I took several - well, six - years to write my 2018 book To the Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder. One of the reasons the book took so long is that you are asking people to open up about the very hardest thing that has happened to them, in this case, the murder of 4-year-old Eldon Smith and the attempted murder of his sister Trinity, age 7, by their mother Amanda. I have never been the sort of journalist who camps on people’s lawns, waiting to ambush them. My approach was very slow. In the meantime, I gathered what information I could. Sometimes this dog-legged into other capital murder cases, including one where a meth addict had murdered three drug buddies in the woods. There are several sections of To the Bridge where I meet the murderer’s mother, and also, see the murderer himself in court, where I watched him cry crocodile tears, watched the family members of those he’d slain variously scream, shake, near-faint and, in the case of a man whose daughter the murderer had beheaded, nearly rip the backboard off the bench in front of us.
It was those crocodile tears that settled it for me. When the murderer told the judge how sorry he was, he made sure, just as the tears began, to face the courtroom, and dammit if there was not a little smile on his face, a smile that seemed to me to say, he was enjoying the pain he was causing to those in the gallery.
His mother had urged me to write the murderer in prison, and as I was still on the uphill section of my book, I one time did. The first letter I received back was all about his contrition. The second (and last) letter was a different animal, a half-dozen pages of cramped handwriting detailing how he had killed and the pleasure he took in doing so, and was it possible I could find some crime scene photos and mail them to him? After I read the letter in my car I needed to drive home fast, the revulsion of the letter causing me to shit, a reaction I’d never had before (nor since).
