Cali Ziegler’s outline, on television, as she raised her pink-manicured right hand, was blurred to protect her anonymity. She enunciated her side of the story with an unambiguous Wisconsin accent, vowels hard and cylindrical as ziti before it is boiled. Perhaps Ziegler endured months without food as I did in pregnancy, eating only the unholy wafer of pregnant women everywhere, saltine crackers, and sipping lemonade. How exactly does malnourishment of first and second trimesters affect the mother’s lucidity? Police officers had come to know Ziegler on a first-name basis long before she met Michalik. In a statement to police about a domestic dispute with a previous boyfriend, she claimed to be pregnant but was later discovered not to be. Now Ziegler really was flowering on the inside.
Nor did the case of the dead cats earmark Ziegler’s first time in court. Before Wilson and Molly were killed, before Michalik and Ziegler broke up, before Ziegler knew she was pregnant, she alleged Michalik threw a cell phone at her during an argument, and he was charged with battery. The morning of Michalik’s plea and sentencing, Ziegler called Ryan and offered him help in the form of an ultimatum. If Michalik was willing to sign over to Ziegler the title to his Jeep, she would give a statement to the judge in Michalik’s favor, but if Michalik was not willing to bequeath his vehicle, she would state that he was more monster than former lover. When Ryan called her bluff, she stormed out of the courtroom, forged Michalik’s signature on the title, and peeled from the courtroom parking lot in his Jeep anyway. One full year later, she would be charged with two felony counts of forgery.
The true turning point in this ever-changing story ultimately arrived in the mail as an unsolicited letter from Ziegler’s brother, Brent Ziegler, to the Oshkosh Police Department. In the four-page memo, he addressed Ziegler’s history of lies and manipulation, in fact revealing that he had discovered the Crosman American Classic 1377 air pistol, the weapon used to kill Wilson, in Ziegler’s dresser drawer. He wrote, “I strongly believe that Cali is wasting the city and county resources and paints a picture that is not true to gain the benefit and the attention of others. If Joseph Michalik did actually kill her cats, he probably was driven to do so by Cali’s ability to play mind games. However, I believe that Cali might have done this herself to gain the desired attention she was not receiving.”
When the deputy DA stood before Ryan and Joseph Michalik, six months after the alleged crimes, the judge asked, “Are you dismissing the charges against Joseph A. Michalik for burden of proof issues?”
“No, Your Honor. We could easily prove Michalik guilty as charged, but I have reason to believe the evidence is not genuine.”
Brent Ziegler wrote in his letter, “Cali alluded that her decision to become pregnant with Joseph Michalik’s baby was intentional. During the conversation Cali stated that she stopped using birth control.” He went on to detail Ziegler’s drinking vodka and chain-smoking cigarettes throughout the pregnancy. “While I understand that Cali has the right to make these decisions for herself, I feel that she is endangering the child she is carrying.” As a fellow mother, I wondered, at this point, whom we should worry about: Wilson and Molly, long gone, or Ziegler’s baby boy, my son’s comrade, born safely on the tail of one war but potentially into the jaws of another.
When I was in labor with Francis, at the end of June, Ryan asked our midwife if a mother named Cali had recently delivered a boy. “We have a Cali in labor right now,” she said, and briefly, though she turned out to be somebody else, I wondered if Ziegler and I would birth our boys in sync, and if I might orchestrate an accidental meeting in the hallway or at the nurses’ station. New mothers do not share rooms anymore, at least not here, but I felt connected to Ziegler briefly, and in a way, Joseph Michalik lived on in my baby boy. That year, 2010, was the Year of the Tiger for babies who promised to be courageous, hotheaded, and rash—warriors of various kinds. In the whirlwind of Francis’s summer birth, I failed to add his name, officially, to our health insurance plan. Our second son, like our first, was an uninsured baby until the university Human Resources Department helped me sort the mess.
We’d been deliberately careful about everything else, even Francis’s name, perhaps because of Michalik. Our son’s nickname, Frank, pays homage to my grandfather; his other nom de guerre, Franco, is a halfhearted, perhaps ironic tribute to my Spanish major and studies in Madrid. Our little boy, like all babies, was a miniature Francisco Franco, a dictator, demanding Mama’s milk and skin-to-skin contact. But his given name, Francis, was a superstitious effort to counterbalance the everyday discord of Ryan’s life defending criminals.
As a young girl, I adored the youngest boy, Francis, in Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson. While his older brothers, Fritz and Ernst, appeared somber and harrowed, taking responsibility for their survival after being shipwrecked, Francis was exuberant, inventive, and playfully optimistic about his family’s future. He investigated wildlife, tamed ostriches and zebras, and amassed his own menagerie of loyal animals. The actor who played Francis, Kevin Corcoran, also played Arliss in Old Yeller, a wide-eyed, animal-loving boy with an unmatched zest for the well-being of all living things. And if Francis Robinson were not auspicious enough, I believed Saint Francis of Assisi bore good fortune, a namesake protection against some kind of unpredictable violence, a prophet sent to us in peace, flag of surrender undulating, like a whitecap in the wind.
At which Madrid museum did I see my first-ever original painting of Saint Francis—the Reina Sofía or
