By Robert P. Bishop

I got a job when I was in grade eight setting pins in the bowling alley at night. My father didn’t protest that I was too young to work when I got that job. His divorce the year before had run him off the rails, and I wasn’t much on his mind. When he wasn’t working at the refinery south of town he was hanging out in bars, boozing it up and carrying on with the local whores. I think he was pleased I got that after-school job; it kept me off the streets at night, relieved him of being a responsible parent and let him carry on without worrying too much about me. We scarcely saw each other between school and my job, but when we did, he was usually drunk, maudlin, and incoherent.

Setting pins wasn’t a difficult job, but you had to have agility and strength. Lifting fifteen-pound bowling balls to the return rails three or four hundred times in a busy six-hour shift wasn’t easy, and picking up the heavy pins and putting them in the correct slots in the reset machine wasn’t easy, either.

I started out working one alley. JJ Willton, who was into his thirties and had been setting pins for years, helped me get the hang of the job. With his help, I learned quickly and soon was skillful enough to handle two alleys at the same time.

JJ had several limitations, one of which kept him from passing the driver’s license exam, so he rode around town on an old bicycle with a canvas bag hanging on the right side of the rear wheel. JJ had another, more serious limitation; he stole women’s underwear from clotheslines and stashed the pilfered garments in his bedroom in the house he shared with his aging mother. 

Everybody in town knew JJ did this, but excused his behavior as one of those quirky things people did who weren’t all there. The more tolerant folks said every small town had its colorful but harmless eccentric. 

A few concerned people urged the authorities to intervene before he did something ugly. The people who expressed these concerns were usually mocked into silence. After all, JJ’s defenders said, his aging mother looked after him. 

What harm could he do?

Fifteen-year old Amanda Cooper and her friend, Lillian Kamp, had gone to see Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean. Amanda and Lillian chatted excitedly about Dean’s good looks and smoldering sex appeal as they walked home that Sunday night. They parted after a few blocks and each went on alone. 

Lillian arrived home safely. 

Amanda’s body was found the next day behind lilac bushes in the small park near her home. Amanda was fully clothed, but one piece of clothing was missing; her underwear.

Amanda’s rape and death shocked the town. These things didn’t happen in Stillwater. Sure, people quarreled and had disagreements, but the rape and murder of a young girl? No, not in a normal town, a good town like Stillwater.

Speculation on who killed her swept through the town like a wind-whipped storm. Tongues wagged, people talked. Because of Amanda’s missing underwear, everybody named one person; JJ Willton.

The police questioned JJ. He admitted he had Sunday night off. When pressed, JJ said he got bored at home with nothing to do so he rode his bike around town. 

The ambitious county attorney was not going to let Amanda’s murder slip through his fingers. A trial and a conviction would elevate him from obscurity to prominence throughout the state. And getting a conviction for the murder of a young girl would pave the way to the US Senate seat up for grabs the following year. 

Citing JJ’s history of stealing women’s underwear, it was easy for the county attorney to convince a judge to issue a search warrant for JJ’s belongings and the house where he lived. The police turned up enough evidence for a warrant. JJ was arrested, charged with Amanda’s murder, and held in the county jail until his trial began.

 People packed the courtroom, eager to hear the sordid details of Amanda’s murder. Amanda’s friends attended and sat together, weeping and sobbing. The first day of the trial Lillian Kamp stood up and shouted, “You bastard! You killed her.” The judge had Lillian removed and barred her from attending the trial. That squashed any further outbursts. Most of us pin boys wormed our way into the courtroom  and sat together, but none of us yelled at JJ. 

The county attorney opened by discussing JJ’s well-known fixation on women’s underwear and what this perversion indicated; a suppressed sexual desire so powerful it often erupted violently when it could no longer be controlled. 

JJ’s defense attorney objected, saying it was speculation on the prosecuting attorney’s part and without merit. 

Sensing the jury had absorbed his damning accusation of sexual violence, the county attorney moved on to JJ’s lack of a credible explanation for his whereabouts and what he was doing the night Amanda was, according to the county attorney, “brutally assaulted and murdered.” The county attorney hammered on this point, asserting that JJ had seen Amanda and Lillian leave the movie theater and followed them, riding silently behind them in the dark, like an animal on the hunt, waiting for an opportunity. When Lillian and Amanda separated, JJ struck.

The county attorney moved on to the most incriminating piece of evidence against JJ; a pair of women’s panties found in that tattered canvas bag hanging on the back of his bicycle. JJ, the county attorney asserted, kept the panties in his bike bag as a trophy, a reminder of a successful hunt.

JJ’s attorney objected, saying anyone could have put those panties in that bag. 

Throughout the trial, JJ said over and over, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it.” JJ and I were the only people in that courtroom who knew he was telling the truth.

The defense attorney called several people to testify on JJ’s behalf. The common theme of their testimony was JJ was incapable of committing this crime. In all the years he had been stealing women’s underwear from clotheslines, he had never done anything that even came close to violence.

The trial lasted three days; JJ was found guilty of murdering Amanda Cooper. The county attorney demanded the death penalty for such a barbaric crime, then, because he knew the death penalty was rarely enforced in Montana, asked the judge to require JJ to undergo a mental competency evaluation. The judge agreed and thanked the county attorney for his magnanimous treatment of a vicious murderer who, the judge said, deserved to die for committing the most sordid crime ever in the fine town of Stillwater.

Three mental health experts testified JJ lacked the ability to comprehend the severity of what he was being accused of. Instead of being sentenced to the state prison in Deer Lodge, the experts said a mental health institution was a more appropriate setting for him.

The judge agreed and sentenced JJ to an indeterminate length of incarceration in the state mental hospital in Warm Springs.

It’s been sixty-eight years since Amanda Cooper was murdered. Most of the people alive at the time she was killed are dead. JJ died forty-three years ago, still an inmate in the state mental hospital. I doubt anyone in Stillwater even remembers him now. There is only one person alive who knows who killed Amanda Cooper. Me. I know.

My father came home that Sunday night, drunk and babbling incoherently. It took me a while to piece together what he had done.

I found Amanda behind the lilac bushes. Her panties were down around one ankle. I pulled them off, put them in my pocket and went home. My father was passed out on the couch. He wouldn’t remember any of this in the morning, and I wasn’t going to say anything to him or to anybody else.

I didn’t know if the cops would discover enough evidence to accuse my father of the crime, but I knew who those missing panties would implicate.

The next evening before I went into the bowling alley, I stuffed Amanda’s panties into the canvas bag hanging on JJ’s bike. 

I’ve got pancreatic cancer and will be dead in a week, maybe two or three at best, so why speak out now? Am I seeking forgiveness? No, I’m not. There isn’t anyone who would forgive me for what I did, so I’m not looking for it. I’m not looking for a clear conscience, either. After sixty-eight years who is left to care if a conscience is clear or not? Maybe it’s time for the truth to be known about that Sunday night.

Yes, the truth, at least for JJ. It’s as simple as that.

And the county attorney? He won that Senate seat and held it for thirty-six years.

                                                        

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Robert P. Bishop, an army veteran and former teacher, lives in Tucson. His short fiction has appeared in Ariel Chart, Bright Flash Literary Review, CommuterLit, Ink Pantry, Literally Stories, Mysterical-E, Scarlet Leaf Review, Umbrella Factory Magazine and elsewhere.