Ellie Nesler: Avenger in a Gray Hat

JAMESTOWN — I played God. Like I said, I didn’t like it, because it’s pretty heavy-duty, but I don’t think I’ll lose any sleep over it.

But we’ll see . . .

--Ellie Nesler, in a statement to investigators, April 2, 1993

*

The ambivalence was there even before the blood had been wiped from the courtroom’s gray linoleum floor. Four hours after she emptied a pistol into the man accused of molesting her son, Ellie Nesler was struggling with what she’d done. She leaned toward a state investigator’s tape recorder and, for more than an hour, conducted a long, rambling debate with herself.

“The man is sick,” she said of the accused molester, a Christian camp employee named Danny Driver. “He deserved to die. Maybe I’m not God, but I’ll tell you what, I’m the closest damn thing to it right now for all the other little boys that he would take.”

“How do you feel?” the investigator asked.

“Scared,” she said. “I feel real scared. I don’t know if I did right, or I don’t know if I did wrong. . . . Danny’s dead. I don’t know how it’ll affect my children. My son was in the other room. He didn’t see it. But now--Danny created a pain for my child--now what have I created?

“Did I create a monster on the other side?”

*

Outside the court, on the main street of this Gold Country town, supporters had gathered that day. “Nice Shootin’, Ellie,” crowed a sign plastered to a pickup truck. This was the initial public reaction, not only among Nesler’s neighbors, but across the country as well. In the first, tidiest telling, she was the avenging madonna who had expressed with five rounds from her .22-caliber pistol a universal rage against sick crime and judicial impotency.

It would not last, this easy view. Unsettling details soon emerged. Nesler, it was revealed, had tested positive for methamphetamines after her arrest. Her accused molester had died shackled, his back turned to Nesler: He never had a chance even to duck. Amid such disclosures, the made-for-TV movie was canceled. Movie makers, and presumably their audiences, abhor ambivalent heroes: No hats of gray in the never-ending Western that is America.

The Nesler conundrum was passed from the moot court of public opinion to a Tuolumne County jury. She had pleaded not guilty, and not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury played it down the middle. It convicted Nesler, not of murder, but manslaughter. “We all empathized with her situation. Who wouldn’t?” a juror recalled last week. Despite the tarnishes, Nesler remained a mother who had acted, however wrongly, on behalf of her son.

And yet the jury also found her sane, which meant prison. As Nesler was hauled off to Chowchilla, her conviction was appealed on grounds of jury misconduct: During the trial’s sanity phase, a juror had brought to the deliberations some unsworn testimony from a Sonora bar stool. During a recess, she’d heard a patron of The Office say that Nesler was a bad mother and a drug user, “a crankster,” as she put it. This contradicted the defense portrayal of Nesler as, in the words of another juror, “this perfect little mom.”

*

Last Thursday, in a 4-3 decision, the state Supreme Court ruled that Nesler deserved a new sanity trial. The majority opinion opened with a painful account of a mother dealing with the discovery that her 7-year-old boy had been raped. The dissenting opinion spoke sternly of vigilante execution. In any event, the People vs. Ellena Starr Nesler had been kicked back to Tuolumne County, and with it the ambivalence.

The sidewalk lawyers were right back at work, debating all the angles. “Ellie’s only mistake,” offered one sympathetic old-timer, “was that she didn’t save a bullet for the judge.” It would have been different, countered another, if she “hadn’t done it in a courthouse.” And so it went, up and down the street.

The final decision to retry Nesler or negotiate her release now rests with Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, a law-and-order Republican running for governor. The riddle is more complicated than ever. Nesler already has served nearly four years and is eligible for release in 15 months. She has been diagnosed with cancer. Her son is said to have suffered in her absence.

“It’s time,” a Sonora painter said, echoing one popular view, “for Ellie to come home.” It might be simple enough to say this, sitting on a bar stool in the last, lazy hours of a foothill afternoon. One suspects, however, that Lungren’s decision won’t be so easily made. “It’s pretty heavy-duty,” as Ellie Nesler said, this business of playing God.