Chapter 18

In order to prove his guilt, the prosecutors needed to establish William's connection to the women, ties to the scene of the crime, and motive. The first part was easy. William worked in the same office as Anna Leigh, frequented the gas station where Kimberly was employed, took personal training from Jill, and had gone on a date with Emma the very night of her murder. The other two components were trickier. Though all of their bodies were found in the same place, it was unlikely that the women were actually killed there. Instead, there was a second, as of yet undiscovered location where the murders had occurred, making it difficult to collect physical evidence beyond what was on the women themselves. Proving motive was perhaps the most difficult task of them all.

The main prosecutors were an older bearded man and a white woman whom I pegged as being around my age. Once or twice my parents had suggested that I go to law school because law was the acceptable career path for people with a penchant for reading and writing. I resisted because all the people I knew in college who wanted to go to law school had been assholes and because being seen as respectable in other people's eyes didn't seem like a good enough reason to go deep into debt for a career I didn't even want. I regretted that decision on days when my bank account balance was particularly low, but by that point I thought myself too old to go back to school.

I considered the prosecutor who stood at the front of the courtroom. She wore a tight gray dress beneath a black blazer. I couldn't attest to her legal chops, but she looked every bit the kind of lawyer who would ruthlessly imprison someone for life.

Perhaps a third, secret reason that I hadn't wanted to go to law school was that I worried I wouldn't be able to cut it. The prosecutor looked like a woman who didn't give in to her indulgences. She probably never drank too much, ate too much, slept too much. She'd probably never been fired from her job. She'd almost certainly never fallen in love with a serial killer.

"Looks like a bitch," Dotty commented.

I thought I was the kind of person who called out misogyny in other women. I was wrong. I remained silent as the prosecutors began their opening statement.

In my notebook I wrote Dear William at the top of a blank page. I saw you today for the first time. Even though we can't speak or touch, I cherish getting to spend this time with you. I couldn't focus on what I was writing while the prosecutor was talking. It was strange going from having spent months of my life suppressing my desire to talk about William to suddenly being in a space where everyone else wanted to talk about him too.

I turned to a new page where I wrote Evidence and divided the page into two columns: one that said Guilty, and the other, Innocent.

Meghan's voice entered my consciousness.

Are you making a pro/con list for William's guilt?she asked.

Shut up,I told her, getting mad at the fictional version of my best friend. This isn't less reliable than a jury of peers.

The female prosecutor paced the courtroom, her heels clicking against the floor.

"We're going to show that William Thompson is guilty without a shadow of a doubt," she said. "This is a man with the means to kill, a man with a violent past, and a man with a motive."

I looked at the back of William's head, which told me nothing. I wrote violent past? in my notebook and underlined it. Was there something more than fights between brothers as he'd confessed in his letters? Hurting siblings was considered acceptable in a way that hurting people outside the family wasn't.

The male prosecutor walked through the condition that the bodies were in when they were found, showing the painstaking care that the killer had taken to conceal his identity.

"Only a very intelligent man could've done such a thing, and I'm here to tell you that William Thompson is an intelligent man," he said.

"In addition to being intelligent," he continued, "the killer would need access to a second location, somewhere private that would allow him time to murder his victims, and William, with his successful law career, has the funds to acquire such a space. He would also need to be strong enough to lift a body on his own, as was William, who played football in high school and more recently received personal training."

What the prosecutor failed to mention was that William hadn't been particularly good at football, lacking both the size and so-called football IQ required to excel at the game. It was the first of many occasions when I had to stifle my desire to raise my hand to correct the prosecution's case with my personal knowledge of William.

He then dove into William's violent past, which consisted of two separate suspensions for fighting, one in middle school and one in high school. In the second instance, he said, the kid that William fought had to go to the emergency room and get stitches. I wondered if such an incident could possibly be connected, if the harm boys wrought on one another in their youths could turn into the deaths of women later on.

When the male prosecutor finished, the female prosecutor closed their opening statement by describing all the reasons why William might've been motivated to kill the four women.

"Maybe William—like many people—underwent trauma," she said. "We know he was a football player. He could have CTE—his brain suffering so many hits on the field that it altered his chemistry."

She went through the victims one by one, speculating as to the events that might've brought about their death.

"It's possible," she told that jury, "that William approached Anna Leigh in a sexual manner and when she refused his advances, he strangled her by the copy machine while her husband waited at home.

"Perhaps Kimberly was sold out of William's favorite chocolate bar or refused to provide change for a hundred-dollar bill and in retaliation he killed her, wrapped her in a tarp, and dragged her the two blocks to where his car was parked at his condo," she continued.

"It's easy to imagine that a man like William was threatened by Jill's physique and athletic skills. What if she pushed him too far in one of their sessions, humiliated him physically in some way, and to punish her, he wrapped his hands around her neck until she was no longer breathing?

"And Emma, that's simple," she concluded. "Men are always killing women during dates. She doesn't look like her picture in the dating app? Dead. She tries to leave the date early? Dead. She doesn't want to have sex? Dead. She does everything right? Dead. It's impossible to know why some women die and some women live, though certain demographics of women are at higher risk than others. As a white, middle-class, cisgender woman, Emma had everything going for her and she still died after going on a date with the wrong man. What a shame."

Rattled off in a row like that, the evidence against William seemed incontrovertible. I looked down at my list where I'd added intelligent, rich, and has motive to the guilty column. There was nothing on the list of reasons that he might be innocent.

I knew that my boyfriend might be a serial killer, but it was different hearing someone else say it. In the front row, Jill's sister was weeping while her mother rubbed her back. I doodled at the top of the notebook page, running the pen over the paper until it made a hole.

Beside me, Dotty picked at her cuticles. I couldn't tell whether she was bored or nervous.

It was a relief when the defense took over. Court trials weren't intended to be a sporting match, but I couldn't help but think about them as being a part of my team, which at that point consisted only of me, Dotty, the lawyers, and William himself. It was a David and Goliath situation where David had been accused of killing a bunch of women.

Both of William's lawyers were older white men who bore a passing resemblance to his father and had Southern accents so strong that they sounded fake. If nothing else, William had the advantage of being well-connected in the legal world. In any other circumstance, their assuming demeanor would've rubbed me the wrong way. It was clear that they were men who were used to getting what they wanted, no matter whom they had to step on to do it. As it was, I was happy that we were on the same side.

"The prosecution would have you believe that this is a slam-dunk case," one began. "In fact, it is anything but. Outside of mere coincidence, there is nothing to tie William Thompson to these four women. No DNA evidence, no fingerprints, nothing in his car or his apartment."

I swore that I heard Dotty growl in approval beside me.

"William Thompson is a good man. He's a lawyer, a taxpayer, a member of his community who has been taken down by proximity to tragedy. How would you feel if someone you knew was killed and while you were still mourning their death, you were accused of causing it?"

I wrote good man? in the "innocent" column across from where I'd written violent past? I looked at the back of William's head, which remained unspeaking.

"Do you think he did it?" I asked Dotty at the end of the first day.

She looked at me.

"There are some things that only God needs to know," she replied.

As I would learn over the coming weeks, we all had our ways of coping with loving someone that the world told us we weren't supposed to love. Some of us were just more honest with ourselves than others.