commute to life imprisonment held nothing for him. And his chances of a complete reprieve were practically nil — so his only real hope of freedom lay in what he could hear now with the gentle lapping of the Achalaya river. Make the break and find out what was happening with Joshua, hold him in your arms again… stay back and save Roddy… make the break…
Or head back to his cell and they all make the break together in three weeks when the tide would be right, as they’d all originally planned. He wasn’t going to be able to save Roddy in any case. One against four or five, he didn’t stand a chance. Maybe he should…
His thoughts were broken. He could hear voices from the far end of the boiler room.
2
Lawrence Tyler Durrant, born May 8th 1962 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the second child (there’s an elder sister) of Nathan Joseph and Myrie-Jane Durrant. The family moved to New Orleans when Durrant was eleven.
First arrested 19th August 1992, six months after the offence, made a full confession on his second interview, held without bail in Oakdale Detention Centre until trial, which ran through April and May 1993. Sentenced to death by lethal injection by Judge Thomas S. Colby on May 26th and bought to Libreville prison.
Jac lifted his head from the files and took a quick sip of coffee, grimacing as it trickled down. It was already cold; he’d been reading longer than he had realized.
Most of the information was in a five-page summary provided at the time of Durrant’s appeal, but Jac found himself leafing back through the files each time he hit a key point — parents, siblings, wife and young child, past criminal form — to find out more.
No history of criminality in the family. Nathan Joseph had been a postal sorting worker for most of his life, then later managed a small chain of grocery stores, while Myrie-Jane worked in a local Ninth Ward cafe once the kids had grown up. The only other family member with any run-ins with the law, though once removed, was Lawrence’s first cousin, Simon: juvenile shoplifting and one count of assault when he was nineteen.
Lawrence was a different matter. After five years of trying to make his name as a light-heavyweight boxer, interspersed with casual jobs, he became a serial house thief — though out of four previous arrests, New Orleans PD had only managed to make one conviction stick.
While his falling from grace as a boxer could have been viewed as the start of his criminality, his police file noted that there was ‘suspicion of other robberies both before his boxing career and while he was still amateur, albeit that no arrests were made during these periods’. And little pattern of violence connected with the robberies, except on one occasion when he was disturbed and knocked a man unconscious with a couple of pistol-whip blows from behind.
But the NOPD argued that Durrant had simply been lucky enough not to have been seen on any of the past robberies. And on this occasion, Jessica Roche had seen him, and he was desperately afraid of going down for a second time. He’d had a taste of prison, a three-year stretch in Oakdale, and didn’t want to return. Second offence, he’d have got a minimum of five years.
Jac rubbed the bridge of his nose. With Durrant’s later self-educating and finding religion in prison, his life was certainly one of contrasts — boxer, thief, scholar, preacher — few of them sitting that comfortably together.
Jac went back to the beginning of the segment on Durrant’s family. Second marriage to Francine Gleason (Durrant’s first at the age of nineteen ended in divorce after only fifteen months) just three years before the Roche break-in, no record of other robberies in that period, or at least none that the NOPD had him down as a specific suspect for, and a baby son, Joshua, only three months old at the time. Not the best timing to re-offend.
But then that had been part of the motive, the prosecution had argued: the financial pressures of the new family and Durrant losing his job as an assistant in a sporting-goods store only six weeks previously. Then his return to heavy drinking and his car accident four months after the murder while out on one of his binges. Larry Durrant’s life was a wreck of mishaps and falling from graces. Doing the right thing at the right time was far from his strongest suit.
Then the therapy sessions following the accident to treat his resultant partial amnesia — or ‘selective amnesia’ as the prosecution later termed it, ‘to blank out the darkness of his actions that night with Jessica Roche’ — and his confession coming out when…
Jac jumped at a sudden bang from next door sounding like a pistol-shot, before he realized it was a door slamming. A man’s voice, shouting, came straight after.
‘I told you. I don’t like you working there any more.’
‘And how am I meant to take care of Molly and pay for my courses?’ The woman’s voice higher-pitched, shriller. Defensive.
‘I’m workin’ again now, I could take care of you. And you got that other money.’
‘Yeah, Gerry. And you know what that other money was for. You know! And how come you’re still splashing it around?’
‘Come on, babe — gimme some credit. I told you what mine was for, too. But this time, I’m like an assistant bar-manager rather than just a barman… and the tips are big.’
Muted mumbling and rustling, as if he was in close, trying to hug and sweet-talk her. Then, after a moment, rising from the mumbling:
‘Give it up, babe… give it up.’ The words punctuated by what sounded like gentle kisses. ‘For me. Is that too much to…’
‘No… no!’ Sharper, louder. Annoyance at his intimacy to try and sway her. ‘It’s not even open for…
‘I just don’t like other guys lookin’ at you like that. It drives me, well… crazy, thinking about it.’
‘Yeah, yeah.
But his voice followed her, and the argument continued in more muted, indistinct tones behind the closed door.
Jac had heard quite a few arguments coming from next door over the past couple of months. He could hear them clearly when they were in the lounge or kitchen directly adjacent, the bedrooms less so, and the bathroom at the far end not at all.
He listened out for a moment more, but all that reached him was the low drone of traffic, like a muffled swarm of bees, passing on Highway 90 a few blocks away. These were the main disadvantages of his apartment block. At the low-cost end of housing in the Warehouse District, the minimal partition walls meant that you could hear your neighbours when their voices raised, as well as the traffic on the nearby main arteries heading out of the city.
Jac brought his attention back to the files, opening the police report with due veneration and turning over the photos that earlier he’d flipped firmly face-down. He hadn’t wanted to look at them initially, in case they influenced his judgement of Larry Durrant before he started. He wanted to get a feel for the man first, then the crime. Get the sequence right.
One gun-shot to the stomach from eight to ten feet, according to ballistics, then the final shot to the head from close range, only a few inches. The photos of Jessica Roche’s splayed body were painfully raw and would have had a strong impact on even the most hardened juror: one of her legs was crooked behind her at an impossible angle, her blood on the black-and-whites merging with where she’d soiled her dress, and one side of her face collapsed where her skull had shattered, stark horror in contrast to the beauty of her unblemished side.
Jac rubbed his forehead and reached for his coffee cup, before realizing that it was already empty. He could imagine the first shot being fired by somebody already on edge, suddenly disturbed. But that final shot seemed out
