Naturally, the prosecution did its best to discredit Wanda Lowell’s testimony. How, after all these years, could she recall exact words, exact dialogue? What was her real interest in the defendant’s husband? Was she secretly in love with him? Wanda grew indignant at the last question and told her questioner she was a married woman and a mother and she hadn’t come here to be insulted. I watched the jury. They were impressed.

The wrap-up came on a day of record-breaking temperatures. Collars wilted, faces drooped, magazines and newspapers were used as fans. Among the jury I sensed a definite anxiousness for the whole thing to be over with. For some of them, what had begun as a privileged adventure had now degenerated into a ritual of tedium. In his summary, my lawyer flattered them, caressed and cooled them with his mellifluous voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you have had the most difficult task any jury can have. You have sat through a trial which has proceeded mostly on hearsay. Yet a few facts have been produced which cannot be overlooked. One, Irene Mattison has devoted fifteen years to teaching children. She has been sensitive to their needs as well as society’s needs. It was a child’s welfare, her own daughter’s, that drove her to murder. It was outrage over an unspeakable depravity that compelled her to pick up a gun and use it. It was Vivian Snell’s clever deceit and vengeful disregard for a child’s life that overruled the defendant’s rational powers. And if we look closely, what other course of action was open to her?”

Not once did he turn his back on them. Instead, he leaned forward, seeking out one pair of eyes after another until he had enlisted them all. He orated but it did not sound like an oration. His tone suggested he was telling them something they already knew.

“And now we come to the question of why the defendant’s daughter has failed to appear in her mother’s behalf. We can’t presume to know all of her motives. Regina Mattison is seventeen years old. Some of you may consider her a child, just as her mother did when it came time to protect her. But child or adult, she is a daughter who has dealt the cruelest blow to her parents—abandonment in time of need. And yet she betrayed her parents long before this. That betrayal began after the first trip she took with Virgil Evans to Vivian Snell’s house. We would all like a ready answer as to why this girl joined this circle, this cult of people, so completely and willingly. Of course, the obvious temptation is to lay the guilt at her parents’ doorstep. But before we succumb to that temptation, let us consider the vast number of parents, many of them good parents, who have lost their children to various cults whose values are alien to those they raised their children with. And let us consider ourselves, let us consider how often all of us, as children, disappointed our parents in our pursuits. Quite simply, there was something inside Regina Mattison that made this group attractive to her, just as there was something in her mother that made them repulsive. When Irene Mattison pulled that trigger, she was doing the same thing she did the day she took a steel brush to the wall of her school. She was wiping out a plague that . . .”