The Chronicles of Jack Best

The City of Dallas hadn’t seen anything like it in years. The news of a dead 21 year old party girl wouldn’t normally be cause for celebration in any corner. But Keisha Greene wasn’t just any dead party girl. She was the girl who everyone said had killed her own baby girl. She was the girl who had been arrested and jailed and tried on charges of capital murder. She was the girl who faced the death penalty. She was the girl whose face was on television every day for six straight weeks, the girl vilified by that TV court lady on cable television, you know, the one who said that Keisha was guilty as sin and should rot in hell for all eternity for what she had done. Keisha Greene was the one who the prosecution said was out partying the day after her daughter went missing, partying with the boyfriend who wasn’t the baby’s father. Keisha was the daughter of the widowed man who told the police and the television reporters and the judge and the jury and anyone else who would listen that there was no way in the world that his little precious daughter would have done such a horrible, horrible thing. She was the one who failed to call the police until six whole days after her daughter went missing. She was the one who, ostensibly, led the search for her child in the days after she reported her missing, the search that garnered national attention, the search that fostered false lead after false lead, the search that resulted in the arrest of two suspects (based on information given authorities by Keshia), arrests that also resulted in the sudden release of said suspects upon the discovery of the body of Keshia’s child, releases that also resulted in public apologies to the arrestees by the chief of police, the publisher of the local newspaper, and the district attorney. Keisha Greene was the girl who steadfastly clung to her story that she didn’t have anything to do with her daughter’s murder, that it was someone else, that she couldn’t, that she wouldn’t do such a thing. It was Keisha Greene’s own psychologist who told the jury how trauma and a poorly developed sense of self-worth and latent Münchausen syndrome and general malaise and a narcissistic personality and sexual abuse and PMDD and migraine headaches and a host of other maladies caused Keisha to behave inappropriately in the face of her child’s disappearance. And it was Keisha Greene’s own shrink who guaranteed to God, the judge and the jury that despite all of these things, Keisha Greene possessed neither the personality nor the wherewithal to committed filicide. Miss Greene was the girl who sat looking pitiful as the district attorney (who decided to prosecute this open-and-shut case himself) laid out a fool-proof presentation, complete with expert testimony, eyewitness accounts, digital animation reenactments, and PowerPoint charts and graphs. Miss Greene was the girl who discretely averted her eyes as murder scene and autopsy photos were displayed for the jury to examine. Miss Greene was the girl who sobbed openly as the medical examiner described her daughter’s last moments of life, the agony she surely must have gone through as she was slowly, painfully strangled to death. But it was also Keisha who smiled broadly when the jury came back with a finding of not guilty. It was Keisha who, as the sullen prosecutor polled the jury, looked on with relief and satisfaction. And it was Keisha who, upon hearing that she was free to go, dashed out of the courtroom with her team of lawyers and her father, through a rear entrance to avoid the throng of reporters and gawkers who were at once stunned and vehemently upset with what they saw as a clear miscarriage of justice, this final wrong verdict of not guilty. You see, in the minds of almost everyone, Keisha Greene was the girl who got away with murder. And now she herself was a murder victim. And the audience that was the hungry and willing paramour of the media whore went wild with abandon.