Death of a Jewish American Princess by Shirley Frondorf

Author:Shirley Frondorf [Frondorf, Shirley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83116-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

The day was not yet over; there was still time for one witness before five o’clock. The speed of this trial was amazing—picking a jury had barely consumed three hours, with time out for lunch. The insanity diagnosis that Steinberg’s psychiatrists had made was a rare disorder, complex and difficult; one would expect this trial to be slow and deliberate. But State v. Steinberg was running on its own momentum and was on a very fast track.

Since Jeff Hotham was accustomed to quick trials, he had his first witness ready and waiting in one of the anterooms. The prosecution usually begins with a bang—a strong, interesting witness to catch the jury’s attention. The boring, but necessary, witnesses can follow, the fingerprint and crime-scene people and a host of police witnesses who tend to make the jury restless with their repetition but cannot be omitted. After this, Hotham’s witness plan grew weaker and seemed to lose punch.

The prosecutor began with the witness who was really his trump card—the sweet, devastatingly appealing Traci, who loved her mother dearly and had somehow survived emotionally intact. The twelve-year-old had been through a crucible for the nine months after her mother’s death and had emerged poised and composed. She had not been to the jail to see her father, nor did she want to go—her smoldering resentment toward him had grown. The two girls had been away a lot that first summer after Elana’s death. They went to the beach in San Diego with Edith Singer and then to Chicago to stay with Edith’s relatives, where they were treated with enormous attention and care. When Mitchell and Bonnie went to Denver to start a new restaurant after the B. B. Singer’s disaster in August, they took the girls with them. The travel must have been helpful. Traci survived and was even mothering six-year-old Shawn and calming her. She was intelligent and had a fiercely independent mind, as her testimony was to show.

Jeff Hotham led the little girl carefully through the events of the night of May 27, how she had started to clean up the pages of her school books and had fallen asleep, how her mother and father were spending a normal evening. She told how she awoke in the middle of the night to hear her mother screaming, “Traci, Shawn, Steve!” “After she screamed everything went quiet. And I yelled, ‘Mom!’ I yelled it twice.”

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