June 25, 2015

Crocodile

The first time Gil Harrington saw Jesse Matthew in the flesh was a Monday or a Wednesday, back in the Spring. I know, because when we drove back from Charlottesville after sitting 15 feet from him in the courtroom that day, when he stared and stared at Gil, and at Hannah Graham's parents, and at me, I took Gil back to her home in Roanoke, then drove on through a storm up the mountain to Blacksburg, parked along Virginia Tech's Drill Field, and went directly into Randolph Hall to teach my 4-5:15 MW class.

I walked to my car after a wonderful 75 minutes with my students, offering them the same deep ethics and global citizenship I had taught Morgan six Springs before, and by the time I drove ten minutes from campus, reaching my gravel driveway, turning off the ignition, now stopped in the verdant territory of my pink-trumpeted daffodils and heady blue hyacinths, I was really afraid.

Afraid, not because I felt spooked that Jesse Matthew was somehow crouching behind the flowers in my gardens.

He could never camouflage in beauty.

Afraid, because I felt drugged.

I am in my late fifties, very healthy, strong and happy. This physical fear, as I sat in my parked car, wondering whether I was going to be able to walk the 30 steps to get into my house, was something I had read about but never experienced.

I felt as if I had been hit by a poisoned dart.

I thought I would have to sleep on the ground, somewhere between my car and my door.  No exaggeration.

I got inside, and still in my clothes, and in my shoes, I slept. Until morning.

When I woke, and showered, and drank my hot tea, I remember looking at my hands and being surprised that they were not covered in boils or bruises, that my skin was unchanged, undiseased.

I wasn't sore. My ribs weren't hurt. My back was strong. I could move my jaws and swallow. I drove to work.

Where was the poison?

I remember feeling a little embarrassed to mention to Gil, when we spoke later that day, that I had been, as I did put it to her, wiped out, the night before.

Dan and Gil Harrington are the most empathetic people I have ever known. So even if I had needed to talk about myself, and even if I were histrionic, Gil would have put my trouble into context, and helped coax me down from that unstable highest branch of the tree.

I didn't want to sound like my experience the day before was such a big deal, given the circumstance that Gil Harrington and John and Sue Graham had just, for the first time, sat in close proximity to the suspected brutal murderer of their daughters, Morgan and Hannah.

But I told Gil.

And I did not expect her response.

She explained that as soon as I left, that early afternoon, she had stretched out on her living room carpet, maybe just to rest her back after the car ride.

That's where Dan found her, hours later, when he came home from work. Splayed, sprawled flat out on the floor. Still deeply asleep.

As if she had been hit by a poisoned dart.

I told Gil: it's as if Jesse Matthew's presence, that first time, was itself a date rape drug, one which he emits, and which we inhaled, just by being in the room with him.

Or, it's as if we had had to induce our own comas, to repair our shock. We had been near something so unfamiliar, so unnatural, so appalling not because he grimaces or smirks or leers--he doesn't--but because he is so calm and still, so like a Mexican Day of the Dead Judas figure, bigger than life-sized, lumpy, a giant heavy  papier-mâché man, but breathing. As Gil says, I have no receptors for what he is.

Today, another soul entered the Charlottesville courtroom and the marathon of Jesse Matthew's trials. Lindsey Crisp is 25, a yoga instructor, certifying for massage therapy. You saw her on my Facebook wall: she is the young woman who performed the incredible spoken poem for Morgan Harrington.

Lindsey grew up in the neighborhood with Morgan. On Lindsey's first day of kindergarten, she had the courage to board the school bus because her older friend Morgan was with her, encouraging her. Morgan was entering 1st grade.

Today, the television program 48 Hours flew Lindsay up from Charlotte. She hadn't seen Gil for several years. We met Lindsey for lunch, and afterwards, headed for the courtroom.

Escorted by armed guards, Jesse toddled in. He was in ankle chains, hand cuffs, and a prison constraint we had never heard of: a belly chain. This chain shackled his wrists to his abdomen.

My God. A 33-year-old man jangling in chains. Although there are a pitcher and cups on the table, Jesse can't pour himself a glass of water. He can't raise his hand to swear the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The implication is clear. He can't kill anyone in court.

Gil and I are dressed in black, for the occasion, both of us wearing cantaloupe orange scarves, for Hannah Graham, her favorite color. Jesse is dressed in a stiff prison jump suit. Gil notes: ironically, it is orange, too.

Unlike during the Fairfax trial, where his hair was tied back, Jesse's long dreads are loose. They swing when he walks, but once he is seated, nothing about him moves.

Lindsey is composed, but tears are on her face. She sees my courtroom drawing come to life. In our minds, the size of Jesse Matthew brings other terrible images to life.

The Judge does not recuse herself; she does not find reason to think she can't be a fair judge in this trial.

Defense holds up a thick binder, and argues that since this is a capital trial, the most serious of trials, with the death sentence on the table, and with national attention bearing down on the case, he needs a lot of time to prepare. He requests eight preliminary meetings, beginning in August, spaced roughly six weeks apart.

Hannah Graham's trial dates are set: July 5 to July 29, but not this year.

Hannah's trial begins in July, 2016. A year away.

The months swing like prison chains.

I see the long stretch of legal delay punch Gil in the gut.

Jesse cuts his eyes at us.

Observing him today, the back of my mind still paged through every book and article I've ever absorbed, from 1960s Childcraft encyclopedia folk tales, where I learned about wickedness, to research on ice-cold sociopaths. In Jesse Matthew's presence, I race with myself to find something, anything that he resembles, but each time, I am baffled. Each time, I sense that I've never been in a presence like his.

His expressionlessness unsettles. What else is alive but makes no shift whatsoever in its expression?

What else is electric with hidden pounce?

Octopi, until they surge to grab food. Lions and leopards and tigers and cheetahs, before they accelerate.

And sexual predators.

This one, we've seen caught on video camera. Traipsing with his bourbon gut, padding in the bad fashion of those silly blousy shorts that hang from him like pillow cases, he moves as dull as sleeping quicksand.

Until he sees Hannah.

Then, as we know, his motion explodes.

He hairpin turns, lengthens his stride, and glides like hell.

I see something else, too, from that night. It's nothing I could report to Charlottesville Police Chief Longo. But look, look with me at the camera's still capture.

This is Jesse Matthew, seconds before he shifts gear, and already, his shadow is making freakish suggestions.

If you really look at this still image from the night Hannah Graham went missing, as a child or an artist will look, and if you'll be willing to see the shapes of things, allowing the trompe l'oeil, you'll see the trick of the evening: Jesse Matthew looks as if he is riding, balanced, on the tip of a crocodile's snout, the way every baby crocodile in fact does like to ferry on his mother.

Do you see it? Look again. Perhaps by accident, his shadow is shaped like a crocodile.

Jesse's phantom reptile is channeling him to the perfect spot, just across the brick river, where he can leap off, and snap for himself.

These days, we have to count how many times we've sat near Jesse in court. And we've noticed, since his Fairfax defeat: all his latent volition is shriveling. Like a dying dragon whose lungs are dead campfires, his breath across the room, Jesse's very presence now, like a musty antiquated bellows, now blows nothing concentrated.

We can breathe, stay awake, sometimes even eat a few bites of a meal, after proximity to him.

His presence, at least in the confines of the courtroom, no longer completely debilitates.

But, still, I sense residual poison and power in the company of Jesse Matthew. Yet I know the Angels have banished his vehicle, not just that fateful cab he used to drive, but his abysmal shadow-vehicle, this alligator-shape you see protruding up from the bottom of the photograph, the one who has given Jesse his primitive lift.

And unlike the Gingerbread Boy, who trusted riding the nose of that conniving fox, and who was devoured, Jesse, who rode a kindred beast, remains.

And the cold-blooded rhyme of Jesse Matthew runs grim:

Run, run, as fast as you can,
You can't stop me,
I'm the Crocodile Man!

I ride the nose of a shadowy beast;
We troll on the mall
'Til I smell a feast.

I'm propelled to her side
On my crocodile ride,
Unconcerned about law in the least.

Run, run, but my reach is vaster.
Try, try, but my fists are faster.
My crocodile guide
And my long practiced stride
Mean tonight is a tasty disaster.

Run, swim, flail, fight.
The Crocodile Man has weight and bite.
You are nothing but prey.
I will throw you away, and--

Since crocodile--
Is in my blood

And I know ditches, brush, and mud,
And field and cab, and mall and car,
And John Paul Jones and Tempo Bar,

And I have shadows who will ride me
Propel, deliver, taxi-glide me,
Put me where the victims are,
Those shiny twinkle twinkle stars,

Who make me snap
And snap again,
And glut myself on girly sin,

I will always ride with hunger.
I will always pull them under.

In secluded gloaming time,
I will always make them mine.

Stop me if you ever can, but
I am Crocodile--more than man.

Jane Lillian Vance
Vice President, Help Save the Next Girl,
And Morgan Harrington's professor in the last Spring of her life