Manifest Injustice by Barry Siegel Page B

He’d needed maybe two minutes to decide.
    Macumber looked around their living room. The Bridgewaters’ house, like his, was a small, plain wood-frame rambler in a neighborhood of such homes, their community nearly rural, a modest suburb in the far northwest corner of Phoenix. When Paul bought his home, it stood on farmland. Bill pointed to their unadorned fireplace. “I’m going to build you a hearth,” he promised.
    So it went at the start. Visits with friends, a picnic in the desert, quiet mornings with his brother, dinners out with his parents. But the tension and despair soon began to build again, not much different from how he’d felt during the endless hours in jail. He tossed and turned at night, sleeping on a foldout couch in his parents’ small living room. Several times, consumed by fear and uncertainty, he broke down and cried. He knew his anxiety came partly from not yet being able to see or talk to his boys. He’d also not heard from his attorney—not a word. His mood kept darkening. He hesitated now to visit with certain people. “No one seems very happy around me right at this moment,” he wrote in his journal. “I seem to cast a shadow over everyone and everything.”
    Then on Friday, October 18—the fifty-second day since his arrest—his divorce attorney called to say Judge Ed Hughes, after holding a hearing and talking to Bill’s sons in chambers, had ruled that Bill should have adequate visitation rights. Macumber would get to see his boys that Sunday. He celebrated, the news dulled only by concern over what his boys thought of him now. Without his sons, he had nothing. He wanted them to believe in his innocence.
    Sunday, he got the boys at noon rather than 10:00 A.M. , at Carol’s insistence. No matter. They rushed into his arms, hugging and kissing. Bill and Harold took them to buy motorcycle helmets for their bicycle races. Then they all had lunch together and spent the afternoon just hanging out. “Today has shown me how easy it is for a man to worry himself into the grave needlessly,” Macumber wrote. “It has been one of the most beautiful and wonderful days in my life.”
    Macumber’s mood lifted even more when word came, on October 24, that Judge Hughes had granted him regular visitation rights with fixed hours: every other weekend from 3:00 P.M. on Saturday to 5:00 P.M. on Sunday. He could talk to his boys by phone now. He could buy them the off-road racing bike he knew they badly wanted.
    That day brought other comforting news. “A very special and very wonderful woman,” Bill wrote in his journal, “told me that she was in love with me.… She said she is not ashamed of her feelings and told me of them openly and honestly. She cried for me and made me feel very special. She said she knows I am innocent and that nobody will ever be able to convince her differently.” They had met through Little League back in the spring of 1971, becoming good friends. By late 1973, they’d sensed an attraction that went well beyond friendship but had said nothing, as both were married. She could see straight into him; she understood him. He wished he’d met her long ago, although then, he reminded himself, he would not have his three beautiful sons. In the early summer of 1974, with Carol gone and this lady also working toward a divorce, they’d happened to cross paths at a Denny’s. Over coffee, they’d finally shared their feelings for each other. On occasion in the following weeks, they’d kissed or held each other, nothing more. His arrest that August had cut short their time together but hadn’t altered her belief in him. He valued this beyond words, but he cautioned her: If I’m convicted, you must never attempt to see me.
    He didn’t fear dying, and given the choice between that and spending the rest of his life in prison, he knew what he’d pick. The notion did not depress him, really. For all his efforts to be upbeat, he realized he very possibly could be convicted. He