A Question of Guilt

Jim McIntyre winced, for he’d heard this song before. We’ve received some reports, his boss, the Multnomah County district attorney, was murmuring on his voice mail. Reports about two anonymous letters. The courthouse got one, the Oregonian another. Whoever wrote them is claiming credit for several murders. Whoever wrote them says he killed Taunja Bennett.

McIntyre stared out his office window at a steady rain. From where he sat, he could see the radiant bronze statue of a woman, perched gracefully on a terrace by the Portland City Hall. Holding a trident, she stood bent over, with one hand cupped. Portlandia, they called this symbol of the town. To McIntyre, it looked as if she were playing craps. He’d always wanted to hang big fake dice from her hand.

McIntyre was not in a good mood. Down the street, on this dreary morning in early May 1994, his divorce trial had just started. He’d been avoiding that event for two years, ever since the separation. It was as ugly as ugly could be, every detail bitterly contested. He’d probably get what he most wanted, custody of their three young children. In exchange, she’d get everything else.

Before him, a jumble of letters and documents spilled across his desk. At home, the disarray looked even worse. He already had the kids much of the time. At 39, he folded laundry and washed dishes most nights now, rather than join colleagues for drinks in downtown Portland. He wrote checks to orthodontists, rather than fix his busted fishing boat motor.

Same old bull, McIntyre thought. That’s what his boss Mike Schrunk’s message was about. He knew nothing about these anonymous letters, but he knew all he wanted about the Taunja Bennett murder. He’d been lead prosecutor on that case; he’d put two people in prison for killing that young woman. In January 1991, a jury had convicted Laverne Pavlinac of felony homicide; two months later, her boyfriend, John Sosnovske, had pleaded no contest to the same charge. Both were serving life sentences.

At the trial, McIntyre had gone up against Wendell Birkland, one of Oregon’s top criminal defense attorneys. There’d been lots of press attention, all sorts of bizarre elements. Most of all Laverne Pavlinac’s confession. First to the cops, then to her own daughter. She’d later recanted, as they often do, but that hadn’t stopped McIntyre from using her tearful admission. After Wendell Birkland finished his elaborate seven-hour closing argument, McIntyre punched the button on his tape recorder, and once more replayed her words.

“I didn’t plan to kill her . . . “ Pavlinac could be heard sobbing throughout the courtroom. “I didn’t mean to . . . I feel like it’s my fault . . . .”

When the tape ended, McIntyre rose and pointed at Pavlinac. “You listen to those words and that emotion,” he told the jurors, “and you will look at Laverne Pavlinac and see the face of a murderer.”

He’d spoken that day with certitude. It was, to him, familiar territory: You take a stand, or else you never get anything done. You fix on your theory, you argue your vision, the jury decides what’s true. Hardheaded, volatile, a pit bull, but honorable and conscientious--that was McIntyre’s professional reputation. The Bennett case was one of five murder prosecutions he handled in 1991.

Could he have made a monstrous mistake? Could he have put the wrong people in jail? No way, McIntyre thought. No way.

“Tell me Mac,” Schrunk’s voice was asking. “What are these letters about?”

Someone in the Pavlinac family must have written them. A relative, or a friend of a friend. What a hassle, what an irritation. He was one of Schrunk’s top lieutenants, a senior deputy district attorney in charge of the violent crimes unit. He preferred to savor triumphs, not second-guess them.

Still, people were asking questions. Mike Schrunk was asking questions. They would have to look into this. They couldn’t blow this off.

McIntyre punched a button on his phone. “I don’t know what those letters are about,” he told his boss. “I’ll check it out.”

*

It had never been an obvious or uncomplicated murder case, but then, few are. It started in late January 1990 with the body of an unidentified female, found strangled in the brush off an isolated road in the Columbia Gorge. Schrunk put McIntyre on it right away, gave him Keith Meisenheimer as his second-chair prosecutor. In mid-February, the case’s two lead investigators, Al Corson and John Ingram, came to brief them.

The detectives sat before the prosecutors, appearing tentative but pleased with themselves. By then, they’d identified the victim as Taunja Bennett, 23, a mildly retarded and emotionally disturbed regular on the local tavern scene. They’d also fixed on a suspect. “Guy named John Sosnovske,” Corson declared.

McIntyre looked back and forth at the two investigators, trying to judge their words. They were a study in contrasts. Corson, with the Oregon State Police, was the more hardnosed; some in the district attorney’s office even called him a “right winger.” He believed people should go to jail, he was a sniper on the state SWAT team, he pursued suspects relentlessly.

Ingram, on the other hand, dreamed of taking early retirement, of starting a new life as a fishing guide out on the coast. A Multnomah County sheriff’s sergeant, he wasn’t as experienced in homicide cases as Corson, but he had a good feel for people. McIntyre thought the two men complemented each other.

They’d received two anonymous calls, the detectives explained. In both, an informant reported overhearing Sosnovske bragging about killing Taunja Bennett. So they ran Sosnovske’s name on the computer, saw he was on probation. Funny, the probation officer advised. Sosnovske’s roommate called us recently, complaining about his heavy drinking.

Just this morning, Ingram told McIntyre, they’d visited that roommate. A woman named Laverne Pavlinac. The lady who opened the door looked like someone’s grandmother. Plump and homey, 57, short graying hair, blue eyes, soft, round face. She urged them to sit down; she made them a fresh pot of coffee. At first, she denied everything. Then she dropped her guard.

Yes, she admitted, she’d made the anonymous calls. She couldn’t protect Sosnovske anymore. Her first husband divorced her after 26 years and four children, her second died of cancer. Then came Sosnovske. He’s an alcoholic, he’s moody, he physically abuses her. She’s 18 years his senior, she’s an enabler, she wants to be free of him. Yes, she overheard him at JB’s Lounge, mouthing off to a man she didn’t know. Talking about some dead girl. Saying he took this girl into the gorge and strangled her.

Ingram, whose expression suggested a kindly uncle more than a homicide dick, made it clear to McIntyre: He thought Pavlinac believable. Most times, they walk into a house on a case like this, it’s a filthy toilet. Cigarette butts everywhere, messy, stinky. People glowering at you. Pavlinac’s house was different. It was nice and neat. She was so hospitable, not the typical sort they interviewed at all. She was older, candid, very convincing. Laverne was a victim herself. “I’d trust her to baby-sit my own daughter,” Ingram declared. “She even said we could search the house, but we thought we should get a search warrant.”

Everything unfolded quickly after that. Reports started flowing to McIntyre one after another.

The next morning, in a cardboard box containing Sosnovske’s papers, they found a half sheet of paper with the words “T. Bennett. Good Piece” printed in pencil.

Late that night--and then almost every night--Pavlinac paged Ingram and Corson with new information: reports on Sosnovske, expressions of fear, memories of past events.

Four days later, Pavlinac led the detectives to the trunk of her car. She’d found a purse there that didn’t belong to her. A strange purse that, the detectives soon saw, contained a newspaper clipping about Taunja Bennett’s murder and a piece of fabric cut from the fly area of acid-washed blue jeans. They’d never revealed publicly that the fly area of Taunja’s jeans had been cut out.

McIntyre quickly authorized a polygraph exam. Within an hour, the detectives had Sosnovske hooked to the box. By 6 p.m., the examiner concluded he “had direct knowledge of or was responsible for” the murder of Taunja Bennett. By 8 p.m., after a second test, the examiner put it unequivocally: Sosnovske killed Taunja Bennett.

No, no, Sosnovske cried. Sitting in the sheriff’s station that night, a thirsty, cantankerous drunk, he looked weak, mean and ravaged.

OK, Det. Corson invited. Then you tell us how you think it happened.

By 10:30 p.m., Sosnovske was writing out a seven-page personal statement. That night, he scrawled, he saw Taunja Bennett at JB’s. She left with his friend Chuck Riley “to have fun.” Later he saw Riley in the parking lot, so he asked for a ride home. When he climbed into Riley’s car, he saw “a body in the back of the car, wrapped in a blanket.” The body “was one of a white female adult.” He didn’t know how she was killed; he didn’t ask Riley. “I was given a ride home with the dead female in the back. I did not go up to the gorge that night.”

It was, undeniably, an implausible story. Getting a ride home with a dead body in the back seat? Riley, the detectives soon learned, was clean as a whistle. Not a fiber or hair strand in his car, not a flaw in his account of that night.

Still, McIntyre couldn’t help wonder: Why didn’t Sosnovske just say “What are you talking about, I wasn’t there?” First he doesn’t know Taunja, then he flunks a polygraph, then he says he does know Taunja. That seven-page statement obviously wasn’t true, not literally. It was, nevertheless, so very powerful, so very meaningful. Who in their right mind is going to put himself in a car with a homicide victim if he didn’t even know her?

*

“I killed Miss Bennett Jan 20 1990 and left her 1 1/2 miles east of Lateral Falls on a switchback . . . I raped her and beat her real bad . . . I have always wanted to be noticed . . . “

McIntyre sat in his office, studying the first anonymous letter.

“I used a 1/2 inch soft nylon rope, burnt on one end, fraid cut on the other and tied it around her neck . . . I threw her walkman and her purse into the Sandy R. I cut the buttons off her jeans . . . I left her facing downhill and her jeans down by her ankles . . . “

Hell, he thought. They saw crackpot stuff like this all the time. Some details were incorrect, others you could glean from old newspaper articles. None of it could be corroborated.

The second letter, sent to the Oregonian newspaper, was a little harder to dismiss. The anonymous writer now claimed Taunja Bennett’s was the first of five murders he’d committed while working as a long-haul trucker. He provided precise details about each murder, some never released to the public. He also sketched a smiling face atop his first page.

“I am a good person at times?” he wrote. “I always wanted to be liked . . . I always have wanted to be noticed . . . So I started something I don’t know how to stop.” After Taunja Bennett, “I felt real bad and afraid that I would get caught. But a man and a woman got blamed for it . . . I thought I would not do it again. But I was wrong . . . “

The “Happy Face Killer.” That’s what an Oregonian columnist, Phil Stanford, was calling him. Stanford thought him the real thing; Stanford even thought he might know his identity. A lady in Bend had called him, saying the Happy Face Killer’s handwriting looked an awful lot like her estranged husband’s. Mike Schrunk, as a result, no longer was just asking questions. Right or wrong, the district attorney was saying, this is a problem. We have to do something, or we look like idiots.

Reluctantly, McIntyre reached for the phone.

As he suspected, Det. Al Corson did not readily embrace the notion of chasing press reports on a murder he’d already solved. Nor, for that matter, did Ingram. Both grumbled when McIntyre spoke to them. This is a waste, the detectives insisted. This dog won’t hunt.

There’s four other murders tied to this guy, McIntyre prodded. We’re not reopening an old case. We’re going after new ones. We’re going after a serial killer.

The detectives swung into action. For days on end in May 1994, Corson and Ingram scrambled across eastern Oregon, tracking the Bend man whose wife thought he might be the Happy Face Killer. They interviewed bartenders, they distributed photos, they built timelines. They never came up with anything, though. Nor did the state crime lab; fingerprints lifted off the Happy Face letters didn’t match any existing records. When the Bend man’s lawyer finally told them to put up or shut up, McIntyre backed off. By then, it was clear they’d been pursuing nothing but a divorced couple’s bitter dispute.

That notion drew a caustic laugh from McIntyre. Not unlike his own deal, he thought. Just days before, he’d won custody of his three children after one final, brutal hearing. He felt scared, and unprepared, but looking out over the playing field, he saw no other choice. For various reasons, his ex-wife couldn’t function correctly; all involved in the settlement conference had recommended he take the kids. Men weren’t generally taught how to be single parents, but he would have to learn.

McIntyre saw nowhere else to look for an anonymous author who liked to sketch happy faces. He had dozens of other matters pressing; a senior prosecutor with three small kids had no time to squander. In midsummer of 1994, McIntyre put the case file on the Bennett murder back into storage.

What the hell, he decided. We have a confession, we have a jury verdict. We have the right people in jail.

*

Just hours after John Sosnovske scrawled his seven-page statement, McIntyre’s phone rang. On the line, Ingram sounded baffled. The purse and jeans patch were phonies. Pavlinac planted that evidence in her car trunk. What’s more, Pavlinac now was telling an entirely new story.

They visited Pavlinac that morning, Ingram explained, right after the state crime lab advised them about the fake evidence. She opened her door, greeted them warmly--and sighed deeply at what they had to say.

Yes, she’d planted those items in the trunk, Pavlinac admitted. The search warrant had listed those items; that’s where she’d gotten the idea. She’d been desperate. Sosnovske was threatening her whole family. “It’s terrible to live your life in jeopardy,” Pavlinac explained. “I wanted him caught.”

Wait a minute, the detectives asked. Was she making all this up to get rid of Sosnovske?

Pavlinac answered through sobs. No, no, she insisted. It was still true. Sosnovske really did kill that girl. She had reason to know. She knew because she’d helped him dispose of the body.

The detectives looked at each other, then turned on their tape recorder.

Sosnovske called her from JB’s Lounge late that night, Pavlinac began. Come fast, he said. Bring something plastic that won’t leak. She found him standing outside JB’s, in an adjacent truckstop parking lot, Taunja Bennett’s body on the ground beside him. He placed the body in the car’s backseat on top of a shower curtain, then told her to drive out the Crown Point Highway. As she drove, she heard him cutting Taunja’s jeans. Once at the gorge, he carried the body into the woods, then threw the shower curtain from the car window. On the way home, he threatened to kill Pavlinac’s whole family if she told anyone.

“Mac, I know it’s screwy,” Ingram told McIntyre when he finished his account. “But she’s still credible. So nice, so open. Come on in, fresh pot of coffee, like a grandmother. How could she possibly not be telling the truth?”

McIntyre labored to digest what he’d just heard. Ingram was right, Pavlinac’s story did still fit the facts. True, she’d given three different accounts, but that’s how it often works. People’s stories evolve as you keep talking to them. Little by little, they admit more. Yes, planting phony evidence, that certainly looked dubious, but Pavlinac’s motivation made sense. She was frightened, she wanted to make sure they took Sosnovske away. Knowing Taunja’s jeans had been cut, she produced a replica--a replica that closely matched the real patch’s shape. That was telling: How could she know what shape to cut?

McIntyre reviewed all they had. Pavlinac’s eyewitness account, Sosnovske’s polygraphs, Sosnovske’s handwritten statement. Combined, it looked mighty compelling. Particularly since they had not one scrap of evidence pointing in any other direction.

You can’t have an advocate who’s hesitant, McIntyre liked to say. You can’t be a prosecutor if you shrink from making the calls. He didn’t mind such job requirements; he felt suited for his position. Even if he had more or less stumbled into it.

He started out thinking he’d be a cop. Working as an Army Airborne MP had been fun. Jumping out of planes, driving fast cars, having patrol dogs as partners--what more could a 19-year-old want? Police science in college had felt different, though. He’d quickly switched to an English major, figuring he’d go to law school and become a criminal defense attorney. He liked the political aspects of the law, he liked the idea of working for himself. Then his GI bill ran out at the end of his second year. He needed an income; the Multnomah County district attorney’s office was offering a $13,000-a-year internship. Once he tried prosecuting, he found he enjoyed it. Trials and cops were better than writing briefs. Helping victims felt good.

Pavlinac was credible, McIntyre decided. She was a victim. Surely she was telling the truth. Which meant they had a case. McIntyre reached for his phone. By late afternoon, Corson and Ingram were rolling to the lumber mill where Sosnovske worked as a sawyer. By 5 p.m., he was under arrest for the murder of Taunja Bennett.

If McIntyre harbored any doubts, they evaporated the next morning, when Corson and Ingram drove Pavlinac out to the Columbia Gorge. As they drove, Pavlinac described Tanya’s appearance precisely, getting every detail right. She also got her geography right. As they passed where Taunja’s body was found, Pavlinac pointed to almost exactly the precise spot.

According to Pavlinac’s account, the murder happened at the Burns Brother Truckstop, which is in Washington County, not Multnomah. So that’s where they formally arraigned Sosnovske that evening. No longer was this a case for the Multnomah County district attorney. Now it was another prosecutor’s problem.

*

Not until the spring of 1995, almost a year after the Happy Face Killer letters arrived, did McIntyre once again hear about a serial murderer. About to bolt for a courtroom hearing, he picked up his phone when it rang. It was Schrunk. Something’s going on up in Clark County, the district attorney began. What’s the deal?

McIntyre glowered at the phone, sport coat in hand. It was unusual for he and Schrunk to talk directly like this; usually they missed each other, usually they left messages. McIntyre wished that were the case now. He wasn’t headed for just any hearing; this was a motions hearing on an attempted murder. Two gang members had shot a Portland police officer; now their lawyers wanted to block the evidence. He was late, he was busy. The last thing he needed was this call.

He had heard rumblings out of Clark County, though. A detective had talked to the local Vancouver, Wash., newspaper. McIntyre didn’t know many details. Clark County hadn’t called him, Clark County had talked to the press instead. That irritated him.

“Basically,” McIntyre told Schrunk, “I just know that a detective up there is shooting his mouth off. Something about a guy who’s confessing to a case we already have a conviction on. I’ll check it out, but right now, I gotta go.”

McIntyre slammed the phone down so hard, the police detective with him started. “Goddamn,” he fumed. “I don’t have time for this.”

His attempted murder trial lasted four weeks. As soon as it ended, he started motions on an aggravated murder case--two men who killed a woman over her automobile. At home, he had carpools to drive, soccer games to coach. Not until early July could McIntyre even look up from his desk. When he did, he started to hear the full story out of Clark County.

In mid-March, they’d found the nude body of Julie Ann Winningham, dumped down a scenic bank off a Columbia Gorge highway. In late March, detectives had arrested Keith Jesperson, a long-haul trucker whom Winningham had been dating. Then on May 5 they’d discovered a letter Jesperson had written to his brother on the day he was arrested.

“Hi Brad,” the handprinted letter began. “Seems like my luck has run out . . . I got into a bad situation and got caught up with emotion. I killed a woman in my truck . . . It looks like I truly am a black sheep . . . I am sure they will kill me for this. I’m sorry I turned out this way. I have been a killer for five years and have killed eight people.”

Jesperson was a giant of a man, 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds. Like the anonymous Happy Face Killer, he described himself as a trucker. Like the Happy Face Killer, he claimed to have started killing five years before.

McIntyre waded in slowly, the matter at first remaining on his periphery. There were forensic tests to arrange, cross-county assignments to figure out, evidence to corroborate.

Then, on Aug. 17, McIntyre received a state crime lab report that commanded his attention. The experts’ findings were unequivocal: The handwriting in the Happy Face letters matched the handwriting in Jesperson’s letter to his brother; fingerprints on the Happy Face letters matched Jesperson’s; saliva retrieved from a Happy Face envelope matched Jesperson’s DNA type. At this news, eyes opened wide all over the Multnomah County district attorney’s office. Now they had a live body saying he’d killed Taunja Bennett, not just an anonymous letter.

Alone in his office, McIntyre wrestled with other news as well. On the same day the crime lab report arrived, so did a deadly, unexpected diagnosis: His father had liver cancer. That took precedence for McIntyre.

He considered his dad a great man. Few knew he was a highly decorated infantry commander in World War II and Korea, for he talked little of himself. Didn’t talk much at all, in fact, but when he did, Jim thought him well worth listening to. After he’d retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel, he’d directed public works projects for the Department of Commerce. Jim’s favorite story about him concerned the seventh game of the 1971 World Series, Pittsburgh at Baltimore. Jim was 14. His dad, a Pirates fanatic, let him and a buddy use his two bleacher tickets while he sat out in the parking lot, listening to the radio. Jim was four rows back when Roberto Clemente went up and over the fence to make the final, glorious series-winning out.

With his children, McIntyre sat by his ailing father hour after hour. Death came quickly, on Sept. 4; McIntyre buried his dad on Sept. 8. When he returned to the office three days later, Mike Schrunk was waiting.

Clear your docket, Schrunk told McIntyre. You’re on Jesperson full time.

*

After John Sosnovske’s arraignment in Washington County on Feb. 22, 1990, McIntyre had managed to stay free of the Bennett murder case for only four days. Then his pager flashed and beeped. Ingram and Corson needed to meet with him, as soon as possible. McIntyre still remembered the detectives’ expressions that gloomy afternoon. They appeared to be almost in a state of shock.

Laverne Pavlinac paged him late last night, Ingram reported. They went to her home first thing that morning. She ushered them in like always, nice and friendly, then turned and headed toward the kitchen. As she walked, she spoke over her shoulder. “It’s correction time,” she said.

Listening to Ingram, McIntyre settled into a seat, fighting a vague dread. Sometimes he thought he should have been a Jesuit.

At first, Ingram recounted, Pavlinac didn’t say much. She made a pot of coffee, talked about her family. Corson finally interrupted. Did she want them to leave? With the statement remaining as she’d previously told it?

Pavlinac shook her head. “No, I want to correct it.”

For an hour and a half, Ingram just took notes. Then he turned on the tape recorder.

McIntyre listened as that tape now unwound in an Oregon State Police conference room. The woman’s voice he heard sounded earnest, genuine, emotional.

It was true, Pavlinac said, that Sosnovske called her from JBs that night. But it was earlier, about 10:30 p.m., and Taunja was alive still. She was standing in the parking lot, joking around with Sosnovske. After both got into Pavlinac’s car, they started arguing. Sosnovske commanded Pavlinac to drive to the Vista House monument, overlooking the gorge. There Sosnovske and Bennett exited the car, leaving her view. Returning to get a piece of rope from the car trunk, Sosnovske told Pavlinac to come watch.

She walked with him to Vista House, where Bennett was lying in the doorway, laughing, her jeans around her ankles. Sosnovske instructed Pavlinac to tie the rope around Bennett’s neck. During intercourse, he told Pavlinac to “hang on” to the rope. When he finished, Pavlinac realized Bennett had stopped breathing. Bennett was dead. They drove east from Vista House, then stopped. Sosnovske carried Bennett’s body “like a baby” into the woods.

“I didn’t plan to kill her,” Pavlinac sobbed. “I was doing what I was told. If I killed her, I didn’t mean to . . . . He kept saying hang on, hang on. I must have tightened it as I was hanging on.”

“Did you pull the rope tight?” Corson asked. “Do you believe that by pulling that rope tight that you caused the death of Taunja Ann Bennett?”

“Yeah,” Pavlinac said. “I feel like it’s my fault.”

When the tape ended, Ingram cleared his throat. “Mac,” he said. “The thing is, she didn’t just say all that to us. She told her daughter the same exact story. Just minutes later, right in front of us.” Ingram leaned toward McIntyre. “How could this not be true?” he asked. “Her own daughter. She tells this to her own daughter.”

McIntyre frowned, looking as if he were in pain. If the murder happened up at Vista House, that put it back in Multnomah County. That made it their case again.

“OK,” he said. “Where do you have her? Where’d you put her?”

The detectives shifted in discomfort. “Well,” Ingram said. “She’s not in custody. We left her at her daughter’s home. We were concerned for her health.”

McIntyre glared. They now had Pavlinac’s confession, Sosnovske’s statement, Sosnovske’s two failed polygraph tests. They also had a strand of hair, lifted from the victim’s body, that matched Sosnovske’s. It looked obvious to him. The emotion in Pavlinac’s taped confession--that was just too genuine to be faked. Yes, some stuff she could get from the newspaper articles, but not everything. She knew things only the killer could know. She’s tormented by guilt, that’s why she confessed. Why else? Why on God’s earth?

“Go arrest her,” McIntyre said. “Go get out there and bust her ass.”

At the booking counter, before being led away, Pavlinac turned and gave both detectives big hugs.

*

In a fashion, McIntyre thought, it was like dealing with Laverne Pavlinac all over again. Once more, a person was claiming to have killed Taunja Bennett. Once more, a person seemingly had details only the killer could know.

Keith Jesperson proved even more eager than Pavlinac to confess. In various contacts with reporters beginning in mid-September 1995, Jesperson so incessantly claimed he was the Happy Face Killer that a judge ordered him to stop talking. Jesperson refused. He alone killed Bennett, he declared. Pavlinac and Sosnovske had nothing to do with it. He won’t be “happy until I am replacing that man in Oregon State Penitentiary.”

Jesperson wanted the noted criminal defense attorney Gerry Spence to represent him. He wanted newspapers to print his letters in full. He wanted everything put on the AP wire. “The truth must be told on this case as God is my witness,” he wrote. “Have a nice day from Happy Face.”

For a while, the prosecutors held back. Mike Schrunk told reporters his office was “reviewing” recent evidence. He remained convinced, though, that “the right people” were imprisoned for Bennett’s murder.

Then Jesperson’s appointed defense lawyer, Tom Phelan, called. “I have information about the Bennett murder,” he told Schrunk. “But there are conditions.”

On Sept. 25, Phelan met in the district attorney’s office with McIntyre and his second chair, Keith Meisenheimer. He offered unlimited access to Jesperson--in exchange for no death penalty.

McIntyre grew animated. He hadn’t even decided Jesperson was for real. “This is too weird,” he said. “You want to deal before your client has even been charged?”

It seemed weird to Phelan, too. It wasn’t his custom to try to convince people of a client’s guilt. Yet that’s what he felt obliged to do. “Yes,” he said. “I want to deal.”

Meisenheimer shook his head. “We think we’ve got the right people,” he declared.

Phelan looked back and forth at these two prosecutors. He’d called around, checked them out. He’d heard good things, but he’d also been told McIntyre was hardheaded. Phelan had expected some resistance from him. This case, after all, could be read as a tremendous error on McIntyre’s part.

“If it were me I’d explore this,” Phelan advised. “I think you’ve got the wrong people.”

McIntyre went to confer with Schrunk. When he came back, he offered harsh terms, not really expecting Phelan to accept. Aggravated murder with a life sentence, 30 years minimum. Phelan agreed so quickly, it startled McIntyre.

What was going on here? Phelan wouldn’t do anything against his client’s best interests. Was he trying to protect Jesperson from the death penalty? Or was this a setup of some kind, a smoke screen? McIntyre felt angry. At Pavlinac, at Jesperson, at the whole situation. They were forcing him to relinquish his sense of certainty. Where, for so long, he’d been absolutely convinced he put the right people in jail, he now felt puzzled.

Who was this guy Jesperson? Why was he screwing up their case?

On the morning of Sept. 29, to find out, McIntyre drove with Multnomah County Sheriff’s Det. Chris Peterson to the Clark County Jail. Phelan was already there, waiting in a back conference room. Minutes later, they brought in Jesperson.

He looked huge to McIntyre. When they took his handcuffs off, Jesperson reached out to shake the prosecutor’s hand. McIntyre recoiled, but forced his hand up; he needed this man’s cooperation. They sat down across from each other.

By then authorities knew something about Jesperson. He was 40. He’d worked as a welder and equipment operator. He was divorced, with two children. He’d lived most of the time in central and eastern Washington. “Dad always has worried about me because of what I have gone through in the divorce finances etc,” he’d written in various letters. “I have been taking it out on different people . . . . “ The murders “all started when I wondered what it would be like to kill someone. And I found out. What a nightmare it has been. . . . “

When Jesperson began talking, McIntyre thought he sounded ill-educated, but not stupid or delusional. He had a flat affect and a con’s institutional politeness--yes sir, no sir--although he hadn’t spent much time behind bars.

He’d met Taunja Bennett at the B&I; Tavern in January 1990, Jesperson said. He was living with a girlfriend, Roberta Ellis, but she was out of town driving a long-haul truck. When he walked into the B&I;, Bennett hugged him. Later, he offered to buy her dinner. They stopped at his house for money. Once there, Bennett was “all over him.” They ended up on a mattress in the living room.

During intercourse, she said something insulting to him about “getting it over with.” Just like his ex-wife used to say. He hit her in the face, first once, then many times. The walls and ceiling were covered with blood by the time he realized she was dead. He drove the body out to Crown Point, leaving it in the woods. Next morning, he returned to the gorge to scatter the contents of Bennett’s purse along the Sandy River.

When Jesperson finished, McIntyre considered. Most of what Jesperson related, he’d already told the news media. Some details were new, though.

Some were even accurate. The body left face up, the head pointing downhill, one arm stiff overhead. But other details Jesperson got wrong. He described Bennett’s underwear and shirt incorrectly. He said one end of the rope was burned, although both ends were cut clean. He said he dragged the body down the embankment, but there’d been no disruption to the foliage.

Was Jesperson a kook or a killer?

He’s seen news reports, McIntyre reasoned. He’s seen police reports, he wants “60 Minutes,” he wants Gerry Spence. He’s a news hound; he loves the attention. He’s lying.

Nonetheless, upon leaving the sheriff’s office, McIntyre drove with Det. Peterson to the site on the Sandy River where Jesperson said he threw Bennett’s purse. McIntyre knew the region well; it was his favorite spot to fish for steelhead.

“If Jesperson is telling the truth,” he declared, “here’s where the purse is.”

*

Even at the time of her arrest, McIntyre had to admit, Laverne Pavlinac’s story presented certain nagging problems. In the 11 months between then and her trial, they only multiplied--as various defense lawyers and investigators more than once pointed out.

Some involved tangible evidence--the crime lab could find no physical trace of Taunja’s presence in Pavlinac’s car, for instance. Others involved practical limitations--it was hard to imagine Sosnovske, a frail drunk with bad knees, carrying a dead body down a steep embankment. Most critical, the logistics didn’t seem right. Taunja had been seen at the B&I; Tavern the night of the murder, Sosnovske 26 miles away at JB’s Lounge, and neither had possessed a car or driver’s license. No one at JB’s or the adjacent Burns Brothers truckstop had seen Taunja; no one at the B&I; had seen Sosnovske.

It doesn’t make sense, the defense team argued. Can’t you see this is all bogus?

McIntyre could not. Nor could Schrunk or Meisenheimer.

It wasn’t, their adversaries allowed, that these prosecutors were dishonorable. Even their fiercest opponent, Pavlinac’s defense attorney, Wendell Birkland, thought them men of good will. That, in fact, was the widespread judgment about the entire Multnomah County district attorney’s office. Over the years, Mike Schrunk’s staff had earned uncommonly high regard in Portland. Schrunk’s office differs from most, it was said. His people aren’t cowboys; his people don’t “charge up.”

As McIntyre knew, Schrunk’s aversion to overreaching prosecutors derived from firsthand experience. In 1957, during a Portland corruption probe, a grand jury indicted his father Terry Schrunk, then the county sheriff. Eventually he won an acquittal, and went on to serve four terms as Portland’s mayor. Mike was in grade school at the time. The experience shaped him.

“I grew up with this,” he would later say. “I got exposed to liars. I can see how good, well-intentioned people can screw up. I’ve been through cases where cops make mistakes. It’s an imperfect system. I understand that, so I’m skeptical.”

He was not skeptical about the Bennett murder case, though. Nor was McIntyre.

If the defense arguments were so strong, they reasoned, why then was Wendell Birkland, one of the best in the state, making noises about a possible deal?

More than noises, really. In late 1990, Birkland started negotiating the precise terms of a plea bargain. Pavlinac would plead guilty and testify against Sosnovske; in return she’d get just six to eight years. Birkland was haggling over the years but clearly thought this arrangement worth considering.

Then, one day in mid-November, Birkland suddenly announced they were rejecting the plea deal. Not because of the years, Birkland explained, but because Pavlinac was innocent.

McIntyre laughed when he heard the news. Just as well, he reasoned. All during the negotiations, he’d been telling Meisenheimer they were giving away too much.

*

He would never, McIntyre reminded himself, put before a jury a story he didn’t believe to be true. That didn’t mean he was never wrong, though. How can you absolutely know what the truth is? How can you ever know for sure?

For days after McIntyre’s visit with Keith Jesperson at the Clark County sheriff’s office, the truck driver’s credibility rose and fell in the prosecutors’ eyes. Sometimes Jesperson got details right, often he did not. He talked of unbuttoning Bennett’s shirt, yet she’d been wearing a sweater. He talked of seeing the dumped body from the far side of a hairpin turn, which was physically impossible. Most telling, on Oct. 2, when they drove out to where the body was found, Jesperson pointed to the wrong ravine.

Despite a gag order, he was still talking to journalists. One day he placed five collect calls to Phil Stanford. “It is difficult to turn yourself in for murder,” Jesperson told him. “Especially when the police don’t want to admit they are wrong.”

Mike Schrunk decided to take things up a notch. He ordered McIntyre to give him daily briefings; he appealed for results; he told reporters, “I don’t want our office to do wrong. The last thing I want to do is have the wrong person in prison.”

McIntyre seethed and paced about. He needed an answer, any answer, but could not find one. The further he delved, the murkier everything looked. Maybe Laverne Pavlinac can help us, he finally decided. Maybe she can take us out of this.

On Oct. 4, Det. Chris Peterson visited her at the Oregon Women’s Correctional Institute in Salem. She was grayer and plumper now, an oddity amid a population of youngsters.

How, Peterson asked, did you lead us to the exact spot where we found Bennett’s body?

It was easy, Pavlinac replied. From news articles, she knew the spot was 1.5 miles from Vista House, before Latourell Falls. As they drove out there, she just watched the odometer.

Peterson pressed. Could she really see the patrol car’s odometer from the back seat?

Well, she said, maybe she only glanced at it.

Glanced at it? Peterson asked.

True to form, Pavlinac revised. OK, she said. She hadn’t been able to see the odometer. What she’d seen was some red paint or tape, two spots marking the area. She also seen tire tracks and broken branches. That’s how she figured it out; that’s how she knew.

Peterson asked his second question: Why did you confess?

The detectives had come to her, Pavlinac said. Ingram and Corson, they told her there was insufficient evidence to hold Sosnovske. They told her they were going to have to release him. Fearing Sosnovske would retaliate against her, she decided to implicate herself.

McIntyre threw up his hands when he heard this. Pavlinac’s description of tire tracks and broken branches didn’t fit with photographs or the detectives’ recollections. Worse, her reason for implicating herself made no sense at all. Why would Ingram and Corson make such comments to her? Not only did they have an airtight eyewitness, not only was Sosnovske already in jail--he was in another county’s jail. It wasn’t Multnomah County’s case.

Pavlinac had lied again, McIntyre decided. She hadn’t bailed them out, she hadn’t convinced them.

How to know the truth, how ever to know for certain? McIntyre felt like ripping his hair out. “You know what happened?” he started asking his colleagues. “I don’t know what happened.”

The day after the Pavlinac visit, detectives wired Jesperson to a polygraph machine. To no avail--he coughed and moved so much, they had to stop midway through the test.

On Oct. 7, they searched the Sandy River area where Jesperson said he’d scattered Bennett’s purse contents. At this remote spot the embankment was steep and thick with blackberry bushes; not even God has passed by, McIntyre told himself. If Jesperson threw anything, it should still be here.

It wasn’t, though. A team of Explorer Scouts, supervised by sheriff’s deputies, fighting through the dense foliage, found nothing.

They had no physical evidence, no fingerprints, DNA or blood. After three weeks and 70 lab hours, the state crime team had found not a single link between Jesperson and Bennett.

McIntyre felt certain now: Jesperson was full of bull.

On Oct. 11, he began preparing to write his final report. He flat out couldn’t act, he would advise Schrunk. Jesperson’s account had too many inconsistencies. Nothing had convinced him they’d made a mistake.

*

Four of McIntyre’s five aggravated murder cases in 1991 went to trial. He recalled each of them; all presented certain challenges. Yet none matched Pavlinac’s for surprises.

First, just before it began in late January, Pavlinac officially recanted her confession. Then she took--and passed--a polygraph exam. It was in those statements--expanded upon at trial and amplified by her defense attorney Wendell Birkland--that Pavlinac’s last story gradually emerged.

She made it all up, she said, to escape Sosnovske. She’d been trapped, battered, desperate, suicidal. Three times before making the anonymous calls about Bennett’s murder, she’d tried to pin other things on Sosnovske. In February 1987 she’d called county probation to report he was drinking. In April 1989 she’d called the FBI to say a bank robber’s photo resembled Sosnovske. On Jan. 10, 1990, she’d again called county probation about his drinking. Just days later, she made the first anonymous call.

After that, Pavlinac explained, the story just snowballed. She started offering the detectives whatever she thought they wanted, whatever would make them believe her. She gleaned many details from early news articles. She took other things from the search warrant. She inferred certain information from the questions the detectives asked her.

Even a baby, she observed, could have found the location of the body out in the gorge. She knew from news reports and a search warrant receipt that it was 1 1/2 miles east of Vista House, below an embankment, “in a loop between switchbacks” before Latourell Falls State Park. Passing the exact spot, she noticed the detectives’ unconscious body language. She also saw two small orange markers, placed by the police so they could precisely triangulate the spot.

Why did she confess? Birkland asked her one day.

“By that time,” Pavlinac replied, “I didn’t care if I lived or died.”

McIntyre never wavered. He liked to think he moved cautiously while deciding what to believe. Once he developed his theory, though, he felt no hesitation at all. Once you make the decision to enter a battle, you damn sure better be ready to fight it. Once you make that decision, you can’t entertain the possibility of being wrong.

On the last day of the trial, McIntyre watched Wendell Birkland beseech the jury for seven hours--”It’s not logical to assume that this 58-year-old grandmother strangled a girl to death”--before finally sitting down. As Birkland turned to hug a sobbing Laverne Pavlinac, McIntyre rose and reached for his tape recorder.

*

It was Det. Chris Peterson who decided they should once more search the Sandy River area where Keith Jesperson claimed to have scattered the contents of Bennett’s purse. The first search just hadn’t been done to his liking. The Explorer Scouts had found it necessary to crawl and twist through those thick blackberry bushes.

On Oct. 14, 1995, after checking with McIntyre, Peterson ordered the Explorer Scouts back out to Sandy River. This time they brought machetes and clippers. First they would hack away the blackberry bushes. Then they’d search the bare ground.

McIntyre coached his son’s soccer game that day. When he returned home at 4 p.m., he headed for the shower. His pager flashed Peterson’s number. He sat down on his bed and picked up a phone.

“Are you sitting down?” Peterson asked.

“Yeah, yeah, what?”

“They found Taunja Bennett’s Oregon ID card.”

“Don’t b.s. me.”

“No, I’m not. It’s covered with mud. Looks like it’s been there some time. Along with other stuff from her purse.”

McIntyre laughed darkly. “Go tell them to put it back,” he joked. “Jesus Christ, go bury it. I don’t want to hear this.”

Police had never known where even to look for Bennett’s purse or its contents. Nor had Pavlinac. No news account had ever provided a hint. Now Jesperson had led them to it--several miles from where they’d found Bennett’s body. It was clear: He had information only Taunja Bennett’s killer could know.

Still, McIntyre wondered. Could someone else have put Taunja’s stuff out there? Everyone but his detectives, after all, had been shown to be liars in this case.

McIntyre now felt certain Jesperson was involved in the crime. But maybe Pavlinac and Sosnovske were also. This discovery at the Sandy River put Jesperson in, he told himself. It didn’t take the others out.

*

Just after McIntyre’s impassioned final argument, just hours after he once more played Laverne Pavlinac’s taped confession, 12 Multnomah County citizens proclaimed the defendant guilty of felony murder. Nine of the jurors actually wanted the more serious charge of aggravated murder. Except for three on the panel, Pavlinac could have ended up on death row.

Knowing this, Sosnovske and his attorney had little appetite for a trial. If nine jurors were inclined to put a grandmother on death row, what would they do with an abusive drunk? In late March 1991, Sosnovske, looking bewildered, pleaded “no contest” to a charge of felony murder. When he drew a life sentence, with a 15-year minimum term, that appeared to be the end of the Taunja Bennett murder case.

There had, of course, been that one peculiar moment midway through Pavlinac’s trial. Authorities in Livingston, Mont., had called Det. Ingram to describe a scrawled message they’d just found on a bus station’s restroom wall. “I killed Tanya Bennett Jan. 21, 1990 in Portland, Oregon,” the note read. “I beat her to death, raped her and loved it. Yes, I’m sick, but I enjoy myself too. People took the blame and I’m free.”

It had amounted to nothing, though. Despite defense pleas, the judge had barred the message from the trial, ruling it to be hearsay with no indication of reliability. That had seemed proper to McIntyre.

You can’t drop a case, he figured, just because someone writes on a bathroom wall.

He still felt that way a week after Pavlinac’s trial, when authorities discovered a second message scrawled on a restroom wall in Umatilla, Ore. “Killed Tanya Bennett in Portland,” this one read. “Two people got the blame so I can kill again.”

*

For weeks, investigators had been searching for the girlfriend Keith Jesperson had lived with at the time of Taunja Bennett’s murder. In mid-October of 1995, two days after finding Bennett’s ID card along a Sandy River bank, they finally tracked down Roberta Ellis.

“Oh,” Ellis said, when told Jesperson was in jail for murder. “I’ve always hoped that what he told me was a dream.” When she returned from a trucking haul in late January of 1990, she saw that Jesperson had moved their mattress from the master bedroom to the living room. As she started to fall asleep that night, Jesperson told her that while she was gone, he’d met a girl at the B&I; Tavern, brought her home, then killed her. It had made him feel powerful, he said.

McIntyre, reeling, had to admit: Here was the key, here was evidence that put Jesperson in while taking Pavlinac and Sosnovske out. The dates of her trucking haul, the B&I; Tavern, even the mattress--Ellis’ account fit all the facts.

Still, Ellis was an ex-girlfriend; Ellis didn’t like Jesperson anymore. Could she be getting even for some long-ago offense?

On Oct. 24, to see if Jesperson somehow knew Pavlinac and Sosnovske, FBI agents called in by the district attorney’s office administered independent polygraph exams to Jesperson and Pavlinac. Both insisted they didn’t know each other; neither showed any indication of deception.

McIntyre resisted for one more day. Could a journalist have fed information to Jesperson? To find out, McIntyre examined defense attorney Tom Phelan’s notes from his earliest conversations with his client, before the press contacts began. Jesperson, he saw, had told his attorney everything right from the start. That’s why Phelan had been so eager to deal.

McIntyre wished this whole affair would go away; he wished he could call the whole thing off. He couldn’t, though. He knew that now. He had to face what he’d done five years before. Not a word of Laverne Pavlinac’s story was true. Nor were any of his own lofty, passionate proclamations to Pavlinac’s jury. Pavlinac’s face was not that of a murderer.

Had they all suffered from tunnel vision once they started hearing Pavlinac’s stories? Had the detectives, trying to corroborate those stories, asked questions that led and fed Pavlinac? Had the detectives, regarding her as a victim, drinking her coffee and driving her around, grown too close and unguarded? Had the detectives manipulated Sosnovske with their hypothetical questions? Or was it all Pavlinac’s fault? Was she that masterful a manipulator and deceiver?

Each theory had its supporters. Whatever the reasons, McIntyre had to admit: They’d all been utterly, colossally mistaken. Even in honorable hands, the criminal system could convict the innocent.

McIntyre called his boss. “We have the wrong people in jail,” he told Schrunk.

*

Before the return of a jury’s verdict, a district attorney has almost complete discretion over how and whether to prosecute a criminal case. After the verdict, though, it matters little what a Mike Schrunk or a Jim McIntyre thinks of his own 5-year-old murder case. Truth, so elusive during an investigation, becomes fixed by a jury’s verdict.

Hoping to un-fix it, Schrunk arranged for an expedited hearing at the Marion County Circuit Court in Salem, near where Pavlinac and Sosnovske were imprisoned. On Oct. 25, McIntyre and his colleagues worked through the night, preparing a 21-page memo that summarized their conclusions. Then they all rolled to the Salem courthouse.

We have made a mistake, McIntyre and Schrunk declared, standing before Presiding Circuit Judge Paul Libscomb. If we knew then what we know now, we would never have prosecuted these people. We must undo this wrong.

McIntyre thought they had a done deal. Here, after all, was an unprecedented scene: Oregon’s most prominent district attorney rising to confess error. At Schrunk’s side, agreeing, stood two assistant state attorneys general and Pavlinac’s defense lawyer. Everyone was joining hands, everyone was singing let these people go.

McIntyre waited for the pen to come out, waited for the release order to be signed. Instead, Judge Libscomb looked up from the documents. He hadn’t had ample time to review them, he said.

Oh, geez, McIntyre thought. Oh, damn.

Schrunk argued and pleaded; McIntyre even took the stand and testified. Still the judge demurred. Everyone drove back to Portland.

Four days later, Judge Libscomb, in a written ruling, declined to release Pavlinac and Sosnovske. The state’s memo, he explained, “while troubling,” is “not conclusive in establishing either the guilt of Keith Jesperson or the innocence of Pavlinac and Sosnovske . . . . Much doubt still remains.” Besides, “under our rule of law, a jury verdict . . . cannot later be simply set aside by some other judge. . . . “ Likewise, “following conviction and sentencing, the prosecutor loses nearly all power to cause any verdict to be set aside.”

For the good part of a month, prosecutors and defense attorneys, scrambling to find a solution, wandered through a legal “Twilight Zone.” After Keith Jesperson on Nov. 2 pleaded no contest to the murder of Taunja Bennett, drawing a life sentence, Oregon officially had two separate parties in jail for the same homicide--put there under two entirely different theories about the crime.

People started sputtering.

“Who cares about rules of law?” asked Jesperson’s attorney, Tom Phelan. “There is no room to believe that these two people had anything to do with the murder.”

“If the criminal justice system can’t allow for the release of an innocent person when all agree she is innocent,” said Pavlinac’s attorney, Wendell Birkland, “then the criminal system is broken.”

Sitting over lunch at his local Elks Club, Det. John Ingram shook his head in regret and puzzlement. “I feel badly that I couldn’t see through this,” he said. “I used to support the death penalty. I don’t believe in it as firmly anymore. I feel helpless. Those two should not be in jail. If I could do anything to get them out, I would.”

McIntyre, although obviously bothered, did not permit himself to sound quite as disturbed as the others. “This is just another case,” he insisted. “I put them away. Now I have to get them out.”

At a second hearing on Nov. 27, Judge Libscomb finally relented. By then inundated with briefs and investigative documents, he conceded that Pavlinac and Sosnovske indeed were innocent. More to the point, he accepted the lawyers’ proposals for how to free them.

Sosnovske’s release was relatively easy: Libscomb ruled that his constitutional rights had been violated because Pavlinac, while wired for sound by the police, had tried to get him to admit guilt. Pavlinac’s release was trickier. She’s been convicted legally, Libscomb declared. Her conduct has been an “affront to our entire criminal justice system.” The cost to taxpayers has been “enormous,” the cost to Sosnovske “incalculable.” Yet to continue to imprison “a factually innocent person” would violate Oregon’s constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment. Though she was “legally guilty,” though her conviction would stand, Pavlinac could walk free.

Asked by the judge if she wished to speak, Pavlinac, handcuffed and shackled, rose and turned to Sosnovske, sitting just on the other side of her defense attorney. It appeared to McIntyre that she was making cow eyes at her former roommate. At 62, afflicted by heart disease and diabetes, she still remained an enigma to all in the courtroom.

“I can’t undo what I did,” Pavlinac told Sosnovske. “But I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the whole situation.”

When it was Sosnovske’s turn, he addressed not her but the judge. “I didn’t murder anybody in 1990,” he said. “I want to be released.”

*

All manner of commentary has followed in the wake of Pavlinac and Sosnovske’s release.

A few critics snipe at the prosecutors and detectives for buying a confused, depressed woman’s preposterous story. Far more express understanding--Pavlinac and Sosnovske, after all, looked awfully guilty not just to the prosecutors, but to a jury and judge. Virtually everyone observes that at least this mistake got corrected. A disturbing case indeed--but also a “refreshing” one. Refreshing because the prosecutors for once admitted and undid their own wrong, rather than dig in their heels.

“I will say this about McIntyre and Schrunk, they were very dogged,” said Phelan. “I’d give them accolades. They weren’t afraid to backtrack, to look, to see if they had the right people in prison. These people came in believing one thing, did a complete 180, and weren’t afraid to say so. These people did the right thing.”

Only occasionally does someone point out that but for a serial killer’s bizarre scribblings, there never would have been recognition of this whopping mistake. Only occasionally does someone ask how often other such mistakes go undetected. Only occasionally does someone--as Wendell Birkland did recently--suggest that “this isn’t an isolated case, Laverne is not the only innocent person convicted by people of goodwill.”

On those occasions, Jim McIntyre more often than not bristles. That’s what he did one late November night at his favorite downtown Portland tavern, the Veritable Quandary, which he likes less for its apt name than for its dearth of criminal defense attorneys. He’d fed his children dinner earlier that evening, then left them in the care of his eldest daughter, now 13. An insensitive dictator, they sometimes called him, but he didn’t care, even if he sometimes did screw up. Things like Internet chat rooms were off-limits to his kids; he’d rather keep the password to himself, he’d rather drive home at midday to log them on when they needed to download something for school.

This has been an awful three months, McIntyre allowed; just ask his family and colleagues. Yes, they’d be fools to say the system hasn’t convicted innocent people. Certainly this was “terribly upsetting,” certainly this has “shaken all of us who work within the legal system.” But no, no. This case hasn’t made him gunshy about his job. Not in the least.

McIntyre saw nothing to apologize for. This was the most amazing and perplexing case any of them had ever encountered. When do you ever see two different people confessing to the same crime, both with facts only the killer could know? Why, take Jesperson out of the picture, they still had a convincing case. They still could convict Pavlinac.

McIntyre frowned, clenched his glass, nursed his drink.

Yes, he acknowledged. Yes, that fact did demonstrate how hard it was to know the truth. It didn’t faze him, though. He was still willing to rise, point to a defendant, and declare this--this--to be the face of a murderer. There just was no other way. Maybe some folks in their jobs can take a car apart, leave the parts on the driveway. He has to sell the goddamn car.

From his seat in the Veritable Quandary, it appeared unavoidable to McIntyre: “Lines need to be drawn,” he said. “Sometimes you end up on the wrong side.”