Page 50 of Shadow of Justice
“I found news articles from when Ellie disappeared. It had been all over the local stations. There were search parties and everything. I didn’t know any of that. I didn’t know that she hadn’t been found right away. I mean, until I started looking it up online, I didn’t know whether she’d been stabbed or strangled or shot or raped or any of it. I just knew she’d been killed, that it happened before I was born, and that you don’t talk about it with my family.”
“Did you ever discuss what you found with anyone?” I asked.
“Not in person. No. But while I was searching for information about Ellie, I stumbled onto this website. An online forum about cold murder cases in Ohio. I discovered there was a whole sub-forum devoted just to Ellie’s case.”
It was here Hayden’s nerves seemed to fall away. She took the jury through how she connected with amateur sleuths who had researched the case.
“Did you learn anything you didn’t already know?” I asked.
“God. Yes. I learned everything. That she was found in the woods like that by hunters. One of these amateur sleuths had done some interviews on his own. He’d talked to a friend of my Aunt Ellie’s who went to college with her. He posted photographs of her I’d never seen before. Although that wasn’t hard to do. The only pictures I’d ever seen of her were the ones hanging in my grandparents’ house.”
“I’d like to direct your attention to what’s been marked as State’s Exhibit 49. Do you recognize it?”
“Yes.”
“Can you describe it?”
“This is the picture my online friend showed me. It’s Aunt Ellie with a group of her friends from nursing school.”
I admitted the photo into evidence and displayed it on the overhead for the jury. “Did anything strike you about this picture?” I asked.
“That’s my Aunt Ellie in the middle,” she said. “I recognized her right away because she looks so much like Mom. For a second, I thought it was my mom. But the hair is different. Longer than my mom usually wore it. But that’s my dad sitting on the end of the bench there.”
Hayden pointed out her then twenty-four-year-old father. He sat on the edge in profile, looking straight at Ellie Luke. She seemed unaware of it, smiling at the camera like the rest of the young people in the photo.
“Your father,” I said. “That surprised you?”
“I had no idea my dad and Aunt Ellie were friends. Were classmates. He didn’t tell me. No one told me. It was unsettling for me to find this all out from strangers online.”
“What did you do next?”
“I printed the picture out and took it to my dad. I asked him about it.”
“What did he say?”
“He shut me down. Got really angry. He wanted to know where I found it. He said he’d never seen that picture before. I asked him over and over, were you friends with Ellie too? Did Mom know? He just refused to answer any of my questions. He snatched the photo out of my hands and took it. He told me to stop chasing ghosts. Told me I didn’t understand what I was messing with. He was so angry. It scared me. So I just didn’t bring it up to him again.”
“Was that the end of it? Did you do what your father asked?”
“No. I just … it bothered me how angry he got. He just exploded. I didn’t know what to think. I mean, I guess I thought maybe he was trying to protect my mom. But I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t want to remember my aunt. Like they wanted to erase her. I felt … I don’t know. I felt like she deserved better.”
“What did you do next?”
“A couple of weeks after Dad blew up at me, he started acting strange around me. Like he wouldn’t talk to me. He just avoided me. He has a workshop in the basement. It’s an old coal bin he turned into his own little man cave. He’d go down there and to be alone. I asked my mom if he was okay. She just shrugged and told me not to bother him. Well, I was worried. It just seemed out of character for my dad to be so moody and withdrawn like that. So I went down there. Two or three times I saw him sitting at his workbench looking at something in a box. When he heard me coming, he closed it so quickly and shoved it into a drawer. The first time, he snapped at me. Told me to stop sneaking up on him.”
“Did you ever find out what was in the box?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“What happened, Hayden?”
“About two weeks after the first time I caught him down there, he left the door open. Dad was at work. I got home early from class and my mom was on a shopping trip. I was alone in the house. I don’t know. I just decided to go down there. I went into Dad’s man cave. I opened the drawer I saw him shove that box into. The drawer itself was open a little bit. So I pulled the box out.”
“What did you find, Hayden?”
“There were pictures in it. Of my aunt. One she was sitting on a bus talking to someone. Whoever took the picture must have been sitting behind her. You could see her in profile. Another picture she was sitting at a picnic table eating lunch. It was a close-up of her face. And another one … she was at my grandma’s. I recognized the side of the house and the bushes she keeps outside. The picture was of my aunt sitting on her bed. It was taken through a window. She was naked.”
One by one, I marked the photographs for identification. When I moved to admit them, Cutler objected.
