To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

Kathy Stott wore a gray A-line skirt, and her long hair was loose. She looked like a schoolgirl. Hildy was with her, as was Amanda’s sister, Chantel, who had darting dark eyes, a petite, hyperalert version of her sister. Chantel’s husband, Daryl Gardner, looked as though he had not thought much of the occasion when getting dressed, or maybe a grubby

shirt and trousers were his comment on the occasion. He saw me watching him and started pacing in a semicircle so close to me I could hear him breathing.

Amanda was being walked down the hall. Today she was dressed as if for a party, in a black velvet top and pants, her hai...

smile turning up the corners of her mouth and eyes. These were striking differences from the hunched, bloated woman of two weeks earlier. The larger difference was the serene, even stoned look on her face. Maybe she was stoned; Hadley had to...

Whether it was medication or the decision to change her plea, whether the suppleness of her features was for protection or for sho...

four late arrivals took seats immediately behind us. Jason Smith was wearing the same cantaloupe-colored tie he had worn the last time I had seen him in court. His divorce attorney, Laura Schantz, was with him, as were two women with highlighted blond hair, one around thirty years old, the other maybe twice that.

he was sitting three strides from her, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. The muscles along his jaw did not relax. When he leaned back, I heard him mention to the two women some plans he had for the weekend, and that he had washed his hair that morning. The casualness with which he said these things felt like a slap, considering the reason we were here. How could he be concerned with how clean his hair was?

it said that despite the grave reasons for being here, Jason was bored.

District Attorney John Casalino explained that Amanda was changing her plea to guilty on count one, aggravated murder, and on count six, attempted aggravated murder. There would be a judgment of dismissal on counts two through five, seven, and eight. The sentence would be life with the possibility of parole in thirty-five years. Casalino said that he, Jason, and two detectives in attendance supported this sentence.

Did her taking the prescription medication Abilify in any way hamper her ability to proceed? “No,” she said.

She asked Amanda to rise. How did she plead to count one? “I am guilty,” Amanda said. How did she plead to count six? “I am guilty.” Her voice did not crack, she remained composed, and because she was facing away from the room, I did not until the next day see, on video, that she kept her

eyes closed as the judge recounted the date of the incident, the children’s names, their ages. It was only when the judge asked, in conclusion, whether Amanda had done these things that she opened her eyes and said, “Yeah.”

While we assume it is the primacy of the mother-child bond that makes us go easier on mothers who kill their children, McAnulty’s sentence made me consider how looks might come into play, as they do in nearly every other aspect of American life in the twenty-first century, perhaps in any country during any century. While we might believe that pretty is as pretty does, on some level we want to see youth and beauty as signs of goodness, of innocence. The attractive woman is given a pass. The ugly one gets the chair.

Court was not a zoo on April 22, 2010. One still photographer, one TV camera, the

gallery half-filled. Amanda’s family took seats in rows c...

Space was made in the front row for Jason’s family, who arrived carrying poster-board photos of Eldon. Deputies set the posters on easels at the front of the courtroom: Eldon close-up and smil...

There was nothing festive about her appearance except, maybe, her handcuffs, which were red and taken off once the guards

seated her beside Hadley.

Jason looked again at Amanda. She would not meet his eyes. “[Trinity] will be free of the bondage of having to think of the person who murdered my son,” he said. “And she has a new mother she can love and put behind her the

horror.” Several days earlier, Jason had married Keli Townsend, the younger of the blond women who accompanied him to court the week before. I wondered at the timing of the marriage, if telling Amanda in open court that she was disposable had been a pain Jason wanted to inflict, and if anyone would have blamed him.

I hope she realizes that her suffering pales in comparison to the suffering that my daughter and my son went through the night she threw them from a bridge in Portland into an icy-cold river in the middle of the

Amanda’s case had moved slowly, and now it was over. As her mother’s and sister’s cries reached a crescendo, as her ex-husband slipped the posters of Eldon into plastic, Amanda was handcuffed and led out the back way. I joined Hadley in the hall. “How did you like that?”

he asked. I said it was brutal. He nodded. “Not a good outcome,” he said. “For anyone.” Hadley found Amanda’s sentencing troubling for reasons that had to do with her, and those that had nothing to do with her. He believed she had been over-medicated in the months leading up to the crime.

He thought there was something to the revenge theory, but there were mitigating circumstances, circumstances that the courts would never consider, because Amanda’s family had feared she would receive death. Her parents and her aunt...

What had replaced it is what troubled him. When Hadley started practicing law, all aggravated murders in the state of Oregon carried a life sentence, but there was no minimum sentence. Parole boards, in his experience, usually paroled murderers—if they stayed out of trouble in prison—after seven to ten years.

Hadley believed in giving people a second chance. The public evidently disagreed. People thought judges and sentences were too liberal, and when given an opportunity to get tougher on crime, they took it. Measure 11 passed in 1994 and required a minimum twenty-five-year sentence for murder, with no possibility of parole prior to the full sentence being served.

Hadley hated this law and knew the liberal line to be fantasy. He’d spent more than forty years looking for these liberal judges and said he had found “darn few.” He believed murderers could change for the better, could become good citizens. The belief was not academic. Hadley...

So, yes, he had saved her life. She would not spend the next decade or two shunted through the death row legal maze, but a thirty-five-year sentence also obviated hope and canceled the future.

Johnson knew Amanda in college. They’d been part of the same casual group of friends and had occasionally stayed in touch over the years.

She disagreed with what the judge had said, that what Amanda had done was truly incomprehensible. A former social worker, Johnson stayed up late at her computer reading the DHS reports. The Smith family’s troubles were like dozens

of cases she had worked on, call after call logged about Jason and Amanda, and likely more instances where calls were not made.

Johnson knew, there was very little the department could do. Whether people closer to the situation sensed the family sliding toward disaster, who could say? ...

like a toxic pair. John...

It had been five weeks since Amanda was given a life sentence, five weeks during which I’d learned that a fear of influencing the outcome, maybe, had kept some people from speaking until the proceedings were over. With Amanda’s fate set, I started to receive calls, texts, and emails. People sometimes contacted me late at night.

I had, for instance, been told about an incident that might or might not be explained by grief. The person telling the story did not want to be identified. The person said Jason had taken leave from his job at Ricoh

after Eldon was murdered. After several months, Jason returned to work, commuting from the rural home outside of Eugene he now shared with Trinity and his new wife, Keli Townsend. The place had once belonged to Keli’s grandparents, and the family lived there rent-free. In May 2010, Jason’s family learned that he had not, in fact, gone back to work at Ricoh—“not one

day,” the person said—and that the joke around the office had become, “Is Jason coming in today?” Where he had gone each weekday for several months was unknown. The deception was revealed at a Mother’s Day party attended by both the Smith and Townsend families. After Jason’s mother said i...

was dr...

the fake commuting was something I had only ever read about, in Emmanuel Carrère’s The

Adversary, the true story of a man who pretended for years to commute to a prestigious job and who took over the financial investments for his family. About to be exposed for never having had a job and having spent the family’s money, he murdered his wife, children, and parents rather than face their contempt and disappointment.

Hadley did not venture a guess about where Jason had gone. He did say he knew a great deal “about Jason’s history, as did the judge and DA,” and that if Amanda’s case had gone to trial, “it all w...

in his opinion “it was Jason who ruined Amanda’s life.” Jason’s mother had commended her son at sentencing for “taking the high road,”

Looked at this way, the Smith family had spared Amanda the possibility of execution. Another way to look at it was that the family had been through

enough and was not going to submit to the scrutiny a ...

I told Hadley my thinking had gone in many directions—she was desperate, she was fragile; she wanted life as she knew it to end. “There’s something, too,” he said, “to ‘You took my joy; now I will take yours.’”

Amanda’s family had sent him “lovely notes” after she was sentenced. I told him I heard they had repeatedly checked Amanda into treatment in the months before she drove the children to the bridge. Hadley said this was true and that she’d been released with at least three different medications, including

some “in a black-and-orange box, with the warning that said, ‘You might go out and kill someone on these, but otherwise, have fun!’” I later looked up what these pills might be. Possibilities included Prozac and Paxil; neither listed aggression as a likely side effect.

Seven days after Amanda was sentenced, the state of Oregon released its Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT) Final Report on Eldon Smith. The CIRT was mandated any time there was a homicide of a youth in Oregon. The twelve-page report included ten occasions on which the Oregon Department of Human Services checked on abuse or neglect incidents involving

Jason Smith and Amanda Stott-Smith, starting in June 2000 when Amanda told police Jason had restrained her and his arrest for assault IV, and ending in October 2008, with Gavin telling a Child Protective Services worker that “he was pretty sure the marks on his arms were caused by his friends and not his mother.”

On August 30, 2010, the state released additional records, in response to a request by KGW-TV for “all DHS records” having to do with the incident and the aftermath. The records ran more than one hundred pages and included medical information about both children. Eldon’s cause of death was listed as “Asphyxiation By Drowning.” Other significant findings