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.
Camille Ostrand in the doorway telling thirty guests that Nell was not my daughter today.
Camille Ostrand at 2:38, to the room, saying that this was a family matter and would everybody please go back outside — which is the sentence that establishes she knew what was on that floor, and which her lawyer spent nine months trying to make mean something else.
Nobody going back outside.
Twenty-two seconds of nothing at 2:39, which the prosecutor played in full, twice, and which is the single most effective piece of that recording. Eleven adults in a room with a woman on the floor, and for twenty-two seconds the only sound on the tape is music from a garden speaker.
And at 2:41, Sutton Ostrand, at full volume, in front of eleven adults who were later interviewed individually and every one of whom confirmed it:
My family owns this town, and the Chief is standing in my back yard eating food I paid for. Go on. Call them. Let’s see whose wrists it is.
Yvonne Prentiss played me those four seconds on a laptop in an office in the state capital eleven days later.
She said: do you understand what he did.
I said: he threatened me.
And she said: no. He described an arrangement. In public. On a recording. With eleven witnesses.
