A heavyset woman wearing the red shirt/khaki pants uniform of a Target employee tried to pull open the entrance door. It was locked from the inside and Julie then understood the meaning of the visitor trap. This was a prison. You could get in, but you could not get out.
Following prison policy, Julie had scheduled her visit forty-eight hours earlier, and slept poorly for two nights. Her thoughts swirled with possibilities as she tried to make a connection between a high-profile inmate in the state’s maximum-security prison and her deceased fiancé. She got in line behind four other women and waited her turn at the processing window. Nobody spoke. This place did not lend itself to friendly chitchat.
A stern-faced woman dressed in a blue uniform took Julie’s ID and ran it through a series of checks. Julie spent several minutes filling out the necessary forms. Once approved, Julie slipped her coat inside a locker and then passed through a metal detector on her way to the secured steel door just beyond. A trap guard, bigger than BC quarterback Max Hartsock, opened the heavy door as soon as everyone in the group had cleared the metal detector.
Julie followed the phalanx down a long, brightly lit corridor. There were no shadows here, probably by design. The door slammed shut behind her and Julie’s heart jumped a little.
They marched in silence with the guard leading the way. Julie listened to the lonely slap of her footsteps against the linoleum flooring. The life energy here was utterly alien. She could not imagine a worse place a person could be.
Taking her assigned seat on a tall-backed metal stool, Julie turned it to face a scuffed Plexiglas divider marked by handprints and coated with a film of prison grime. Her side of the room was a big open space. A meager splash of sunlight filtered in through a row of hopper windows ten feet off the ground and covered in mesh wire. Other visitors took up the remaining stools and waited. They appeared practiced at this and far more at ease than Julie, who clutched her hands in nervous anticipation.
On the other side of the glass partition was a room big enough to walk single file. Julie could see a single metal door off to the left. At precisely 12:30 P.M. a loud buzzer sounded and a guard opened the door. In shuffled a row of severe-looking men, who, like the visitors, came in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors.
Each man took a seat at his assigned window and the room instantly filled with chatter, indiscriminate as at any party. A man carrying a large manila envelope seated himself in front of Julie. She recognized him from various media reports, but he looked like a phantom of the image splashed across the evening news.
Julie’s first thought was that Brandon Stahl was too frail to survive in here, among such men. He had a thin build, delicate face, and a smallish head topped by a wavy mop of brown hair that descended past his forehead to tickle his eyes. A full goatee, peppered with gray hairs, could not offset the liability of Brandon’s high cheekbones, and did not give him the prison look of the other inmates. He had on a beige uniform reminiscent of the nurse’s scrubs he’d once worn. The short sleeves revealed no tattoos, not that they would have made him any more threatening. His sunken eyes, dark like the rings surrounding them, conveyed profound sadness. Years behind bars had not hardened Brandon, but appeared to have drained him of life force.
After he settled, Brandon pushed a few strands of hair away from his face, picked up the phone on his side of the divider, and indicated Julie should do the same.
“Thank you for coming to see me,” Brandon said into the phone.
He had the compassionate, gentle voice of a nurse-a tone she knew so well. Compared to the other voices Julie heard rattling about the visitation room, abrasive and angry as blaring horns, Brandon spoke with the sweet timbre of a flute.
Someone thinks that condition is the reason I’m going to die in prison. Brandon’s words came back to her. Was it possible Julie was speaking with an innocent man?
“Needless to say, I was surprised by your call,” Julie said. “I’m eager to know how you think your case is connected to Sam Talbot. And how you even know anything about him, or me, for that matter.”
“You’ve been putting out a lot of queries online. That’s how I know about you.”
Julie believed him. She and Michelle had spent several hours posting to various Web-based resources looking for a takotsubo expert. This man serving a life sentence had been her only bite.
“I didn’t know you had access to the Internet in prison.”
“It’s limited,” Brandon said. “But that’s not how I found out about you.”
“I thought you said-”
“That’s how my secret admirer found out about you.”
“Secret admirer?”
“I have someone who believes in my innocence. He or she, I don’t know, discovered your posts and brought them to my attention. My admirer also included your cell phone number.”
The revelation unnerved Julie more than a little. Someone knew enough about her to pass along private information to a convicted murderer.
“Do you have any idea who this secret admirer of yours could be?”
“None,” Brandon said. “But I’ll tell you this. It’s someone who really knows medicine.”
“A doctor?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“What can I do for you, Brandon? Why is it you wanted to meet with me?”
Brandon thought a moment.
“How much do you know about my story?”
“Only what I’ve heard on the news.”
This was a bit of a lie. Julie had done extensive research on the Colchester murder case before her visit. She wanted to be prepared, but did not want Brandon to think she came here with any prejudgment. For this meeting to be of value, Brandon had to believe Julie could be an ally in his fight.
“I didn’t kill Donald Colchester. Donald wanted to die, but I didn’t help him.”
This part of Brandon Stahl’s case had been well documented during the sensational trial that took place several years ago. Donald Colchester suffered from end-stage ALS. The ravages of his disease had taken a significant toll, and prior to his death, Donald had become totally paralyzed. Though he was never a patient in Julie’s ICU, Donald lived at White Memorial as a permanent resident in the long-term acute-care floor where Brandon once worked as a nurse.
Julie had reviewed Donald Colchester’s medical records before this visit. She saw no reports of recurrent infections, pneumonia, sepsis, or kidney inflammation, all of which were common when an ALS patient neared death. He had maintained his body weight, and had no unexplained or refractory fevers, no changes in his level of consciousness. His labs showed no decrease in oxygen saturation, or an increase in tumor markers. Eventually he would present with all of those symptoms and more. But at the time of his death, Donald Colchester, same as Sam Talbot, was paralyzed and wanting to die, but incapable of committing suicide.
“You say you didn’t kill Donald Colchester, but then how do you explain the recording?” Julie asked.
“I just told him that I’d help him die because he was so miserable. That’s all he ever wanted. I said it thinking he would forget it or get over it. I just wanted to give him a little bit of comfort because he was in so much pain. I told him I’d use morphine, so he’d know it wouldn’t hurt. Sometimes words heal more than medicine, you know? All I did was give him a little hope that his suffering would end soon, but I never would kill him-and I didn’t.”
The recording was the smoking-gun piece of evidence presented at Brandon Stahl’s trial. And it had come into existence in a rather scandalous way. Donald’s father, William Colchester, a Massachusetts state legislator representing the Fourteenth Suffolk District, became convinced the insurance company and hospital were denying Donald medical services that would improve his quality of life.