Free The Confession by Domenic Stansberry Page A

some secret between us, some complicity in the crime, some voyeuristic pleasure, there in the Otis, touching each other all over.) Now my eyes met Dillard’s, and I could see his misery and confusion and the jury saw me watching him and we all knew the trial had been going badly and his fate hung in the balance.
    “I would say he displays tendencies in that direction,” I said, “but I would not put him definitively in that category, no.”
    “Mr. Danser, didn’t you indicate earlier in your testimony that there were contradictor) indications on the tests you administered?”
    At the prosecutor’s table, Minor made a note. It was a bad phrasing of the question. It gave Robinson an avenue to attack the results of my tests during the upcoming cross-examination.
    “Yes, that’s true,” I said. “There are often contradictory indications on such tests.”
    “In your own conversations, with me, after interviewing my client, did you not suggest a quite specific clinical diagnosis, in regard to Mr. Dillard’s mental state at the time of the crime?”
    I realized where he was headed now, and what I was expected to do.
    “No. I don’t believe I made a definitive diagnosis, no” Wagoner blanched. He didn’t like the answer, but I was only telling the truth. He had talked, and I had listened, but I had never actually put forth the diagnosis he wanted me to repeat now, in front of the jury. I could not go out on that limb, not with Paulie gone from the case. I could not join the likes of Sherman and Lowe.
    “You did evaluate my client for delusional thinking, though, and memory loss, did you not?”
    “Yes.”
    Wagoner went to the defense table and gathered up his copy of Kleinsdt. He read from the text out loud, reciting the passage on situational memory loss. He pivoted on his heels and arched those eyebrows of his, trying to look confident, maybe, wise and capable. A man on the verge of bringing the truth to light.
    “In your judgment, did Mr. Dillard suffer from this disorder?” he asked. “I mean, in the sense that he could have blacked out, and killed Ms. Mori in an act of unconscious rage that he would not remember later.”
    At the defense table Dillard was full of trepidation, I could see, and I felt my dilemma more acutely. This was the moment my testimony had been building to. I didn’t want to punish Dillard for his lawyer’s incompetence, but I couldn’t manufacture the kind of evidence Haney wanted.
    “I’d say it was possible,” said, and I felt the energy leak out of the courtroom.
    “Possible?”
    “Yes. Possible.”
    “Possible,” said Wagoner.
    Wagoner repeated the word again, as if savoring it, as if he had won some major point. The truth was, my testimony was lukewarm at best, and he knew it. I had not given him what he wanted. He poked at me a while longer, the way one pokes at a piece of overcooked cod on a dinner plate, hoping it is really not so bad as it seems. Eventually he’d had enough.
    “No more questions your honor.”
    Then came Minor Robinson. It would be anticlimactic now, I thought, his battle with me. For all practical purposes, I was a neutral witness. My guess, he’d sweet talk me, work out a gem or two for the prosecution, then let me go. But I was wrong. He went after me the same way he had gone after Sherman and Lowe. Possible , you say? With a glee that was a bit too personal. What do you mean by possible? Tearing me apart, mocking me. So you have doubts about your own diagnosis , and changed it here on the stand? Going on far longer than necessary, attacking me in a fashion I have no appetite now to repeat. I suffered. I squirmed. Later, I tried to shrug it off—a bad case, these kinds of things happen—but Dillard was doomed, and my testimony had done neither of us any good.
10.
    The day the verdict came, it was windy out at the point. I was in my hot tub, out on the deck, trying to empty my head. To ease the stress, as they say. I had the radio on KPFA, the