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If Quinn thought that delving into the open wounds of Vince Knox’s past would provoke him to explode on the stand, then he couldn’t have been more wrong.
Vince Knox stood up, a burly man with thinning brown hair and a protruding belly. His tattooed neck and scars from being stabbed in prison attested to his troubled life.
With tears in his eyes, he turned to the jury. “I’ve never said I was a good man. I’ve done plenty wrong in my life. Plenty to be ashamed of. I killed my friends. Drove that truck straight into a tree. But that’s gotnothing to do with what happened that night. Scott, he did something bad to that girl. He raped her. And then he told her he’d do it again if she ever told anyone. I heard him say it. Every word of it.”
Vince Knox’s testimony was enough for Judge Shaw to reject Dale Quinn’s request to dismiss the case due to lack of evidence. Quinn looked crestfallen. He’d walked into court that morning expecting the case would be over by lunchtime. He walked out like the rest of us, unsure where the verdict was headed.
Mitch Alkins and Dale Quinn gave powerful closing arguments. In Alkins’s version, Scott Blair was a predatory rapist. Cruel, calculating. He knowingly and with full premeditation entrapped a teenage girl and raped her to win a competition. His conscience was guilty from the start. He tried to arrange an alibi and did his best to wash away the evidence. In Dale Quinn’s account, Scott Blair was, at worst, an immature jock falsely accused after a consensual sexual tryst that the girl regretted in hindsight, spurred on by her angry, vengeful parents and a prosecutor’s office trying to use Scott as a high-profile scapegoat to satisfy a public lust to jail men accused of sex crimes.
As the jurors filed out of court to deliberate the verdict, I felt as if I were saying goodbye to old friends. At the start of the trial, the jurors were strangers. To each other. To me. To everyone in court.
Over the course of the trial, I’ve come to know them as individuals. Their facial gestures. Their nervous tics. I’ve seen them cry. And laugh. Roll their eyes in disbelief. Mostly I’ve seen them stifle yawns while they discreetly checked the time. After two weeks of testimony, they’re now tasked with determining whether Scott Blair is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of rape and sexual assault.
There are some who say that the reasonable doubt burden is one of the reasons why so few rape cases end in a conviction. It’s a difficult standard to meet when it comes to sexual assault, because rarely are there witnesses other than the parties themselves.
The idea that guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt dates back to the eighteenth-century British jurist Sir William Blackstone, who wrote in his seminal works that underpin our legal system: “Better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.”
Studies show that rapists tend to be repeat offenders more than other criminals. They go on to rape again, at a rate of around five rapes in their lifetime. That means the ten guilty rapists who escape, to paraphrase Sir Blackstone, might go on to rape another forty innocent women. I wonder what Sir William Blackstone would say about that?
The jurors will review the evidence and argue the merits of the case. Then they will vote until they reach a unanimous verdict. Either they will find Scott Blair guilty. Or they will find him not guilty. We will find out in the coming hours or days.
I’m Rachel Krall and this isGuilty or Not Guilty,the podcast that puts you in the jury box.
51
Hannah
Dear Rachel,
Let me start by apologizing. I promised myself that I would respect your boundaries. I’ve restrained myself. I haven’t left letters on your car or anywhere else intrusive for some time. Yet here I am, downstairs in the lobby of your hotel, writing this note. I promise that I’ll leave it just outside your door, followed by a loud knock to ensure that you’ll get out of bed to collect it.
I’m ready to meet you, Rachel. Tonight. At the Morrison’s Point jetty. I’ll go there as soon as I drop off the letter. I know it’s late, but please come. I don’t think I can do this alone.
I know who killed Jenny. I’d tell the cops, but after watching the Scott Blair rape trial unravel, I’m not confident a jury would ever convict. The lack of forensic evidence and the passage of time would work against a successful prosecution. There’s one witness from the night Jenny was killed. A reluctant witness. A dying witness. You led me to him when I followed your car to the Golden Vista retirement home.
Rick saw Jenny’s killer. He told me so when I spoke with him this morning, after he was discharged from the hospital wing. At first Rick pleaded ignorance, but he eventually relented. He said that it didn’t much matter anymore if the truth came out. Apparently, he has weeks to live. “They can’t do anything to me in hell.” He laughed dryly. And then he told me what he remembered from that night. He told me the name of the boy he’d seen running away from the beach.
Thanks to Rick’s recollections, and my own hazy memories, I believe he’s right. The only way to find out for sure is to ask him straight out. To ask Jenny’s killer. His confession might be all we get.
Below is the letter that I’ve been writing to you over the past few days, about what happened the night that Jenny died. I wrote it in fits and starts, in different pens, and in handwriting that changed with my moods. I hope it’s legible enough for you to read.
After that drunk boy disconnected my call, he smashed the phone with the receiver until it was a mess of wires. When he was done, he kicked the glass phone booth door until it shattered. All the while, he held my upper arm so tightly that it was bruised for days afterward. My feet were bare. By the time he’d dragged me across the concrete toward the beach, the soles of my feet were slashed and embedded with glass.
He threw me on the sand next to Jenny. She was lying on the ground near the fire as the boys stood over her, drinking.
“Your little sister came to tell you that you need to go home.” He laughed. Jenny stared at me. The numb expression on her face turned to panic.
“She’s the kid sister,” said a drunk voice from the dark. “What do we do with her?”
“Let’s take a look at her. Maybe she’s old enough.”
I felt a hand grab my chest. “Flat as a pancake,” he said. “Definitely underage.”
He flicked up the skirt of my dress. I tried to pull it down. It made him laugh. He flicked it up again. I grabbed the folds of my dress and held them tightly to my body.
“What do we have here?” He pushed my hands away and pulled my skirt up anyway so they could all see my underwear.
“Hello Kitty panties. Such pretty panties.” He pulled me toward him and whispered into my ear with his stale drunken breath, “Do you know what a grown-up kitty is called?” I shook my head.
