Chapter 26
The Second Courtroom
The trial of the State of Georgia against Corinne Ann Bellamy began on the tenth of March, 2025, a Monday, in rain.
It took four days to seat a jury. She sat through every minute of it, in a grey wool suit that Nate had bought her at a department store in Macon, with her hair pinned up and a legal pad on the table in front of her. She had been permitted the pad. She had been permitted a pencil, too, with the lead sharpened to a careful point, and a deputy stood by while she wrote.
She took it all down.
She took down the prospective jurors, one by one, as they came forward to the box. A retired mail carrier. A dental hygienist. A young man who said he worked in solar panels. A woman in a green cardigan, who looked at the defendant for a long time and then looked away, and whom Nate struck without a word.
She took down the questions.
Have you heard anything about this case?
Have you formed an opinion?
Could you impose the death penalty, if the evidence supported it?
Could you vote for life, if the evidence supported that?
Do you understand that the burden is on the State?
It was strange to sit on this side of the questions. She had spent four years learning to listen to them. She knew every shape they could take. She knew the voice of a man who was lying to get on the panel, and the voice of a man who was lying to get off. She knew the way a juror's eyes went to the table when they were afraid of the answer.
Everybody has a story, she thought. They bring it in with them. They put it down on the rail. And we have to choose twelve who'll set it aside.
I've never met anyone who could.
On the fourth afternoon, at ten past three, the clerk called the last name. A tall, stooped, white-haired man in a corduroy jacket walked to the box and stood with his hands behind him.
"Mr. Eugene Tolliver," said the judge.
Tolliver.
She looked up.
He was seventy, perhaps. He had a long, lined, patient face, and spectacles held together with tape at one hinge. Beside her, Nate had gone still. She heard him draw breath.
"Any relation to Bernice Tolliver?" he said, politely. "The evidence clerk?"
"My sister."
"Did she discuss this case with you?"
"She discussed the old one." The old man's voice was dry and slow. "She discussed it a good deal. She didn't sleep for about a year. I don't think she's ever forgiven herself for not saying what she saw."
The prosecutor rose. "Your Honor. We'd move to strike for cause."
"Mr. Feldman?"
Nate was looking at Corinne. She did not look back at him. She was watching the old man's face.
"The defence accepts him," said Nate.
There was a murmur. Judge Okafor lifted his eyebrows.
"Counsel. You're sure."
"Yes, Your Honor."
"On the record: the juror's sister was a witness in the prior proceedings, for the defendant's side."
"Understood."
"Very well." The judge looked at the State. "Motion denied. Mr. Tolliver, you'll take seat nine."
The old man nodded gravely, as though he had been offered a chair at a funeral. He walked to the jury box and sat. He folded his hands in his lap. And he looked, for the first time, directly across the room, at the woman in the grey suit.
He did not smile. He did not frown.
He only looked at her, as if he were trying to remember where he had seen her before.
The State's lawyer was a woman.
That was the first surprise. Corinne had expected, she realized, another Haines: a long, pale, courteous man with a soft voice and a manner like warm lard. Instead the attorney general had sent a small, square, sharp-eyed woman named Miriam Castellano, fifty-one, who wore a navy suit and flat shoes and had a reputation, in Atlanta, for never losing a murder case.
She rose for her opening on the Monday morning.
She did not use notes. She walked to the rail of the jury box and stood with her hands at her sides. She had a rough, low, unhurried voice, with the faint vowels of the coast.
"Ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to tell you a story. And I'd like you to remember, as you hear it, that I'm not the one who made it. I'm only the one who has to prove it."
She paused.
"Between September of 2023 and August of 2024, five people died in Georgia. They died in a lake, in a boathouse, in a church car park, in a kitchen, and on a pier. Their names were Owen Maddox. Grant Pruitt Junior. Terrence Boyle. Dale Sutter. And Caleb Moss. They were between twenty-six and thirty-four years old. Two of them had young children. All of them, you will hear, had done terrible things."
She let it sit.
"I want to be clear about this. The State does not dispute it. We will not ask you to believe that these were good men. The evidence will show that in June of 2019, four of them, and one other, took part in a, in a crime against this defendant, so grave that it is hard to speak of in a public room. The evidence will show that the law failed her. That it failed her not once but many times, in many ways, over many years. That there are people in this county who should be ashamed."
A low sound went through the gallery. Judge Okafor lifted his gavel an inch, and set it down.
"And I will tell you something else," said Miriam Castellano. "I don't expect any of you to like what I'm going to say next. But it is the whole of my case."
She turned, and pointed.
"She killed them."
Corinne did not move.
"Every one. With a plan. With a weapon she bought for the purpose. By lying, by luring, by waiting. She did not do it in the heat of a moment. She did not do it in fear for her life, except for one. She drowned one man in a lake while he begged. She shot a man on his knees. She shot a man in a church car park, in the back, as he was walking away. And on the eleventh of August of last year, on a public pier, she shot an unarmed man who had saved her life, who had come to her of his own accord to hand her the proof she'd been seeking, and who was standing with his hands empty when she counted to nine."
The courtroom was entirely silent.
"The law of this state does not say that a person who has been wronged may choose her own punishment. It doesn't say that some men deserve it, and so it's justified. It does not say that. If it did, ladies and gentlemen, there'd be no law, there would only be a list. And someone would be writing it. And someone would be on it. Perhaps you. Perhaps your son."
She walked back, very slowly, to her table.
"I ask you to listen with sympathy. I ask you to look at the evidence with open eyes. And at the end of this trial, I'm going to ask you to do the hardest thing a juror can ever be asked. I'm going to ask you to tell her that it was wrong."
She sat.
Nobody coughed. Nobody moved. In the corner, beside the jury box, a court reporter named Pike, a heavy grey man with a moustache, looked up from his machine with a face like tallow. His fingers had stopped on the keys. He took a long moment to remember that he was supposed to be taking it down.
Gerald Pike, thought Corinne. Prologue. Execution.
I know how it ends.
She did not know why the thought had come. She pushed it away.
Nate's opening was half the length.
He had not slept. She could see it. His collar was a little too tight, and his hands, when he put them on the rail, were not quite steady. But when he spoke, the tremor went out of his voice, and something steadier came in.
"The prosecutor is right about one thing," he said. "She did it."
Corinne looked up sharply.
"I'm not going to stand here and tell you that she didn't. I'm not going to say that someone else was in the room, or that the gun was planted, or that the confession was coerced. It wasn't. It's eleven hours long, and it's the most honest document in the file. She gave it freely. She gave it to the man who arrested her. She gave it, I think, because she's spent four years watching people lie about her, and she couldn't bear to add one more."
He stopped.
"What I will ask is a different question. It's the one that the law has to ask. It isn't did she, it's what did she mean? And I'd like you to hold that question open. Hold it open as you hear the evidence. Because there is a word in the indictment, and the word is malice, and you cannot find malice in a person without looking at everything that's been done to them first."
He took a step.
"You're going to see a video. You're going to see the whole of it. I'm sorry. I'd spare you if I could. But you cannot understand this case without it, and the State has agreed that it will be played. You're going to hear a girl called Corinne Bellamy, at twenty-three, in a bedroom. Or rather, you won't hear her. That's the point. You'll hear four men, and you'll hear her silence."
His voice caught.
"And then you'll hear what the system did next. You'll hear from the clerk who saw the evidence tape change colour. You'll hear from a young man who wrote down what he saw and didn't dare say it. You'll hear a recording of a deputy of this county walking into her kitchen in the middle of the night with a pistol in his hand, and telling her, politely, that he was going to take care of her."
He looked at the jury.
"I am not asking you to say that it was right. I'm not. I think it was a terrible thing, and I think she thinks so too. What I'm asking is that you look at the whole of the picture. That you see the thing the State wants you to leave out. That you see what a person does when every door has been shut in her face, and the last door is a gun."
He stood a long moment, quite still.
"That's all. I'm going to ask you to tell her the truth. All of it. Both halves." He said the last two words very softly. "And I'll leave the rest to you."
He sat down.
Nobody said anything. In the gallery, somebody was crying quietly. She did not turn to see who.
Both halves, she thought.
He heard me.
The first witness for the State was Special Agent Terrence Ames.
He took the stand in the same raincoat. It was a standing joke among the deputies by now: he wore it indoors and out, in all weathers, as other men wear a wedding ring. He folded it carefully over the railing. He swore on the Bible, and sat, and looked at the jury as a man looks at a field he is about to walk across.
Castellano took him through it.
It took an hour. He was a good witness. He was slow and precise and dry, and he never raised his voice. He described the first call, the pier at Lake Alder, the body of Owen Maddox. He described the boathouse, the shell casings, the hole in the back of the sofa. He described the church car park and the long tin-coloured afternoon in which they had pulled Terrence Boyle's keys from the ignition and found his phone still lit.
"Agent Ames," said Castellano. "Did there come a time when you identified a suspect?"
"There did."
"Who was it?"
"Ms. Bellamy."
"How did you know?"
"I didn't know at first. I suspected." He looked, for a moment, at the defendant. "It was a pattern. Each victim was connected, by name or by record, to a case that had been dismissed in October of 2020. I had the transcript of the preliminary hearing. I had the motion papers. And in each file, one person turned up. She'd been the complainant, and then she was a witness, and then she went away. She attended every funeral."
"Every one?"
"Every one but the last."
"Did you speak to her?"
"I did. In January. At her home."
"And what was her demeanour?"
Ames considered.
"Quiet," he said. "Controlled. Intelligent. She offered me coffee. She said, you've come about Grant, before I'd said his name."
"Did that strike you?"
"Yes. It did."
"Did she confess?"
"Not then."
"When did she confess?"
"On the eleventh of August. At Tybee." He paused. "She gave me the phone, and she told me she'd killed him. I hadn't asked. She volunteered it."
"Thank you, Agent Ames."
Castellano turned to the table. She did not go on. She seemed, Corinne thought, to be waiting, with an air of weary honesty, for the other thing.
"Your witness, Mr. Feldman."
Nate stood. He buttoned his jacket. He did not go to the lectern. He walked to a spot about six feet from the stand, and stopped.
"Agent Ames. You've been with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for thirty-one years."
"Yes."
"You've worked homicide for twenty-two."
"Yes."
"How many confessions have you taken in that time?"
"A hundred and forty, give or take."
"How many of them were eleven hours long?"
"None."
"How many were volunteered, without prompting, on a public pier, to the arresting officer?"
"None."
"How many were accompanied, voluntarily, by the surrender of the only evidence that proved the confessor's motive?"
Ames hesitated.
"None," he said.
"Why do you think she did it?"
"Objection," said Castellano. "Speculation."
"I'll allow it," said Judge Okafor. "He's a trained investigator. He can say what he formed as an impression."
Ames was silent for a long moment. The rain had begun again outside; she could hear it on the high windows, a fine dry ticking, like sand.
"I think she wanted somebody to hear it," he said at last. "I think that's the thing. I've been in a lot of rooms with a lot of people who've done terrible things. And most of them want to be forgiven. Or they want to be believed. She didn't want either. She wanted it written down."
"Written down."
"Accurately."
"Did she say so?"
"She did." He turned his head, and looked, directly and unhurriedly, at the defendant's table. "She told me, on the pier, for the record. And then she said it. In the most exact language I've ever heard from a person under that kind of stress. She gave me dates. Times. Names. She corrected herself twice. When she got a number wrong, she went back."
"Agent Ames. Did you believe her?"
"Objection."
"Overruled."
"Yes," said Ames. "Every word."
"Even the part about the nine seconds?"
"Especially that."
"Why?"
"Because it was the only part she had no reason to tell me." He looked at the jury. "Nobody asked her to count. Nobody would've known. She could have said, I fired, he fell. She told me she said it aloud, because he asked her to. She told me he said thank you. I've been doing this thirty-one years, Mr. Feldman, and I've never heard a murderer volunteer a detail that makes her look worse."
"Unless she was telling the truth."
"Unless that."
Nate stood for a moment. His face, from where she sat, was in profile, and she saw him close his eyes briefly.
"Nothing further," he said.
In the front row of the gallery, an old woman in a green coat put her face in her hands.
At four o'clock, Judge Okafor adjourned for the day.
The jury filed out. The deputies came to her table, and she stood, and held out her wrists. The cuffs went on. They were cold. A woman's voice, from somewhere at the back of the room, called out in a clear, high, angry tone, we're with you, Corrie, and was hushed. A man's voice, from the opposite side, called something she could not hear and did not want to.
She walked out through the side door.
In the corridor, in a pool of fluorescent light, there was a small group waiting. It was not the usual one. It was not press. It was four women, in their thirties and forties, in ordinary coats, with ordinary faces. They stood against the wall in a row. They did not speak.
One of them held a lantern.
It was a very small one, battery-operated, made of white paper. It gave out a soft light. She was holding it in both hands, in front of her chest, as someone holds a candle in church.
She did not say anything.
None of them did.
They only stood, as she passed between the deputies, and looked at her. Each of them looked at her. And as she went by, the one at the end, a woman with grey streaks in her hair and a bookmark sticking out of her bag, lifted her free hand, very slightly, and touched her own chest, over the heart.
Is it? the bookmark had said.
Corinne held her gaze for one second.
Then the door closed, and the corridor was empty, and there was only the long green hall and the squeak of the deputy's shoes and, from a long way behind, a single high voice, singing something she could not make out.
She went on.
She did not cry. She was very careful about that. She had done a great deal of crying in the last six months, and she did not intend to do any in front of a deputy. But in the cell, with the door locked and the water oak outside the window, she sat on the steel bunk and took out the pad, and the pencil, and wrote, in her neat flat capitals:
DAY ONE. THEY ARE LISTENING.
And under it, after a moment:
I DID NOT EXPECT THAT.