Eliza or Till Death Do Us Part, page 38
I honestly can’t conceive that Eliza wouldn’t believe me. I think that, in this manuscript, I have presented so many facts which only Gary can be aware of and which I clearly can’t have gleaned from his diary unless I knew it by heart, that it should be enough to persuade her of my real identity. Besides, any doubt she may still have should soon be swept away by the physical evidence. If, inexplicably, she still refuses to believe me after that, I really don’t care about being free or not as, for me, freedom is synonymous with getting her back. What I resent the most about being in prison is that it deprives me of her. If I get released and if she is not there to wait for me, I’ll go straight back to her. If she rejects me, I’ll undoubtedly come up with new ideas or find some new way to be reunited with her. Whatever happens to me in the future, I’ll pursue one goal and one goal only: to be with her and keep her forever.
Once she knows what really happened, however, I can’t imagine why Eliza would reject me or wouldn’t return my love. On the one hand, contrary to what I used to think, she did love Gary but left him for a number of reasons, particularly her depression as well as his general physical appearance and bad habits, which, having all been corrected or removed, no longer constitute an obstacle to a renewed relationship between them. On the other hand, she had, to say the least, a weakness for David’s body and, in many ways, loved him as a husband, as she showed before and during the trial, although she was put off by some aspects of his personality. Since those aspects were artificial and will naturally be replaced by more attractive ones, it appears obvious that, in the future, she should love David more than she ever did. Now, in view of the fact that I am both Gary and David and that two pluses never make a minus, I can’t be erring in expecting Eliza to continue loving me and actually love me more than ever in the future, even if this manuscript shows her that I am far from being perfect. For one thing, she will evidently not be pleased when she first becomes aware of my many lies and of the incredible extent of my deception, but, after thinking it over and realizing it was uniquely motivated by my passion for her, I don’t doubt she’ll forgive me and love me even more for it.
Rereading some parts of my manuscript, I notice that I have often been too optimistic when considering the future of my relationship with Eliza. This time, though, I am convinced I am right in thinking that these pages will persuade her of the truth of my story and lead her to stop the divorce procedure, to help me regain my freedom and to take me back for good. I now know how much she can cherish my love and firmly believe that, far from wanting to reject me for it, she’ll return it with all the more passion as the lovable frog has changed itself into a handsome prince, as she can have her cake and eat it too, as Gary now happens to have David’s body. I don’t know how long it will take but I am certain that, sooner or later, I’ll be back in San Francisco with Eliza and that, at last, we’ll have a chance to enjoy the kind of relationship I have been working so hard for and dreaming about for so long.
EPILOGUE
My client, whom, in doubt, I will call Smith/Jenkins, mailed his manuscript to me some eight months ago. I read it immediately, in two sittings. I finished reading it at three in the morning and went to bed extremely perplexed. I should confirm at the onset that I did not believe one word of his story when he recounted it in Judge Oppenheimer’s office the day his trial ended. I viewed it as a desperate ploy used by a desperate man. The night I finished reading his manuscript, however, I was no longer so sure that his version was a pack of lies, but I was not convinced either that it was the truth. I could see three possibilities: it was a tale Smith had made up to be released; it was a fantasy he wrongly believed to be true; it was an honest account of what had really happened.
The first possibility was still a good bet even though it suggested on the part of my client a formidable imagination that I had not suspected in the least. After all, spurred by the fact that his alleged victim’s body had not been found, he could have come up with the rough tale he told us at the end of his trial and refined it during his first few weeks in prison. In that case, it would appear that a physical examination of his body would not reveal the various procedures he claimed to have undergone. But, since most of the physical evidence could easily be checked, I surmised that that part of his story would soon be substantiated. If he had indeed gone through those operations, the possibility that his story was a lie would become much less likely, although it could not be eliminated. As the prosecutor said in Judge Oppenheimer’s office, the physical evidence, if it were found, would not prove anything. It could simply mean that, despite indications to the contrary, Smith needed all those surgical procedures. The fact that they would match operations which would have made Jenkins look like Smith would be purely coincidental and maybe would have planted the idea of his story in my client’s mind. Although it is stretching the imagination quite a bit, it is also possible to imagine that Smith would have undergone the procedures just to be able to claim later that he is Jenkins. Such a scenario would indicate he did not make up his story during the trial but that it was part of a scheme thought up years ago. It would also imply, in my client, not only an extraordinary imagination but also a Machiavellian mind that I really doubted he possessed.
The second possibility, that my client’s story was not true but that he believed it, was, in my view, the least likely. It would mean he suffered from a serious mental illness that could have been with him for a long time or that could have been caused by the stressful events of these past years. In the first case, his crime could be directly linked to his condition. In the second one, he would have murdered Jenkins for his money, but, when confronted with his act and its consequences, he would have been unable to face them and broken down. Then he would have made up an elaborate story to convince himself more than anybody else that he was not guilty. In both cases, it is likely that the physical evidence he claimed to have would not be found. At any rate, the possibility that my client had serious mental problems could easily be confirmed or ruled out by a thorough psychiatric examination that I planned to arrange as soon as possible, something I realized I should definitely have done before the trial.
The third possibility, that Smith/Jenkins had written the truth, was the most intriguing one. But it was so extraordinary that I could not bring myself to really believe it. If I could admit the scheme itself and the physical transformation that went with it, I had a hard time accepting two things: the fact that Ms. Denman could be married to the same man twice and never know it, and the alleged surgical procedure that changed the color of my client’s eyes. Yet, at the same time, I had to concede that, with the context and the details, his story no longer appeared as absurd as it had the first time. It also presented the advantage of accounting for all the facts and leaving nothing unexplained, unlike the accepted version that, among other things, assumed a murder when no body could be found. In addition, if, as I suspected, a physical examination of Smith/Jenkins would confirm that he had undergone all the physical changes he mentioned, it would be obvious that, despite the aforementioned problems, his version of the facts could not be lightly dismissed.
When I got up that morning, however, I had not made up my mind about which possibility I tended to favor. The first and the third one seemed to me equally farfetched while the second one appeared even less believable. Before making up my mind, I decided to gather as many facts as possible. To that effect, I immediately drove to the Potosi Correctional Center where I asked Smith/Jenkins whether he would agree to be evaluated by a psychiatrist, which he did. With his consent, I also arranged a complete physical examination of his body by the medical personnel of the Center and by outside specialists. In addition, I questioned him at length about the Houston ophthalmologist who had allegedly operated on him and about the “real” David Smith and his family, but I could not learn anything more than I already knew. Before I left, he urged me to mail a copy of his manuscript to Judge Oppenheimer and to Robert Carson. He also confirmed to me that he had sent a copy to Ms. Denman who, incidentally, is no longer his wife if his story is true since he married her under an assumed identity.
The next day, I did mail copies of my client’s story to Oppenheimer and Carson, adding in a note that I thought they would find it interesting reading. I also managed to retrieve the five hundred most recent pages of Jenkins’s diary and gave them, along with a copy of the manuscript, to a friend of mine who teaches English at a nearby university and who specializes in computer analyses of great works of literature. I asked him to find out whether the story and the diary had been written by the same person. At first, pointing at the very different handwritings, he thought that I was joking, but he finally agreed to do it.
That evening, I called Ms. Denman. She told me that she had read the manuscript and was completely baffled and extremely troubled. Like me, she could not make up her mind about the whole matter. On the one hand, she found his argument rather convincing, but she still could not accept that Jenkins and Smith could be one and the same person. Forty-eight hours later, she telephoned me to tell me that she had reread the story and now tended to believe it. She added, however, that she wanted me to try to investigate the matter as thoroughly as possible so that one could know the truth once and for all and act accordingly. She was ready to help me to the best of her abilities and to pay for whatever would be necessary. She also said that she planned to visit Smith/Jenkins soon and to stop the divorce procedure until she knew more. For one thing, if his story was true, their marriage would be null and void anyway.
A couple of weeks later, I received the psychiatric and the medical reports. I found the first one rather cryptic but, although I gathered from it that my client suffered from various neuroses and other personality problems, I did not see anything in it suggesting the kind of delusion that would make him wrongly believe the story he wrote down. As for the medical documents, they confirmed, as I had expected, that Smith/Jenkins had indeed undergone several surgical and other procedures: hair transplant, plastic surgery, myopic keratomileusis, extensive dental work, removal of moles, electrolysis, stripping of varicose veins... The next day, the friend to whom I had given the manuscript and the diary called to inform me that it was “probable” that the two pieces had been written by the same person as they used a similar vocabulary, comparable sentence structures and possessed many stylistic features in common.
I then immediately called Ms. Denman to whom I imparted all my new information. She told me she was not surprised by it. She had visited Smith/Jenkins the previous weekend and, after a long talk with him, had accepted the idea that, no matter how crazy it sounded to her, he was indeed her ex-husband. She added that she was now ready to change her testimony and swear that Smith was really Jenkins and asked me to notify the right authorities.
Soon after, I had lunch with Judge Oppenheimer. He had read the manuscript and was admittedly quite perplexed by it. When I told him about the medical reports, the computer analysis and Ms. Denman’s new position, I expected him to agree with my call for immediate action, but he asked me to gather more information, claiming that we lacked sufficient grounds to do anything for the moment. As I was arguing against his position, he revealed to me that he had discussed the case with Carson and that they both thought that Smith/Jenkins’s written story, however troubling it was, did not constitute any new evidence. He also explained that the fact that my client had undergone all kinds of surgical procedures did not prove that he was the victim or that he was innocent. As for the computer analysis, he considered it worthless since the author of the manuscript had had access to Jenkins’s diary and could have imitated its style. Finally, he reminded me that the testimony of a wife in favor of her husband, since after all they were still officially married, cannot be considered, even in our case where Ms. Denman had first testified against Smith/Jenkins. When I disagreed, he told me that I would be right only if her testimony had been the only piece of evidence against my client, which was clearly not the situation. He assured me, nonetheless, that he was not opposed to a reopening of the case provided I could come up with additional and more significant material. As the surgical procedure that allegedly changed the color of Smith/Jenkins’s eyes constituted a sticky point, he urged me to try to find the Houston ophthalmologist who was supposed to have performed it. He also promised me that he would immediately reconsider the case if I could find the “real” David Smith, provided such a person existed, or his parents, and if their testimonies corroborated my client’s claims.
From that moment on, although I was still not completely convinced that Smith/Jenkins was telling the truth, I devoted most of my professional and personal time to the case. I first drove again to the Potosi Correctional Center where my client and I spent several hours perusing Houston telephone books I had borrowed from a library. After innumerable calls to various eye clinics, we almost certainly found the one where he claimed to have been operated on, partly on the basis of his memory of the place and of its location. However, when we were given the names of the doctors and surgeons practicing there, he could not recognize any. He then gave the receptionist a physical description of the man, but she claimed that it did not fit anybody working there or having worked there recently. She then admitted she had held her job for eighteen months only. When we asked to speak to somebody who had been there longer, she became impatient with us and hung up. I tried again several times myself the following days and finally talked to the head ophthalmologist, who had been at the clinic since 1973. He assured me that nobody corresponding to my description had ever worked with him. When I insisted, he gave me the names of the doctors who were employed there in 1987, but he maintained that none of them looked like the man I was seeking, adding that one had died and that two had moved out of state without leaving addresses. I suspect that he knew the identity of the man I was looking for but, since I had made the mistake of introducing myself as a lawyer, that he assumed I was working for somebody who wanted to sue his clinic and decided not to help me, all this provided, of course, that Smith/Jenkins was not lying. I briefly toyed with the idea of hiring a private investigator to find my man, but finally discarded it. I remembered what he had told my client and was convinced that, if we found him, he would deny having performed the surgery, even or especially in a court of law.
I must admit that the failure to find the ophthalmologist who allegedly changed the color of my client’s eyes planted more doubts in my mind about the veracity of his story. Those doubts were consolidated after I talked with several eminent local ophthalmologists. Like Judge Oppenheimer’s, they basically scoffed at the idea that such surgery could be performed today. However, a couple reluctantly conceded that it could conceivably exist in the future while one thought it was likely that research was now being conducted in that direction.
Nevertheless, I went ahead with my elusive quest. I undertook to find the “real” David Smith, using all kinds of means. For a while I hired a private investigator whom Ms. Denman agreed to pay. I also got in touch with the F.B.I. and the New York City police who, incidentally, proved very uncooperative. When all that failed, I placed ads in the three main New York City dailies, promising a substantial reward to anybody who could provide information that would help locate David F. Smith, born in Philadelphia on July 30, 1957, Rutgers University graduate, last seen in Manhattan in 1989, when he was homeless. I also included a detailed physical description. Those ads led to a deluge of letters and phone calls that supplied hundreds of tips and leads of all kinds. With the help of a couple of private investigators based in New York City, I checked every tip and pursued every lead, but, after a dozen trips to the East Coast, countless hours of work and thousands of dollars spent, I was back at square one. Yet, I strongly felt that the David Smith whom Smith/Jenkins claimed to have met did exist and was very much alive.
Since I was unable to find Smith, I decided to try to find his parents. It turned out to be relatively easy. I obtained their names, Beverly and Barbara Smith, an address and a phone number from the Rutgers University office of admissions. When I tried to call them, I reached a young man who did not know anything about them, which led me to conclude that they had probably moved to Florida. That did not prevent me from going to Philadelphia and to the address I had in my possession. There lived a nice couple who informed me that they had indeed bought their house from the Smiths. They told me that they were not in contact with them but remembered that they had moved to Stuart, Florida. Stuart being a small town, I thought I would locate them without any difficulty, but when the Florida telephone operator was unable to find their names in her computer, I decided to fly there. Once in Stuart, I investigated their whereabouts, but in vain. Intrigued, I placed an ad in the local paper, explaining that I was looking for Beverly and Barbara Smith who had moved to Stuart from Philadelphia in 1989. The following morning, I was awakened by a phone call. An old lady informed me that her dear friend Barbara and Barbara’s husband, Beverly, from Philadelphia, had been killed in the crash of a private plane that occurred somewhere in the Everglades in February 1990. That day, six other people called to tell me the same thing.
The news of the death of David’s parents crushed me. The previous evening, I was convinced I was on the brink of solving the puzzle that had taken over my life. Obviously, Beverly and Barbara Smith would have been able to tell me and a court of law whether my client was their son. A confrontation would have once and for all authenticated or impugned his claims. Now, not only was it back to square one again but it was becoming less and less likely that we would ever know the truth. Yet, I tried not to get discouraged. I contacted the Rutgers University alumni office that gave me the names, current addresses and phone numbers of all David’s classmates who had majored either in history or in economics. I was able to reach almost every single one, but fruitlessly. About one quarter of them remembered him but none of them had stayed in touch with him or would be able to physically identify him now or possessed pictures of him, except for the formal one at the end of the yearbook. When I first heard about that picture, I persuaded the woman who mentioned it to mail it to me. It was a bad picture, much too dark, which did not help much. Although I realized that it had been taken more than ten years ago, I was not impressed by its resemblance to Smith/Jenkins. I showed it to Oppenheimer immediately and pointed out to him that Smith’s ears were noticeably different from my client’s. The judge agreed but did not consider the picture significant partly because it was old and of poor quality and partly because Smith/Jenkins had admitted undergoing plastic surgery. I then ran the picture with a new ad in the New York newspapers, but with no luck.
