The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (30 page)

 

Often, facts and truth don't have much to do with each other. So it is in all crimes of the heart, especially those involving secrets. In this case, there is a particular flavor of truth for every surviving family member, friend, and former teammate leveled in the wake of ruin after Ross's death.

For Willoughby, the facts were simple: “She sold me a dream.” So Willoughby wrote in a six-page, neatly lettered note to her mother nearly four months after she shot Rosalind Ross. The note starts, “Hey Mommie,” and ends with palpable resignation, if not regret. “You has always been right when it came to Rosalind.”

The envelope is sealed with a small penciled heart, “I love you” etched inside.

By all accounts, loving Willoughby's mother was no easy task, a volatile woman so divorced from reality that the day before her daughter's sentencing for the slaying she was making up Malika's room for her to come home. Willoughby chose not to correct her perception. There was, she told a friend, no point. (Willoughby declined to be interviewed. Harp could not be reached for comment.)

In her letter, Willoughby pleads with her mother for understanding and forgiveness, not for killing Ross but for loving her.

“I know you didn't want me to be gay and did not approve,” she writes. “Mother, I loved her deeply. I wanted her to act like she loved me and most important I wanted to prove you wrong. I wanted you to see that Rosalind really did love me . . . that it was meant to be. I wanted to show you that being gay wasn't going to stop me becoming somebody in life.”

The letter goes on, providing both a motive for the killing (“It was like I couldn't get her out of my system. When we wasn't together I thought about her all day. And I was sad that she was with somebody else and loved them more than she loved me”) and, possibly, an explanation for it. “She tells me she didn't mean to hit me and I believed her, mother.”

“It's called Intimate Partner Violence,” explains Michael Hart, Willoughby's attorney. Hart's team told the judge hearing the
State of Wisconsin v. Willoughby
case that its client had been “belittled, threatened, humiliated, lied to, controlled and slapped around by Roz.”

They hired an expert, Liz Marquardt of the Sojourner Family Peace Center, to interview Willoughby and vouch for her credibility as an abuse survivor and to explain the intricacies of same-sex domestic violence, how it is often overlooked, especially among women, whom society views as equals. Hart also gathered testimony from friends who said they had seen Willoughby with black eyes and bruises.

“We went to lunch one day at McDonald's, and she told me about the abuse,” recalls Rubis. The meal happened in 2009, when Willoughby was again living with Ross, by some accounts for the fifth time. Though Rubis “never observed anything” herself, she did hear from mutual acquaintances that Willoughby had reported to work with a “busted eardrum.” Willoughby blamed basketball.

“I've played basketball my whole life,” says Rubis. “I've never seen that happen.”

In June 2010, Willoughby was treated for a bruised tailbone at Saint Joseph Hospital's ER. She would later attribute the injury to being battered by Ross. “She bruised her tailbone from playing basketball in the rec league,” Spencer says flatly. “She went up for a rebound and she fell on her butt. I took her to the hospital after the game. To say Rosalind did that was a lie.”

In court, the Milwaukee DA echoed the Ross family's rebuttals, detailing numerous instances of Willoughby's possessiveness and physical threats, almost all incited by Ross's talking to other women. Women like Ross's former lover, Belinda Huddleston.

Huddleston, 33, began dating Ross in February 2009. The IT tech and Ross saw each other privately for just over a year before deciding to stop. Huddleston had her first and only face-to-face encounter with Willoughby just after Christmas.

“It all started because Roz bought me a designer handbag, and I put it on my Facebook page,” says Huddleston. After seeing the post on Ross's page, Willoughby went searching for Huddleston and Ross and found them visiting the Ross family home.

“I'll kill you,” Willoughby said.

Huddleston didn't move.

“No you won't,” Huddleston said calmly. “You're not stupid.”

Ross saw what was happening, immediately ushered Huddleston into the house, and called the police. Willoughby pounded on the door, then fled the scene.

By April 2010, Ross had broken it off with Huddleston for Willoughby, but the two stayed in contact. “Roz told me she thought it was going to work out this time because they had known each other for so long,” Huddleston says.

It didn't. Early that August, Ross confided to Huddleston that she wanted to leave the state, that it was the only way to be free. She wanted to move to Oklahoma and invited Huddleston to come with her. Ross planned to earn her degree, then use her old basketball connections to land a position as a recruiter. She believed basketball could save her again, like it had all those years before.

September 15, four days before she was due to leave Harambee, Ross departed Huddleston's house to break up with Willoughby for the last time. She assured Huddleston she'd be back for dinner.

Minutes before 9:00, a worried Huddleston called Ross. Ross answered from the Popeyes drive-thru.

“I could hear Malika in the background saying, ‘Who is this? Who is this?' And Roz said, ‘I'm going to have to call you back.' It was the last thing she ever said to me.”

“The crime was intentional,” she says, her voice thick with tears. “Malika knew exactly what she was doing.”

She describes how Willoughby practiced shooting the gun on several occasions. How the weapon was no secret to Ross and Willoughby's circle. How both women spoke of it often, showed it around to friends and family like one would an engagement ring.

“It was never not loaded, as far as I knew,” Huddleston recalls.

 

For all the haziness in the testimony and postmortem of the case, exhibit one—the West Silver Spring Popeyes exterior security surveillance tape—distinguishes itself in its clarity.

The video, recorded from a camera mounted on a high post at the edge of the parking lot, begins with the most crushingly ordinary of activities. Cars and trucks cruising through, placing orders for chicken and fries, then driving to the pickup window. It is 8:50
P.M
.

After a few moments, Willoughby's BMW pulls up to the electronic-menu kiosk, Ross at the wheel. The women are already fighting.

For more than a minute, Willoughby can be seen windmill-punching Ross—an unhinged mania of fury almost comic in its expression, like something one would see in a
Three Stooges
skit. After a bit, she thrusts herself into the backseat and retrieves something from a book bag. Seconds later, Ross screeches the car forward, slamming the brakes to the right of the pickup window. It is 8:54
P.M
.

Willoughby resolutely exits the passenger side, wearing a white shirt, straight-leg jeans, sneakers, a gun already in her hand. She is not frantic. She walks calmly to the back, where she pauses behind the right taillight and visibly adjusts the weapon.

She resumes walking to Ross's open window. Once there, she leans in and coldcocks her with the gun. Ross deflects the blow, and in less time than it takes to inhale, Willoughby forces the gun back through the window and fires a bullet into the left side of Ross's head, right behind her ear. It is 8:55.

Willoughby then draws back and begins bouncing around the parking lot like a boxer, her arms curved to her sides, flapping up and down. She jumps and paces, toes turned outward, stomping back and forth as if working a stage. Her face a rictus of confusion and horror, she returns to the car window. She flings open the driver's-side door and tugs at Ross's body. She pulls and heaves, finally jerking Ross onto the pavement, where she thuds with chilling finality.

Willoughby squats over Ross's motionless torso, cradles her head. She shakes her hard, harder, then jolts up again, resumes the frenetic circling, manic adrenal terror animating her limbs. She walks toward the pickup window, pivots, tramps back to Ross, every step a jackhammer. She shakes her once more. She then retreats to the edge of the parking lot, right beneath the security camera, tilts her head up, oblivious, consumed, and opens her arms wide, eyes closed, chin to God. It is 8:57.

Willoughby has yet to call for help. Instead, she doubles over as if wracked by cramps, her waist folding in on itself, heaving. The cops arrive, alerted by the interior Popeyes security alarm activated after the shot was fired. They swarm the scene. Willoughby does not run.

Amid the chaos lies Ross, in the drive-thru lane. Long and lean. Dressed in her favorite outfit, black polo, black jeans, limited-edition black-and-red Nike Air Force 1s. Improbably static, emanating dignity in its stillness, the only calm amid a flood of loss.

“I wanted to make her stop. I was angry. But I didn't want to kill her.”

This is what Willoughby told police after her arrest. Before she became hysterical, confused. Before she was medicated and put on suicide watch. Before she hired Michael Hart.

She told officers she didn't even know for sure if Ross was dead. Then she saw a coffee mug with the word
HOMICIDE
printed across it in black letters.

That's when I knew she was gone,” she told police.

A little more than a year after shooting the “only person I ever loved,” as she told the court the final day of the hearing, Willoughby was sentenced to 13 years in prison, eight for first-degree reckless homicide and five for use of a dangerous weapon.

Her friend and teammate Jamie Rubis visited her the Saturday before she was sent away. To the end, Willoughby remained flummoxed.

“She was trying to understand how her life could change so quickly,” Rubis says.

 

The Graceland Cemetery on North 43rd in Milwaukee is a vast, flat acreage with roads winding throughout the property. Willie drives, watching the headstones and monuments tick by. The windows are cracked, releasing the sounds of pop radio into the outside air.

“I do this every night,” he says. “After my work shift at the foundry.”

Willie brakes in front of a nondescript patch of grass, then gets out, walking cautiously between headstones until he reaches a flush bronze plaque with a single red carnation draped over the side.

“There she is,” he says. He tries to smile, but his face trembles. “My baby girl.”

He says hello, stares intently at the stone. In the center is a picture of Ross in a yellow tuxedo and boutonniere. Her hair is shaved tight. She looks comfortable, content.

“We were going to have her look more like a lady,” Willie offers, “but this is the way she was. This is her.”

He begins to cry, his voice rising, piercing the clear, empty space.

After a few minutes, he walks back to the car, his grief boiling to rage.

“I have to say good-night to my daughter in a graveyard,” he sputters, his head shaking back and forth as if watching tennis.

Inside the car, he talks about how he and wife Pamela used to drive to see Roz most days. Sometimes they would scream and holler. Other days they would sit from noon to midnight, chatting with their child. More than a few times, they slept by their daughter's side. Some friends grew concerned.

So much hurt. How could they go there?

It was the wrong question. When your child is in the ground, the only real question is how do you ever leave?

Later that night, at Red Lobster, his daughter's favorite restaurant, Willie does not pretend to be doing well.

“I had a bad moment this weekend. I wrote on my Facebook page that there is no God.”

He is dressed in his grieving uniform: a T-shirt with screen-printed photos of Rosalind all over the front and back,
RIP
scrolled along the bottom. Willie has more than a dozen shirts in the same vein. One features Willoughby's mug shot and the words:
THE WOMAN WHO KILLED MY DAUGHTER. STONE COLD KILLER
. In the winter, he switches to sweatshirts.

“All this hostility, it keeps coming up,” he says. “I don't know what to do with it.”

He refuses therapy or medication. “That isn't going to help me.”

Instead, he screen-prints the shirts, attends stop-the-violence rallies, and tries to forget the years he let slip away while Ross was alive.

“She said to me once: ‘You told me to be who I am. And you can't accept who I am. What am I supposed to do?'”

It would be a decade before Willie and his daughter had more than a cordial relationship as adults. The gap haunts Willie.

“If I had known,” he says, “I would have set myself right.”

In 2009, at Pamela's insistence, Ross and her father met for a talk.

“We got everything out in the open,” Willie says. “I had to sit myself down and say my love for my kids was greater than my problems with homosexuality.” For Ross, it would prove too little, too late.

Willie orders another bottle of beer, pushes his salad cucumbers to the side of his plate.

“Every day I put a mask on. There is this song, ‘Champagne Life,' by Ne-Yo. She loved that track. I hear that and I break.”

He talks about how when he saw his daughter's body at the morgue, he noticed some knots in her hair. He wanted them combed out, the way he had done when she was young. Neat and pretty.

“And the funeral director told me the knots were actually interior bumps from where the bullet ricocheted around her skull.”

Willie takes a long gulp of beer.

“If they had a camera set up in Malika's jail cell, I would watch it 24 hours a day,” he says, eyes dark. “It would be the only thing I did.”

 

It is an unusually clear day in downtown Milwaukee, and the West Silver Spring Popeyes is doing a brisk business when the Ross family drives past.