‘You Have the Right to Remain Silent’ : A videotape. A revolver. A jealous ex-boyfriend. All of this--and none of this--explains how a teen-ager from a family of selfless public servants came to be a suspect in a brutal robbery and a murder.

The pictures were taken by the convenience store’s three automated surveillance cameras. They are shot from on high, in stark black and white. They are on a videotape but they are stills, snapped three seconds apart to conserve film. The mind reads the images like a child’s flip book--individual frames that, when viewed quickly one after the other, form a surreal, herky-jerky semblance of motion. They move like a bad dream.

A wide view of the store. Display racks, bright fluorescent lighting, broad, clean aisles--the familiar tableau. A slight figure in a wide-striped hooded shirt appears. A candy bar materializes in her hand. She arrives at the counter as if to pay. A female clerk is tidying up nearby. She walks behind the counter to accept the money.

Now, a view from behind the counter. It is tighter, more intimate. For the first time, we see the face of the figure in the hooded shirt. She is a young woman, her features expressionless, her face downcast. She is waifishly pretty. Her eyes rise under heavy lids and lock on the clerk, who is now behind the cash register. The clerk is tall and thin and wears her hair in a businesslike banana clip.

The next frame comes. The customer’s eyes are wide, her mouth agape. She is pointing a handgun at the clerk, who is looking down, toward the register, and does not appear to see the gun.

For what comes next, you must remind yourself that this is not fiction, not a re-enactment in a TV docudrama. You are about to watch something terrible.

Next frame: The assailant has stiffened and fired. The clerk is frozen in recoil. The impact of the bullet is snapping her backward, like a fist in the face.

Then: The customer leaves the store. Now she is gone. Click. Click. Click. Fifteen shots of a nice, clean, empty convenience store, eerily normal, the body on the floor hidden by the countertop. And then, suddenly, the assailant has reappeared. Now she is behind the cash register, attending to unfinished business. She is leaning over the woman she has shot, trying to jimmy open the register.

The clerk is paralyzed, her spinal cord severed at the neck. She is 45 seconds into what will be a lifetime of quadriplegia. She will never again walk. She may never breathe again without mechanical assistance. Lying there on the floor of the convenience store, she cannot speak. But she can hear.

This is what she hears:

“Are you dead yet? No? How do you open this?”

This happened here on March 8. For months, the FBI and police had no clues other than that videotape. Then a break, the kind that occasionally happens in the most sordid of cases: In Oklahoma, a jealous ex-boyfriend was pulled over for speeding and ratted to the police.

That brought the FBI to the front porch of Jim and Suzanne Edmondson’s large gray house at the quiet corner of Martin Luther King and 13th streets in Muskogee, Okla.

Some agents rustled in the pyracantha bushes below the porch. It was 5 p.m. on June 2.

“Where is Sarah?” one of the agents asked Suzanne Edmondson.

Her daughter, Sarah, wasn’t home. Suzanne felt panic. The Edmondsons were used to trouble with Sarah, and it never got any easier to face.

But this was different from having to pick her up at a police station at 2 a.m. for some juvenile escapade. These men produced a warrant for Sarah’s arrest on charges of attempted first-degree murder in Louisiana. They showed Jim Edmondson faxes of the pictures from the convenience store. One looked a lot like Sarah. The gun looked a lot like Jim Edmondson’s .38, the one Sarah had borrowed without permission a few months before when she drove off with her boyfriend for a trip through the South.

The lawmen sat in their unmarked cars and waited out the day.

At 11:30, Sarah and a Jeep full of friends pulled up out front. Out of courtesy, the officers had agreed to let Jim Edmondson turn his daughter over to them.

Father and daughter stood alone, alongside the bushes in front of the house they had lived in for all of Sarah’s 18 years. Up walked an FBI agent. Sarah Edmondson--a perplexed look on her face--was locked in her father’s arms.

Jim Edmondson spoke in his quiet, steady Oklahoma drawl.

“The FBI is here, and they want to question you.”

Then, Jim Edmondson said this to his daughter:

“You should be brave. No one is going to hurt you. And you should never forget . . .”

He took a breath.

” . . . that you have the right to remain silent. You have the right to have an attorney with you at all times, and anything that you say can be held against you as evidence.”

*

Sarah Edmondson is the daughter of an Oklahoma judge. She is the niece of the state attorney general, the granddaughter of a former congressman and the great-niece of a former Oklahoma governor. The Edmondsons are a political dynasty in Oklahoma--something like the Kennedys, except without the scandals, until now. Their record is the old-fashioned one of genuine, selfless public service.

Because of the defendant’s lineage, the case has attained national notoriety.

In cases such as these, the media’s impulse is to engage in forensic sociology. The questions being raised are familiar; they get raised whenever someone unlikely gets charged with something unspeakable. Why did no one foresee this? How did a good child with so many advantages suddenly go bad?

Sarah went bad, but there was nothing recent about it. When she hit puberty, her parents say, everything inside her seemed to rot and warp. From her early teens, she was a liar and a drug abuser. She had protracted bouts of near-suicidal depression. Her parents were not unheedful of her troubles, or neglectful, or uncaring. They checked her into a psychiatric treatment center when she was 13.

*

On March 6, Sarah Edmondson and her boyfriend, Benjamin Darras, 18, got in her white 1986 Nissan Maxima and left his home in Tahlequah, Okla., without telling anyone where they were going. Two weeks later they returned. Sarah’s parents were angry and frightened because they knew she had taken a handgun from the family’s weekend cabin--they were afraid she was suicidal and might harm herself with the weapon.

On the road trip, they drove through Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Oklahoma. Darras--who was arrested with Sarah that night at her parents’ home--has told police that on March 8, the couple needed money and that Edmondson held up the Time Saver convenience store in Ponchatoula, La., just off Interstate 55. The slug that severed the spinal cord of the clerk, Patsy Byers, matches test firings from Jim Edmondson’s Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver, police sources say. Byers, paralyzed from the neck down, lies in a rehabilitation hospital in Houston.

Police also suspect that the couple were in Hernando, Miss.--300 miles north of Ponchatoula on I-55--the day before. On that day, a cotton gin operator named William Savage, 58, was shot in the face in his office. He died. About $100 and some credit cards were taken with his wallet.

A police source says the slugs recovered from the Hernando slaying also match those from test firings of the Edmondsons’ .38. Although the police say Sarah Edmondson and Darras are “prime suspects” in that case, no charges have been filed yet. Police sources say she has fingered Darras as the triggerman in Hernando, and is bargaining for a lighter sentence in the convenience store robbery, or immunity in the killing.

Sarah Edmondson and Darras sit in the Tangipahoa Parish jail in Amite, La., she on $1 million bond, he on $500,000. Prosecutors reduced her charge to attempted second-degree murder because that allowed them to add weapons charges. An attempted murder conviction carries a sentence of up to 50 years; the additional charges could carry another 109. Darras is charged with armed robbery. He has pleaded not guilty. She has remained silent; a not guilty plea was entered by the court on her behalf. Lawyers would not allow an interview with either prisoner. The two likely won’t face trial until early next year.

There were no signs of a scuffle at Producers Gin, where Bill Savage worked. It appears Savage, who was at his desk, had time only to stand up and look at his killer, who fired two shots--the first glanced off Savage’s shoulder; the second hit him directly in the face, killing him. He fell forward. The killer then slipped Savage’s wallet from his pocket and took his money and credit cards and fled, driving through town and getting back on the interstate.

For 30 years, Bill and Barbara Savage worked alongside each other in the tiny office of the cotton gin where he was killed. He managed the operation; she did the books.

They were married in 1955. “He was 18 and I was 15,” she says. “That’s kind of a Southern thing.” He was her first boyfriend. Together, they went on hayrides and to movies and to stock car races over in Arkansas.

The Savages had two girls--Terry and Joy--and they had a warm life.

On the day of her husband’s funeral, Barbara Savage wore a black dress with pearls on the front and a zipper up the back. Bill had encouraged her to buy it while they were on a shopping trip together.

“I have arthritis and my hands are bad, so I don’t do buttons in the back very well or zippers. I usually wear something with buttons down the front,” she says, pointing to the buttons on the front of her white shirtdress. “But he liked that dress, and I said, ‘Well, you know I can’t zip it.’

“And he said, ‘Oh, I’ll always be here to zip it for you.’ ”

*

The tail end of Patsy Byers’ 11 to 7 late-night shift at the Time Saver convenience store in Ponchatoula was the best. That’s when her husband, Lonnie, who was heading out on his delivery truck route, would stop by, fix a cup of coffee with cream and sugar, and they’d talk.

They’d talk about their three children. They’d talk about how much she liked her job because of all the people she met. She’d never be behind the counter; she’d always be out on the floor fiddling with something or talking.

She was straightening the magazines in front of the gray metal counter when the woman in the video pictures walked up to the register.

According to the clock on the video, Patsy Byers was shot at 11:52 p.m., not yet an hour into her shift. Lonnie never wanted her working at all, much less the night shift. But, like everything, once Patsy set her mind to it. . . .

Just outside Ponchatoula, where the Spanish moss hangs from the live oaks, Lonnie Byers was watching TV, lying on the sofa in their tidy, gray, double-wide trailer.

The phone rang. It was the boyfriend of a neighbor up the road who had just stopped by the Time Saver. He asked if Patsy was working tonight. When Lonnie said yes, she was, the boyfriend said Lonnie’d better get on up there right away.

Before Lonnie Byers could put his shoes on, the Ponchatoula police called.

“There’s been an accident at the Time Saver.”

“How bad is it?”

“She’s conscious.”

That’s all they would tell Byers about his wife. When he arrived at the Time Saver, his wife was being brought out on a stretcher. She was driven to a hospital in Baton Rouge. The next morning, when Patsy woke up, the first person she saw was Lonnie. Her voice barely a whisper, she said:

“I quit.”

The time in Baton Rouge was the worst.

When visitors came to her hospital room, Patsy would pretend to be asleep. She wouldn’t receive her children, ages 18, 13 and 4, because she couldn’t hold them in her useless arms. She wouldn’t allow the television or radio to be turned on. She wouldn’t even allow the blinds to be opened. When doctors and nurses visited her, they used flashlights.

“I couldn’t even get any sunlight,” Lonnie Byers says. “People would send flowers and I’d set them on the window, and I’d kind of draw the curtains back early in the morning to get some light to the flowers. She would tell me, ‘It’s too bright in here.’ ” Then he’d draw the curtains and return with Patsy to the blackness she had painted her room in.

This gentle man, who bears no ill will toward Sarah Edmondson’s parents, thinks differently about their daughter. He and Patsy have lawyers; they have filed a civil suit against Sarah Edmondson and Benjamin Darras for any money that may come from their stories.

“We just don’t think she deserves to have anything. Anything that she can enjoy,” he says in calm, measured tones, no different from those of the previous two hours’ conversation. “I would like to see her put away for as long as my wife cannot walk. And if my wife walks, then Sarah can walk.”

*

It’s 5 p.m. on a stiflingly hot late August afternoon at the Edmondsons’ home in Muskogee. Nearly three months ago, at this time of day, the police officers stood on Suzanne Edmondson’s front porch and told her they had come for her daughter.

Jim and Suzanne Edmondson had so many talks, so many fights, so many tears with their daughter in the den where they now sit. On the table next to Suzanne are the self-help, positive-thinking books that keep her barely wired together.

Sarah Edmondson’s old boyfriend, the one who turned her in to the police, was Patrick Williams. The Edmondsons helped Williams, a drug user and a high school dropout, to get his equivalency diploma with math tutoring sessions at their kitchen table. At Christmas, a stocking was hung for Patrick, three years older than Sarah. When Sarah broke up with him a year ago, things got ugly. The Edmondsons obtained a restraining order against him. He could not be found for this story, but in June he told the Muskogee Daily Phoenix and Times-Democrat: “I’m still in love with her. The rest of my life, I’ll be living by her jail. I’ll be bringing her money or cigarettes or whatever she wants.”

The Edmondsons met Ben Darras only a couple of times. He is also a high school dropout and a drug user. His mother told a newspaper that he was dominated by Sarah’s strong personality. When Ponchatoula police questioned Darras after he was arrested, he could not spell his hometown of Tahlequah.

“Sarah started hanging around these druggie, yucky kids in high school. She fell in with the outlaws, the freaks,” Suzanne Edmondson says. They had such high hopes for Sarah. Instead, Sarah took in strays. Consider it a twist on the sort of public service practiced by generations of Edmondsons.

All around the dining room table, like place settings, Jim Edmondson has fanned out three months’ worth of the local newspaper for a reporter to see.

The June 9 issue of the Muskogee newspaper printed the surveillance photo of the woman in the hooded shirt holding the gun on Patsy Byers. Alongside it is a recent mug shot of Sarah. The similarity is convincing.

Jim Edmondson says it is “horrifying” to see the pictures side by side.

“Is it obviously she?” Suzanne Edmondson asks her husband, as she sips a cup of coffee in their kitchen.

Her husband swallows hard and hitches his neck.

“They say mothers know.”

Both express great empathy for the Byers family. Suzanne Edmondson wrote them a note saying so.

“Our heart just goes out to them so much,” she says. Her husband nods. “At some point,” she continues, “when it seems right, we’d like to meet them. We really would. It might help.”

Suzanne Edmondson moves uncomfortably around her daughter’s room, with its mementos from a Girl Scout, choir-girl youth.

Is this the room where Sarah Edmondson first turned away from the light?

It all broke in December, 1990. During that month, one of Sarah’s best friends committed suicide. Another friend was killed in a car crash. And soon after her grandfather Ed Edmondson saw his alma mater--the U.S. Naval Academy--score a touchdown in the Army-Navy game on TV, the lifelong public servant died of a heart attack at his home five blocks away.

When Jim Edmondson came back from watching his dead father being taken out on a stretcher, he went up to Sarah’s room, held his daughter and told the 13-year-old that her beloved granddad had just died.

She threw her telephone through the window nearest her bed. The only other thing she broke in her room was the glass in a picture frame. Inside the frame was a silhouette of Sarah.

A couple of days later, she came home with a dozen cans of black spray paint. She took the things off her walls, brought down the lace drapes and covered the cheerful, flowered wallpaper with great, looping streaks of black.

Since then, Jim and Suzanne Edmondson have repainted Sarah’s room. Suzanne points to the dark orange ceiling.

“See? You can still see the black underneath.”