Page 34

THIRTY-THREE

Josie flipped past the initial reports to the first photo of Roe Hoyt she could find. A gasp slipped past her lips. It was taken at the hospital after she was first found. Josie didn’t know how common color photography was in the early sixties but this picture, at least, was in color. The resemblance to Lila was so striking, it sucked Josie right back to her childhood. Mother and daughter shared the same deep-blue eyes, high cheekbones, and defined jawline that would make supermodels jealous. Like Lila, Roe was thin but that could have just been from her circumstances. Someone had clothed her in a hospital gown. She swam in it. One of her gaunt wrists was handcuffed to the metal rail of a bed.

Trinity scooted over, abandoning her laptop and pulling Trout across her lap so she could get closer. Their shoulders brushed. The picture wavered between Josie’s thumb and forefinger. “Wow,” Trinity whispered. “Lila got all of her mom’s genes, didn’t she?”

Whereas Lila’s hair had been black, like Josie’s—a happy coincidence for kidnapper Lila—Roe’s was honey brown. It was long, the way Lila had always worn hers, but matted and tangled with leaves, twigs and substances Josie couldn’t identify. Lila’s eyes had always gleamed with cunning and malice. Roe was a different story. Hers looked vacant at first but if Josie angled the picture a bit, they looked haunted, frightened. It reminded her of a lenticular photo. Like the kind found on bookmarks when Josie and Trinity were kids. Holding it flat, you saw a tiger sitting calmly but if you tipped it slightly, the tiger threw its claws up and opened its mouth in a roar.

“That’s not what she looks like now,” Trinity remarked. “At all.”

Josie had forgotten that the inmate locator site provided pictures of incarcerated individuals. She’d look at it later. Tucking Roe’s photo into the back of the file, she took out a stack of reports and started reading. Trinity leaned in and read along with Josie.

What hadn’t made it into the initial article Trinity had found was that law enforcement was never able to find Roe’s family, or anyone who knew her, even after releasing her photo to the public. Josie wasn’t that surprised. Who would want to come forward and claim the woman living in the woods who had slaughtered her own children? Months went by, medical exams and psychological evaluations were performed, the shack where she’d lived was thoroughly processed—by the standards that existed in the mid-sixties—and a nationwide search was conducted for any missing women near her age.

It was as though Roe Hoyt appeared on that mountain one day by magic with no human connection to anyone in society. Like she’d stepped through a portal from another dimension. Of course, that’s not what had happened. Someone had given birth to her. She’d come from somewhere. If she’d been found today, between modern technology, mail-in DNA tests, and social media, the police would likely be able to find her relatives in a short amount of time. DNA wouldn’t be used in a criminal case until 1985, in the UK, nearly twenty years after Roe Hoyt was discovered. Back then, police hadn’t had as much to work with. Although fingerprinting was used in the sixties, it hadn’t helped identify her since her prints weren’t already on file anywhere.

“No one ever figured out where she came from?” Trinity said.

Josie turned so she could look at her sister’s face. A familiar excitement gleamed in Trinity’s blue eyes. It was the look she got when a particular story caught her attention and made her want to dig in. They worked in different fields but the one thing they had in common was their obsession with finding answers to questions no one had yet been able to answer. Josie could practically hear Trinity’s pitch to her producer despite the fact that Roe Hoyt’s case wasn’t unsolved.

“If they found any of her relatives, it’s not in this file,” Josie replied. “You didn’t find anything in your online search?”

From Trinity’s lap, Trout kicked his back legs out, nudging Josie’s thigh. She patted his bottom as he began to snore.

“Not about that,” Trinity answered. “Most articles were the same as the one I showed you. Even her conviction wasn’t really covered. It was like a footnote. It seems like this would have been a pretty shocking case back then. I’m surprised it didn’t get wider coverage. Anyway, let’s keep going. If her family was never located, how did she get her last name?”

As Trout’s snores increased in volume, they went back to reading the contents of the file.

She’d initially been entered into custody as Roe Doe—a variation of Jane Doe—but the district attorney felt that was too comical given the heinous nature of her crimes. None of the police officers, nurses, doctors, social workers, or prison staff who interacted with her wanted to lend her their last name. Roe viciously attacked every person she came into contact with at the first opportunity in any way that she could. One nurse suffered a concussion. Another received a gash on her forehead that required twenty stitches after Roe slammed her head into the edge of a sink. A social worker’s wrist was fractured after Roe tackled her to the ground. Law enforcement and corrections officers frequently reported scratches and bites.

It seemed that no type of restraint was enough to prevent her from attacking people. Even when she was restrained with a straitjacket, she still managed to lash out in the moments before it was first put on or right after it was removed—no matter how many people were there to help. Finally, medication was administered to keep her calm, particularly when she needed to be transported or examined. Eventually someone decided her surname would come from the road nearest where she’d been found.

Trinity took the report Josie had just finished with, running her fingernail along the page until she found what she was searching for. She had to speak louder to be heard over Trout’s snores. “They estimated her age to be twenty-five. Based on what?”

Josie spread the pages of the file out on the bed in front of them and thumbed through them until she found a stack of medical reports. “A physical examination, X-rays, and the fact that she’d given birth to at least six children.”

That meant Lila’s age had also been an estimate though perhaps it had been easier to gauge since she was a child. Looking at the timing of tooth eruption had been a valid method of estimating a child’s age long before the sixties.

Trinity jostled Trout as she pawed through more of the reports. “But not based on anything that she was able to communicate to anyone? All of these reports so far say she ‘didn’t speak’ or ‘couldn’t speak.’ Was she able to read and write? Draw pictures?”

“Not sure.” Josie flipped through several more pages. If Roe Hoyt was still alive, that meant she’d been incarcerated for over fifty years. This file was thick but not so thick that it would cover that kind of time span. “There are medical reports here and psych evals but I think they only go up to her trial…Oh wait, there are some things from when she was first incarcerated.”

Roe Hoyt had had a public defender. Both her attorney and the DA had her examined by medical experts they had chosen themselves. It was common practice for each side to retain their own experts, who would often have differing opinions as to the health and mental state of the defendant. In Roe’s case, the physician for the defense believed she had likely suffered some sort of injury to her brain or a stroke that resulted in aphasia, rendering her unable to speak or write. In addition, she had tremors in her dominant hand which made drawing difficult. A copy of one of her hand-drawn pictures had been included. It was crude. Stick figures, one large and one small. Their heads were misshapen. Her and Lila, perhaps? What was possibly intended to be a rectangle hung over their heads, but it, too, was distorted, as though her hand had jerked violently a couple of times while she drew. There was no way to tell what the shape represented. A roof? Josie wondered what else she had drawn.

According to the report from the doctor her attorney had retained, she was able to follow simple directions which led him to believe she understood language and what was happening around her but could not express herself. Tremor aside, most efforts to get her to communicate via the written word or drawings were impossible given her tendency to attack anyone within striking distance. The defense doctor also believed that the brain injury had impaired her judgment and impulse control, causing her propensity for violence.

Roe’s attorney had tried to have her deemed incompetent to stand trial. He failed.

Evidently, the judge, and later the jury, found the doctor for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania more credible. His report opined that Roe Hoyt’s failure to communicate verbally may have been attributable to a head injury but could just as likely be intentional on her part. In terms of her right-hand tremor, he dismissed the notion that it was caused by a head injury. Instead, he diagnosed her with an essential tremor, which was often genetic and developed in perfectly healthy people with no known cause. He stated that her tendency toward violence was a result of her having antisocial personality disorder. He believed she knew exactly what she was doing when she attacked people; that her actions were purposeful and malicious, and that she had no remorse for the harm she inflicted on others.

“Good lord,” Trinity murmured as she scanned the last pages alongside Josie. “Pretty much the only thing they agree on—sort of—is the possibility of a head injury. Are the X-ray reports there?”

Josie found them. “She had an old skull fracture.”

“But they really didn’t know the true extent of the injury.” Trinity lifted Trout up, interrupting his symphony, and deposited him onto Josie’s lap. She retrieved her laptop, doing a quick search. “CT scans and MRIs weren’t available then.”

“Which means the doctors were more or less guessing as to the seriousness of her brain injury and what effect it had on her.”

Trinity put her laptop aside and started riffling through the pages before them. “None of these reports talk about the age of the fracture. Is there a way to tell how old a fracture is?”

“On the skull? I’m sure there is today,” Josie said, searching her tired mind for cases she’d worked wherein Dr. Feist had done exactly that. “Based on the stage of healing, I think, and a doctor’s clinical experience. I’m not sure it’s something that can be pinned down precisely. Were doctors able to do it back when Roe was found? I don’t know.”

“Which means that she could have sustained the fracture a year or ten years before she was discovered.”

Josie understood what Trinity was getting at which was that there was a possibility that Roe hadn’t always had aphasia.

Trinity found the radiology report which didn’t offer much detail. Josie stroked Trout’s side as she went back to the medical reports, rereading. “I wonder what she would have told people if she’d been able to communicate.”