“Life is hard. You either take responsibility and soldier on, or you pass blame to your kids,” Kevin wrote. “Can you imagine how I feel knowing I am in jail because my mother loves getting high more than she loves her own son?” He reiterated over and over that three fentanyl patches equaled “THREE TIMES” what she had been prescribed.
Ryan worked long hours preparing for the Duffy trial. In the weeks leading up to the big event, Linda began to call Ryan at his office. Bob had already been found guilty at his trial of felony counts for recklessly endangering safety and for threats to injure with intent to extort, and he was sentenced to serve two years in prison with five years of extended supervision. Linda was fully aware now of her power. Maybe she regretted it.
“I don’t want Kevin to end up in prison,” she told Ryan. “I feel like I’m squealing on my own baby, and now he’s going to be in the dark for years.”
She called repeatedly, asking for advice about what to say when the DA called her to the witness stand at trial. “I can’t tell you what to say,” Ryan said, reminding her that if she recanted her written statement and prior testimony, she would be impeached and called a liar. Eventually at trial, Ryan was given the opportunity to cross-examine Linda after the assistant DA took her turn, and Linda testified that she could not remember events.
“Is it possible that on that night in October you fell to the ground because the grass was slippery or because it was dark or because the ground was uneven?”
“I can’t say for sure,” she said.
“And is it possible that Bob, not Kevin, helped you back into the house?”
“I don’t remember.”
“And is it possible that Kevin left for his gig and didn’t return until closing time?”
“I really don’t remember.”
“And is it possible that on the night of October second because you were under the influence of powerful drugs, self-administered and later administered by hospital personnel, among them opiates, and then Xanax, a downer and mood relaxer, that you misrepresented the events?”
“It’s possible.”
“You agree, then, that your statement might be colored by the drugs and your emotional state at the time?”
“Yes.”
And there it was—the take-back. Linda Duffy backpedaled her way off the witness stand, having retracted significant details in her story. Did she do it because she loved her son or rather because she had lied in the first place?
“This is a case about the dissolution of a thirty-year marriage and how, in that marriage’s dissolution, Kevin Duffy became collateral damage,” Ryan argued in his closing statement. “Seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that humankind is driven by the passions or instincts linked to self-preservation. In other words, humans—people—as much as we may not want to believe it, are inherently self-interested. Linda was recently ordered to pay five hundred dollars a month in spousal maintenance to Bob. Certainly she would have been excused from those payments if the man were in prison.”
What else did Linda stand to gain if her husband and son were incarcerated: the house, all of the family’s possessions, and some version of revenge? In his statement, Bob said about Linda, “She was always hurting her sons, always wanting them to take sides.” In her statement, Linda said much the opposite: “I believe Kevin is a victim because of his dad. The kids were put in the middle a lot.”
Before Kevin’s testimony, Ryan jotted him a note, right there at the defense table: “Say you love your mother and father.” Was this reminder really necessary, and if so, would his efforts to appear sympathetic be enough to convert self-preservation into real tenderness and possibly forgiveness, if not now, sometime in the distant future?
I attended portions of Kevin Duffy’s trial. I’d become attached to his innocence too. When he offered us an employee discount on bunk beds at the furniture store where he worked, we arrived, all four kids in tow. Although we sternly warned them not to climb around like monkeys, they disobeyed us. They scaled the sides of stacked beds and mounted them in wet boots. The girls fought vociferously.
“I’m sleeping on top.”
“No, I am, you idiot. I’m older and I’ve earned it.”
“Mom, Irie says she’s getting the top bunk. She’s too big to sleep up there. She’ll break the bed and land on me.”
If bunk beds provided the illusion of more space in our 1,700-square-foot house on Hazel Street, maybe the kids would fight less, and maybe Ryan would scream fewer curse words at bedtime. With two in top bunks, I’d be less inclined to sleep with them, more likely to climb into my husband’s heat.
“My brother and I slept in bunk beds,” Kevin told us. He was sweet-lipped and smiley, waving away my apologies as if truly entertained by the kids’ antics. It was impossible for me to imagine he ever got angry, much less violent, but I’d also learned nothing is what it seems. Our children were known to hold hands and dole out bloody noses on the same afternoon. Leo, for example, never exhibited violence in public. People found him to be passive and gentle, but his nickname at home was “the angry German.” He threw tantrums as if gargling anger, vomiting if the Badgers or Packers lost an important game. He’d throw books at the TV screen and convulse in a language we didn’t understand.
Friends and colleagues of Kevin Duffy’s responded to his plight with an outpouring of support in the form of letters addressed to the court. His aunt wrote, “I believe the entire incident is a grand fabricated scheme and that Linda let her lies go too far. She has manipulated the system for her own agenda.”
After a two-day trial and hours of deliberation in State
