where I could reach
him. He stared at me blankly. “I’m not going to be here,” he said.
“I’m locking this sonofabitch up.” He closed the door and
disappeared into the back.
----
Judith wasn’t surprised that Rick had
come undone in front of me, nor that the store itself seemed to be
barely functioning. “That place should have been folded up beaucoup
long time ago,” she said. “There’s not enough money there to keep
the place going, but he was laundering money through that
business.”
If that was the case, however, none of Judith’s investigators or
lawyers had ever managed to produce any hard evidence of it. And
the visit to Rick’s Appliances had brought to mind a lingering
question I’d had since Judith first told me about the money that
her family allegedly had stolen: Where had it all gone? Rick, for
all his volcanic rage, struck me as an unlikely financial
mastermind. His house was small and simple, on the edge of a
trash-filled culvert. From what I could discern, none of the other
relatives seemed to be living much better.
Louise, meanwhile, had gone missing. Judith hadn’t seen her in
over a year. Judith was, in some sense, back where she’d started.
And it wasn’t clear if by pressing on she had any hope of winning
back more than she’d already lost.
Back home after the trip to Carthage, I tried to navigate the
thicket of facts I had dutifully set down in notebooks and tape
recorders. The longer I talked to Judith, the more difficult it
became to write anything about her saga. The evidence was so
simultaneously scattershot and voluminous that it seemed impossible
to corral. Something extraordinary had happened to her, that much
was certain. And something dark clearly had taken place in her
family—indeed, it seemed to still be happening. But a great many of
the answers lay in a time that was now out of any reasonable reach
of memory. Judith was fighting a war against a basic erosion of
historical facts, and I had unwittingly ended up fighting it
alongside her.
At times her motivations seemed to slip into something like
revenge. “I probably will never be able to ever, ever get back all
this money that these people have taken,” Judith admitted to me at
one point. “I hate the fact that Rick has any of this. But the
public humiliation that he is going to have to deal with down the
line, I wouldn’t want to be walking in his shoes.” The further I
waded into the story, the more I wondered how I could possibly
untangle what was important from the petty grievances of a
messed-up family.
Several months later, I was reading through the court filings
for Judith’s lawsuit in Texas, as it wended its way toward trial,
when one document caught my eye. It was a note postmarked November
29, 2010, from Louise Williams to the court:
Dear Judge Weiman,
I have no money to travel and my Doctor won’t let me go that Far
because of my Health. And Just about everything Judy Patterson has
Said is a Lie.… This is about the Fourth time She has Done this she
Wants to make a Movie of me and my family & Smear our names all
over the world. If I had any money I would sue her.
Something Bad is going to happen to Because [God] Don’t like
ugly.
Sincerely,
Ethel Louise Williams
Smear our names all over the world.
Was she referring
to me? I remembered back to my visit, when I’d been sitting in
Judith’s living room and she’d answered a call on her cell phone.
“Can I call you back?” she’d said. “Evan is here.” Not “that
reporter” or writer or any of the ways I’d described myself to try
and make clear the boundaries of our relationship. As many times as
I explained to her that we weren’t really on the same side, that my
journalistic motives were not necessarily aligned with her legal
and personal ones, it never seemed to sink in. “I’m beginning to
think that some sort of media attention would help us,” she
confided to me at one point.
Reading Louise’s letter, though, I
him. He stared at me blankly. “I’m not going to be here,” he said.
“I’m locking this sonofabitch up.” He closed the door and
disappeared into the back.
----
Judith wasn’t surprised that Rick had
come undone in front of me, nor that the store itself seemed to be
barely functioning. “That place should have been folded up beaucoup
long time ago,” she said. “There’s not enough money there to keep
the place going, but he was laundering money through that
business.”
If that was the case, however, none of Judith’s investigators or
lawyers had ever managed to produce any hard evidence of it. And
the visit to Rick’s Appliances had brought to mind a lingering
question I’d had since Judith first told me about the money that
her family allegedly had stolen: Where had it all gone? Rick, for
all his volcanic rage, struck me as an unlikely financial
mastermind. His house was small and simple, on the edge of a
trash-filled culvert. From what I could discern, none of the other
relatives seemed to be living much better.
Louise, meanwhile, had gone missing. Judith hadn’t seen her in
over a year. Judith was, in some sense, back where she’d started.
And it wasn’t clear if by pressing on she had any hope of winning
back more than she’d already lost.
Back home after the trip to Carthage, I tried to navigate the
thicket of facts I had dutifully set down in notebooks and tape
recorders. The longer I talked to Judith, the more difficult it
became to write anything about her saga. The evidence was so
simultaneously scattershot and voluminous that it seemed impossible
to corral. Something extraordinary had happened to her, that much
was certain. And something dark clearly had taken place in her
family—indeed, it seemed to still be happening. But a great many of
the answers lay in a time that was now out of any reasonable reach
of memory. Judith was fighting a war against a basic erosion of
historical facts, and I had unwittingly ended up fighting it
alongside her.
At times her motivations seemed to slip into something like
revenge. “I probably will never be able to ever, ever get back all
this money that these people have taken,” Judith admitted to me at
one point. “I hate the fact that Rick has any of this. But the
public humiliation that he is going to have to deal with down the
line, I wouldn’t want to be walking in his shoes.” The further I
waded into the story, the more I wondered how I could possibly
untangle what was important from the petty grievances of a
messed-up family.
Several months later, I was reading through the court filings
for Judith’s lawsuit in Texas, as it wended its way toward trial,
when one document caught my eye. It was a note postmarked November
29, 2010, from Louise Williams to the court:
Dear Judge Weiman,
I have no money to travel and my Doctor won’t let me go that Far
because of my Health. And Just about everything Judy Patterson has
Said is a Lie.… This is about the Fourth time She has Done this she
Wants to make a Movie of me and my family & Smear our names all
over the world. If I had any money I would sue her.
Something Bad is going to happen to Because [God] Don’t like
ugly.
Sincerely,
Ethel Louise Williams
Smear our names all over the world.
Was she referring
to me? I remembered back to my visit, when I’d been sitting in
Judith’s living room and she’d answered a call on her cell phone.
“Can I call you back?” she’d said. “Evan is here.” Not “that
reporter” or writer or any of the ways I’d described myself to try
and make clear the boundaries of our relationship. As many times as
I explained to her that we weren’t really on the same side, that my
journalistic motives were not necessarily aligned with her legal
and personal ones, it never seemed to sink in. “I’m beginning to
think that some sort of media attention would help us,” she
confided to me at one point.
Reading Louise’s letter, though, I
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