sound. The clouds had smothered the moon, and from my window I saw no artificial light break the darkness. There were only variations of shadow: trees against grass, land bordering black water, and the sea waiting beyond. Beside me I had a cup of coffee, and the list of names connected with his trial that Randall Haight had provided. I found myself thinking about Selina Day. I wanted to see a picture of her, because in this she had been all but forgotten. For Haight, she was a ghost from his past inconveniently summoned to the present by the taunts of another. The story of her life had been written, and given its conclusion. If she mattered at all it was simply because she shared an age with Anna Kore, and it could only be hoped that they did not already share a similar fate.
So I began trawling the Internet for details about the killing of Selina Day. There was less information than I might have wished, mainly because her death occurred in the glorious days before anything and everything ended up on the Internet, either as fact or speculation. Eventually I had amassed a small pile of printed pages, most of them from the archives of the local
But I found that for which I had been searching: a picture of the murdered girl. In it, she was younger than she was when she died, probably by three or four years. Her hair was worn in pigtails, and she had a pronounced gap between her upper front teeth that might eventually have been corrected by braces. She was wearing a checked dress with a lace collar. The photograph had been taken side-on, so that Selina had turned her head slightly to face the camera. It was not a formal pose, and she appeared happy and relaxed. She looked like what she was: a pretty little girl on her way to becoming a young woman. I wondered why a more recent photo had not been used, then figured that this was the picture her mother had chosen to represent her. This was how she had wanted her daughter to be remembered, as her little girl but with a whole life ahead of her. One could not look at such an image and not feel grief for those left behind, and anger at the end Selina had met.
The accompanying articles did not include the kind of hand-wringing features usually inspired by such cases, typically represented by the twin poles of ‘What Is Happening to Our Children and What Can We Do to Make Them Better People Less Inclined to Kill Teenage Girls?’ and ‘What Is Happening to Our Children and Can We Make Them Better People by Locking Them Up Forever, or Trying Them As Adults and Sentencing Them to Death?’ Instead, the reports remained studiedly factual, even after a minimum eighteen-year sentence had been passed on each of the boys. As soon as the case had concluded, it appeared to fall entirely from view.
That was, I supposed, hardly surprising. A small community would not wish to have that particular wound repeatedly reopened: a murder committed by two of their own, a pair of apparently normal young boys, against a black girl, who was not one of their own by virtue of her race but was still only a girl. The situation was further complicated by the fact that the black and white communities in that part of North Dakota shared a common bond through baseball. North Dakota, along with Minnesota, was one of the few states in the Union where blacks and whites had always played together with little trouble. Freddie Sims and Chappie Gray had been the first black athletes to play semipro baseball in North Dakota, soon followed by Art Hancock, the ‘black Babe Ruth,’ and his brother Charlie. Eventually the Bismarck town team attracted the great Satchel Paige, and it was in North Dakota that Paige played alongside white men for the first time. Upon retiring from the game, a number of the black players decided to spend the rest of their lives in Drake Creek, and there was still a small museum in the town devoted to their achievements. In other words, the sex-related killing of a black girl by two white boys would have threatened the delicate racial balance that this part of North Dakota had managed to maintain for so long. Better to deal with it, then set aside all that had happened as extraordinary and move on. And perhaps those who felt that way were right: The killing of children by children is a terrible exception, or it was until gangbangers and ignorant men began glorifying the code of living and dying by the gun in projects and ghettos. Each instance deserved to be examined, if only so that some understanding of the individual circumstances might be reached, but whether or not there was a general lesson for society in a case like the Selina Day killing seemed unlikely.
Still, by the end of my search I had confirmed a number of the names on Haight’s list: the two public defenders appointed to the boys, the prosecuting attorney (who was the same in both cases), and the judge. The witness statements were minimal, as the boys had confessed to the crime before trial, so the issue at hand became purely a matter of sentencing. No mention was made of the deal that Randall Haight had claimed was struck, the social experiment that would ultimately allow him and Lonny Midas to escape the shadow of their crime, publicly at least. Again, that wasn’t particularly unusual; to some degree, it would have been dependent on the progress made by the boys while in custody, and no sane prosecutor, defender, or judge hoping for a degree of advancement in the judiciary would willingly have become a public party to such an agreement in the immediate aftermath of the trial.
I started working on the four names. One of the public defenders, Larraine Walker, was dead; she had died in a motorcycle accident in 1996. The second public defender, Cory Felder, had dropped off the radar, and I could find no record of him after 1998. The prosecuting attorney was a man named R. Dean Bailey. That name rang a bell. A couple of keystrokes later, R. Dean Bailey was revealed as a repeatedly unsuccessful challenger for a Republican nomination to Congress. Bailey’s views on immigration, welfare, and, indeed, government in general were colorful to say the least, even by the standards of some of the vitriol that regularly emerged from the extreme conservative wing of the Republican Party. In fact, like most of his kind, his views on federal government could best be summarized as ‘keep it as small as possible unless it’s convenient for me and my friends to have it otherwise, and as long as I can still be a part of it and stick my nose in the federal trough’; or, to put it another way, it’s all waste except for the part that benefits me.
Meanwhile, his views on race, any religion that didn’t involve Christ, anyone whose first language wasn’t English, and the poor in general would have earned him sidelong glances at a Nazi Party convention. Thankfully, somewhere on the Republican National Committee common sense continued to prevail against giving Bailey a national forum for outpourings that bordered on hate speech and sedition. I couldn’t begin to imagine what journey he had taken from being a prosecutor prepared to allow two boys convicted of second-degree murder a chance at a normal life to someone who was now advocating letting the poor starve and proposing limits on the right to religious freedom, but it didn’t seem likely that he would be overjoyed at being reminded of the Selina Day case. Bailey was now a partner in the law firm of Young Grantham Bailey. A quick search produced a list of cases that routinely pitted YGB’s exclusively wealthy and influential business clients against communities and individuals whose quality of life had allegedly been damaged, sometimes to the point of mortality, by the actions of those for whom Bailey and his partners acted as mouthpieces, firefighters, and bully boys. They seemed particularly adept at employing delaying tactics that caused cases to drag on for years, draining their opponents of funds and energy or, as in some particularly odious cases, until the plaintiffs simply died and their cases died with them. I made a note to call Young Grantham Bailey in the morning, if only to see how Bailey might respond, then put a line through it. Randall Haight had enough problems without drawing the attention of a man like R. Dean Bailey to him, especially an R. Dean Bailey who had undergone some form of reverse Damascene conversion.
That left the judge, Maurice P. Bowens. According to Haight, Bowens had been the prime instigator of the proposal to offer the boys new identities prior to their release. I found a short online biography of Bowens, prepared upon his retirement from the bench. He had begun practicing law in Pennsylvania, but had subsequently moved to North Dakota, eventually becoming a federal-court judge there. He had retired in 2005, indicating his desire to live permanently in his home just outside Bismarck, there to watch the ‘mighty Missouri flow by his doors,’ as he put it.
There was only one Maurice P. Bowens listed in the Bismarck directory. Having nothing better to do, I called the number, and a woman answered on the third ring. I gave her my name and occupation, and asked if this was the residence of the former judge. She told me that it was.
‘I’m his daughter, Anita,’ she said.
‘Would it be possible to speak to your father? It’s in connection with one of his old cases.’
‘I’m sorry. My father has suffered a series of strokes over the past eighteen months. They’ve left him very frail, and he speaks only with great difficulty. I take care of his affairs for him now.’
‘I’m sorry to hear about his illness. I’d be grateful if you could mention to your father that I called. It’s about Randall Haight, or William Lagenheimer, depending upon how your father chooses to remember him. I’m acting on Mr. Haight’s behalf. Please tell your father that, as far as I’m aware, Mr. Haight hasn’t done anything wrong, but
