Framed

The Absence of Motive

JOHN GRISHAM

When Joe Bryan was in the second grade he met his future wife, Mickey Blue, who was in the first.

Obviously too young to even think about a romance, they nonetheless kept an eye on each other as they grew up in their small, neighboring Texas towns.

Mickey was popular in school but very quiet and studious.

Joe seldom met a stranger and thrived on interaction with others.

He often had the impression that he was watching Mickey a lot more than she was noticing him.

As teenagers, Mickey dated Joe’s twin brother and he dated her cousin.

Other romances came and went, and at some point they realized they were dating the wrong people. When Joe finally asked her out she quickly accepted and within weeks they were inseparable.

Both wanted to be teachers and went away to different colleges with the same goal.

They loved children and believed that learning was the key to happy, successful lives.

When they married in 1969, Mickey taught in an elementary school and Joe taught Latin and English and coached the swim team.

He had a small faculty apartment and they spent some of their happiest years there.

Their lives were consumed with each other and the kids they taught.

They dreamed of starting their own family, but after three years of marriage received the sad news that Mickey could not bear children.

They were devastated, but this made them even closer.

In 1975, they returned to Mickey’s hometown of Clifton, Texas.

Her parents still lived there and the family was respected and well known.

Mickey had been voted Miss Clifton High her senior year and she quickly renewed old friendships.

She got a job as a fourth-grade teacher and Joe became the high school principal.

They loved living in Clifton and were active in the community, especially the First Baptist Church and, of course, the schools.

Joe was out almost every night at some school function.

He never missed a football game, home or away, and Mickey was usually with him.

Their days revolved around their classes, their students, and school activities.

They were rarely apart and were often seen taking their long evening walks through Clifton.

At home, Joe often helped Mickey grade papers and prepare lessons.

He even helped her decorate her classrooms.

With no children at home, they doted on one another and were determined to keep their marriage fresh.

They watched so many of their married friends drift apart with time, pulled in different directions by children and careers.

They stayed close to their families and were always ready for another gathering.

For Thanksgiving each year, Joe and Mickey hosted her family for a traditional dinner, and for each Christmas they visited his family for the festivities.

—

Mickey was always the first teacher to arrive at Clifton Elementary School, often at her desk at 7:00 a.m.

She enjoyed the quiet of the early morning before the real day began and the hallways were filled with the eager voices of young students.

On Tuesday, October 15, 1985, Mickey did not arrive at the school.

Oddly, her classroom was still dark and empty when a colleague, Susan Kleine, a fifth-grade teacher, walked by and noticed the door was closed.

It was also locked, and Susan assumed Mickey was in the copy room on the other side of the building.

At 8:00 a.m. , though, there was still no sign of Mickey, and Susan knew something was wrong.

She hurried to the office of the principal, Rex Daniels, and informed him Mickey was absent.

Susan assumed she had called in sick and Rex had forgotten to summon a substitute.

But Rex said he had not heard from Mickey.

His first inclination was to call Joe, but he remembered that his friend was out of town.

Joe, in fact, was 120 miles away in Austin, attending the annual gathering of the Texas Association of Secondary School Principals.

He had spoken to Mickey at 9:00 p.m.

the night before when he called from his hotel room in Austin.

As always, he had told her he loved her, and that he would be home the following afternoon.

Rex asked his secretary to call the Bryan home, which she did, but there was no answer.

He asked her to call Mickey’s parents, Otis and Vera Blue, who lived nearby.

They answered the phone, said they had no idea where Mickey was but assumed she was at work.

They had seen her the previous afternoon when she had stopped by.

They left immediately to go check on her.

As did Rex Daniels, who arrived at the Bryans’ first and saw that Mickey’s car was parked in the garage.

The morning papers lay in the driveway.

He rang the doorbell but no one answered.

The Blues arrived with a key and they all went inside.

Vera went first and called her daughter’s name.

When she stepped into the master bedroom, she screamed at a ghastly sight.

Blood was splattered across the ceiling and four walls.

Mickey lay across the bed, covered in blood, obviously dead.

Rex grabbed Vera and Otis, led them to the living room, and sat them on a sofa.

They were horrified, inconsolable, almost unable to speak.

Rex returned to the doorway of the bedroom but did not step inside.

For a moment he looked at Mickey’s body lying across the unmade bed.

She was naked from the waist down and her pink nightgown was pulled up to her thighs.

Rex managed to gather himself, found the phone in the kitchen, and called the police.

Around 10:00 a.m. , as Joe was attending a session of the conference in Austin, Harold Massey, the organization’s executive director and a longtime friend, asked Joe to step outside the room.

In a foyer, Massey told Joe that his wife had been shot to death in their home.

Joe fell into a chair and mumbled, “Mickey Bryan of Clifton, Texas?”

Three other principals who knew Joe well helped him upstairs to his room where he lay in the bed, shivering in his suit and tie.

Clifton was at least two hours from Austin, a fact that would become important later.

Joe was in no condition to drive.

Two friends from Clifton arrived around noon to take him home, and when he saw them he broke down and began crying again.

One friend later recalled, “Very little was said.

Joe sat in the back with his head down and cried the whole way.”

As they entered Clifton, Joe looked out the window at the streets and houses and buildings he knew so well, and dreaded the awful moment when he arrived at the home he and his beloved Mickey had built ten years earlier.

As they approached it, the first thing he noticed was the police cars parked everywhere.

Law enforcement officers were crawling all over the place and the bright yellow crime scene tape was strung around trees and light poles.

City policemen, county deputies, state troopers, and crime scene technicians were busy with the investigation.

The fabled Texas Rangers were already on-site, always ready to help the local boys with a homicide investigation.

The neighbors watched in muted disbelief.

Word of the murder had spread quickly, as it always does in a small town.

Joe recognized the sad and frightened faces of his people.

Still stunned and sleepwalking, Joe gamely tried to answer the first wave of questions from the investigators.

Yes, he kept a gun in the house, a .357 Magnum pistol loaded with birdshot to kill rattlesnakes and copperheads that sometimes got too close.

He told them he and Mickey kept $1,000 in cash in a metal box.

After a few more questions, Joe was driven to the home of Vera and Otis Blue, where shocked and grief-stricken friends were gathering.

When Joe saw Susan Kleine, he asked her again and again, “What am I going to do without Mickey?”

Later that night, Joe went to his mother’s home in the small town of Elm Mott, forty miles away near Waco.

Distraught, bewildered, and emotionally spent, he lay awake in bed and kept asking himself, Who in the world would want to hurt Mickey? And why?

—

At the crime scene, investigators worked feverishly late into the night.

Some details emerged: Mickey had been shot four times at close range; Joe’s .357 Magnum was missing; lead pellets were in Mickey’s wounds and all over the bedroom, indicating the pistol was probably the murder weapon; there were no witnesses; the neighbors had heard and seen nothing; there were no suspicious fingerprints; no boot or shoe prints; no semen was found with vaginal swabs; there were no signs of forced entry into the home; a cigarette butt was found on the kitchen floor, though neither Mickey nor Joe smoked.

When the investigators realized that Mickey’s gold wedding band, watch, and diamond ring were missing, along with Joe’s pistol, they assumed she had been the victim of a burglary-turned-homicide.

But there was little evidence to support this theory, or any other for that matter.

They found few clues.

Mickey’s body was removed, leaving behind a blood-soaked mattress and carpet and a bedroom splattered with blood.

The sheer volume of blood convinced the police that they needed an expert.

Robert Thorman was a detective with the police department in nearby Bell County, and four months earlier had received his certificate as an expert in “bloodstain pattern analysis.”

The Bryan murder was his first fee-paying job moonlighting as an expert.

Through the good-ole-boy network of police and sheriffs, word was out that Thorman had passed his tests, got his diploma, and could now study bloodstains and see things invisible to other investigators.

Those who practiced bloodstain analysis, at least in 1985, believed that a bloody crime scene was filled with clues as to what happened and who-done-it.

By carefully analyzing the drops, spatters, sprays, drippings, trails, prints, and smudges of the victim’s blood, a seasoned expert could find crucial evidence.

Thorman had been certified after taking a one-week, forty-hour crash course for which he paid four hundred dollars to a private company that specialized in training “experts”

in all types of forensic disciplines.

His classes were held in a hotel ballroom in Beaumont, and, remarkably, every “student”

in the class earned high marks, got the certificate, and was ready to testify.

When Thorman arrived at the Bryan home Tuesday night, he immediately went to work doing what he had just learned in the hotel ballroom.

He studied the specks of blood scattered around the walls.

He took photographs.

He tacked strings here and there, took measurements, and spent over two hours in the bedroom.

But his thorough examination yielded nothing of substance.

His visit produced little, but he would be back.

What it did not yield would become far more significant.

Like most homeowners, Joe and Mickey owned an assortment of flashlights—large and small, old and new, close at hand but rarely to be found when needed.

No flashlight was found at the crime scene.

Joe and Mickey’s bedroom was searched from top to bottom for hours by different investigators, including the expert Thorman, and not a single person ever mentioned a flashlight.

One of the Bryans’ flashlights, though, would become a crucial piece of evidence, its significance exaggerated by the investigators.

—

When Joe was overcome with fatigue, he fell asleep, only to be awakened by another nightmare.

This can’t be true, he kept telling himself.

After a fitful night, he finally got out of bed Wednesday morning and braced himself for another awful day.

His first chore was to visit the funeral home to discuss the arrangements for burying his wife.

While he was there he was told that Joe Wilie wanted to talk to him.

Joe was driven to the police station and entered, without a lawyer.

Taking a lawyer had never crossed his mind.

Wilie was a former state trooper who had been promoted to the Texas Rangers, the state’s elite and legendary crime-fighting unit.

Typical of a Ranger, Wilie carried himself with a self-assurance that some considered cockiness, an aura of believing that he could solve any murder.

He began the conversation by asking Joe some routine questions about his life with Mickey.

Joe, fatigued and emotionally spent, was initially struck by Wilie’s total lack of sympathy.

Peering from under the brim of his obligatory white Stetson cowboy hat, he was brusque, cocksure, and to the point.

No one observing would’ve had a clue that the Ranger was talking to a man whose wife had just been brutally murdered.

Joe wanted to know how the investigation was going.

Dammit, he wanted to know who killed his wife.

But Wilie was tight-lipped and gave almost no details.

He did say they had found the metal box but there was no cash in it.

No, Joe had no theories about who might have wanted to kill Mickey.

He still could not believe anyone would want to.

As unpleasant as it was, the interview was not confrontational.

The accusations would come later.

—

Unknown to Joe, and without his consent, the investigators had removed from the home all of the Bryans’ valuable papers and documents: bank statements, insurance policies, checkbooks, bills, wills, virtually everything.

The bank statements revealed a frugal lifestyle that came as no surprise.

Joe and Mickey saved their money and had about $35,000 in various accounts.

The mortgage on their home was approximately $36,000 and covered with a life insurance policy.

Upon the death of one, the mortgage would be paid off.

The couple had purchased inexpensive term life insurance policies on each other for about $150,000.

Their retirement benefits through the Texas Teacher Retirement System were $26,000, payable to the survivor.

Joe would see none of the money.