The Third Trial of Jesse Matthew: Day 1
September 16, 2015
Bright Indictment
While Gil was getting dressed in purple this morning--Morgan's favorite color--the sky through the Harringtons' front window responded.
I was up at 4:30 a.m., to play with my kitten (who was rejected by her mother) and to feed the cats (and the three raccoons, who have their own food and water bowls).
In fact, everyone's water had to be changed, before I could drive to Dan and Gil's. My mother always told me when I was growing up, though I think it would be difficult to find the origin of her holy wisdom in chapter and verse, that there is only one sure way to go to Hell, which is to pass by an animal's water bowl and not change it to fresh water.
I had dressed in bright purple, too--my shirt, my scarf, my amethysts and sugilite--and before the sun rose I headed down the mountain from Blacksburg.
And then Dan, in his orchid South African tie, designed with its herd of silver elephants on the march--elephants who never forget--and Gil and I, in our purple--headed from the Harringtons' Roanoke home, and drove two hours northeast to Charlottesville.
Cresting Afton Mountain, we are talking about the six years Jesse Matthew has been free, "six years Morgan didn't have," Gil notes. I find myself thinking of the greens. The bowls of greens that Jesse's grandmother won't be serving to her grandson. The thought arrives as if Morgan has whispered to me: now, he'll be the one serving.
We park downtown, and Dan and Gil indulge me. We are in the little University Avenue Starbucks and I'm getting my vinte flat white. Strong fuel to adjust me to my clearest spiritual vision. I don't want to go into the courtroom today with anything less than what Gil calls flames in our eyes.
Not hellfire flames. Brightness.
I don't want to be hell's butcher. I would always rather serve as one of heaven's bakers or candlestick makers. I like the kind of flame Gil carries in her heart and eyes. No emoticon nooses, no saloon-town tough talk of vigilante justice, no declaring wishes for anyone else rotting. We've had enough rotten hell on earth.
It's brightness that we are trying to produce, not more darkness.
Dan stands with me while we are waiting for my coffee. He is made of such fine cloth, a handsome, wistful man, so kind to his patients, his friends, his family.
I think of the archaic word, wist. It is a variant of wit, and it means to have knowledge of something. We know the more familiar 'wistful,' meaning to have a vague sense of sorrow or regret.
"This used to be a dress shop," Dan remembers, looking around Starbucks. After medical school in West Virginia, Dan was at University of Virginia, living in Charlottesville for ten years, from 1980-85 as a resident, and then from 1985-90 on the faculty. When he was an Intern, Dan met a nurse named Gil. They married in UVa's Stone Chapel. Their son Alex was born in 1987 (my daughter, Iris, was born 8 months later), and their little girl named Morgan was born on July 24, 1989 (my son, Emerson, was born 8 months later).
Gil is outside of Starbucks, standing on the sidewalk, giving a phone interview. She is on a live radio show broadcasting out of Richmond, but Dan and I don't know that. "Come on, Gil, this way," we say, and she makes little gestures with her free hand, which she later explains meant, SHE IS ON THE RADIO, LIVE, but which are inscrutable to me. I think she is for some reason teaching me in the air how to crimp the edges of apple pie.
I see a squirrel burying an acorn. The squirrel is digging as fast as it can with both front feet. I almost yell back to Gil, who is still speaking into her
phone on live radio: GIL! LOOK! AN OLYMPIAN SQUIRREL!
While Dan attends a morning meeting, Gil and I order vegetable omelettes at the hospital cafeteria. It's 9:00 a.m. and the last camera crew left the Harringtons' home after midnight. Trying to eat her first bite of breakfast, Gil takes a call. She does two more phones interviews, calmly and generously, as she always does, and then, twenty minutes after we first sat down, Gil smiles at me, takes a deep breath, and picks up her fork.
Suddenly, our texts tell us, the time for Jesse Matthew's arraignment has shifted, from 12:45 to 1:30.
So when Dan rejoins us, since we now have time, we drive to Morgan's Bridge, Copeley Bridge Road, the last place Morgan was seen alive. Peggy Fox from WUSA9 in D.C. is already there with a cameraman. Dan and Gil put up ribbons and prayer flags, and add shiny colored glass pebbles to beautify the sliver of garden near Morgan's bronze plaque.
My job is to wield the fattest Sharpie that's ever been made. On the sidewalk, I inscribe: We made it, Morgan! We have charged Jesse Matthew with first degree murder. Six long years, but never a doubt. We have begun Justice for Morgan Dana Harrington.
Then I draw a ferocious open-mouthed dragon, with long fangs, scales, and the leathery whiskers of a catfish. The dragon's gnarled, clawed finger points to more words: The unstoppable dragon of Justice roars today.
Cars roaring by all slow down when they recognize the Harringtons. These townspeople roll down their windows, and give Dan and Gil their blessings. These kind strangers also express their hope that Jesse Matthew will get what he deserves. Everyone has heard the lead story on radio stations across the state, or seen the front-page color photos and headline of every state newspaper.
I especially enjoyed today's Roanoke Times, with a great cover photo of Morgan laughing above a huge image of Jesse Matthew being caught looking straight at the camera, furtive and beady-eyed, next to one gigantic word: INDICTED.
Unhurried, we leave the Bridge at 11:51, when I check my silenced phone to learn that somehow, AGAIN, the time for the arraignment has shifted. Now, we must race: we have just nine nervous minutes to get across town to the Courthouse.
We park and enter together, and learn that this time, we are to go upstairs, to a tiny little courtroom, a space befitting Alice in Wonderland. Deputies caution us that Jesse Matthew will be seated extremely close to us if we sit in the front. "Good!," Gil exclaims, "We are here to sit as close to him as we can."
At funerals, birthdays, lifetime achievement ceremonies, and marriages, you are surprised and comforted by who shows up. In crucial times, who arrives to lend support creates deep everlasting bonds. So when Kenny Jarels walks in, wearing a dress shirt and tie, and when Trina Murphy and her sweet mother arrive, both of them beautiful women, and when every reporter comes over and one by one hugs us, long, unguarded hugs that feel like nothing but family, some of those reporters including Ananda Rochita and Nadine Maeser from Roanoke, who three weeks ago today suffered the shock of their lives when their colleagues and friends Adam and Alison were murdered on live television, Dan and Gil and I feel rich, rich with the comfort of deep bonds. Love and respect is in everyone's eyes, in ours most of all.
What started out six years ago as our wish to engage the media has clearly become a happily accepted engagement. The media love Dan and Gil.
Then I hear, from behind a thick, closed, wooden door, the unmistakable sounds of Jesse Matthew clinking his many chains up the staircase.
And then the heavy door opens.
I have been in the room with Jesse Matthew many times. When he looks at me, it isn't scary. It's weird. He is unemotional, unafraid, unmoved, unembarrassed. He has always been like a river rock attached to a big mound of dreadlocks: round, rough, and unfeatured. Nothing you expect to be able to feel or speak.
A vacant, heavy, hard mass. That's a bizarre description of what it is like to be with another person, but again, you see what I mean: being with Jesse Matthew has always been weird.
Until today.
For the first time, I see Jesse Matthew afraid.
His breathing is shallow. He keeps swallowing hard. I count four gulps. He keeps looking over at us. He can't get a deep breath. And he can't hide his nerves.
He sees that I am sketching him again.
I remember learning that elephants have just under a billion muscles, or one or two less, with which they control their sensitive trunks. Exaggerations aside, I don't know what muscles I am finding, but I find them, and I estimate I use just about a billion to flare the light in my eyes. As Jesse looks over at any of us, my eyes shoot enormous, electromagnetically disruptive, lava-like solar flares.
Maybe angels are escaping my eyes to festoon the courtroom airspace with their invisible flights.
The courtroom business is brief. Yep, Jesse, it's murder again.
What an anti-climax--for you, maybe, Jesse.
But not for us.
Who will his lawyer be this time? Another day, another murder. Another lawyer, another schedule. That's Jesse's body language. He's trying to camouflage as a river rock again.
But this time, he is failing.
And he is about to change colors.
It's not fear I see anymore.
He rises, and is led back through the gauntlet of all of us in the toy courtroom.
And that's when Jesse Matthew finally shows me the man Morgan and Hannah and RG saw.
He looks first at Dan Harrington, then at Gil, then at me, and finally at Kenny. He stares at each of us with a malevolent, horrifying snarl in his eyes. I think to myself, he would kill us. Given the chance, he would kill us all.
He shows me pure hate.
That's what our girls saw, in their last minutes.
You are something we will never be, Jesse Matthew. Why are you this weird monster of a man?
I am beginning to hear rumors. Some of them, I am beginning to research. Your tired-looking papa, for example. I know what he did.
You will receive Justice, and it will walk up to you and whisper some secrets you have never understood.
Angels will visit you alive, as humans visit the dead at funerals.
The Angels will bear news, about a place you will know, a place where everything is brighter than the flares I showed you jetting from my eyes.
A place where you will be consumed again and again by the coils and the breath of the unstoppable dragon of Justice.
Where will your bright, hot cell be, Jesse Matthew?
On this earth, or in a stranger prison?
Jane Lillian Vance
Vice President, Help Save the Next Girl, and
Morgan Harrington's professor in the last Spring of her life
https://www.facebook.com/jane.vance.7