The first line of his letter said, “I don’t know if you remember the face they showed you before you saw mine.” He wrote that he had spent nineteen years trying to understand how someone could be so certain about a thing they hadn’t actually seen. He didn’t accuse me of anything. He said he had read the trial transcript after his release and realized how many times the police had shown me the same photograph before the identification. He said the question he had carried for nineteen years wasn’t whether I hated him, but whether I had ever been allowed to recognize him without already knowing who I was supposed to see.
I read the letter three times. Then I found the old case file in the box I’d kept in the attic and pulled out the identification paperwork. I had never looked at it closely because for twenty years I couldn’t bear to. The photographs were there, along with the dates of the interviews, and something I had completely forgotten was written in the margin of one page. “Witness exposure to suspect image prior to formal lineup.” I sat on the floor until my husband found me. I told him I had spent nineteen years believing I had given my mother justice, and suddenly I wasn’t sure what I’d given anyone.
I contacted the attorney who had represented him after his release. He helped me obtain the remaining records, and there were discrepancies I’d never known existed. Another witness had described someone significantly different from the man I identified, and evidence from the original investigation had apparently never been tested because the case had been considered solved. I called the man and told him I was sorry. He was quiet for a long time and then said, “I don’t need you to say you did it on purpose. I need you to stop being certain.” That was harder than anything else he’d said.
I don’t know what the final truth will be, and for the first time in my life I’m allowing myself to say that without trying to fill the silence. My mother was murdered, a man lost nineteen years of his life, and I helped put certainty where there should have been questions. I cannot give him those years back, and I cannot undo the testimony I gave when I was twenty-two. But I can stop protecting the version of events that lets me sleep at night. I have given the records to a new investigator, and now I’m waiting to find out whether the truth I was so certain about for nineteen years was ever the truth at all.
