Day 4: The First Trial of Jesse Matthew

June 18, 2015
Fairfax, Virginia

The Visitation

I don't know the visiting hours and I don't know which prison will be Jesse Matthew's.

He may be a relatively brief visitor himself, assigned along the infamous gray row where dead men beyond rehabilitation walk out of their cells to their scheduled execution.

I don't know how many appeals will carry Jesse Matthew aloft on his remaining apocalyptic months of concrete and chains--his lawn and flowers--until, one afternoon, an autopsy report will describe the contents of his stomach, his last mastications, fries and a burger, maybe onion rings, the batter reddened in a paste of bloody ketchup.

During his incarceration, who from among the living will visit this man that I believe will be proven an infamous sexual predator and serial killer, becoming a terrible memory in criminal justice lectures, indelibly featured in cramped dozens of jail-faced Google images?

Family, I guess, will at first make the dreary pilgrimage, but how can the conversation run? How have you been, Jesse? We're all fine. No, nothing much has changed. Well, except that there seem to be fewer skeletonized girls found in the Albemarle woods.

Like kissing an electric fence, those live visits will burn: they will always burn, and the puckered keloids will never heal.

So Jesse Matthew's human visits will thin, thin to the vanishing point.

Which will suit his other visitors.

In every one of the thirty-three countries I've traveled to, without exception, I have met rational, high-functioning, sane people, who, with no fixations on horror films or grim folklore, and no embarrassment or ambivalence, accept the existence of ghosts.

The purpose, powers, and the forms of ghosts do vary, culturally, but ghosts, I have gathered, are ubiquitous.

There are those we might call Good Ghosts, who assist the living. We refer to them as Angels. They leave enigmatic directions we might call coincidences, and if you can see to follow their messages, you find medicine, secret passageways, and insights.

The Good Ghosts usually knew us when they were alive; we loved them, and now they protect and guide us. They lose their inhibitions most when we are dreaming; they come and play with us then, hide and seek and riddle games, as if we are all children together. Violence in your heart sends Good Ghosts away, and once banished, they can not remember you.

There are other Ghosts as well.

Universally, Angry Ghosts don't like to be observed by a crowd, so they haunt solitary but not entirely empty places, where there is usually just one person to witness or hear their presence, like an inmate in a prison cell.

Angry Ghosts are inclined to show themselves where they are positive no one else can detect them, enter and reside, like a hidden roommate, in the deep interior of secretive, guilty minds, where not even an exorcism can dislodge them. In his nocturnal prison room, like cockroaches, Angry Ghosts may soon scuttle around Jesse's isolated mind.

No one should pleasure in the punishments wrought by an infestation of Angry Ghosts. They are inhumane, and relentless. Like fleas or ticks, the Angry Ghosts bite, pinch, fill themselves, and lay eggs. They are horrors, fueled by the venom of retaliation. They destroy peace.

There is another rare and unusual specter.

A Phoenix, a reincarnated ghost, is alive again as a human, so she is not exactly a ghost. But she was, like a drowned woman who spews the water from her lungs and coughs back to respiration, for all intents and purposes, dead, and then not dead. You could call a Phoenix just a survivor, but the ghosts always claim her as one of theirs. She tagged their realm, and she has powers that other people do not.

To be in the presence of the Phoenix, RG, who sputtered back to life from Jesse Matthew's strangling, Gil Harrington and I returned to the Fairfax Circuit Courtroom on this afternoon, June 18, 2015.

RG is the young woman who was attacked in 2005 while carrying her groceries home. For ten years she had been understandably reluctant to detail the full extent of her attempted murder, until she sat before Judge Schell on the first day of trial.

On the witness stand, she mastered liberation. Unlocking her own prison, she admitted outright that in fact Jesse Matthew had fully raped her.

And any doubt about her powers as a Phoenix dissolved when, just two days later, after the prosecutors proved their case--"overwhelmingly," to quote Judge Schell--and Jesse Matthew pled guilty, she requested to reconvene the court specifically to have her day, to speak before the prosecuting and defense teams, before the Judge AND Jesse Matthew, in an open courtroom, before dozens of live-streaming reporters, and explain exactly what suffering and impact, for a decade, Jesse Matthew's wildly brutal, diseased attack has caused.

That day was today.

You must realize: just to enter the Fairfax County Circuit Court, exactly as though you were proceeding through security at an airport, one has to proceed through a zigzag line, remove one's shoes, and, if you wear an abundance of rings and bracelets as Gil and I prefer, get wanded.

Blue digital schedule boards hang high from the walls and announce five dozen cases being heard throughout the building, as if they were an abundance of flights.

Such a clockwork space would not be where I expected to behold a living ghost today, but in she walked.

I had somehow imagined a quavering statement, delivered despite sniffles.

Clearly, I had never fathomed a Phoenix.

RG has the casual command of a woman gifted in languages and cross-cultural pleasures. She is physically slight, but metaphysically executive.

And although RG was dressed powerfully nonchalantly, in casual western chic, her elegant slender handsome presence made me remember the gorgeous refinements of her brilliant civilization: the ten-meter raw silk sari I bought for my dying mother, in 1985, hot pink with an emerald green and navy border, bristling with real spun zari gold; the inlayed stonework efflorescing upon Agra's Taj Mahal, lapis, turquoise, malachite, onyx, and agate irises and lotuses blooming and scrolling perpetually up the cenotaphic white marble; India's famous ramshackle but indestructible markets, edible snake gourds longer and curvier than rearing cobras; the stacks of genius softbound books published by Penguin India, Ruskin Bond, Ashis Nandy, Sunetra Gupta, Arundhati Roy; hand-strung strands of jasmine flowers sold for you to braid into your hair or place upon your pillow, to perfume the journeys of your dreams.

From the greatest culture of intelligent pleasures, RG crossed oceans, inhaled after a decade's nightmares, swore her identity on the stand, and flared her tremendous Phoenix wings.

Yes, she indicated, she could barely pick up a cup, move from a chair, walk across a room, or chew food, after he brutalized her. She was so badly beaten, broken with pain.

Yes, she wrestled with self-esteem.

And she tried, as she said, to put what Jesse Matthew had done to her "in cold storage"; to repress how she had thought, in the moments of struggle, so this is how I will die. I am dying. My life is ending now.

And she realized: as she tried to hide from her memories, she eroded. She without action in response to his crimes was eroding.

So the Phoenix rose to vibrant being.

She called her attacker a faceless parasite.

She recognized the scourge of such violent sexual predators, and spoke on behalf of all victims, everywhere in the world, to protect and defend them.

She recognized the heroism of the American judicial system which persisted on her behalf for a decade.

She confirmed that she relives the horrible attack every day; suffers the shock of a man, then 23, smashing, beating, strangling, and raping her. She thought no one would hear her cries, and that Jesse Matthew would extinguish her.

The Judge was at full profile to the courtroom. He was entirely focused on her testimony. He watched the Phoenix intently.

She finished her work, and walked out.

And then, wearing a convict's dull green prison jump suit, Jesse Matthew, who had watched RG's testimony as unresponsively as if he were a stale loaf of bread, as nondescript as a cinder block, as odd as a styrofoam mannequin with cheap toothpaste for blood; cold, unnatural, a bad approximation of a man, Jesse Matthew was led out, to be whisked to Charlottesville, where he has other trials descending like tornadoes.

After the formal courtroom appearance of RG, post-docket, the Phoenix had another request.

So down the hall and through two doors Gil and I were lead, flanked by armed deputies, the Prosecutors, and the victim's advocacy assistants.

In a small room, RG entered.

How can I tell you the magic of being in such proximity to the girl who came back to life.

What a historic meeting, Gil knighting RG with a majestic spontaneous delivery of appreciation, and RG opening her resplendent wings to reveal a glinting mirror, in which Gil, in which even I, saw our reflections.

We were all covered in Phoenix feathers, all of us trembling a little, finally to have flown to this rare branch of mutual minutes to say we had been aware of one another for years, and to hug, and to hold each other's hands.

Gil was so glad to hold and hug RG.

I was so glad to take her hands in my hands, and to kiss her on the cheek.

She was warm as fire, this reincarnate. She was smart, and happy, and she also had a tremble, a little quaver to one side of her smile, like a little earthquake beginning, or a new molting.

We were the same.

All of us Phoenixes.

Back in Roanoke, I watched Gil's hands sweep and slice and lift like fantastic wings, her pendulum motions exposing what looked liked white plumage built inside the ripe tomato she had opened, until she conjured summer sandwiches drizzled with basil.

Tomorrow, there is one final chapter to the First Trial of Jesse Matthew.

Tomorrow, a different specter has work to do, who is not a Phoenix.

In the Epilogue, a different class of Ghost speaks to Jesse Matthew.

Her name is Morgan.

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