Authors: Allison Leotta
Anna was surprised. She hadn’t asked him to do anything recently. “What have you got?”
“Wendy put the lake house up for sale.”
Jody looked shocked. She met Anna’s eyes and said, “That was fast.”
“How’d you find out?” Anna asked.
“There was a little ad in the
Holly Grove Observer
,” Cooper said. “So I made an appointment to go see it.”
“Why? We saw it at the memorial service.”
“We saw what Wendy wanted us to see.”
“True. So did you crack the case?”
He smiled. “No. But this Realtor was chatty. She said I could put in a lowball bid because the owner needs to sell it. Apparently, they owned the house free and clear at one point, but the coach borrowed almost a million dollars against its equity. Now, Wendy needs to get whatever she can out of it, to pay off a bunch more debts they racked up.”
“A million dollars in debt,” Anna said. “What’d they spend it on?”
“That, I couldn’t tell you.” Cooper said.
“I’ll send out trial subpoenas to banks, credit cards, and the credit agencies,” Anna said. “The problem with that is they won’t have to give me anything until the day of trial.”
They quieted as the waitress came back with their food. As they ate, Anna used her phone to log on to the Michigan courts’ website and search for the articles of incorporation for Owen Fowler’s companies. But they were too old. The website only had documents going back ten years.
After lunch, they went back to the courthouse, but instead of Judge Upperthwaite’s beautiful courtroom, they descended to the basement, where the clerk’s office was housed. Here, the building’s magnificence gave way to grim function. Windowless halls were lit with fluorescent lights; old stone walls painted off-white led to a large room filled with mismatched filing cabinets. The room was separated from the hallway by a long Formica counter. The whole basement smelled dank, as if centuries of court records were slowly molding. A hauntingly pale man came over.
“Hi,” Anna said. “I was hoping to see the articles of incorporation for any companies Owen Fowler owned.”
“That might take a while,” he said.
“I understand. We can wait. Thank you.”
He turned and disappeared into the labyrinth of filing cabinets. An hour later, he came back and handed Anna a file full of papers. “It’s ten cents a copy, so you owe me three dollars and seventy cents.”
Anna fished out the money. “Thanks.”
They walked up the stairs and back outside. The sunshine felt good after the gloom of the courthouse basement. The three of them sat on a bench in the square. Anna looked at the papers. The coach had created three corporations. The first was called Fowler Athletics. It had a number of prominent citizens on the board. According to the coach’s website, this was the company through which he ran his summer camps. The second was Fowler Athletics Charity, the charitable, nonprofit arm of his camp, the part that served underprivileged kids. It, too, had a board of directors with titles like “mayor,” “councilman,” and “state senator.” The final corporation was called FirstDown, LLC. It had been founded in 1996 and had only two people on the board: Owen Fowler and a woman named Lena Hoffmeister.
“FirstDown sounds like another football company. But who’s Lena Hoffmeister?” Cooper said.
Anna and Jody shook their heads. Cooper pulled out his phone and tapped his Google icon. Ten minutes and fifteen dollars later, he had completed an online background check on Lena Hoffmeister. He held the screen so both sisters could see it.
The report listed basic biographical information. Lena was born in 1932 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She graduated from Grand Blanc High School in 1950. And in 1954, she changed her name to Lena Upperthwaite, after marrying one Lawrence Upperthwaite.
Anna blinked. “This is Judge Upperthwaite’s wife.”
Jody looked up in surprise. “Judge Upperthwaite’s wife was Coach Fowler’s partner in this FirstDown company?”
Cooper nodded. “Looks like it.”
35
J
udge Upperthwaite shouldn’t be sitting on Jody’s case. His wife had been in business with the murder victim. Their families were financially intertwined. The judge should recuse himself.
But Anna was hesitant to file a recusal motion. It would suggest he was so tied up with the parties, personally, that he couldn’t be a fair arbiter of the case. No judge—no person—wanted to think that way about himself. And Judge Upperthwaite would be the one to make the decision. He would be offended, and if he denied the motion, she’d still be stuck with him for the rest of the trial.
She considered going to talk to Lena Hoffmeister but dismissed the idea. It would infuriate the judge.
While she mulled the recusal issue, Anna moved for some advance-of-trial subpoenas, which would allow her to see the coach’s financial information sooner than the first day of trial. The judge denied them all, without giving a reason.
After that, she decided to ask the judge to recuse himself. Jody deserved a judge whose family finances weren’t intertwined with the dead man’s. If Judge Upperthwaite denied the motion, at least Anna would have preserved the issue for an appeal. If—she hated to think about this, but she had to—Jody was convicted, Anna would need all the appellate arguments she could get.
She wrote a motion explaining that Lena Upperthwaite and Owen Fowler had been partners in FirstDown. She cited the leading cases on judicial conflict of interest, attached a copy of the articles of incorporation, and filed it.
Two days later, she got back a one-sentence order from the judge, summarily denying her motion. No reasons were given.
• • •
A week later, Anna found a large yellow envelope stuck in between the wooden door and the screen door of Jody’s house. She picked it up.
Anna Curtis
was handwritten on the front. There was no stamp, address, or return label.
Anna took the envelope to the kitchen table. She grabbed a steak knife and sliced it open, cutting her finger in the process. “Ouch!” Blood dripped onto the yellow envelope.
Anna went to the bathroom and searched the medicine cabinet for a Band-Aid. It was so quiet and lonely in Jody’s house. At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, she already would’ve passed two detectives talking about swabbing her for DNA. After her finger was bandaged, she returned to the kitchen and opened the envelope more carefully this time. Five pieces of paper slid out: five police reports. There was no note saying who’d left the envelope or why. Whoever left it wanted to remain anonymous.
The first document was a police report from 1999, similar to the witness statement from Jody’s report. Short, simple, and to the point:
CW: Deana Dominguez, DOB: 1/21/85
S-1: Owen Fowler, DOB: 3/17/64
Date of report: 7/5/99
Witness Statement: CW reports that S-1 engaged in vaginal intercourse with her while in his car, in the 1500 block of Otis Place at approximately 23:00 on 7/1/99. CW does not wish to press charges.
Anna looked up. Coach Fowler had sexually assaulted another girl, years before he assaulted Jody. Anna considered it a sexual assault, although she had no clue how it happened. He had been thirty-five; the girl had been fourteen. That was statutory rape, whether or not the child “consented.”
She looked at the next piece of paper. It was a similar report from a thirteen-year-old girl, in 2006, who had sex with the coach in his car. The third file was a fifteen-year-old girl, in 2009, almost verbatim to the 2006 event. A fourteen-year-old girl reported in 2011; she had the distinction of sex in the coach’s office in the school, as opposed to his car.
Coach Fowler was a serial rapist. And a pedophile.
And somebody, anonymously, wanted Anna to know it.
According to the reports, none of the girls wanted to press charges. Maybe the girls had all felt allegiance to him; they might’ve even thought he was their boyfriend. But it begged the question of why they had all gone to the police. It also made Anna wonder how many other “consenting” children might
not
have made a report.
Anna heard a soft squeaking noise and realized she was clenching her teeth. She forced her jaw to relax, then realized that her fists were clenched too. Her entire body was clenched. She saw exploitation and abuses of trust again and again as a sex-crimes prosecutor, and it always angered her. But this was a man she had known and trusted—and he was preying on girls like her own sister. It felt like a very personal betrayal.
Anna looked at the last page, a case from just a few months earlier, in March of 2014. She skimmed the witness statement, which had similar text to the others:
CW’s mother claims that S-1 had sex with her in his car, on 3/7/14 at approximately 01:00. CW is uncooperative and refuses to give a statement.
Anna looked at the girl’s name and inhaled sharply. It was Hayley Mack—Kathy’s daughter.
36
T
he MotorCity Casino was the most glamorous new building in Detroit. It featured musical acts, luxury restaurants, and hip nightclubs. With its attached parking garage and highly visible security guards, it was a glass-and-neon fortress, and thus one of the few places in Detroit to which suburbanites would venture. They could drive in, party, and drive out, without ever setting foot on an actual piece of city pavement.
When Anna and Cooper walked in, the casino was throbbing with a Friday night crowd. Colorful lights and chrome accents made the interior feel like a refurbished ’57 Chevy on acid. Shiny motorcycles and pieces of classic cars were scattered about. The air thrummed with the clinking of slot machines and the calls of gamblers ordering free drinks.
Not everyone looked like they could afford the festivities. At the slot machines, old ladies pulled the handles down so regularly, they could have been working on an assembly line. A guy with gray skin clutched an oxygen tank as he played craps.
The blackjack area held an acre-long sprawl of bright green tabletops. The ten-dollar-minimum tables were filled with packs of giggling sorority girls, there to have fun and flirt. The hard-core players chain-smoked and focused on the action at the table. It was the only place Anna had seen in years where smoking was allowed indoors.
Kathy Mack was dealing cards at a table with a hundred-dollar minimum. Her uniform was a white button-down shirt and black bow tie, which helped camouflage how painfully thin she’d gotten.
Her long dark hair and full red lips helped offset the uniform’s androgyny.
“Thank you,” she said, smiling at players who tipped her.
Kathy fed the chips into a hole in the table and looked up. When she saw Anna and Cooper standing there, her smile became genuine. She turned to the center of the blackjack corral.
“Break!” she called.
A supervisor came over, checked her cards, and called in another dealer. The players moaned. “She’s my good luck charm!” said a man who’d just tipped her.
Kathy nodded at them as she got up. “Good luck, gentlemen.” She came around the table and gave Anna a hug. “Good to see you. Are you here to play?”
“I need to talk to you,” Anna said softly. “About Hayley.”
Kathy’s smile faded, but she nodded. “Let’s go somewhere else.”
She led them to a restaurant called Iridescence. A live band played covers of Motown in front of a three-story wall of glass looking out over the city. In the darkness, the metropolis was a pretty cross-hatch of lights on a black background. You could sit here and feel cosmopolitan, at least in the nighttime, when you couldn’t see the broken cement and burned-out buildings.
They sat at a tall table in the bar. Anna pushed Hayley’s police report across the table. Kathy picked up the paper and read it. She shook her head with disgust.
“This is all that the police put in the report? Those assholes. How did you get this?”
“Someone left it on Jody’s doorstep. Can you tell me what happened to Hayley?”
A waiter came over to take their order. Kathy said, “I can’t drink while I’m working. But you should try their double martini, dirty, with extra olives.”
“A double martini, dirty, with extra olives,” Cooper told the waiter. Anna held up two fingers.
“How much do you know?” Kathy asked.
“I heard she was teased online,” Anna said. “I have no idea how the coach came into the picture.”
Kathy pulled out a pack of Camel Lights and tapped one from the pack. Cooper picked up a box of matches from the ashtray on the table and struck one to light the cigarette. She inhaled and nodded her thanks.
“Hayley was a volleyball player. Pretty good at it. I guess he ‘mentored’ her. He told her if she ever had a problem at a party or needed a ride, she should call him. One night, she went to that horrible party, drank too much, and passed out. When she came to, the kids were all laughing at her and she had writing all over her face. She didn’t know exactly what had been done to her. She called Coach Fowler to rescue her. I wish she’d called me. But she was afraid she’d be in trouble if I found out she’d been drinking. Anyway, he picked her up. But he didn’t drive her home. He drove her off to some secluded dirt road. He raped her.”
The waiter returned and set down their drinks. Both Anna and Cooper pushed their martinis toward Kathy. She stubbed out her cigarette, picked up a drink, and took a long swallow. Her lipstick left a dark red stain on the rim.
“How did you find out?” Anna asked.
“She moped around the next day. At first, I thought it was typical teenage sullenness. Then she moped the next day. Then she came home ‘sick’ from school on Monday and refused to go on Tuesday. She still wouldn’t tell me what was going on. I heard about it from a waitress here, whose son goes to the school. The kids at school were calling her—” Kathy’s voice broke. She drained the first martini and reached for the second one. “Terrible names. I went home and talked to Hayley. It wasn’t easy. But she finally came out with it.