The Devil's Interval Read Online Free PDF Page B

petition.
    â€œAnd Gifford’s is?”
    â€œHabeas,” said Isabella. “And that’s good. A direct appeal means that you’ve got to stick to issues you can identify from the trial transcript. But in habeas, you can go ‘extra-record,’ meaning, you can go outside the transcript and find evidence or issues that didn’t come up during the trial.”
    â€œSuch as?”
    â€œSuch as lots of things. Evidence the police suppressed or mishandled, a witness who wouldn’t come forward during the original trial.”
    â€œHave you got any of those?”
    â€œNo,” said Isabella, “not yet. But we do have one mystery we haven’t been able to figure out.” She’d leafed through the file again, and pulled out a few sheets fastened together with a red paper clip. “Take a look at this,” she said, “when you go through the file. The police canvassed the Plummers’ neighborhood during their investigation, and a neighbor insisted she hadn’t seen Travis drop Grace off—which would have been nice corroborating evidence, but she did say she’d noticed two other vehicles at Grace’s late that night.”
    â€œAny details?”
    Isabella shook her head. “We wish. She was unclear about whether it was two cars, a car and a truck, a van, an ice cream truck! Apparently this particular little old lady was the self-appointed neighborhood watch warden. Her husband went to bed early every night, and she was a night owl. So she was constantly peering out her window late at night.”
    â€œDidn’t the fact that she’d seen two other vehicles, parked at Grace’s, whatever they were, support Travis’s theory that someone else could have come by—another sweetheart, or a burglar orsomething?”
    â€œThat would have been nice,” said Isabella. “But unfortunately this neighbor, Mrs. Herbert Orson Lomax—she referred to herself that way, all three names, every single time—was the quintessential elderly lady, with failing eyesight and slightly muddled recall. She was recovering from cataract surgery on the night Grace was murdered.”
    â€œThey pulled a Twelve Angry Men discredit on poor Mrs. Herbert Orson Lomax during the trial,” said Eleanor.
    â€œGot it,” I said, thinking of the Henry Fonda classic in which the busybody neighbor who insisted she’d seen the wrongly accused young man neglected to mention that she’d spied the crime at the exact moment an El train rumbled past, obscuring her view.
    â€œStill, I guess your investigator is going back to talk to her again.”
    â€œAgain, I wish,” said Isabella. “Mrs. Lomax has gone to her reward since the trial.”
    â€œWhat about all the new DNA evidence?” I asked. “I heard Barry Scheck—the guy from the OJ criminal trial—on the news the other day, flogging his book about stuff like that.”
    â€œThat’s an exciting emerging area,” said Eleanor. “It’s one reason they reopened the Sam Sheppard case after all these years. And that may be something Isabella can pursue. But right now, the DNA evidence is hurting her case. It’s Gifford’s DNA that was all over Mrs. Plummer. We don’t know yet if there’s any other angle to pursue.” Eleanor and Isabella exchanged a quick look. Neither said anything.
    â€œOkay, so what next?”
    â€œNow,” said Isabella, “we’re in the process of writing a brief and investigating the habeas. It’s on a killer deadline. Because once we file our AOB—that’s an appellant’s opening brief—and the state responds, we file a reply brief, and then the habeas petition is due in 180 days. If we miss the deadline, the issues that are in the habeas petition are lost forever. No one can ever raise them again.”
    â€œWhat aren’t you telling me?” I asked.
    â€œLots,”