Bloodsworth by Tim Junkin

Author:Tim Junkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2005-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

BLOODSWORTH’S TRIAL MADE good copy, and the local papers ran stories each day describing the contest. MURDER-RAPE TRIAL STARTS WITH GRUESOME EVIDENCE, headlined a story by Scott Shane in the Sun. DAWN HAMILTON’S COMPANIONS TESTIFY IN MURDER TRIAL was the banner headline for the March 6 edition of the News American. FOOTPRINT TENTATIVELY LINKS DEFENDANT TO SLAIN GIRL, 9, headlined another News American story written by Cynthia Skove. 5 PLACE MAN WITH SLAIN GIRL, 5 SAY HE WAS HOME, topped another for the Sun. BLOODSWORTH ON STAND, DENIES MURDERING CHILD, ran another. Some of the reports suggested that the tennis shoe had connected him with the murder, while some claimed it had not. Some stories emphasized the lack of any scientific proof that he was the killer. Some dwelled more on the identifications. Speculation was rampant as to the outcome.

Thomas Hamilton, after testifying early on in the trial, had then sat and watched the entire drama unfold. He’d previously become convinced by Chris Shipley’s certainty, that Bloodsworth was the man who killed his daughter. He wanted to see him convicted, see him get the death sentence. But after watching the witnesses, he feared that the evidence wasn’t strong enough. Like Steven Scheinin, he expected an acquittal.

Hamilton and the lawyers may all have underestimated the enormous unspoken pressures that exist in a case of this type. The jurors, simple citizens from the community, were asked to judge a man their own police department, after an enormous investigation, believed was guilty of a heinous crime. These jurors had been handed the responsibility for deciding whether this man went free. It was obvious that the prosecutors also believed he was guilty. Totally and completely guilty. The jurors fully realized that if they found him not guilty and he was in fact the murderer, other innocent children might be raped, tortured, killed. They’d seen the horrible and frightening photographs of what was done to Dawn Hamilton. Photographs that showed flies crawling over this little girl’s bloodied body. Yes, the judge gave them an instruction that they had to find proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But psychologically, emotionally, they must have wanted to believe that the state had the right man, that they had the chance to put an end to this sordid tragedy. If the evidence was even close, how in good conscience would they acquit?

ON THE MORNING of March 8, the institutional floodlights of the Baltimore County Detention Center came on at 7 A.M. as they did every morning in the jail that had become Kirk Bloodsworth’s world. With the lights, the murky images of sleep vanished, replaced, as his mind woke, with the dread of the nightmare that had become his life—the dread of consciousness, of the place he inhabited, of what they were saying about him, and of what he would have to face that day.

He lay unmoving for several minutes, trying to fight off the nausea in his gut, the sickness and fear in his mind, trying to find the will to move, to get off the mattress, to just stand up.

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