Read What Strange Creatures Online
Authors: Emily Arsenault
When the show was over, Jeff clicked off the TV before the first commercial came on. Without the blare of cable news, the silence in the room felt sudden and oppressive.
“When are you gonna move somewhere you can get a pet?” I asked Jeff.
“You know, Theresa, I’ve admired how you’ve been able to embrace pet ownership after poor Jedi. But I still don’t think I’m ready.”
Jedi was our childhood dog—a Lab mix my mother got us as a divorce-consolation aid when I was ten. Jedi struggled with a mysterious skin condition that affected his hindquarters, which were often shaved or scratched raw or both, depending on the severity of his rash and the amount of spare cash my mother happened to have on hand for vet bills. He wore a dirty, dented Cone of Shame for at least a quarter of his life. When I was about fourteen or fifteen, I was too ashamed of his appearance to walk him around the block. I’d sneak him behind our toolshed when my mom thought I was walking him, giving him a stick to chew on and whispering, “Sorry, Jedi. Sorry.”
“Well. Jedi had a good life. Most of it anyway.”
Jeff frowned. He doesn’t like to talk about Jedi much.
“And it’s been, what, fifteen years since he died?” I said.
“Maybe I’ll be getting a ferret soon.”
“A ferret?”
“Yeah.” Jeff sighed. “I think maybe I’m a ferret guy waiting to happen.”
“People with ferrets are . . .”
“Creepy. I know. That’s what I’m saying. Plus, ferrets require a lot of attention. I’m already unemployed. Maybe I should go for it.”
“A ferret is not the answer,” I said.
“After a ferret then maybe I’ll start playing World of Warcraft.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Well. It’s a little difficult to stay positive right now.”
“I understand.”
“Theresa . . .”
“Yeah?”
“The police were asking me all sorts of questions.”
“Yeah. I can imagine.”
Jeff picked up a roll. “Questions I wasn’t expecting.”
“Like?”
“Like where I was all weekend.”
“Why wouldn’t you expect that?”
“It wasn’t the question itself.” He peeled a layer of flaky pastry, then put it back down on the plate uneaten. “It was how they asked it.”
“And how was that?”
“Like they wanted something from me they weren’t getting. Like I should know what happened. They even asked me that. ‘What do
you
think happened to her?’”
The emphasis on “you” jangled my nerves.
“And what did you say?” I asked softly.
“The only thing I could.” Jeff shrugged. “That I don’t know. But I’ve been going over it all day. What the possible answers could be to that question.”
“And what have you come up with?”
“Um . . . she ran off with another man. A man with a much nicer car than hers.”
“Wouldn’t she have brought her makeup?” I asked.
“Theresa, be kind.”
“I’m not being unkind. She
did
leave her makeup, did she not?”
“And her clothes. Her suitcase.”
I decided not to try to come up with some Pollyanna explanation for this. Jeff was right. It didn’t look good.
“Or she went out to get a quick bite at Denny’s and some psycho snatched her.”
I nodded. This seemed more plausible than her running off with another man and not bringing any spare clothes. More plausible, but a whole lot darker.
“You said they didn’t find any wallet or purse in her room?”
“Right.”
“So it looks like she went out for something, intending to come back soon.”
“Right,” Jeff repeated, more quietly now.
“Did Kim take walks much? Or jogs for exercise?”
“Jogs? No. She belongs to the gym on Cedar Street. Walks sometimes.”
“Did you tell the police that?”
“They didn’t ask that. If she walks. They wanted to know about the last time I had contact with her.”
“And that was the Friday she left, right?”
“Yeah. When she called to ask if she’d left her phone.”
“You told them that?”
“Yeah.”
“And what’d they say?”
Jeff let his gaze catch mine, but just for a moment. “They asked me to give them her phone.”
“And did you?”
“Of course.”
“Did you show them those weird pictures?”
“No. But I assume they’ll see them.”
I began to wonder who else the police would be questioning. I wanted to ask Jeff what he knew about Kyle, but I couldn’t figure out how. It was probably best for him not to know about Carpet World for the time being.
“So now you don’t have those numbers you were so curious about?” I asked.
“Well, they’re in my phone now. Since I called them all. And I know who they all are. Except the one who sent her those texts.”
Jeff put his palms to his forehead and leaned his head back, closing his eyes. “I take it you haven’t gotten around to talking to Zach Wagner yet?”
“Actually, I have,” I said, and told him about it.
When I was finished, I asked Jeff if Kim had ever told him about Jenny Spicer.
He shook his head. “I knew she had a friend who was murdered when she was a kid. She wrote about it once for Wagner’s class. She said they never figured out who did it. It sounded pretty horrific, and I never asked her about it. She didn’t mention that it was a famous case. She didn’t ever mention Donald Wallace.”
“Where’s your laptop?” I said.
“I don’t feel like looking that up right now,” Jeff mumbled. “Do you understand?”
“Oh. Of course.” I stared at the limp leftover crescent rolls, feeling terribly insensitive. Naturally, at this moment, Jeff wouldn’t want to read about a young girl’s murder.
“And this video project she was doing? She didn’t mention it at
all
?”
“No. Never a word. She had her video camera all the time, but like I said—she mostly just took footage of Wayne. Although . . . you know, she
did
go over to Nathan’s a few times recently.”
“Nathan the bartender?” I asked.
“Yeah. The guy she works with. The guy with the snake, you know? He’s also a videographer. Does weddings and stuff, and films some local bands, too, I guess. And, like, VHS-DVD conversion for people’s old wedding videos. She went over there a couple of times because he has some fancy video-editing software. She told me she was doing a voice-over. Some video she was really proud of. Of Wayne eating a taco.”
Jeff wrapped his apple slice in his napkin and said, “Jesus.”
“What?”
“It sounds so stupid, now that I say it. Of course she was lying to me.”
“Do you think that she . . . ?”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore tonight. I think I need to go to bed.”
April 25, 1993
The Daily Leader
Abbott Found Guilty of Spicer Murder
FAIRCHESTER, MASS.—After four hours of deliberation at the Pelsworth County Courthouse yesterday, the jury in the Andrew Abbott murder trial handed down a guilty verdict.
Abbott, 18, will likely face life in prison without parole after being convicted of strangling nine-year-old Jenny Spicer of Fairchester last fall. Sentencing will take place on May 9, when Abbott is expected to receive a sentence of at least fifty years.
The verdict brings to a close a two-week trial of a case that has shocked the community in Fairchester and surrounding towns. A large crowd outside the courthouse watched as Abbott was led out in handcuffs and leg shackles and loaded into a police car on its way to the county jail.
“Andrew Abbott had a highly inappropriate relationship with a little girl half his age,” said Assistant Prosecutor Natalie Trevor during a press conference after the trial.
“When he became convinced that she was going to tell her parents, he killed her and tried to make it look like a random act of violence. This young man is a highly disturbed individual, who considers himself a Satanist. Now, whatever else that means, it meant for him that he could use an innocent young girl for his own sick purposes and then dispose of her. There is no morality, no remorse in a belief system like Andrew Abbott’s,” she said.
Trevor prosecuted the case alongside Donald Wallace, the Pelsworth County district attorney.
Members of Spicer’s family, who attended each day of the trial, were visibly pleased and relieved when the verdict was announced but declined to comment for this article.
Spicer disappeared on October 17, 1992, while walking home from a friend’s house. Her body was found near the Davis Reservoir the following week. An autopsy concluded that she had been strangled.
Abbott confessed to the killing when investigators questioned him on October 26, then later recanted. During the trial Abbott’s attorneys argued that the confession was made under duress, but they failed to convince the jury.
One young witness testified to seeing Abbott with the victim in the hours before her disappearance. Others described an inappropriate relationship that had been developing between Abbott and Spicer. Prosecutors also presented evidence that Abbott had molested Spicer, and several witnesses testified that Abbott was engaged in occult practices.
Two classmates of Abbott’s from Fairchester High School testified that he admitted to killing the girl and described her final moments.
February 26, 2006
The Daily Leader
DA Drops Charges—No New Trial for Abbott
FAIRCHESTER, MASS.—County prosecutors will not pursue a new trial for Andrew Abbott for the 1992 murder of nine-year-old Jenny Spicer, Pelsworth County District Attorney Joshua Broderick announced yesterday.
During a 1993 trial, Abbott was convicted of strangling the young girl, but he was released from his fifty-year sentence in December when new DNA evidence suggested that he was not the killer. A judge then ordered a new trial for Abbott. With the district attorney declining to retry the case, the charges are dropped and Abbott is exonerated of the murder.
“Nearly fourteen years have passed since Jenny Spicer’s tragic death. Witnesses’ memories have faded, the original lab technician who examined the hair evidence has since died, and it would be very painful for the Spicer family to have to go through all this again,” Broderick said in a statement released yesterday.
Part of Abbott’s conviction rested on two hairs found clutched in Spicer’s hand. Initial analysis in 1992 found the hairs to be “consistent” with Abbott’s hair—a determination made through a microscopic hair-comparison process, which was standard before DNA testing.
In late May, DNA tests performed on two hairs showed they did not match Abbott’s hair. His lawyers worked for two years to get the DNA testing. Appeals Judge Catherine Beckwith granted the request after Abbott’s lawyers pointed out that two unsolved murders and one unsolved disappearance of young girls in the Pelsworth-Wellport area between 1995 and 2001 had similar circumstances to the Spicer case and suggested she had fallen victim to a serial murderer.
Meanwhile, two young witnesses recanted some of their testimony from the original trial, claiming now to be unsure of their statements that they saw Spicer with Abbott on the afternoon of her disappearance. Abbott’s family has long maintained that his confession was the result of fatigue and police intimidation after a six-hour-long interrogation. The New England Project for Justice has been providing representation for Abbott since 2002.
“If they really thought Andrew Abbott was guilty of Jenny Spicer’s murder, there is no way in hell they’d be letting this go,” said Abbott’s attorney, Harriet Chambers.
“We’re just happy it’s over,” said Abbott’s sister, Stephanie Reece. “We were thrilled when the conviction was overturned last year. Ever since then we’ve had this hanging over our heads—the chance they’d try to bring it to trial again. Now we know he’s home for good.”
Andrew Abbott himself was not available for comment, nor was anyone from the Spicer family.
It was still early when I got home, so I went online and read all about Jenny Spicer, Andrew Abbott, and Donald Wallace.
Reading these articles, I felt I did have a vague memory of the case around when I was a teenager. Most of the articles about Andrew Abbott and Jenny Spicer were from 1992 and between 2004 and 2006. Abbott’s conviction was overturned in late 2005. It seemed he was freed more quietly than he was convicted. While the DNA evidence was apparently pretty damning to the case against him, remaining questions about the appropriateness of his friendship with Jenny kept him from being celebrated as an innocent man finally set free.
Still, in 2006 there were a couple of relatively high-profile articles about Andrew Abbott—including a feature in a national newsmagazine. The article depicted Abbott as a loner kid of ambiguous sexuality who was immediately suspected by his neighbors and the local police department “because he was different.” Naturally, he wore a lot of dark clothing and listened to Iron Maiden. He’d had to repeat a grade in elementary school due to “academic setbacks and social difficulties,” so he was still in high school at the time of Jenny’s death even though he was eighteen. It had come out during the trial that he’d had therapy at age thirteen for depression and inhalant abuse.
The feature contained a picture of him at the time of the trial. He had stringy brown hair that reached his shoulders and a long, narrow face with pockmarked cheekbones and an unusually large beak of a nose. His mouth was slack and open, his eyes dull and empty.
In a picture from 2006, Andrew Abbott appeared much more alive. He had a fresh haircut, and looked more muscular, better fed, and better dressed in a forest green polo shirt. He wasn’t exactly smiling for the camera, but he was regarding it with a calm and serious expression.
The article ended with a quote from Andrew Abbott:
“It’s not about blame. I don’t think any one person is to blame. It was a perfect storm, sadly. I don’t have time to figure out who deserves the most blame. I’ve wasted too much time already to bother with that.”
A couple of years later, his lawyers reached a settlement with the state for $150,000 in compensation for his imprisonment, although the state “denied liability,” whatever that meant.