Chapter 20 The Target
The Target
The purpose of a memoir is to share something universal in one own’s idiosyncratic experience: something meaningful that’s helpful or healing or adds to our understanding of a moment in time.
(This is but one woman’s view, and it is the opinion of a novelist who is only now writing a memoir.) Unless, of course, you are Barbra Streisand or Winston Churchill or Barack Obama.
Then you’ve earned the right to write whatever the hell you want.
Now, I don’t view this tale as a coming-of-age story or a chronicle of how I once partied harder than I probably should have.
It’s certainly not the narrative of my three-year affair with a married man in his forties when I was in my mid-teens: I have withheld the most prurient details of that experience.
Nor is this the saga of a once-promising athlete who never made it.
It’s not even the account of how I recovered after killing a boy. Because I’m not sure I ever did recover, at least completely. I would have to be far more of a sociopath than I am to put that in the rearview mirror (and, as we know, those objects are always nearer than they appear anyway).
This is, pure and simple, the story of just another amateur, a person who tried once too often to play above her game. I flew too close to the sun—like so many others before me—believing I could escape that sort of flight unscathed.
I could tell that the Westchester County district attorney, Eric Lindley, knew this courtroom well.
His office was in a building in White Plains only a block from the courthouse where the trial was beginning, and he seemed more comfortable in the room than anyone but the judge.
He moved the way he might in his own living room, running his fingers across the mahogany rails, pausing beneath the chandelier—his eyes glancing up at it with almost familial affection—gazing out the tall windows at the early spring sky.
He and the judge were both roughly my father’s age, though Judge Ephraim Wood’s hair had far more salt than pepper, and his robe gave him a gravitas that made him seem older.
It worried me that he and Lindley knew each other and seemed to get along so well, but my own lawyer reassured me that it was inevitable they’d be (at the very least) acquaintances and, besides, it was the jurors who mattered most. Still, when Lindley made a small joke during his opening statement about golfers who might tap their ball closer to the pin with the tip of their shoes when they thought no one was looking (Was he suggesting I was that type?
No, no, a thousand times no.), Judge Wood smiled more appreciatively than I liked.
And the fact that the DA and his wife were friends with Eleanor Catton certainly ratcheted up my paranoia.
The result of the pretrial motions had been a mixed bag for my side.
The fact I had had an affair with a married man wasn’t relevant, and the jury would never know.
(The fact I had begun that affair when I was fifteen is known now only because of this memoir.) That time I had accidentally destroyed a Tallmadge stop sign was deemed irrelevant also: it was a minor fender bender involving but one car and one driver, and—again, until this book—no one knew how stoned I had been.
Ah, but the idea I had smashed Frank Pendleton’s car window?
We had the sense the district attorney would find a way to get that in via “character” testimony about who I was as a person: the jury was probably going to hear about that because it was evidence of my modus operandi, the idea that—I kid you not—it involved a golf club.
I found it unnerving that it was unlikely I’d ever testify in this criminal trial, but most certainly would be called upon by the plaintiffs as a fact witness in any subsequent civil trial.
When I argued with Mr. Barker that all I wanted to do was clear my name and tell the jury under oath that I hadn’t removed the target, he said there was no need: all that being on the stand would do was open me up to a cross-examination that might be difficult to rein in, and that the bar for conviction in a criminal trial was so high—guilt beyond a reasonable doubt—that defendants rarely risked that sort of exposure by testifying in their own defense.
Still, as I watched Eric Lindley methodically lay out the case against me, I grew anxious and exasperated.
“Let’s be clear,” he said, his tone avuncular because the last thing he wanted to do was be seen as bullying a young woman and, thus, get the jury on my side, “Mira Winston never meant to hurt anyone at the Tallmadge Country Club. But she was reckless and selfish and wild, and you will see that, without question, she vandalized country club property and ripped the target off the club’s driving range practice net.
And this action resulted directly in the death of young Kenneth ‘Kenny’ Foster: an ambitious, smart, hardworking young man of spectacular promise.
How do we know this? Only Miss Winston had the motive to remove the target: not one other person at the country club had ever complained about it.
Not one. No one cared about it but her. Likewise, she had the opportunity.
On Monday, July 31, 1978, she was virtually the only member at the golf course that day, because the course is closed on Mondays for maintenance.
Oh, the caddies were allowed to play for free those Mondays: it’s even called ‘Caddy Day.’ But none were at the driving range net.
None. And, finally, there is evidence. Plenty of it, including one absolutely damning reality: the police found the target wadded and buried inside a pocket of Mira Winston’s golf bag.
You will see as we present our case that what happened is as clear as clean glass: an impulsive young woman found the target vexing, and when the club pro wouldn’t remove it, she took matters into her own hands and did it herself. ”
He held up three fingers: “Motive. Opportunity. Evidence. It is, you might say, the prosecutorial trifecta. A brash, rash, irresponsible eighteen-year-old—an adult—found something she didn’t like, flouted the rules, and illegally tampered with it.
Did she understand she was wrecking property that wasn’t hers?
Of course, she did. Did she care about the idea that, perhaps, other club members might have liked the target?
Not in the slightest. It really was an act of supreme selfishness.
“Now, did Miss Winston know that she was destroying the structural integrity of the net? I doubt it, but only she knows for sure. Did she realize her actions might result in someone’s death?
In this case, poor Kenny Foster? No. The law understands that and we respect that.
But the law is also clear: Miss Winston’s carelessness and disregard for anyone but herself led directly to Kenny Foster’s death. ”
There was obviously more. Lots more. Still, you can see where this was going.
Now, ever since my own near death in a Smith College bathtub, living at home with my parents, my friends all away at college, I had been a poster child for sobriety.
Mr. Barker and my parents were reminding me all the time that any sort of dustup with the law, anything I did that reminded people of how a once-promising golfer had become a stoned and coked-out reprobate, could make a difficult prosecution much easier.
Nevertheless, I know I didn’t like the young adult the prosecutor was introducing to the jury.
And, it seemed to me, the jury didn’t either.
There were eight men and four women. Two of them were golfers.
Half of them had children. They were Black and white and Asian.
But what seemed to matter to both the district attorney and my lawyer was this: Did they come from money?
Lindley wanted as many middle-class and working-class jurors as possible.
My lawyer wanted all the old money and country club denizens he could get.
We did not know their incomes, but we knew a lot about the final group: just under half the jury were executives and just under half were blue-collar workers, and two were (and this word fascinates me these days) homemakers.
At the beginning of the voir dire, for instance, after my lawyer and a junior lawyer in the firm had reviewed a prospective juror’s questionnaire, he would ask that person about their hobbies and interests.
He’d ask whether they belonged to country clubs or swim and tennis clubs, whether they played bridge, and even what kinds of cars they drove.
He’d ask if they had children or grandchildren, and what television programs they watched.
He did this because the trial had become, in part, about class.
There is no person more despicable than a rich person who hasn’t gotten what—in my case—she wanted and then lies about it to steer clear of accountability.
And that’s fair. There’s a good reason the bumper sticker “Eat the Rich” has legs.
And so my legal team wanted as many (Mr. Barker’s words) people of means as possible, while the state wanted those jurors who would see me as entitled, one of those suburban aristocrats who feel as if the world is theirs for the taking.
Of the two golfers on the jury, one played at a public course, and one was a member of a club like Tallmadge.
Toward the end of his opening argument, Eric Lindley focused on who Kenny Foster was as a person, really trying to bring him to life, and the economic rationale for his family settling in Tallmadge.
He talked about the school system and what a terrific student Kenny had been, and how he and his family were outsiders amidst the old money and privilege of the community.