Who Named the Knife Read online

  Mormons are taught that life is a test, that they have been plucked out of heaven and brought to earth to try on the temptation of free will. In Maryann’s household, the tests were challenging. By the time Maryann was nine, Penne had fallen in love with a black man, become pregnant, broken her church’s covenant and her mother’s heart. Only Maryann was left to compensate for the family failings while Gladys’s relatives refused to speak to any of them. Gladys and her children were shunned. “It was hard hard on my mom. Her own father was terrible to us. Her whole family was. After that we never saw much of them.”

  But the religion of prophets and rules continued to be an integral part of daily life. There were lessons before school. There were the Monday evenings when all Mormon families read from The Book of Mormon. There were the other six days of the week, each of them regulated by sanctions and doctrine. Tuesday nights were for Mutual meetings. Other nights were given over to Beehive Girls or Gleaner Girls. There was Sunday school and the Young Adult Group.

  My own family was ashamed of the Saints, although they went along to Independence, burning bridges all the way. My father was that mad, grief-stricken woman’s grandson, raised to be obedient but also to think. Critical Thinking was the core of his faith. The training in thinking came from his father, who had watched his family disintegrate. It came from his mother, who was a teacher. It came from law school. It was something he taught me. Never believe in prophets, false or otherwise. Always question. Question everything.

  20

  As our letters became more frequent, I tried to make mine more personal so that Maryann would do the same. I told her about eloping and running away to Mexico. I told her that Philip had left college and me, and that finding him in Mazatlan five months later felt like a miracle. I’d called an operator in Mexico City and she had tried every beach town and village, finally locating him in a bar, where he had been sleeping on a table.

  “I miss you.”

  “So come on down.”

  “You know I can’t do that. My parents would freak. I can’t travel with you unless we get married.”

  I told Maryann that an hour later Philip called again and I drove from Boulder to Tucson in the backseat of our best friend’s father’s car. Listening to the radio. Had a white cotton suit in a white suitcase. My hair up in curlers.

  Maryann wrote back saying her parents had moved her from Phoenix to Yuma when she was fourteen and that marked the end of her childhood. “Mom and I argued a lot and I stayed gone a lot. Dad would come home and have to play peacemaker. By the way, did I mention I was a daddy’s girl?”

  She had left a good friend in Phoenix, a girl she had met in the sixth grade named Mariann. Now, at the tender age of fourteen, she began to slip away on weekends, taking a bus back to Phoenix to stay with her friend. Attached like Kahlo’s painting of the two Fredas, they were both slender, with long, brown hair. The other Mariann was serious about church and God and being good, but when they went to the mall to skate, Maryann showed her how to flirt, how to drink and smoke, things she was learning in Yuma. I read this with some surprise. Hadn’t she said, in court, that William had introduced her to alcohol and cigarettes? It was there in my yellow notebook. By sixteen, she had a driver’s licence and drove herself back and forth between Yuma and Phoenix, three hundred miles each way. She swore to herself that she would go back to Phoenix for good as soon as she was done with high school. “Which is exactly what I did,” she wrote. “Which is how I met William.”

  The letters were taking us someplace, but I was asking myself all over again whether, given the drive out to Hanauma Bay, she might not have pulled the gun on William. (Stop! Thief! Get out of this car. Joe and I would prefer to go back to the bar and dance!) I was asking myself whether she might not have run out onto a sidewalk in the afternoon sunshine and shouted for help. Maybe it was because my mind was not made up in 1982 that I had made myself late on that last day. Maybe I wanted a second chance.

  Dear Linda,

  I didn’t consciously think about it at the time, but on some level I knew mom & dad would hate William, which made him all the more attractive. I ‘needed’ to be loved and accepted, to have someone else validate my existence and my worth. As long as I agreed with him, he fulfilled that need. Think Charles Manson and you’ll have a good picture of the type of personality William has. I honestly believe, had he been free longer during his life, he would have had a ‘following’. He was a very charismatic, manipulative man. From the time he was 14 until today, and he’s 51 now, he’s only been free for 14 months of his life. (This little tidbit I found out about after I was arrested.) But in that fourteen months he managed to collect two wives! Today I read his Board Transcripts and realize what an ass he makes of himself; how absurd much of what he says sounds. But back then …

  Two wives?

  With the letter, she enclosed an article from California Legal Magazine. Its title is “Where Is William Acker?” and it says William is five feet eleven inches tall and weighs one hundred and sixty-five pounds. It says he’s been in trouble with the law since he was six, but that his record is closed because he’s in the prison witness protection program. Moved from one prison to another, from one state to another, he’s provided information in a dozen cases, including one against Jesse Gonzales, who is now on death row because of William’s testimony. Making deals with prosecutors around the country, but especially in L.A., he has created an interesting life for himself. And it all began in 1978, when Bert Bray called the sheriff’s office in Yuma.

  William says he testifies against fellow prisoners in order to bring moral balance to his life. At parole hearings he maintains that, although he participated in the robberies immediately preceding the murders of Larry Hasker and Cesario Arauza, his wife shot the victims. In 1991, however, he told the parole board something different.

  21

  Parole Hearing, William Acker, 1991

  …

  COMMISSIONER O’CONNELL: Okay. What have you discussed in therapy?

  INMATE ACKER: Well, just about the criminal personality seminar. Basically that criminals want to blame everyone else for their criminal activity. I’ve done that myself, you know …

  COMM. O’CONNELL: Well, tell me how you’ve done that then.

  INMATE ACKER: How have I done that?

  COMM. O’CONNELL: Right. How have you changed?

  INMATE ACKER: Well, I don’t make victims of people no more.

  COMM. O’CONNELL: Okay, then answer me this: Did you commit the murder for which you’re in custody?

  INMATE ACKER: Yes, I did.

  COMM. O’CONNELL: What about the one in Hawaii?

  INMATE ACKER: I committed them all and I want the woman behind it, the woman that’s incarcerated, I would like her set free.

  COMM. O’CONNELL: Okay. So Marianne [phonetic] didn’t do anything?

  INMATE ACKER: Absolutely nothing.

  COMM. O’CONNELL: And is this the first time you’ve said that?

  INMATE ACKER: The very first time.

  COMM. O’CONNELL: Okay. And this is a change of attitude because of this class you took?

  INMATE ACKER: Listen to me. Marianne Bray [phonetic] has a good family, a family that’s willing to help her. Okay?

  COMM. O’CONNELL: Yes.

  INMATE ACKER: She’s always had that.

  COMM. O’CONNELL: Yes.

  INMATE ACKER: Give her that chance.

  COMM. O’CONNELL: Yes, I’m aware of that. It is difficult, however, to give somebody a parole date when she’s sitting there looking at two counts of murder. One of them based solely upon your testimony in Hawaii and the other one, again, based upon your testimony in California.

  INMATE ACKER: Well the DA’s office last board hearing made a real strong point of what I did, you know. In other words, he didn’t accept my testimony. So let him stand by that decision. Let him make that decision. Let him make – let that office stand by what they write, what they do, and free that woman. She d
eserves to be free.

  When Maryann read the magazine article in 1992, she sent it to the University of Southern California Wrongful Conviction Project. Would the article help her get paroled?

  One of the law students telephoned Stephen Hioki, wondering if there were any records of the trial. Hioki told the student that Hawaii routinely destroyed court transcripts ten years after a trial, but that there was something they should know about Maryann’s sentencing. Judge Au had used the word accomplice in his instructions to the jury. And this was improper, Hioki said, because Maryann hadn’t been tried as an accomplice; she’d been tried as the shooter. “At least one jury member said he didn’t think she pulled the trigger,” Hioki remembered. “So they must have thought the judge gave them permission to find her guilty even if she didn’t do it.” Hioki said that he had petitioned the court for a judgment of acquittal or a new trial only a month after Maryann was sentenced based on Judge Au’s improper instructions. He said the petition was denied. Then he said that a plea of habeas corpus might be worth trying.

  22

  That fall, Michael and I were going to spend three months in New York. “Have a safe trip,” Maryann wrote. “New York seems like an exciting, yet intimidating city, although I’ve never been there.”

  I promised to tell her everything. Seeing things for someone else would be like motherhood all over again. The pleasure of being a conduit. For Maryann, I went to the public library and looked at the vaulted ceilings, marble floors, and rooms that contain the secrets of existence. I went to the Tenement Museum, and the Pierpont Morgan Library, where I saw an exhibit of John Ruskin drawings, manuscripts, and letters. I told Maryann that the Tenement Museum had the kind of apartments that our ancestors probably lived in when they crossed the Atlantic from Europe. I said the Ruskin exhibit cost $5 to enter and that his work is autobiographical and that he was an only child whose mother was intensely religious. All through his childhood, I said, she made him memorize sections of the Bible. He was expected to enter the ministry, but instead, he had a breakdown. I said maybe that was what had happened to her and, as I wrote, I imagined Maryann’s mother looming over her with The Book of Mormon in hand, telling her to believe it or else.

  I told her that up in Times Square a man was living in a block of ice.

  In her next letter, Maryann said she knew all about breakdowns. She said during her first years in prison, she had come very close. “I spent many weekends my first couple of years here getting drunk on homemade wine. Most of it’s pretty nasty-tasting stuff. But, once you get the first glassful down, you really don’t taste the rest.”

  I kept writing. I told Maryann about the groceries I was buying and how much they cost and what I did with them when I got them home to my rented kitchen. I told her about the movies I was seeing and about an exhibit of photographs taken in the nineteenth century when Ruskin was writing his books and falling in love with a ten-year-old child named Rose la Touche. The photographs were portraits of an Italian contessa who asked the photographer to lengthen her neck and reduce her waist.

  Maryann wrote back: “Sometimes I imagine the kind of place I could afford and where I would choose to live and how I would spend my time. I think about the very reduced social life I would have if I got out of here and then about how it would be entirely my own. I mean my life. We women are so new at forging our own identities.”

  I had no interest in forging a new identity. I was stuck on the past. I told Maryann that it was hard to know whether the Countess Castiglione had created herself or disguised herself in those photographs. I said that if I were locked up the way she was I’d probably spend all my time trying to recreate my childhood. I’d remember the feel of the carpet on the stairs, I’d remember the smell of the kitchen sink or the dustiness of potatoes in the white metal bin in the dark pantry, where things rarely used were kept. I told her that my brother was once in the hospital, unable to speak or move, and he kept himself sane by recalling our grandparents’ house – every inch of it! He began in a corner of the kitchen and made himself remember pictures on the walls, doorknobs, floor surfaces, ceilings, cracks, nails, placement of furniture, salt shakers, dishes, curtains, sounds, smells.

  I told her that if I could steal my own life and put it in a glass-topped box, I’d probably do it, then hold it in my hand, run a finger around it. Not because the contents are beautiful, but because they are contained, visible, embalmed. Open the box and pick around at the pieces. I said I wished she would do that for me, starting with the house where she lived when she was a child. “A simple description,” I said.

  I told her the man who encased himself in ice had reemerged. “Must go to sleep,” were his first words. “Can’t talk. Can’t think.”

  23

  Dear Linda,

  My little cell is 8 × 10. As you walk in the door, which has a little window in the middle for the staff to see in, the bunk bed is straight ahead. To the right of the door are two metal lockers and a metal desk with a stool on the left that swings out. To the left of the door is the sink and on the wall around the corner from the sink is the toilet, facing the bunks. Valere – my cell mate – drew a diagram of the room, which I’ll enclose. On the wall between the toilet and the bunk are two metal shelves. The bunks, of course, are metal also. Years ago the institution provided wooden lock boxes that we could utilize for storage and they fit perfectly at the foot of the bed. The lid flips all the way back, the opening is toward the mattress, so now it’s a shelf and storage, and a good place to write. We are also allowed footlockers, at least for the time being. Valere and I each have one. My tiny TV sits on one. In the past we were allowed to receive personal blankets, sheets, towels, rugs and I’ve managed to hang on to some things and it helps give the room a better feel. Even though the blanket and bedspread are worn and old, it still helps. I have a latch-hook rug of a wolf on the floor. They are leaning toward making us get rid of all our little comforts which really used to upset and depress me. Now, I just wish they would do what they are going to do and quit messing with us and threatening us. I do like having these little touches of “home”, but for a little while longer, I can do without them until I get out and really have a place of my own to call home!

  I’m on the top bunk, so I can get up here and kind of be in my own little world. During my lunch breaks during the week, I have the room to myself. It’s limited and I’m never just totally by myself, but in my mind I can take myself far away from here. One of my dreams is to, one day, be able to travel. I would love to see Europe like that contessa.

  Love ya,

  Maryann

  24

  In January, Michael and I flew home after a snowstorm that smothered New York and then New Year’s Eve with thousands of people jamming the streets, watching the year 2000 tick away on the Times Square clock. The millennium, when things were supposed to change.

  There were no more letters from Maryann.

  By March it was still colder than hell in Toronto (I’m convinced hell is cold) and brutally colourless. This is our famous dog-shit month, when all of it rises to the surface, along with used condoms and the inorganic crap of city life – plastic bags, coffee cups, frozen cigarette butts. I kept telling people about finding Maryann, about writing to her. I found myself referring to her as my prisoner. “Don’t you care if she’s guilty?” people asked.

  I said I was trying to find out if I cared.

  Still no letters.

  We were going to be in California for two weeks. Near Corona. Near the prison. I wrote to ask if I could visit her, telling myself that my interest was rational. Maybe I’d made myself late on that last day. Maybe not. Maybe I was trying to find out how much I owed her.

  When the last ice disappears and a bit of green emerges, Toronto becomes feverish: deck chairs dragged out of basements, hoses attached to spigots, gardens raked, windows washed. In May, one is glad to have experienced the confinement of winter. Touching the ground, breathing the outside air is bliss. I told m
yself that the next part of Maryann’s life might be like this. She would be sent to Hawaii for the hearing. In my head, I created a vision of her wearing the soft blue muumuu. I saw her unchained, walking through the courthouse, going out through the huge double doors. From the top of the steps she would look up at the volcanic mountains and beautiful Punchbowl, the extinct volcano under which she once lived. She would adjust her shoulders, unflex her fists. Finally the clock face would crack. Time would begin.

  25

  I am standing outside a confessional. It’s a novelty to me, but apparently I would like to be invited in. I am standing on one foot and then the other, waiting. Go on in! It’s time to confess!

  But I’m not Catholic!

  Never mind about that! The priest will listen to you regardless.

  It occurs to me that, in spite of my sins (acts for which I crave forgiveness), what I want to tell the priest is that I’ve lost my faith. I no longer believe in anything. Perhaps he can offer some advice? I must say, it’s odd to dream so directly from life since I have, indeed, felt a sudden draining away of the mystical belief that usually sustains me. There have been times when the sustenance was thin, when I was full of shame and despair. But the shame meant that the faith was still there, lurking. This is different.