On Easter Sunday my daughter called and asked me to come and get her, and her mother-in-law put a hand on my chest in the doorway in front of thirty guests and told me to go home. My son-in-law told me to call the police, because the Chief was standing in his back yard eating food he’d paid for. He was right about that — and it is the reason he lost everything.
I have thought a great deal about that plastic sleeve.
Camille Ostrand put a cracked phone in a bag with a hairbrush and two cardigans and handed it to a deputy on her own front step. She could have dropped it in a pond. She could have left it in a drawer for six weeks and made everybody go and get a warrant for it.
She did not, because to her it was a phone belonging to a girl who had made a scene at a party.
That family had been operating for so long inside a county that never asked them anything that the entire concept of this could be used against me had gone out of them, the way a muscle goes.
The call was forty-one minutes long.
It starts at 2:13 with my daughter’s voice, and it does not stop until somebody’s foot pushes the phone further under the sofa at 2:54, which does not end a call.
What is on it, in order:
Everything that happened to my daughter, which is hers, and which was played once, in a closed room, and which I did not listen to and will not.
Yvonne offered. She offered in the correct way, which is once, without any weight on it, and then she never raised it again.
The prosecutor asked me, much later, whether I understood that a jury would hear it and I would be in the room.
I said I understood. I sat in that room and I looked at the back of my daughter’s head for nine minutes and I did not hear a single thing, and I have no idea how that is possible and it is what happened.
