My Ghost Has a Name

Rosalyn Rossignol

Description

A family friend becomes the detective and seeks the truth when a young woman is jailed for her mother's violent murder

On October 20, 1999, thirty-eight-year-old Nell Crowley Davis was bludgeoned, strangled, and stabbed to death in the backyard of her home in Bluffton, South Carolina, near Hilton Head Island. In My Ghost Has a Name: Memoir of a Murder, Rosalyn Rossignol tells the story of how Davis's sixteen-year-old daughter, Sarah Nickel, along with the two teenage boys, came to be charged with the armed robbery and murder. Since no physical evidence tied Nickel to the murder, she was convicted of armed robbery and given the same sentence as the boys—thirty years. In the months that followed, Nickel vehemently insisted that she was innocent.

Torn by Nickel's pleas, Rossignol, a childhood friend of the murder victim, committed herself to answering the question that perhaps the police detectives, the press, and the courts had not: whether Sarah Nickel was indeed guilty of this crime.

During five years of research, Rossignol read case files and transcripts, examined evidence from the crime scene, listened to the 9-1-1 call, and watched videotaped statements made by the accused in the hours following their arrest. She also interviewed family members, detectives, the solicitor who prosecuted the case, the lawyers who represented the defendants, and the judge who tried the case, as well as Nickel.

What Rossignol uncovers is a fascinating maze of twists and turns, replete with a memorable cast of characters including a shotgun-toting grandma, a self-avowed nihilist and Satan-worshipper, and a former Rice Queen of Savannah, Georgia. Unlike all previous investigators, Rossignol has uncovered the truth about what happened, and the reasons why, on that fateful October day.

Sujets

• GA
• VA
• AR
• NC
• SC
• MS
• TN
• LA
• KY
• Local
• FL
• History
• United States
• General
• Murder
• History of the Americas
• South
• General officer
• Memoir
• State
• Histoire
• Personal Memoirs

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611178272
• Langue: English

Extrait

My Ghost Has a Name
My Ghost Has a Name
memoir of a murder
Rosalyn Rossignol

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-826-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-61117-827-2 (ebook)
Front cover design by Faceout Studio, Lindy Martin
Imagery by Shutterstock
For Nell
As, therefore, the storm that prevents a sailor from putting into port is more dangerous than that which does not allow him to sail, so those storms of the soul are more serious which do not allow a man to compose or to calm his disturbed reason; but pilotless and without ballast, in confusion and aimless wandering, rushing headlong in oblique and reeling courses, he suffers a terrible shipwreck, as it were, and ruins his life. Consequently for this reason also it is worse to be sick in soul than in body; for men afflicted in body only suffer, but those afflicted in soul both suffer and do ill.
Plutarch, Animine an corporis affectiones sint peiores
And let me speak to th yet unknowing world How these things came about.
Horatio, Hamlet , act 5, scene 2
Contents
Prologue: The Phone Call
1 Death in the Afternoon
2 Death in the Afternoon, Scene 2
3 He Said/She Said
4 Ridgeland Cemetery, October 20, 2004, 4 P.M .
5 Digging Up the Past
6 The Future in an Instant
7 Hell Is Murky
8 The Role of the Press
9 Conspiracy to Kill a Goose
10 The Solicitor s Worthless Check Unit
11 Meeting Sarah
12 Writer s Block
13 The Nelsons
14 The Nelsons after Dark
15 Juror Number 13
16 The Public Defender s Office Weighs In
17 John s Birth Mother
18 Mama; or, I Digress
19 Sarah s Best Friend
20 A modern day Svengali
21 Father s Day at Broad River
22 The Church of Satan
23 The Judge Wore Leather
24 Madmen, Freaks, and Evil People
25 The Necromantic Ritual Book
26 How he d like to kill someone
27 The Beginning of the End
28 Short but Not Sweet
29 Sentencing
30 Postconviction Suspense
31 An Unexpected Letter
32 Putting It All Together
33 When the Hurly-Burly s Done
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Prologue
The Phone Call
It s one of those days when I am haunted. My ghost has a name but no local habitation, which explains how I could move from Iowa to Maryland and still see her-hazel eyes, long blond hair parted in the middle, brilliant smile-mostly in my dreams, but sometimes out of my eye s corner, filling my peripheral vision, a dark shadow against the sun. Until I blink and turn my head and she is gone. And I stop to wonder where she is, from what dimension her spirit occasionally obtrudes into this material one. I do not wonder if she is at peace. I know she cannot be at peace.
The last time I saw Nell she was pregnant with Sarah, who would be the oldest of her three children. Even though Nell was still two months from her due date on that January afternoon, her belly was colossal, much too big, I felt, for her slight frame. Still she was full of energy and optimism, happy with her husband, Joe Nickel, and her job as an x-ray technologist in Hilton Head, South Carolina. When she left, my mother said, That was sure nice of Nell to stop by. I m so glad you were home.
The next time I heard my mother say Nell s name I was one thousand miles away from our childhood home in Augusta, Georgia. I was sitting on the secondhand sofa in the sunroom of our wood-frame house in Dubuque, Iowa. I had just come home from work at Loras College, two blocks away, where I taught English writing and literature. My son, Rich, answered the phone. I took the phone from him, making a face because I didn t really feel like talking to Mama. I said hello.
Did you hear about Nell? she asked, not bothering with her usual greeting and small talk.
What do you mean did I hear about Nell? What are you talking about?
Nell Crowley, she went on, as if I knew more than one. The one you used to go around with in high school. The one who was your maid of honor when you married Bill. She was murdered, they say it s by her daughter, with a baseball bat.
I held the phone, my gut filling with horror. I was unable to speak, or even breathe for a moment. The sensation was so physical, I felt as if I d been punched in the stomach, hard. Mama s voice came back over the line. Are you there? Did you hear what I said? I managed to choke out a yes, furious that she could simply call me and make such a statement in such a calm voice. Swallowing my rage, I responded, I have to go now, and hung up.
Then the dreams started-right away, that very night. At first they were all violent: A zombie-Nell ambushing me from beneath a shadowy stairwell, trying to cut my throat, her own face livid and swollen with the blows that killed her. Or Nell alive again, whole and beautiful, inviting me into her room to listen to a new band on her stereo, then stabbing me in the chest. Was this survivor s guilt, I wondered? Or some bizarre, atavistic fear of the dead? Was I being haunted by her ghost?
I called her mother, Julia, to express my sympathy for her loss. I asked about Nell s father, Jack. Julia said that he had died, mercifully, of a heart attack the previous February. She missed him terribly but was so thankful he didn t have to live through this horror, which was, and would be always, unbearable. Julia felt that the entire incident had come about as a result of Sarah getting mixed up with the wrong crowd, and the wrong drug-crack cocaine.
Even though I didn t know Sarah, I told Julia I had a hard time believing Nell s sixteen-year-old daughter had killed her. Julia said there were two other teens involved, both male, but that there was just too much evidence suggesting Sarah s participation to believe otherwise. Plus, Julia said, Sarah had written about hating her mother in her journal and told some of her friends she would like to kill her.
Although it took more than a year for Sarah to go to trial, I kept up with her case and read accounts of the proceedings in Beaufort County, South Carolina, newspapers. Claiming that she had had no part in her mother s murder, Sarah pleaded innocent. Sarah s journal, however, was more damning than Julia s initial characterization of it had suggested. In one entry, composed almost exactly one year before the murder, Sarah had written, speaking of her brother and half sister, I love her and Willie to death and I would never let anyone hurt them but I know I ll end up hurting them both when I kill mom. She deserves to rot in the fiery pits of hell. I ll take her there myself. My God , I thought, she really did do it . Yet Sarah continued to assert her innocence, so vehemently and so convincingly that I was torn.
A memory: Mama stands at the door to my room, Kool Filter King in one hand, highball glass in the other. Nell and I sit on the white shag carpet that covers my bedroom floor, the butt end of a joint smoldering in an ashtray I had made in ninth-grade art class. We silently watch its smoke curl upward in a thin spiral. Mama says, Nell, you better make sure you have something to wear to church tomorrow if you re spending the night. Nell and I exchange looks; she says, Well, Mrs. Hunnicutt, we thought Rosalyn might spend the night at my house, if that s OK. Mama likes Nell, thinks she s a good influence because she gets good grades. Still she wants to say no, has always preferred saying no; I have no idea why and never will. But sometimes she says yes. Well, all right, but next weekend I want you to go to church with us. Mama bobs and weaves her way back to the kitchen, where she is playing cards with her sister and two of my uncles. We finish the joint, and I pack a paper bag with a change of clothes. If I could, I would never come back .
Following Nell s death my son once asked me, Why was she your best friend? There were the usual reasons. I thought she was beautiful; I loved the way she moved her hands. I loved the fact that, although she was smarter than me in algebra and geometry, I could always best her in English. But mostly I loved her because she was my refuge. I grew up in a home with a widowed mother who had never wanted to have a child, but whose terminally ill husband had somehow talked her into the idea that I would be better than nothing. Nine months later he died, leaving her with a baby girl whom she saw primarily as a burden. As a child I escaped my sense of alienation in books and a rich fantasy life. But there were some things I couldn t escape, one being the sense that I was forever in the way, an unwelcome distraction in my mother s busy social calendar. As I entered my teens, my sense of alienation grew into a profound loneliness. That loneliness ended, however, when I changed schools and started attending John M. Tutt Jr. High
Nell was one of the first people who sat with me at lunch, who asked me to come over after school, and to spend the night on weekends. At her house, where everyone slept late on Sunday morning, and then had a big pancake breakfast cooked by her dad, I always felt welcomed, and valued for myself. When we had sleepovers, something that happened most weekends, and many, many summer nights, we would take turns tickling each other s backs, and I loved the way she touched me, soothing me into sleep when my turn came second. Before long I was spending more of my afternoons and weekends at Nell s than I did at home.