faces and speculations and shifted time lines and at the heart of it, a brother s regret that he hadn t paid more attention the last weekend to the incessant calls of that fraternity boy. i had my chance that weekend when that kid called that many times. i felt like i should have protected her. i wish i had that chance again. you never get those chances again, do you? nope, you don t. you just get a lifetime to think about them. every time you talk about it, your eyes go red and they start to water. cause i just remember how alive she was that weekend. i just remember how excited she was that weekend, and i just remember my little sister, and i miss her, i miss her. tom rattled off the script and threw it into a drawer. it didn t make him feel better, of course.
about his moving date from michigan. pat was very suspicious of that fudging. also, there was the way tom talked about the weather on the day of the murder. if i remember, this was almost the identical weather that it was. as if he was actually right there when it happened. he does not use the wording that this was the weather in charlotte or this was the weather in michigan or that he was told this was the weather like that day. and remember that watch police found in jennifer s hand after the fire and the bracelet and ring tom said his father found at the grave? tom suggested those were left by his suspect, chris woodson. but pat came to a different conclusion. it s your suspicion tom is my suspicion is that it s connected, that this staged event at the murder scene is the ring is possibly staged. did you ever ask tom about that? no. and then there was pat s suspicion that tom knew too much about the murder if he wasn t around to witness it. they took all the sw
done to this person? because i got to live with myself every day. and then a decision that would come back to haunt him. tom wrote himself into his screenplay. since he was writing fiction, he says, he wanted to make a change. he didn t want it to seem like his beloved sister had a steady stream of men visiting her trailer, so he put himself in the place of scott snowden, that other boyfriend chris encountered just before jennifer s murder. this is someone i protect in my life. i made her pure for my family. i made her pure for my parents. i made her pure because she was a good person. of course, tom wasn t really here at the trailer park any more than he knew for certain that chris was really here. this was a fictional story based on real events, yes, but spun together with altered names and faces and speculations and shifted time lines and at the heart of it, a brother s regret that he hadn t paid more attention the last weekend to
and their suspicions grew. one of the weirdest things happened the day after the incident in the trailer park. this boy, chris, and one of his fraternity brothers came over to the morgan house. and out of the blue, unsolicited offered a bizarre theory as to how jennifer may have been killed before the fire got to her. that what probably happened was a lamp fell over and probably ignited the carpet, the chemicals in the carpets made these fumes, and these fumes probably killed jennifer before the fire ever got to her. the thing that made the story suspicious, said the morgans, was that when chris told it just one day after jennifer s death, no one knew she was dead before the fire. we all looked at each other like how odd is that? this person who was so in love with her would come, and instead of shedding one tear or even saying i m so sorry, he sat there with a fraternity brother and described what probably
happened that day. in fact, kenny boone didn t tell them somebody killed jennifer and tried to hide the crime with a fire until the day after chris offered his explanation. later that same week, the morgans saw chris again at the funeral. did you watch him? chris reaction was very stoic, really expressionless and as i would speak to my relatives, he would walk over to where we were all standing and get close to where we were almost trying to overhear conversation. that struck me immediately. what did it seem like he was doing? wanted to know if anybody thought he did it. does anybody suspect me? is anybody saying anything? i had gone to the caretaker, and i had said, has anyone come and inquired about jennifer s grave, and he described chris.