Nancy Grace: The Eleventh Victim

It had been especially tough for Hailey personally, dredging up all the old memories of Will’s murder. But after a three-week presentation of evidence, the jury convicted. Hailey was exhausted and drained at the end.

Katrine came to see her not long after, still a fragile wisp.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to testify at trial,” Katrine said, handing her a sky-blue velvet box.

Inside was the pen, etched with the words, FOR HAILEY, SEEKING JUSTICE, KATRINE DUMONT-EASTWOOD.

They hadn’t been married, but Katrine, Hailey learned, had officially taken his name after his death.

“I know it sounds crazy, but in my heart, I’m his wife.”

No. It didn’t sound crazy at all.

For the next ten years, Hailey wore the pen hanging on a black silk cord around her neck during every jury trial and often in between.

Now, she gazed out the window at bright lights shooting upward at Turner Stadium, slicing the dark sky. The night air hummed with cars flying past on interstate I-75.

Just for the moment, she allowed herself to consider the eleven women, long silenced, dead in their graves.

Hailey had studied the eight-by-ten crime scene photos, hundreds of them, at length, from every possible angle in the weeks leading up to trial, poring over each one to determine any possible probative significance she could use to State’s advantage in court.

But tonight they haunted her, not as potential evidence at trial, but as photos of the suffering of real people. Now the media was circling the case like vultures, threatening to pick clean the bones of the women by exploiting them again, this time in sensational news accounts.

The headlights blurred, flying by outside her window. She thought of LaSondra Williams, strangled, her slender neck marred by three long, angry scratch marks and her torso ripped open. If the papers had their way, her name…and lifestyle…would make city headlines, maybe further if the Associated Press picked up on the trial from the death-penalty angle.

It’s the least you can do , she told herself, leaving her office and heading to the record room to start running rap sheets.

By midnight, Hailey’s eyes were red and irritated from squinting at the computer screen.

Fingerprints don’t lie, and they told Hailey that Leola Williams’s first baby girl, just twenty-four, was a crack hooker.

LaSondra worked motels near the strip clubs on Stewart Avenue skirting Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the seediest piece of highway with the highest crime rate in the entire state. LaSondra was just part of the scenery outside strip bars, motels that rented rooms by the hour, and crack houses doing their business.

And LaSondra hadn’t just been arrested. She’d been arrested over a dozen times for soliciting sex for the purpose of prostitution, pleading guilty or no contest under oath every single time.

In addition, her record was dotted with at least a dozen other charges for pandering, minor possession of cocaine, and one conviction for spitting on an officer at the time of arrest. They were all actually petty crimes, none warranting hard time…maybe an occasional overnight in the city jail, maybe a fine.

Hailey could see how LaSondra’s family had never known the truth.

And what a series of mug shots. The girl was beautiful, thin, with gorgeous dark hair floating in waves down one side and pinned back on the other. But Hailey spotted telltale facial bruises on one mug shot and a gaunt, hollow-eyed searching stare in others. La Sondra was thin, all right. Cocaine thin.

As Hailey stared at the photos in the bright, overhead lights of the records room, the girl in the picture stared right back.

She closed her eyes to block out the image, and another face, a beautiful face with chiseled features and deep blue eyes, appeared before her. Another murder victim.

Will.

It happened late on a beautiful, vivid, spring afternoon, three weeks before their wedding. Countless minor details were still etched in Hailey’s memory, mundane things that unfolded in the minutes before her life was destroyed.

She remembered hurrying down the marble steps in the university’s Psychology Department and out into the sunlight. She was elated, having just finished the last essay of her final exam for her Masters in Psychology. She’d actually finished a year early.

Practically skipping home from campus, she burst through the door, tossing her books and her favorite coral-colored raincoat onto the scratchy plaid sofa.

Her last thought before she turned toward the answering machine, with its blinking red light, was that she’d been wrong about the raincoat. That morning, she’d had the feeling she might need it, heedless of the forecast, but it hadn’t rained after all. It was sunny.

The message was from Will’s sister.

“Hailey-please call me. As soon as you can.”

That was all there was to the message. Just nine strained words, and a click.

Hailey’s hands shook as she reached for the receiver, fluttering over the dial like moths batting around a porch light in the dark. Instinctively, she knew.

Will was dead.

For months, it didn’t register. Will was murdered. Murdered in a senseless act of what the police called “random violence”-a mugging. Hailey’s beloved fiancé had taken five shots, four to the head, one to the back, over his wallet containing thirty-five dollars, credit cards, driver’s license, and a picture of her. The credit cards were thrown to the ground beside his body.

Her world skidded to a halt.

Nothing mattered anymore; the days, weeks, months that followed melted and blurred, one into the other. Hailey wouldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, went days without speaking. Then days turned into weeks.

The clocks in her parents’ home were removed when the ticking drove her crazy, and the house stood completely quiet. It was as if time stopped along with the clocks. Her wedding dress hung in the closet and no one dared suggest she put it away. She wouldn’t pack away his clothes, his letters. Even her notebook of wedding plans sat unmoved at her bedside with the blue pen on top, as if there were more to write.

The fresh-faced girl with the world waiting for her was dead. She died alongside the man she loved on a sunny spring afternoon.

Eight months later, the first, thick package in plain wrapping arrived, jammed into the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

It was from the first law school that wrote her back, answering her query with an application. That single envelope started a trickle that swiftly became a torrent, triggering long nights typing essays, researching scholarships, ordering transcripts, lining up references.

Her original plans-to teach college psychology or counsel patients in a quiet carpeted office-were out of the question, no longer even a remote option. The anger, the rage, but most of all the pain, were simply too big to fit into an antiseptic lecture hall or a muted psychologist’s office.

One year to the day after Will’s murder and with little fanfare, Hailey loaded her belongings-including her wedding dress, delicately folded into a big white box-into her car and left her family standing in the driveway, waving good-bye until they were just a tiny snatch of color in the rearview mirror.

Hailey opened her eyes and saw LaSondra still staring back at her.

Stuffing the photos into the back of the trial folder, she went padding in stocking feet out of the overhead fluorescent glare and into the lamplight of her own office.

There she dialed by heart the number for Christian Brown, managing editor of the Atlanta Telegraph , on his private office phone at his faux-Italian rococo behemoth on West Paces Ferry. His wife had dreamed it up. No children, just lifestyle.