A Death at Crooked Creek by Marianne Wesson

Author:Marianne Wesson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2013-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

The letter I eventually received from the legal department of the Mass-Mutual Financial Group was polite but final. Until that time we had communicated via e-mail about my hope that I could access the company’s archive of material related to the Hillmon case, but the attorney in charge of the matter must have believed that the formality of hard copy would discourage me from further pleading. “Dear Professor Wesson,” the letter advised me, “Please be aware that in accordance with existing MassMutual policy governing confidential and/or attorney-client privileged materials, we are unable to honor your request. We hope that our efforts and responses to your other requests for information related to the Hillmon case have been helpful to you and we wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.”

This outcome disappointed me, of course, but I could not be surprised. Nor could I quite believe that the decision to bar me from their archive rested on no motive but solicitude for the attorney-client privilege. If there were privileged materials in the archive, MassMutual, successor to the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, was the client, and could waive the privilege. Apparently Connecticut Mutual had been willing to do so a decade earlier when attorney Donald Paine had wished to see the materials. There was something, or possibly many things, hiding in their archival files that they did not want me to see.

MassMutual had, however, been good enough to provide me with some information before cutting off communication. They had furnished a typed inventory of the newspaper articles of which they had copies; I had already obtained nearly all of them, but the list was a useful confirmation that I had found most of the press accounts that mattered. And they had agreed to provide me with copies of three photographs that I had seen in the American Heritage article about the Hillmon case that I had read while still in law school. The tiny captions on the published photographs had said they were supplied courtesy of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, so I was fairly certain MassMutual had them, and they did. They had charged me $150 to send three digital images, but it was worth it. It would have been worth it even if I had received only one photograph in return: the one below, which arrived with the label “Brown__Hillmon__retouched.” (The retouching must have affected the color only, as otherwise it seems identical to the one published in 1968.)

One cannot judge the absolute height of the men from the picture, of course, but it is possible to get a fairly good idea of their relative heights. It’s not just the heads, it’s the shoulders. Hillmon looks to be the taller man by, in my estimation, about an inch and half.

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