The crowd had the look of a congregation, sitting on the pew style courtroom benches and fanning themselves against the raging afternoon heat. Janet Thatch leaned in close to Angie to mutter indignantly.
“I can’t believe she’s doing this. She said that she’d never take a plea bargain.”
“Well she’s got to think about Katie. Katie’s only five and she needs her mother.” Angie reminded Janet. “I still believe in her. She could never have done such a thing.”
“I guess you’re right Angie. I just wanted her to go through the trial and prove that she was innocent. But that’s easy for me to say, I’m not facing twenty five years in prison.” Janet said as she straightened back up to watch the proceedings.
The focus of their conversation was Connie Towmann. Up until the previous February, Connie had just been one of the many midwestern housewives going about their domestic missions in the suburban developments and strip malls of southwest Kansas. She shopped, kept house and took care of her family. Today, after a gut wrenching trial that had spanned endless weeks, she walked out of the county courthouse as a free woman. Well, she wasn't entirely free. She wasn’t going to jail, but her agreement to a plea bargain left her with a relationship with a probation officer and her own personal cloud of suspicion. Even before she stepped into the light of the unseasonably warm August sun, the crowd buzzed with the whispers of gossip and doubt.
There were a legion of friends and supporters of the Towmann’s who staged car washes, bake sales and various other events to raise contributions for Connie’s defense fund. The long nightmare began two days after the most recent Valentines Day when 13-month-old Garrett stopped breathing. Connie and Wayne sat stunned on opposite sides of the room after Dr. Jacobs told them that little Garrett was gone. Their lives changed irrevocably in that moment when the two young parents sat numbly. Even as they sat in disbelief, Jacobs was dialing the sheriffs department. Since Connie had been the only adult in the house with the baby at the time, she was arrested and charged in his death. For the next six months expert witnesses battled tooth and nail. One assertively insisted that Garrett Towmann had died because he had been violently shaken, causing his brain to suffer tremendous trauma while slamming back and forth within his skull. The defense offered the testimony of an equally credentialed expert who insisted just as vehemently that in all his years in medicine he had never seen a verified case of shaken baby syndrome. Defense attorneys advanced the theory that a fall that the little boy had taken two days prior to his death had caused a slow swelling in his brain that eventually killed him.
“There is no such thing as shaken baby syndrome!” Dr. Urlacher had confidently insisted on behalf of the defense.
CNN had attached itself to the story like a pit bull on a pork chop and never let go. They covered the trail, they covered Connie’s loyal friends. They even covered the coverage. Connie’s friends helped raise bond, raise funds for her defense and had watched and supported her in the countless TV interviews when she declared that she did not hurt her son and would never take any kind of a plea deal. That’s why many of her supporters were perplexed when, with the jury finally deliberating and the trial racing towards a conclusion, Connie agreed to plead no contest to a single charge of injuring a child. It seemed that neither the defense nor the prosecution were confident of their chances of prevailing, and when the prosecution approached Connie’s attorney with the chance to plead guilty to the lesser charge and go home to her family, he advised that she give it serious consideration. The prosecution would save face, avoiding the embarrassment of an acquittal.
The following morning, for the first time in months, Connie Towmann woke up without the specter of prison dangling over her head. She sat at the dining room table staring at the newspaper that declared ‘Towmann Cops Plea.’
“Everyone understands honey.” Her mother reassured as she poured two cups of coffee.
“No they don’t Momma. I could see it in their eyes when I walked out of the courthouse. They think I killed Garrett.”
“Honey, if they don’t believe in you then they were never your friends to begin with. You have to think about that little girl playing down the hall. You did the right thing.”
Connie thought for a moment and then nodded in silent agreement. Katie needed her mommy. Connie picked up her coffee mug with a sigh as her mother stood behind her and rubbed her back in as soothing a manner as she could. Down the hall Katie hugged her baby doll, Janie, and sat it on the bed, holding it in a sitting position. Suddenly, Katie’s eyes narrowed, her grip tightened around the doll's neck, her voice lowered to a guttural, animalistic growl and she began to violently shake the doll.
“When I talk to you, you listen to me or you'll get the same thing I gave Garrett!”
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