No Matter How Loud I Shout (9 page)

“What'd you do, tell them you're no killer, just a punk tagger?” Geri Vance asks. In the Juvenile Hall hierarchy, graffiti artists—taggers—are lightweights, commanding little respect.

“Tag-banger,” Ronald corrects quickly. “We're a lot badder than just taggers.”

The other boys in the small classroom laugh again. Ronald often tries to impress the others with tales of his supposed criminal prowess, no matter how counterproductive that might be for a kid trying to get out from under a murder charge. He is wasting his time, though: Most kids who have been in the system as long as his classmates have possess finely honed bullshit meters. They can tell in a moment from Ronald's showy bravado and too-cool patter that before his arrival at the lockup, he never did much of anything wrong, always small and quiet and slightly left out, invisible in class, invisible to girls. He just had this slightly off-kilter appearance, and people always assumed the worst, giving him a wide berth, the way you would a quiescent yet mean-looking dog. In the lockup, they know better.

“Didn't you tell us you had blood all over your clothes or your backpack or something?” one of the other kids asks. “How'd you explain that?”

Ronald's grin widens a notch. “I said I was walking home that night and I flagged down this van, so I could hitch a ride with this dude I know. And when I got in, there's blood all over and a sack of money on the floor. And he tells me, ‘I did it. I killed them.' It's like, I didn't know until I got in the van, and by then, all the blood was all over me.”

The other kids are genuinely interested now, intrigued by the notion that you could climb innocently into a van and suddenly be thrust into the middle
of a murder. It is not such an outlandish notion to the kids in this room: Three of the six students in the class this night are charged with murder simply for being willingly present when someone else did the shooting or stabbing. Now they wonder if they can learn something from Ronald they might be able to use in court. Enjoying the spotlight, Ronald continues to recap his testimony, slipping into the street slang he has carefully cultivated since entering the hall, hoping it will give him standing.

“So then they ask about the money I'm supposed to have stolen from my bosses, that I supposedly killed them for. And I say no, I got that from this dude's van. I told them that I just reached down and picked up some of the money sitting there on the floor of the van and said, ‘Break me off.' ”

The other kids stare at him, then shake their heads, immediately losing interest. Someone mutters the word “Fool,” and Ronald looks confused. “What's wrong with that? Wouldn't you want to break off some of the money for yourself, too?”

“Man,” Geri says with disgust, “no wonder they want to fry your ass, talkin' that kind of shit in court.” Geri, facing his own murder rap, has written a series of eloquent letters to the court, polishing them in class, acutely conscious that he will walk into court presumed to be a monster, and that he will have a tough time combating that perception. “You go into court, you're not on the street, dummy. You think that judge is going to believe anything you say now? Break me off. He's gonna break you off, all right. Break you off right into prison.”

Ronald just shakes his head at this piece of wisdom, still smiling his invulnerable, indecipherable smile. “Can't send me to prison,” he says mildly, and this irks Geri even more. Because, unlike Ronald, Geri can go to prison.

The last student arrives a few moments later and I start the class with a five-minute writing exercise. Ronald declares his intention to write a quick page about a boy wrongly accused of murdering his bosses. “I'll call it, ‘Innocent Blood,' ” he says, inscribing the title onto a piece of blue-lined loose-leaf paper with a wobbly flourish.

For the next five minutes, he seems to be concentrating on his work, but when the time comes to read aloud to the class, Ronald is the only boy in the room whose page is still blank.

T
HE
first time Peggy Beckstrand saw him, Ronald Duncan giggled and smiled over his shoulder at his parents sitting in back of the ancient courtroom, a skinny boy with those little kid arms you could wrap your thumb and pinkie around, no problem. It seemed hard to believe he could raise, much less successfully aim and fire, a double-barreled shotgun. The police had thought that right up until he happily showed them how he did it. That was a year ago, though, and since then, Ronald has bulked up in the hall, a product of forced calisthenics and starchy foods and the march of adolescence, new muscles and goatee and a slight paunch aging his five-foot-five frame.

“I didn't do anything, I swear,” he tells his parents every time they visit, and they, of course, believe him. He is their baby, their youngest son, a kid who has never been in trouble a day in his life, but for the occasional detention at school, a cut class here and there. They dismiss his confession to the police. They have heard of terrible things that can happen to a young black male locked up in a police interrogation room; they know what happened to Rodney King. Ronald's father, a humble and soft-spoken gentleman with a deeply lined face and the hard calluses of a man who worked a lifetime with his hands, speaks with a quiet passion about his son's innocence, of how he
knows
with something that borders on religious faith that his boy, the child who came to him late in life and made him young again, could not possibly be a killer. He and his wife are no longer married, but they are living together again while the case is pending, their Ronald's future in the balance. The case is now the center of their lives, every hearing, every motion, every casual utterance in court. To them, Peggy Beckstrand is the monster—the humorless face of the state, trying to take their child away.

She feels their stares drilling into the back of her neck at every hearing. Peggy feels sorry for them, for the pain their family must bear, the look of incomprehension on their faces every time they hear the courtroom ring with the words, “Ronald Duncan: two counts, Section 187 of the California Penal Code—murder in the first degree.” She wonders what the Duncan family sees when Ronald comes strutting into the room, grinning and waving like a kid getting off the bus from summer camp. At such moments, when disgust wells up within Peggy, she sometimes watches Ronald's mother and father rise and extend their hands toward him, reaching out across yards of empty space, the closest thing to an embrace they are allowed in court, where touching the accused is not permitted, the cold reality juvenile and adult systems share. To Peggy, it is as if she and the family
are looking at two different children. Will they remain so blinded by love, she wonders, when the trial begins and she hauls out the pictures of what Ronald left behind on the night of the murder? Would
she
be so blinded if it were her daughter Courtney skipping into the courtroom? Even after all these years in the DA's office, it is the sort of question that can still haunt this former preschool teacher, this mother and grandmother, whose job is to be a prosecutor of children.

But then, there are the pictures. They haunt her, too, agony and loss captured in the harsh strobe light of a crime-scene photographer's camera. The last pictures of Chuck and Adelina Rusitanonta.

The image will always be indelible in Peggy's mind: husband and wife slumped in their old Mercury station wagon, engine still running, back door ajar. Shortly before 11:00
P.M.
, the car had drifted slowly into a lamppost on a residential street. A man had run out onto his porch at the sound of two loud bangs followed by the sound of a car crashing, just in time to see a shadowy figure run away from the car and toward a van that seemed to have been waiting.

Inside the car, husband and wife were still wearing their matching Baskin Robbins shirts, impossibly huge matching holes blown in their heads by a pair of point-blank shotgun blasts, their blood and brains and bits of bone sprayed like graffiti onto the windshield, dashboard, and seats. Their facial features were wildly distorted, sagging like party balloons that had been overfilled, then deflated, by the volcanic heat and pressure of expanding gases leaving the gun barrel along with the buckshot. (Typical of her sometimes morbid obsession with the gritty details of crime, Peggy had gone to a medical library to study this ballooning phenomenon so she could explain it all in court in clinical detail—even though she knew the judge hearing the case would not be the least bit interested. This was a habit left over from a career of jury trials in adult court, where no detail could be ignored or issue taken for granted. “It's a matter of being prepared. Of being professional. If this were a
real
court,” she says with biting contempt, “there would be no question. I'd have to do this.”)

Natural suspicion, then hard evidence and witnesses (a talkative getaway driver, a bloody van), led detectives to young Ronald Duncan, the only other person working that night at the ice cream store. After telling a series of preposterous lies about walking home alone and getting mugged that night—and after police made an unfortunate and ultimately illegal reference to the killer receiving the death penalty that would come back to haunt Peggy—Ronald switched his story and confessed. He calmly explained
how he rode home in the backseat of Chuck and Ada's car after they closed up shop for the night, determined to rob them, a sawed-off shotgun in his backpack along with his schoolbooks and unfinished homework.

As he would explain to his interrogators, a few minutes into the ride, having worked up sufficient nerve to carry out his plan, he pulled out his weapon and, without a word, fired at Chuck's head with the single-shot shotgun, the car still moving. The cops, who had found no murder weapon, had been taken aback by this, asking,
Are you sure it was single-shot?
Ronald had nodded: There was just one barrel. It wasn't a double or an over-and-under, he said. The awful implication of this would later stun Peggy as much as it had the police. It meant this fifteen-year-old boy had to shoot Chuck, who had been driving, break open the gun, take out the spent shell, put in another one, close the gun, and shoot Adelina—even as the now driverless car was drifting to the curb and crashing. Not to mention the fact that the vinyl interior of the Mercury station wagon had to have looked and felt like a slaughterhouse after that first shot. This provided clear evidence of premeditation, rather than a spur-of-the-moment act of irrationality. To calmly reload and kill a second time in the face of such carnage took a special sort of commitment.

“What was Ada doing during this time you had to reload?” one of the interrogators had asked. As Peggy later calculated it, the woman must have sat there for a good five to ten seconds wearing part of her husband's brain before Ronald got around to dispatching her, too.

“She screamed,” a deadpan Ronald recalled. “After I shot her, it wasn't nothing else said.”

Ronald admitted taking some of the store's receipts from a bank bag beside Chuck's body, but all the blood had finally unnerved him, and he only got a portion of the money, though it was a sufficient wad for him to show off like a game hunter's trophy the next day in school. Robbery might have been only part of the motive anyway. Ronald also said he was peeved at his bosses for criticizing him for being late. As a friend would later recall, “He didn't like being
dissed.
”

One of the interrogators couldn't help but say, “Hey, you must've really hated Chuck and Ada to do something like this. And Ronald had smiled, then said, “No, I really loved them.” Every time she reads that in the big blue Murder Book, it gives Peggy chills. Because she believes him.

Now, as the day of the trial approaches, Peggy has become increasingly obsessed with the case. The detectives have moved on to other investigations
and seldom return her phone calls; it is now her responsibility alone to pursue Ronald. She takes the files home with her every night, sitting in bed with them, playing tapes and reading transcripts, falling into a fitful sleep with the trappings of murder spread all around her like a scrapbook. She even keeps the numbing crime scene photos in her top desk drawer, pulling them out whenever the place gets to her, a grim salve fortifying her resolve to put the shooter away. Here is a kid who was never abused, never deprived, raised in a solid middle-class family with all the clothes, stereos, color TVs, and opportunities he could want—a kid who, unlike so many of the truly pitiful children Peggy prosecutes daily, has no excuse for his conduct. Ronald's parents say there is a simple explanation for this: He is innocent. But Peggy sees Ronald as a conscienceless emblem of an era in which unspeakable acts of violence are carried out every day by juvenile delinquents—a legally mandated but quaintly outdated term for the sort of mayhem Ronald and his peers commit.