summary but the complete autopsy and crime scene reports as well as a set of crime scene photographs. These would be hugely helpful to me when I wrote the description of the crime in my story.

Every reporter has at least a splice of the voyeur gene. Before going to the words I went to the photos. There were forty-eight color photographs taken at the crime scene that depicted the body of Denise Babbit as it had been found in the trunk of her 1999 Mazda Millenia and as it was removed, examined on scene and then finally bagged before being taken away. There were also photographs that showed the interior of the car and the trunk after the removal of the body.