Patricia Cornwell - Red Mist

“What about rumors,” Marino again says. “What was the word about what happened to her?”

“Originally it was thought that Barrie Lou Rivers choked on her last meal. But no evidence of that. No rumors I’ve heard in recent memory. Nobody was talking about the case anymore until Jaime Berger started looking into it. I would offer water, coffee, but I can’t leave the room. You want something, just tell me and I’ll make a call.” She directs this at me. “If you want something,” she says, smiling at Marino as she puts her headphones back on, “get it yourself.”

“Suze mentioned one thing kind of interesting about Barrie Lou Rivers’s CO level,” Marino tells me, as his attention continues drifting back to Mandy. “It was like eight percent. She says normal’s maybe six at most.”

“I don’t know if it’s interesting or not,” I reply, as I go through the transcript of a clemency hearing for Lola Daggette in which Colin Dengate testified, and also GBI investigator Billy Long. “I’ll have to look at her case. Not an unusual level for a smoker.”

“You can’t smoke in prisons anymore. None I know of. Not for years.”

“Yes, and drugs, alcohol, cash, cell phones, and weapons aren’t allowed in prisons, either,” I reply, as I review the factual history of what happened in the early-morning hours of January 6, 2002. “Guards could have given her a cigarette. Rules get broken depending on who has power.”

“But smoking could explain her CO, and if so, why would someone give her a cigarette?”

“We certainly can’t know if anybody did. But it’s true that carbon monoxide and nicotine from cigarettes put a strain on the heart, which is further exasperated by the narrowing of the arteries from heart disease, which is why I keep reminding you not to smoke.” I slide pages in Marino’s direction as I finish with them. “Her heart’s already working hard if she’s stressed, and then an exposure to smoke and her heart works even harder.”

“So maybe that’s why she had the heart attack,” he persists.

“It could have been a contributing factor, assuming someone gave her a cigarette or cigarettes while she was awaiting execution,” I comment, as I read about Liberty Halfway House, a nonsecure, not-for-profit treatment program for girls located on East Liberty Street, just blocks from Colonial Park Cemetery, very close to the Jordan house, maybe a fifteen-minute walk from it, I estimate.

At approximately six-forty-five the morning of January 6, a Liberty Halfway House volunteer on the healthcare staff had begun making rounds of the residential facility to collect urine specimens for a random drug screening. When she arrived at Lola Daggette’s room and knocked on the door, there was no answer. The volunteer entered and heard the sound of running water. The bathroom door was shut, and after knocking and calling out Lola’s name and getting no response, the volunteer became concerned and walked in.

She discovered Lola naked on the floor of the shower stall with hot water running. The volunteer testified that Lola was frightened and excited and was using shampoo to wash items of clothing that appeared to be very bloody. The volunteer asked Lola if she had hurt herself, and she said no and demanded to be left alone. She claimed she was doing laundry because she didn’t have access to a washing machine and to “just leave the fucking cup by the sink and I’ll pee in it in a minute.”

At this point, according to the transcript, the volunteer turned off the hot water and ordered Lola to step out of the shower. On the tile floor were “a pair of tan corduroy pants, women’s size four, a blue turtleneck sweater, women’s size four, and a dark red Atlanta Braves Windbreaker, size medium, all of them extremely bloody, and the water on the shower floor was pinkish-red from all the blood,” the volunteer testified, and when she asked Lola whose clothing it was, she replied that it was what she’d had on when she was “checked in” five weeks earlier and was issued uniforms. “They were what I was wearing on the street, and since then they’ve been in my closet,” Lola explained to the volunteer.

Questioned about how blood could have gotten on the clothing, at first Lola said she didn’t know. Then she offered, “It’s that time of the month” and claimed she’d had an accident in her sleep, the volunteer testified. “I got the distinct impression she was making things up as I was standing there, but Lola was known for that at the LHH. She was always talking big and saying whatever would impress someone or keep her out of trouble. She’ll say and do pretty much anything for attention and to protect herself or get a favor and never seems to realize how it’s perceived or any possible consequences.

“Unfortunately, she’s like the boy who cried wolf around here, and it couldn’t have been more obvious the blood could not have come from her having her period,” the volunteer said under oath in the hearing. “It wouldn’t make sense for menstrual blood to be on the thighs, knees, and cuffs of a pair of pants and on the front and sleeves of a sweater and a jacket. Quite a lot of it hadn’t washed off yet, because there was so much of it, and my first thought was wherever it came from, the person must have hemorrhaged, assuming it was human blood, of course.

“I also don’t know why Lola would sleep in street clothes, which the wards aren’t supposed to wear while they are in residence.” The volunteer continued a testimony that was damning. “They wear them when they get here and when they’re released. The rest of the time they wear uniforms, and it didn’t make sense why Lola would have been wearing the clothing in bed. Nothing she said made sense to me, and when I told her that, she kept changing her story.

“She said she’d found the bloody clothes in a plastic bag in her bathroom. I asked to see the plastic bag, and she changed her story again and said there was no bag. She said she’d gotten up to use the bathroom and the clothes were on the floor, in there, in the bathroom, just inside, to the left of the door. I asked if the blood was wet or dry, and she said it was sticky in spots and other stains were dry. She claimed she didn’t know how the bloody clothes got there but was scared and tried to wash them because she didn’t want to be blamed for something.”

The volunteer reminded Lola that what she was suggesting would mean someone had gone into her closet and removed the clothing, gotten it bloody somehow, then reentered her room while she was asleep and left the clothing in the bathroom. Who would do such a thing, and why didn’t Lola wake up? The person who did it “is quiet like a haint and is the devil,” Lola reportedly said to the volunteer. “It’s payback for something I done before I got stuck in here, maybe someone I used to get drugs from, I don’t know,” she said, and she got angry and began to yell.

“You can’t tell no one! You can just fucking throw them out but can’t tell no one! I don’t want to go to jail! I swear I didn’t do nothing, I swear to God I didn’t!” the volunteer testified Lola said, and the more I read, the more I understand why no one at the time considered any suspect other than Lola Daggette.

Marino does little more than glance at what I slide over to him, handling the pages with a casualness and lack of curiosity that makes me suspect he’s studied them before.

“You’re familiar with this transcript?” I ask.

“Jaime’s got it in the records she’s been collecting. But she didn’t get it from him.” He means she didn’t get it from Colin Dengate.

“I wouldn’t have expected him to turn this over, because it wasn’t generated by him. She would have to get it from Chatham County Superior Court.”