Irie and Leo couldn’t believe their dad was on TV. We listened to him feed the reporter standard defense attorney lines, clutching his poker hand tight against his breast pocket, in his first high-profile case, State of Wisconsin v. Joseph A. Michalik, in which an Iraq War veteran was charged with killing his ex-girlfriend’s cats, facing two counts of felony mistreatment of animals resulting in death.
“A lot of evidence wasn’t heard today,” Ryan said. “My client is innocent until proven guilty, and that is how we are proceeding should we go to trial.”
In Oshkosh, where Memorial and Independence Day parades yield larger turnouts than elections, where Veterans of Foreign Wars and Humane Society dogs make parade-goers weep, the needles on spectators’ moral compasses spun in endlessly confused circles, Joseph Michalik greeted simultaneously by salutes and damnation. This fusion of love and hate also characterized Michalik’s short-term relationship with the cats’ owner, Cali Ziegler, a young woman sympathetically bulging, pregnant with Michalik’s son. The evidence against Michalik—necropsy reports and feline remains—symbolized the end of their romance, though nobody knew yet what to make of Ziegler’s baby and the umbilical cord connecting these estranged lovers as much as it yoked mother to child.
Their June due date was only days before our fourth child—our second son, Francis—was predicted to arrive, two boys muscling up in separate wombs on the same side of town. Ziegler and I were under care of the same midwives at the same medical center. The boys’ fathers were leading news, more scandalous locally than the war itself ever was, animal rights activists landing a brighter spotlight. Ryan expected picketers around every corner, their acronyms a jumble of nerve-racking letters: ASPCA, PETA, HSUS. They printed T-shirts, pinned orange ribbons to their lapels, and staged protests at Michalik’s preliminary hearing, arraignment, and pretrial conferences.
Ryan reviewed the evidence meticulously and arranged plot points in his head. As every lawyer knows, and as every Law & Order enthusiast believes, trials are theater, even though what makes for riveting TV does not always make for justice. Joseph Michalik was a name we learned to say at home, enjoying its onomatopoetic quality, cathartic as the f-word. Linked in consonance with click and lock, Michalik sounded like a prison cell door, lights out, a fate Ryan guarded against for the first time, as prior to Michalik, his clients had only faced time in jail. In some ways, Michalik reminded us of Derek Green because he was utterly sympathetic, but our allegiance to him was further accentuated by the fact that he’d never committed a crime before returning from Iraq.
As Ryan grated out public defender appointments, it was easy to take his clients’ wrongdoing for granted, but his job also entailed looking at crimes from a levelheaded perspective. Transgressions were not always as egregious as prosecutors argued. He met every DA at the line of scrimmage and tried to prevent overwhelming defeat, using pure and simple common sense: a voluntary program instead of probation, probation instead of jail time, or a short-term stay in the clink instead of a longer stint in Wisconsin’s prison system.
The state’s case against Michalik began a week before Christmas, stockings hung by Cali Ziegler’s stovetop with care. Michalik crashed at her upstairs apartment in Oshkosh, where they’d briefly coexisted, allowing their possessions to commingle. He stayed this night with Ziegler’s permission, while she worked hospice care. I’ve always wondered, whose spiritual needs did Ziegler tend to on the night in question? Did she crush ice chips or massage the lifeline on an old woman’s palm?
Of course, nobody recorded details of Ziegler’s nightshift or of her journey home at sunrise. Instead investigators focused on the scene of the crime. Aside from one thud in the night, downstairs neighbors neither heard nor saw anything suspicious, but in the morning, Michalik texted Ziegler to report bad news. Her orange-and-white cat, Wilson, had escaped, and Michalik could not find him. Michalik laid Ziegler’s house keys on her kitchen table, pulled the door closed, tightened his backpack, and bicycled twenty miles to his mother’s house beneath weeping, sleeting skies. When Ziegler arrived home from work, not many hours later, she called out for her furry companions, but she could find neither Wilson nor her black kitten, Molly.
“Molly, come here, girl,” she said, but she did not hear the clack of claws.
Perhaps because I was raised with indoor-outdoor cats, in the country, a missing feline never signaled foul play. When Fluffy, Tiger, Smokey, or Puff—all uninspired names, I realized too late—disappeared, we assumed they were hunting mice in the woodpile, chasing chipmunks in the field, or taking a vacation in the Doemels’ barn. Our faith in their return was always rewarded hours or days later, and this experience made Ziegler’s instinct to call Oshkosh police seem strange, but she called them twice.
The first time police responded to Ziegler’s phone call, they searched her backyard as if trawling a frozen river, searching both sides of the fence alongside the duplex, beneath the ice-dipped shrubs, whistling and cooing, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” Ziegler traipsed down the wooden fire escape, joining officers, packing snow into a semisweet glaze. Near the driveway, she bent to peek beneath a snowmobile trailer, and because she had committed Wilson’s markings to heart, she spotted him immediately, even though he was camouflaged, his white-and-orange patches identical to the rust-colored cottonwood leaves strewn across the snow. His fangs were clamped against his furry lip, body gone stiff, dead from blunt-force trauma to the head.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Ziegler likely wept. “Joseph must have shot him with his air rifle.” On hands and knees, officers scraped Wilson from the ice, taking his congealed body into their arms for evidence. His grimace looked ferocious like a cougar’s despite his domesticated size. Ziegler disappeared upstairs and returned quickly, still in some muted version of hysterics. “The air rifle is gone,” she cried,
