Donald E. McInnis. She’s so Cold. J & E Publications, 2019.
She’s So Cold is one of the most harrowing stories I have read. It is non-fiction, but I had to put it down about a dozen times—not because I lost interest. I just had to take a break because of its intensity.
Yes, it begins with a terrible murder of twelve-year-old Stephanie Crowe in 1998 in Escondido, California. It was not the murder itself that was the horror story. Do not misunderstand, the death by stabbing of a twelve-year-old girl in her home while her parents, brother, and sister were sleeping is terrible. That is not the focus of She’s So Cold.
The story is not about Stephanie, the victim. It focuses on the ordeal that her fourteen-year-old brother Michael and two of his friends went through.
I have read true stories like this before, but they were set in totalitarian countries. Yes, there were times I had to pause while reading The Gulag Archipelago and Heavenly Man, but the victims in those books were victims of cruel governments in lawless lands. This was set in the United States of America in 1998: Land of the Free, Liberty and Justice for All, the Bill of Rights, Innocent until proven guilty…and these victims were boys. They could have been in one of the high school classes I teach.
The author was the defense lawyer (when the authorities finally allowed it) for one of the three boys arrested and tormented for days before they were even read their rights. Like most boys, they had been taught to respect the police. Even though they sometimes went over twenty-four hours without sleep in the interrogation room, they tried to please the men asking the same questions over and over again.
To sum it up, the boys were browbeaten by the four detectives and one “specialist” on the case. They were repeatedly lied to. Michael was asked numerous times why there was blood in his room if he were sleeping and did not hear anything. There was no blood in his room.
To get one of the boys to confess, when he asked for his parents, he was told that his folks knew what he did and they did not want to talk to him. Each was told that the other two boys had confessed to things they had not confessed to. At times they were not allowed to go to the bathroom.
The police would not allow their parents to be with them. There was no mention of any rights or having an attorney present. Eventually, after three days to a week, the three boys were arrested. By this time they had been intimidated and scared out of their wits. Michael was even told that the reason he did not remember killing his sister was because he was demon-possessed.
My heart went out to those boys. I could not imagine even most adults standing up to the interrogation techniques used. But before I went into teaching I was in law enforcement. In fact, my first teaching job was at the Coast Guard Marine Environmental Protection School teaching other Coasties about environmental law.
We understood that a case was always “innocent until proven guilty.” Since most of our work was involved with oil and chemical spills, we understood the importance of all kinds of evidence including eyewitness testimony and physical evidence. I do not believe we ever lied about a case to anyone. Occasionally to protect a source of information, we might have said something like, “Even if I know who reported it, I couldn’t tell you.” Sometimes we knew, sometimes the tips were anonymous.
And we were always dealing with adults.
Once when I was working on an oil spill, I got a phone call at the Coast Guard station from a newspaper reporter. I was the English major, so I usually got the media calls. The reporter was convinced that a certain oil company had deliberately discharged the oil. He kept asking me variations of the same question to try to get me to incriminate someone when we were still investigating.
His news article the next day misquoted me. He lied. Some reporters do. That was his problem more than mine. They people he accused were not happy, but they knew both us Coasties and the newspaper and trusted us more.
But what if people whom you trust persist in saying terrible things about you? You eventually believe those things. That is what happened to the three boys. As the Bible says, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” (Proverbs 18:21)
Perhaps even more infuriating in the story is that a man with a police record who was a mental hospital outpatient was roaming the neighborhood that night. He looked into the window of at least one neighboring house and said he was looking for a girl named Tracy. A police car patrolling the area saw someone enter the Crowes’ house through a sliding door (which was ajar the next morning) close to midnight when all the Crowes were asleep. Just a couple of weeks later the man would be arrested for molesting two middle school girls and became a registered sex offender.
He was briefly questioned the next day, but the police noticed no blood on his clothes. He had spent the night in an all-night laundromat. Hmm. The police did take a few of his newly washed clothes as evidence. A few months later, after the preliminary trial had begun, the defense asked that the clothes be sent to a state lab for analysis. Traces of blood were found on some of the clothes. Its DNA matched Stephanie’s. But he was not arrested, and Escondido continued with the trial against Michael and his two friends.
There is a lot more. This is a gripping tale of law enforcement gone lawless.
I recommend also the brief afterword which discusses how the so-called Miranda rights go above the heads of most children. The author makes some recommendations for times when children are arrested or giving testimony in which they may be implicated. Most children in the face of authority tend to be honest, but they are easy to take advantage of and can be manipulated easier than adults. Such actions may appear to be a quick way of solving a mystery, but manipulation does not bring us closer to the truth—and investigations and court hearings should be about the truth.
Note to our readers: We have been using the standard Seventh Edition MLA format for our bibliographical information at the heading of each review. A little over two years ago, MLA issued a new handbook with some significant changes. Beginning with this review, we are now using the format of the MLA Handbook, Eighth Edition. Of course, since we normally just review one book at a time or books by the same author, we do not alter the order of the family name and given name of the author.