When Cass saw Emma’s bones, she broke free of Abby’s hold and started to run toward the grave. Agent Strauss was barreling down the hill, gun drawn. He got to them first and got them to their knees. They were in shock, but Judy managed to start her defense right then and there, crying about how she had no idea her daughter was dead.
She would later claim that she also had no idea how Emma died. She would testify that she came home to find Emma at the bottom of the stairs, already dead, and that her husband insisted they hide the body because she was pregnant with his son’s baby and he did not want his son’s life to be destroyed. He drove Emma’s car to the woods and buried her, then left the car at the beach so everyone would believe she had drowned in the ocean. She would turn on him viciously to save herself, disclosing his obsession with his son, his emotional abuse of Judy herself, and his attraction to her daughter.
Jonathan Martin told a different story after conferring with his lawyers, the story that would eventually be believed by prosecutors and become the basis for a plea bargain. He told how he arrived home to find his stepdaughter dead. He admitted to being scared for his wife, who had killed her own daughter, and also forhis son because of what Emma had said about being pregnant. He claimed he was overwrought with fear about what it would do to his son, so he hid the body and left the car at the beach to stage a drowning. He begged for understanding, for the compassion of fellow parents who do stupid things to protect their children.
Jonathan Martin passed a polygraph. Judy refused to take one.
An autopsy of Emma Tanner’s skeletal remains could not determine if she had ever been pregnant.
Cass
For days and weeks after I ran away, I watched any television show I could find as they reported about me and Emma and how we had disappeared. I talked to the Pratts about it, but I did not tell them the truth about Emma. I told them she had run away after fighting with our mother and that I couldn’t stay there without her.
At first, I prayed that Mr. Martin had driven her to the hospital and that I would wake up to see news of that—of an accident in a home and the girl recovering nicely. When I heard about the car being left at the beach, I knew they had staged her disappearance and used my own running away to give it credibility. And even then, I hoped beyond reason that I was wrong—that she was safe somewhere. That Mr. Martin had paid her to go away and never come back and that it was enough money for Emma to do it. Maybe she thought she could always come back for more and more and torture them all forever. Or maybe she had moved somewhere exotic and was living with a handsome native, or worshipped by an entire island of natives, and finally being happy. It was crazy to think this, but it was enough to keep me from going home, to hide in the train station so I could think of what to do. It was there that I met Bill and Lucy. I got in Bill’scar and rode all the way to Maine. And then got on Rick’s boat and felt free and powerful as we crossed the harbor to the most beautiful place I had ever seen.
I returned after my escape to find my sister. I was still holding hope that she was alive somewhere—I gambled that I could make them bring her out of hiding. Or that the press would make her surface. I didn’t know the outcome. But I knew if I could make my mother doubt her husband, make her believe he had lied to her all this time because he had also cheated on her and because everyone was believing me that Emma was on the island, that she would break. Summer would become winter inside her mind and she would threaten to reveal what they had done that night, whatever it was, and that Mr. Martin would be forced to show her proof. That is what happens when we lose faith in a person. We have to see the evidence. Words and promises are no longer enough.
I knew if I could do that, if I could break her, the truth would be set free.
I ran to my sister’s grave, to my mother and my stepfather. I ran to Emma, finally, after all those years.
Mr. Martin and my mother were on their knees with Agent Strauss holding a gun to them. They looked up when they heard me, and Mrs. Martin started pleading even harder for everyone to believe her about that night. Mr. Martin was silent. He had the good sense to wait for his lawyer.
And with all this going on, all I could really see were the lifeless bones of my sister’s hand coming out from the ground. And all I could really hear was the scream inside me, echoing into the darkness.
TWENTY-THREE
Dr. Winter
Finding Emma Tanner was not the end of the story. It was only the beginning.
The investigation was taken over by local authorities. Detectives and prosecutors descended upon Cass, the Martin family and the Bureau as they attempted to piece together the events of the past three years.
On the other side were two teams of defense attorneys, one for Judy Martin and one for Jonathan Martin. They aligned briefly for an offensive strike, going after the Bureau, Agent Leo Strauss and Dr. Abigail Winter. They made a motion to dismiss the charges on the grounds of entrapment, seeking to dismiss the evidence and testimony from that night when the Martins led them to the body of the dead teenager. It was a frivolous legal argument because the Martins had not been coerced into committing any crime, but rather leading authorities to evidence of a prior crime. But the claim had to be defended.
Leo was steadfast in his testimony at deposition. “We do it all the time. We lie to suspects about things we know and things we’ve found. We had a hunch and we went with it.”
He did more than that. When pressed about where this hunch had come from, he mentioned the inconsistency with the location of the bedrooms. “Abby figured out that Emma had not been on that island, and she knew that Cass was saying things that didn’t add up. No—we did not know what had happened to Emma Tanner. We just knew that she had not been on that island and that someone in that house could have the answer.” He did not elaborate. But he took full responsibility for their tactics. He said it had been his idea. This was his case. He was the lead investigator and he made the call to run this lead without involving anyone else on the team—except, of course, for Dr. Winter. “Why? Because she knew that family better than anyone. Because I needed her.”
Abby had weighed in on the reasons Cass had told them things that were not true with a theory that made it impossible for them to charge her. “I believe Cass Tanner was in a state of profound emotional stress, which caused her to have short-term dissociative disorder. It’s common in cases of severe stress like this. It is my opinion that the trauma of her escape and the return home, where she relived the death of her sister and faced the extreme conflict of being home with her mother but also knowing what her mother had done, were too much for her to handle. She created a false reality to cope. A reality where her mother was not responsible for her sister’s death and was therefore a safe place for her to be. She needed to feel safe again.”
She went on from there, on the pathology of short-term dissociative disorder and her opinion that Cass was now well—that she had a full recollection of what happened to her sister and understood now that her sister was dead. She had insisted that the other stories about the island were true, that they had happened to her, and that she had no idea how Richard Foley died. She had cometo remember meeting Bill and Lucy Pratt at Penn Station, how they offered her hot chocolate and then, after learning she’d run away, a place to stay.
And the story about the beach, the one described with meticulous detail right down to the moonlight and the sand groomer—well, that was all just part of the delusion. Her mind could not dismiss the facts of Emma’s disappearance, so it incorporated them into the fantasy.
Of course, none of this was true. Cass knew exactly what she was doing when she told that story. She had crafted it perfectly—fitting the details to the factual findings so the Bureau would believe her, letting her mother spin theories about what had really happened that night after her husband drove off with Emma’s body.
No charges were brought against Cass. Her attorney used public sympathy and Dr. Winter’s testimony to weigh on the prosecutor and block every effort to have Cass evaluated again. Other than one visit to her pediatrician, Cass evaded physical examinations as well.
In the end, they rolled Jonathan Martin with a plea deal for obstructing justice in exchange for his testimony. A forensic autopsy confirmed a broken neck—Emma had been dead on impact. They used Abby’s theory to explain Cass’s behavior and convince the jury that she was sane. Both testified against Judy Martin, who was, in the end, convicted of federal obstruction charges. But without more of a motive, without the truth about what had gone on in that house, and with two possible theories about how Emma fell—at the hand of Judy Martin or the hand of Jonathan Martin—the jury was hung on the charge of manslaughter.
Abby and Leo had not been in the same room until the day ofsentencing nearly seven months after finding Emma’s body in the woods. They had to be careful about appearances. But Abby had met with Cass to help with the evaluation of her mental state. And Leo had written reports, given depositions, and met with the higher-ups at the New Haven field office to walk them through everything that had happened.
The investigation had not ended, even after the conviction of Judy Martin. There was the death of the boatman, Richard Foley, which was being investigated by the Maine state police in conjunction with the Bureau. The working theory had it pinned on the Petersons. Their rowboat was found in a wooded area near the water’s edge in nearby Christmas Cove, confirming their hasty departure from the island. The couple had not been found. The Bureau was heading up the search for them—Carl and Lorna Peterson, a.k.a Bill and Lucy Pratt—and possibly one unidentified child whose clothes were found in the dresser drawers.
There were two pieces of the puzzle that had fallen through the cracks. The first was the child.
Other than one book of lullabies, some clothing in a drawer and a crib found in the basement of the house on the island, there was no evidence of a child. Dishes, drains, linens were initially examined for biological evidence, but the search came to a screeching halt after Emma’s body was found. With Abby’s guidance, Cass was able to process what had transpired and soon reported that the child had, in fact, been part of her delusion. The working theory was now that the clothing and crib and the book were keepsakes from the child the Petersons had lost years before—although that child had been a two-year-old boy, and the clothes belonged to a two-year-old girl. Still, there was no reason to expend additional resources on forensic evaluationsuntil they found the Petersons and had some kind of crime to prove.
