Green and Shaffer were surprised by how quickly December flurries had accumulated and seemed to be smoldering in the parking lot like a widespread scattering of ash. The snow was pinkish gray where kicked-up gravel poked holes, crystals spinning velvet and crinoline layers, as the temperature fluctuated. Shaffer followed Green’s tire treads. He was pushing the cart now, wheels spinning like electric beaters, the Sony system box newly fastened to the shopping cart as they headed uphill. Shaffer pushed Destiny’s stroller into the white wind, knuckles wet and red. I wondered, later, had they considered snagging gloves, warm winter jackets, or shoes without holes for themselves?
Halfway home—they had almost made it—a police officer spied Green, Shaffer, and all their baggage, including their infant child. He pulled over, offered assistance, and discovered, as backup arrived on the scene, evidence, or lack thereof—no receipt, no bags—that would be used against both parents in a court of law. Ryan and I were out celebrating; he turned thirty-one that very day in 2008, a momentous epoch—the year Fern was born and also the year he had opened Ulrich Law Office. Fittingly, we would mark Derek Green and Allison Shaffer’s Walmart theft as the exact moment in time when Ryan’s work in criminal defense truly began.
From the outside looking in, Oshkosh appears innocent, known worldwide for its children’s clothing and overalls, but having both been raised here, we ridiculed our city with nicknames like Oshburg, Osh Vegas, and the Big Zero. Initially when Ryan gained VIP access to our hometown underbelly, we were dazzled, instead of distressed, to learn that our hamlet possessed an alter ego characterized by offbeat, sometimes Hollywood-like hijinks and crime. One of the first mothers Ryan defended, Renee Dubois, was charged with a felony crime known as uttering—distribution of forged checks. I could not help but imagine this devious woman “udder-ing,” or milking that quintessentially female organ. The judge showed no sympathy as Dubois cried about a daughter awaiting her return in Florida.
Another mother, Imani Butler, was accused of stabbing her boyfriend in the back with a paring knife while her daughter watched TV in an adjoining room, an incident humorous only because the guy avoided hospitalization, and we never knew whether to take the story figuratively, as a metaphor for betrayal, or literally. Violence registered on a sliding scale, but where crimes landed was never clear, such as when a guy named Malik Turner pointed the muzzle of an unloaded gun at his girlfriend’s stomach. She quickly chased him from the apartment, hurled a twenty-pound cinder block onto his windshield from her second-story window, and screamed till he burned rubber up the street, brick still wedged into the spray of broken glass. He craned his head out the driver’s side window, a preposterous spectacle that made it easy for the police officers to track and arrest him. Facing up to twenty-five years in prison for battery and recklessly endangering safety, Turner almost rejected the deal of the century in favor of a trial but came to his senses after a jury had been selected.
“That guy scared the shit out of me,” Ryan said of this first on a list of truly dangerous clients. Of course, the women—victims, “victims,” or perpetrators—interested me most, immersed as I was in motherhood, temporarily relieved of a depression I’d suffered since childhood. I had always imagined myself derailing like a freight train. When I was only six years old, at the babysitter’s house, I’d wear plastic bags over my head, plotting my death. “You’ve got to do more than just breathe into a bag, moron,” older children would tell me. My backup plan was to suffocate beneath a kid pileup, and I begged them to sit on me. Often my depression manifested as anger, and I’d chase my full brother, Christopher, through our house with a chef’s knife as if hunting an animal, ready to skin him alive. When he called me ugly or stupid, I’d snap and scream, “I’m going to kill you!” I’d run brandishing the blade, my urge insatiable. He usually locked himself in our parents’ home office, but once (or twice) I forced the butcher blade into the opening between the sliding wood doors, hoping to cut my brother open.
Two of my own three children, during our first full winter in Oshkosh, were daughters, and I studied them just as closely as I did Ryan’s clients, wishing away my brand of madness. Fern was born the same month and year as Green and Shaffer’s daughter, Destiny—a potential playmate, had our social circles overlapped—and we also struggled to afford the high cost of raising a family. Even though quitting his daily ninety-mile commute to Milwaukee to hang his own shingle in Oshkosh was a good decision family-wise, those transitional years would prove financially deadly. Starting a business sounded dreamy in June, nerve-racking in December.
Even before Fern, Ryan had worried himself sick over money. Throughout our childbearing years, his most repeated utterances were variations on the same theme: “Let’s wait another year.” “Enough babies already.” “How can we afford to feed all these mouths?” “Jesus Christ, we’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.” Wisconsin’s payment to private attorneys taking public defender cases was the lowest in the nation, frozen since 1995, when the per-hour rate was lowered from $50.00 to $40.00 per hour, a rate that seemed almost feasible, until a report by the Sixth Amendment Center ascertained that the average overhead rate for running a law office
