William Krueger - Tamarack County

LaPointe had already served more than half that sentence when Ray Jay Wakemup had come forward with a story that cast a good deal of doubt on LaPointe’s guilt.

The summer before last, as a result of the work the AA program required of him, Wakemup had visited LaPointe in the Stillwater Prison, just outside the Twin Cities. After the visit, Wakemup went to see Corrine Heine, who’d been the public defender for LaPointe in the murder trial. The story that he told Heine, and that Heine subsequently told the media, made headlines across the country. It was a story of the justice system gone terribly wrong.

The day Karyn Bowen died, Ray Jay Wakemup turned sixteen. He was living with a foster family, the fourth since he’d entered the system seven years earlier. His older brother, Harmon, lived on his own and was enrolled in a criminal justice program at Aurora Community College. He was going to be a cop. Harmon had promised his little brother a very special sixteenth birthday present. He picked him up that evening, and they headed to a house outside Aurora, which Ray Jay knew was rented by Harmon’s best friend, Otter LaPointe. There was a red Corvette parked outside the house, and at first Ray Jay had thought the impossible, that Harmon was giving him the sports car as a present. Inside the house, he was greeted by the smell of frying hamburger. The table had been set for four, and there was a cake in the middle of it with sixteen candles. And there was a pretty blond woman standing beside LaPointe, smiling like she knew some important secret, and they all cried, “Happy birthday, Ray Jay!”

They ate hamburgers and coleslaw. They drank beer, and music played on LaPointe’s tape deck. From her purse, the blonde, whose name was Karyn, took out cocaine, a mirror, and a razor blade, and they all snorted lines. She also brought out a hand-rolled joint, and they passed it around. And then Harmon said maybe it was time for Ray Jay’s birthday present. Ray Jay was feeling pretty unstable at this point, a little sick, in fact, but he said yeah, it was time. The blond woman gave him that smile again, the one that told him she knew absolutely something important, and she stood up, held out her hand, and said, “Ray Jay, honey, you come with me.”

He tried to stand up but fell right over. Then he began to feel really sick to his stomach. His brother helped him into LaPointe’s bathroom, where he proceeded to throw up his dinner and his birthday cake. He sat down beside the toilet and, because he felt like there was still more to come, was afraid to move far from the bowl.

Harmon left him there, and Ray Jay drifted off. He came to a while later, when Harmon and LaPointe lifted him off the bathroom floor and took him to the living room, where they laid him out on the couch. He remembered the blond woman sitting beside him, stroking his cheek, saying, “Poor baby.” He remembered the music went on and on, all night it seemed, and whenever he opened his eyes, he saw them dancing, all of them together, the woman rubbing herself against both men. He remembered that the music finally stopped, and when he opened his eyes he was alone in the living room. Later, he got up to pee, and when he laid back down on the sofa, LaPointe stumbled in from another room and slumped into a chair. He was wearing only boxer shorts, and he looked like he’d just run a marathon. His head fell back, and Ray Jay heard him begin to snore.

A little while later, Ray Jay woke again, this time to the sound of the toilet flushing, and he opened his eyes just in time to see the woman walking, stark naked, from the bathroom. She disappeared through a door to another room, and Ray Jay heard Harmon laugh from inside. Ray Jay had a pretty good sense of what he’d missed out on, but he was in no shape to try to remedy the situation.

The next time he woke up, he heard the birds singing, though it was still too dark to see anything outside the windows. What woke him was Harmon bending over Otter LaPointe, slapping his face and telling him to wake up, they had a problem. LaPointe was out cold, and despite Harmon’s best efforts, he didn’t stir. Harmon saw that Ray Jay was awake and told him to give a hand. Together they lifted LaPointe and dragged him to the other room, which turned out to be a bedroom. They laid him on the bed next to the woman who was naked and, Ray Jay thought, sound asleep. Harmon told him to go back out into the living room, and Ray Jay went. A little while later-Ray Jay had gone back to sleep-Harmon shook him roughly awake and told him it was time to go. There was light in the sky then, the first flush of dawn. Harmon drove Ray Jay to his foster home. But he didn’t drop him off immediately. They sat in the car and Harmon talked to him, told him a story that scared the crap out of him. The woman at LaPointe’s place, Harmon said, was dead. Otter had killed her. He told Ray Jay that if he said anything to anyone, they were all going to jail. Ray Jay was old enough to be tried as an adult, Harmon informed him, and even though he hadn’t killed the woman himself, he was there and any white jury would send him to prison for his part in it. Did he understand? Ray Jay was so scared and his mouth was so dry that he couldn’t talk, so he just nodded. Harmon told him he would take care of things, but if Ray Jay ever opened his mouth, they were all dead men.

Ray Jay had lived in terror for days, and then LaPointe was arrested and admitted he’d killed the woman and said nothing at all about Harmon and Ray Jay Wakemup having been there. Ray Jay didn’t know the why of it, but he was greatly relieved.

He followed the story in the papers-it was all over the North Country news-and many of the things he read bothered him. What bothered him most was that, besides LaPointe’s own admission of guilt, the most damning evidence seemed to be the skin found under the dead woman’s fingernails, and the fact that LaPointe had scratches down his cheek. And the reason this bothered him so much was that Ray Jay remembered no scratches being there at all when he and his brother had picked Otter LaPointe up from the chair in the living room and dragged him into the bedroom and laid him out on the bed beside the woman who had seemed to be merely sleeping but, he’d come to understand, was already dead.

And when he thought more about it, he realized that LaPointe had been sacked out in the living room chair in a stoned and drunken stupor when the woman had gone to the bathroom, naked, and then returned to the bedroom, after which the sound of Harmon’s laughter had been clear.

And the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that it hadn’t been LaPointe who’d killed Karyn Bowen.

He kept all this in his heart. He didn’t dare speak to Harmon, who was prone to fits of rage. And then LaPointe was convicted and sentenced to forty years, a lifetime, it seemed to Ray Jay, and the truth became like razor blades in his heart. He had to tell someone.

He’d been raised Catholic, more or less-probably less than more-and hadn’t been to confession in forever. But having no one else to advise him, he went to confession at St. Agnes. Ray Jay spoke to the priest there in vagaries about knowing a terrible truth that might get him into trouble if he shared it. The priest tried to pry out of him the exact nature of this truth, but Ray Jay didn’t cough it up. In the end, the priest’s advice was to unburden himself. Until he did this, Ray Jay’s conscience wouldn’t give him rest and his soul would carry a stain.

So, alone and more scared than he’d ever been, he went to the Tamarack County sheriff’s office and asked to speak to the only cop he knew, Cork O’Connor, who was a breed, a man with Ojibwe blood in him. But O’Connor wasn’t there, and the man who came out instead was big and red faced and smelled of cigars. He looked at Ray Jay in the way a lot of white people looked at Indians. He took Ray Jay back to his office and explained that he was the sheriff and whatever Ray Jay had to say to Deputy O’Connor could be said to him. So Ray Jay spilled his story. The sheriff listened and told him to wait and went outside for a very long time, and when he came back in, he brought with him two other men, neither of whom was Cork O’Connor. One man said he was Judge Carter, and he introduced the other as Sullivan Becker, the Tamarack County attorney. Judge Carter asked Ray Jay to repeat the story he’d told the sheriff, and Ray Jay did.