The Best American Crime Writing (16 page)

On Thursday night, Ayat’s fiancé dropped by her house as usual, spending an hour having tea and talking with her family before returning home. Muhammad al-Akhras remained awake until 4:00
A.M.
watching live TV coverage of another suicide operation: A Palestinian gunman had entered the Jewish settlement of Eilot Moreh, killing a family of four and barricading himself inside their house for hours before being shot dead by Israeli troops. His daughter, he said, stayed up through the night as well, apparently studying in her room. Palestinian schools are normally closed on Fridays, but the students in Dehaishe had lost two weeks during the Israeli Army’s March incursion, and makeup classes had been scheduled for that morning. At 7:30
A.M.
, Ayat gathered her books and hustled out the door to class. “She said, ‘Please wish me well on my test today,’” her mother remembers. “Then she waved goodbye.” At the
end of classes that morning, Ayat’s closest friend, Shuruq Awwad, was struck by her parting words. “She said, ‘I’m going to pray in Al Aqsa; I won’t see you anymore.’ I asked her, ‘Are you going to do something, are you going to do some operations?’ But she said, ‘No, no.’”

Ayat followed a route along footpaths and through fields, skirting Israeli military checkpoints and crossing unnoticed into Jerusalem. Palestinian sources believe that an accomplice was waiting for her in a car on the other side of the Green Line. There she received her belt of explosives and was driven to a drop-off point near the Super-sol market in Kiryat Hayovel. She was so composed before her act that she shooed away two Palestinian women selling herbs and scallions in front of the supermarket. Then she walked purposefully toward the door, where the security guard, fifty-five-year-old Haim Smadar, may have attempted to block her path. At that moment Rachel Levy brushed by Ayat. Ayat pressed the detonator, blowing herself in one direction and Rachel in the other. Their bodies were found on opposite ends of the entrance to the Supersol market.

Avigail Levy knew that something was wrong when she heard sirens near her apartment. She immediately phoned her sister, who switched on the radio and relayed the report of a bomb at the Supersol market. Avigail screamed, “My daughter is there!” and rushed with her son to the scene. Hours later she identified her daughter’s remains at the morgue. “Her body was mangled, but her face was perfect, untouched,” she said, sitting in her cramped living room last week. Undisturbed since the bombing, the shelves in Rachel’s bedroom provide a poignant snapshot of a teenage girl’s life: Tommy Girl perfume, Clinique makeup, Victoria’s Secret fruit body lotions, stuffed dolls, and tiny blue trolls from her childhood that she’d refused to throw away. A picture taped to the wall was drawn by her adored brother Kobi the day she died, showing a sad person and two flowers. “To Rachel, I love you,” reads the childish
scrawl. “I wish you were alive. I want you to live.” Composed yet in deep mourning for her only daughter, Avigail Levy says she strongly supports Ariel Sharon’s massive military occupation of the West Bank. “I don’t want revenge,” she insists. “But I want the government to make it clear that if another family sends their child to be killed, they will suffer. This is the only way for them to understand—when they feel what we feel.”

Muhammad al-Akhras heard about the attack on Palestinian television. He received confirmation that his daughter was the suicide bomber when half a dozen militiamen from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades stood outside his house and fired their guns in the air in salute. Though convention calls for the father of a martyr to express pride in the act, al-Akhras seemed as overwhelmed by grief as Avigail Levy as he sat in his tiny family room a few hours later. “Words cannot express the pain I feel,” he mumbled, staring down at a studio photograph of his daughter taken in front of a fake cityscape of lower Manhattan, the Twin Towers above her head. As he spoke, relatives carried out the prostrate body of another daughter, who had fainted from shock a few moments before. In a garage across the alley, a stream of visitors, from local Hamas leaders to the mayor of Bethlehem, dropped by to express their condolences. They sipped strong Arabic coffee and warmed themselves in the freezing rain by huddling around a wood fire burning in a metal drum. Ayat’s fiancé seemed as uncomprehending as her father about her suicide attack. “If she had just told me what she was planning, I would have stopped her,” he said softly. “May God forgive her for what she has done.” Other members of her family insisted that they regarded suicide bombings as morally wrong, but explained that Israeli brutality had left Palestinians no other choice. “Sharon has killed hope in our life,” said Ayat’s cousin Mutlak Qassas. “Today Ayat went to send him a message with her blood and her body.”

Muhammad al-Akhras knew he would have to keep the mourning period short. Dozens of Israeli tanks were already massing at
the entry points to Bethlehem, and he was worried the troops would exact retribution on the men of his family. He said that he had received no offers of financial support from either the Palestinian Authority or the Iraqi government, which has paid as much as $25,000 to the families of suicide bombers. He wasn’t sure whether he would accept such an offer, though he conceded that he might have no other choice: As the father of a suicide bomber, he was all but certain that he would be fired by his Israeli employers. His sons had already left the camp on their own and found their way to different hiding places. “Nobody should have to experience this kind of loss,” al-Akhras said. Yet taped to the windshield of his car was a black-and-white poster of Ayat draped in a flowing kaffiyeh and brandishing a pistol—the same picture that had begun to appear in the alleys of Dehaishe, inspiring new martyrs to the cause.

On the afternoon of March
29,
2002, I was hunkered down behind a wall in the freezing rain in Ramallah, covering the siege of Yasser Arafat’s compound, when I received word that a teenaged female suicide bomber from Dehaishe refugee camp had blown herself up in a supermarket in southern Jerusalem. Sensing a story, I immediately left the combat zone around Arafat’s headquarters—driving through a cordon of tanks and armored personnel carriers—and headed for Bethlehem. I spent the next three days piecing together the parallel lives of Ayat al-Akhras and one of her two victims, 17-year-old Rachel Levy
.

There was one vital piece of information I was unable to discover in time for the deadline: How had Ayat been recruited for her fatal mission? In the course of writing a book on Bethlehem during the intifada, I pieced together the whole tale: Her handler was Ahmed Mughrabi, 27, commander of an Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades cell in Dehaishe, whose younger brother had been a close friend and coworker of Ayat’s older brother, Samir. Beginning in early March 2002, Ayat had written four letters to Ahmed Mughrabi offering herself
as a martyr; three days before her death, the Al Aqsa cell leader had met her in his hideout, interviewed her for several hours, and come away convinced of her commitment She was the third of a total of six suicide bombers, most of them teenagers, that Mughrabi dispatched to Israel before his capture by Israeli soldiers in Dehaishe in late May 2002. Now incarcerated in Nafha prison in the Negev Desert, he faces a likely prison term of eighteen consecutive life sentences, one for each of his victims. The Mughrabi family and the al-Akhras family, ironically, remain close. Late last year, Ayat’s older sister Zainat was engaged to be married to Mohammed Mughrabi, the 21-year-old brother of the man who sent Ayat to her death
.

M
ike Garrish took the stand and swore before God and judge and what appeared to be all of Habersham County to tell the whole truth and nothing but. His wife sat anxiously in the courtroom, as did his only remaining sister. His parents, barred from watching the trial because they were on the witness list, waited in a room down the hall.

At the prosecution table sat Jim Hallman, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent who had sat Mike down at the kitchen table one November night twenty-two years ago when Mike was 16 and his little sister lay murdered in a bedroom down the hall and said, “You did this, and I’m going to see you go to the electric chair for it.”

Behind Hallman, filling the courtroom, were the people of Demorest, population 1,000. All these years they had watched Mike, judged him, refused to let their daughters date him, kept the gossip alive as only a small town can do:
That’
s
the boy who killed his sister
.

Until this day, Mike had never opened his mouth. He knew the danger of talking. The day his sister was killed he opened his mouth and his words were misunderstood, twisted, and for that he had paid. He had resolved to say nothing until his day in court, which he had stopped believing would come. Now that it had, he thought it should feel like deliverance, some sort of turning point toward resolution and freedom, but the slant of the questions and the fear in his wife’s eyes told him this might not be the end after all.

“Do you remember talking to Agent Hallman here that day?” asked District Attorney Mike Crawford.

“Yes, sir,” Mike said. He was in his late thirties now, thin and balding, with a deep drawl and big serious wary brown eyes.

“And do you remember him asking if you had killed your sister?”

“ … Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I did not kill her,” Mike said.

“Do you recall ever telling Jim Hallman that ‘If I did, I don’t remember?” “Yes, sir.”

“Why did you tell him that?”

“I was mad at him for asking me the question,” Mike said. “And it wasn’t—the statement was said, ‘If I did, I don’t remember it.’ It was more or less a hateful remark.”

“You were a suspect in this case for a long time, were you not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What kind of effect did that have on you?”

Now here was a question—the central question, in fact, of Michael Garrish’s life. What kind of effect does it have on you to be called home from work one day when you’re 16 years old to find your house and yard full of investigators, medics, crime scene technicians, and neighbors; your 13-year-old sister lying dead in a back bedroom, her blood still wet on the shag carpet; your father, who discovered the body, in tears and shock on the front walk? What kind of effect does it have on you to have the GBI interrogate you at length about your whereabouts until you make the mistake of uttering the seven most poorly chosen words of your life, words that make you a temporary suspect in the eyes of the law but forever guilty in the eyes of the community?

What kind of effect does it have on you when the police stop suspecting you but no one knows that, not even you—because they keep that little tidbit to themselves? What kind of effect does it have
when the case stays open and the real killer goes uncaught for more than two decades?

“What kind of effect did that have on you?”

From the stand, Mike said, “It made me angry.”

The DA wound it up. “Did you have anything to do with your sister’s death?” he asked.

“Absolutely not.”

When he finished testifying, Mike stepped off the stand and walked past the judge, lawyers, bailiffs, and townspeople, past agent Hallman, and ultimately out of the courthouse, free.

Mike Garrish had always in fact been free. He just had never
felt
free.

He is 16 years old, a tenth grader in Demorest, a good little place to grow up. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows everybody’s
dog
. The Garrish house (modest one-story brick ranch) is on Hancock Road, a two-laner through the pine barrens of Habersham County, 80 miles northeast of Atlanta. The house seems big to Mike, the woods out back so vast, the walk up the driveway to catch the school bus interminable when in fact it is maybe forty yards at most. The closest neighbors are the Hansards, across the road, and the Pruitts, next door, a couple of acres away. A prison guard and his wife and son live there. The boy, Tony Pruitt, is 14. He rides the school bus with Mike’s younger sister, Lisa.

In the Garrish house live father, son, and daughter. They have been through a lot lately. A move from Demorest to LaGrange and back again, a shift in the family structure. They are three where once they were five: father, John; mother, Pat; children Vicky, Mike, and Lisa. But then John and Pat divorced, and Pat stayed in LaGrange. Vicky married and moved to Michigan, leaving John, Mike, and Lisa in the house on Hancock Road.

John fixes Pepsi machines and restaurant fountains. Mike works after school as a doffer at the Chicopee textile mill across town. Lisa takes care of the house and is good at it. She’s a tough little kid with a strong sense of self, a unique way of doing things. When the teacher asks for, say, a report on a foreign country, most kids might pick England or Spain, but Lisa never fails to pick some place no one has ever heard of, just to be different.

One Saturday when she was 8, Lisa walked through the back door with fists full of change and her mother asked, “Where did you get all that money?” Lisa had been selling pony rides for a quarter to the neighborhood kids. Now she is 13—actually, two weeks away from 14. When she grows up she wants to be a lawyer, rock star, and horse rancher, all at the same time. She plays clarinet in the band. She is starting to curl her hair and experiment with makeup and jewelry. She is five foot six and weighs 130 pounds. She is mature for her age, and boys notice.

As brother and sister, Mike and Lisa are typical. They aren’t the Bradys and they aren’t the opposite of the Bradys; they are just two kids in your average hardworking family in a small town in North Georgia.

This day, a Wednesday, begins normally enough. Mike drives to school. He gets out around one o’clock because he has to punch the factory clock at 4:00
P.M.
Meanwhile he goes over to Tower Mountain, a hangout spot, and hooks up with some friends. They decide to go to Mike’s and smoke a joint. They smoke the joint and the friends leave around 3:30 as Mike gets ready for work. Lisa’s school bus drops her off, and Mike is just leaving as Lisa walks down the driveway to the house. She has a sack of last night’s Halloween candy in her hand. Here’s some candy, she says, get some if you want it. Mike gets a fistful, they say bye.

It is just another ordinary coming and going, but then again it’s not: Mike will never see his little sister alive again.

Lisa usually has a snack, does some homework, watches her favorite afternoon television shows, and waits for her father to come home from work. His schedule depends on how many service calls he has and where they are. This afternoon he finishes up early with a call in Helen and arrives around 4:30. In the den he finds the TV on, a half-empty glass of iced tea on the hearth, Lisa’s Adidas and socks on the floor by the chair. In the kitchen, he stops to go through the mail on the counter. He calls for Lisa. She doesn’t answer. He looks in her bedroom. She isn’t there. He goes to the phone to call Mrs. Pruitt next door, see if she’s seen Lisa. As he picks up the phone, he glimpses through his bedroom door and sees his daughter lying motionless on the floor.

Lisa is on her back, between the foot of the bed and the dresser, a rivulet of blood at her nose and mouth, down the side of her face. Her right hand is bloody and sliced almost to the bone. She wears a brown plaid shirt with puffed sleeves, tucked into her blue jeans; the bow-tie collar is soaked with blood. On her left wrist is a bracelet, on her finger a ring. In her earlobes are earrings in the shape of Christmas trees. Her feet are bare; her toenail polish is wearing off. The carpet beneath her is saturated with her blood. John Garrish kneels beside his girl, feels for a pulse, and believes he has found one. He calls an ambulance, then the Hansards across the road.

Across town, on the factory floor, Mike is running bolts of fabric off the machines. His supervisor comes over and says someone’s here to see you. At the door is his neighbor, Debbie Hansard, who solemnly says, “Your dad needs you at home.” Mike turns around and goes to find his supervisor. Jim Hallman and other investigators later will find this strange. Wouldn’t you ask what’s wrong? Wouldn’t you be curious about why a neighbor would drive across town to tell you to get home as fast as you can? If you don’t ask, doesn’t that suggest you already know what has happened at home? By the time Mike leaves, Debbie Hansard has gone back toward Hancock
Road. Driving home, Mike thinks his father has had a heart attack. When he arrives to find the road and driveway clogged with sheriffs’ cruisers and detectives’ cars, he knows he is wrong.

Out front he meets Hallman, a young GBI agent who has been on the force for four years and before that was a Douglas County deputy under the legendary Sheriff Earl Lee. Hallman should not have caught this case at all, because when the call came in he was on his way home. For two seconds, he had thought about letting the after-hours agent handle it but then decided to go ahead and handle it. Couple of hours at most, he told himself, not knowing it would turn into twenty-two years.

Hallman questions Mike in the kitchen. The Garrish family doesn’t know it, but this is typical. You first eliminate the people closest to the victim. The father, mother, brother, and so forth. Where were you this afternoon, he asked Mike. What did you do? Say you smoked a little pot? With who? What time did you leave for work? Did you see Lisa? What time was that? Did you have a fight? Did she catch you smoking pot? Were you afraid she was going to tell on you? Hallman finds Mike vague and uncooperative. “If something happened to your loved one and we came to you with questions, we’d expect you to be cooperative,” Hallman would explain later. “Maybe you’d be cooperative for an entirely different reason. Maybe you’ve got fifty kilos of cocaine in the trunk of your car, who knows? If you’re not cooperative, that raises suspicion. He was scared. There was the marijuana. And he’s a kid.”

Hallman ratchets it up a bit, tries to provoke Mike with intimidation:
You did this, didn’t you? You did this and I’m going to see you go to the electric chair for it.
Mike—terrified, pissed off—says, intending sarcasm: “If I did, I don’t remember it.”

Now this, to a detective, is a red flag. Mike Garrish is the last to see Lisa Garrish alive; has spent the afternoon using drugs; does not seem overly distraught about his sister’s death or interested in
answering questions. And now this little gem—If
I did, I don’t remember it
. Hallman thinks he may have his man.

Having just been told he’s going to the electric chair, Mike is stunned. He staggers outside into the night and sits beneath a peach tree at the edge of the yard. He is crying now in the dark. When his mother and stepfather pull up and get out of their car, the first thing Mike says is, “Mama I didn’t kill her.” And his mother says indignantly, “Well who says you did?”

What a mess there is in the Garrish house. Because Lisa has a severely sliced hand and what looked like a cut beneath her chin, investigators at first think she has been stabbed to death. It isn’t until later, during the autopsy, that they find the bullet holes in her head and chest. She hasn’t been stabbed at all; she was shot with a .38-caliber gun—and a .38-caliber gun is soon discovered missing from her father’s closet. The crime scene investigators, out of Atlanta, have to turn around and head back to Demorest to reprocess the scene, pull up the carpet and retrieve the slugs from the hardwood floor.

A murder weapon would be helpful, but the cops can’t find one. They are back the next day to search the creek and woods for a gun and/or knife. The Garrish family, meantime, makes funeral arrangements. At the visitation, there are hundreds of people—classmates, teachers, neighbors, coworkers, friends, relatives—and Mike believes every last one of them is staring at him. Actually, some are. Everyone knows the police consider him a suspect and want him to take a polygraph (which he will pass). Many wonder at his dry eyes and composure, even consider it a sign of cold-blooded guilt and will someday testify to that. Mike sits alone on a staircase and wishes they all would just go away.

Before they close the casket he takes all he has on him—a dollar bill—and tears it in half. He puts one half in his sister’s coffin and the other in his wallet, where it will remain for the rest of his life.

He cannot bear to return to school. His mother and stepfather
have decided to move to Michigan to be near his older sister, so Mike decides he’ll go with them. On the day he turns in his textbooks and withdraws from school, there appear to be a million kids in the hall, staring, whispering. The crowd seems to part as Mike walks through. It is all he can do to keep his head up and finish what he started.

Mike and the rest of the Garrish family do not know it, but Hallman has stopped suspecting him because his time card at the factory gives him a solid alibi. Whoever did it left no fingerprints, no murder weapon, no witnesses, nothing. Technology is lacking—no DNA or Luminol to pick up trace blood, none of the sophisticated techniques crime scene specialists would be able to use in the decades to come.

But soon Hallman would develop a theory: Lisa was watching television in the den when the killer arrived, probably with the intention of molesting her. That there was no sign of break-in or struggle suggested she knew the attacker. He pulled a knife. She tried to grab it away and it sliced her right hand to the bone. She went to the kitchen to clean up, unaware of the danger she was in. At some point, Lisa must have gone to her father’s bedroom for one of the guns she knew he kept in the closet. The killer either beat her to the gun or wrestled it away from her. He shot her once in the back of the head, three times in the chest, left her for dead on the carpet and fled with the weapons.