How often have I said to you that
when you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable,
must be the truth?
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
“I really don’t want to talk about this,” Mariet said. He paused, then he said he had heard from Tess’s family and friends that the police were investigating some “rumors.” He wanted to know what exactly were these “rumors.”
Detective Elaine Stevenson said that so far none of the rumors had panned out.
Sounding pained for the first time in the interview, Mariet complained. “Why are they doing this?”
“It happens in every case I’ve had,” Stevenson said. She sounded as though she felt Mariet’s pain, as if she wasn’t talking as a detective to a possible, but as one person to another, a woman to a man. “It’s not just this case. It’s not just you. It’s not just Tess,” she said. “Every case I’ve investigated.”
The nation had suffered through this with the O. J. Simpson case. On smaller scales, Stevenson and Wright had seen it on their own cases. Now Mariet was living it.
“People sit back with the limited information they have,” Stevenson said. “A lot of the times from the TV and newspapers – and that’s not accurate.”
Stevenson recollected her thoughts.
“They sit and speculate on the limited information they have. They draw conclusions and then they tell someone – and off goes the rumor. It happens in every case we have.”
Mariet breathed. He said, “It’s hell.”
“Yeah,” Stevenson said. “It’s hell for you… It’s hell for us, believe it or not. Because rather than being able to focus on this case and try and solve-,” she did not finish the thought. “We’re running around and trying to figure out the rumors.”
“It makes it a little bit worse when it’s your family,” Mariet said.
It was 1:51 p.m.
“In the second interview,” Stevenson said, “you called it an accident.”
“I always referred to it as an accident,” Mariet said. “Because…” He trailed off.
He put a hand to his forehead. He held it with his palm over his eye. Ten months and 10 days later, he would repeat this gesture at the end of his trial on charges of second-degree murder.
“When it first happened, and I was on some of the medication I was on, I became very depressed when I would refer to it as a murder,” Mariet said.
A State Board of Health doctor had prescribed him Prozac and other pharmaceuticals to help him deal with the stress.
“And so I just used the word ‘accident’ because it was easier on myself,” Mariet said. “But now I have to face the facts. I tell people: my wife and my kids were murdered.”
“So, you don’t believe it was an accident?”
“No. I never did.”
