"Motion for Discovery" by Erin McReynolds

Motion for discovery Winner: Editor’s Choice Award

Erin McReynolds 1. Request for admission: One home movie, 34 mins., dated 07/04/2004.

2. Original recording is in possession of Victim’s daughter, Erin McReynolds.

3. Footage is of Defendant (age 47) and Victim (age 49), as well as Victim’s mother (age 68), father (age 69), and brother (age 42), also McReynolds (age 27) and her boyfriend, S (age 26).

Summary: Footage is taken on a handheld camcorder. The picture shakes somewhat. Footage begins outside on a partly shaded patio. Light is good, a sunny day in the back yard of Victim’s parents’ house in Laguna Hills, California.

Brother of Victim—McReynolds’s uncle—is telling a humorous story. Ambient noises: wind chimes, caged parakeets chirping in neighbor’s backyard. At times parakeets render conversation barely audible.

Camera is on McReynolds’s boyfriend, S. (sideburns, striped button-down shirt), then on Victim’s brother (light blue Polo shirt, Ray-Bans) as he describes a pet monkey they had when he and the Victim were children. McReynolds, holding the camera, is heard asking her uncle questions and laughing. Camera pans to smoking

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propane grill beset with patties. McReynolds sings “burgers on the grill” to the tune of “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors.

A different conversation can be heard, in the house, through the screen door ten feet away. According to McReynolds, these are the voices of her mother (Victim), grandparents (Victim’s mother and father), and the Defendant, although they do not appear on camera. It is a lively conversation with laughter. At several points, Defendant’s voice can be heard (high, but louder than the women’s voices). Prosecution has attempted to isolate the indoor conversation to determine content, but words are unintelligible due to McReynolds joking, near the camcorder microphone, about the dangers of owning a monkey.

Focus is now on Victim’s dog, a brown, medium-sized terrier mix. Much of the footage follows the dog around the back yard as it sniffs the grill, chews grass, and lays itself down in front of the door to the kitchen. Camera remains on dog as Victim’s father slides screen door open, admonishes dog, and carries a plate of sausages to the grill.

Footage cuts ahead, approx. 10-15 minutes. The entire family, except for Victim and Defendant, are now at the patio table: Victim’s mother, father, brother, and McReynolds and her boyfriend, S. They discuss the rancid odor of goose farms. Victim’s brother tells a joke about a chicken and an egg in bed together.

Victim and Defendant remain in the kitchen, alone together.

[McReynolds notes that for the Victim to remain indoors, especially while the rest of the party was outside, was abnormal and further evidence of Defendant’s increasing control. In photographs, Victim is often tilting her tanned face toward the sun. McReynolds points out that Victim was a Leo.] Group at patio table appears to have just finished eating and are telling more jokes. McReynolds can be heard informing group, “The first real joke I ever heard was in this back yard, when I was a kid.” Addressing Victim’s brother: “From you, I think.”

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Scene cuts to McReynolds as someone else holds the camera.

McReynolds (white tank top and cat-eye sunglasses; blonde, short hair) tells a long-winded and clumsily animated rendition of the joke she thinks her uncle told her when she was a kid: A highway patrolman is investigating a car crash in which a family has died. On the hood of the wrecked vehicle sits a monkey, who gestures to the officer and then to himself. “You can understand what I’m saying?” asks the officer.

The monkey nods his head up and down.

“Well, did you see the crash?”

Yes, nods the monkey.

“What happened?”

The monkey pretends to have a can in his hand and tilts it to his mouth.

“The father was drinking?” asks the officer.

The monkey nods.

“What was the mother doing?”

The monkey puts a hand on his hip and wags his finger.

“She was nagging him?”

The monkey nods.

“I see. And what about the kids?”

The monkey starts hooting and screaming, flapping his hands.

“They were fighting?” asks the officer.

The monkey nods.

“Well I think I have a pretty good idea how this crash happened, then. Thank you.”

The officer turns to go, then says, “Oh, just one thing: What were you doing during all this?”

The monkey curls his hands around an imaginary steering wheel and grins.

Victim’s mother (white hair, glasses) laughs softly into her napkin. Victim’s brother can be heard off-camera expressing doubt

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that he taught his niece that joke, that it must have been someone else. McReynolds posits it may have been her mother, but as she is still sitting inside with Defendant, she cannot ask.

From the kitchen, Defendant’s voice has grown sharp and loud in a way that suggests a quarrel, but laughter from Victim suggests Defendant may have been telling a joke or a humorous story of his own.

Footage cuts ahead. Still in back yard, an unknown amount of time has passed. Camera, in possession of McReynolds again, focuses on Defendant as he sits listening to Victim’s father talk.

This is the first appearance of Defendant on camera. He has salt and pepper hair, thin limbs and a round belly in a Hawaiian-print shirt and long shorts. Note that Victim’s father has exact same build as Defendant, and is attired the same, but is bald.

The others appear to have gone back inside. Victim’s father is telling Defendant about a recent fender bender in a parking lot. It wasn’t his fault, he says. The woman he hit denied culpability, but the police took one look and agreed with him. Before the story is done, Defendant crumples his can of beer, stands as if to go into the kitchen, but then puts his hand in his pocket and lets the older man finish. He asks a rhetorical question, nothing of consequence, just something meant to convey participation.

Briefly, Victim’s voice is heard from the kitchen, at a moment when the other voices have gone quiet. A sliver of a moment. Over before you know it is happening.

Camera travels indoors to the kitchen. Footage blurs and bounces. We see the harvest-gold linoleum, the chests and shoulders of the people in the room, as if camera was thought to be turned off, but is still on.

Victim is heard off camera asking McReynolds what she thought of upstate New York when she and S. visited his hometown in winter. McReynolds responds that it was “just a bunch of

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twigs.” There is a strained quality to McReynolds’s voice, which she explains as being due to the fact that she was frustrated with Victim for bringing Defendant to the gathering after Victim had just confided, the week before, that Defendant had been abusive and threatening. At that time, McReynolds planned with Victim a way to escape Defendant by leaving the state [See D-138: Interview with McReynolds at SC police station 07/13/2004.]

Defendant is sitting at kitchen table, near Victim. He addresses McReynolds directly for the first time. He says that he was asking S. what he’d be doing for Fourth of July if he were back home in upstate New York. McReynolds does not respond. [McReynolds notes that this amiable sort of conversation was the norm between them; that Defendant always seemed friendly and eager to get along with Victim’s family. McReynolds indicates that Victim’s mother and father were also familiar with Defendant’s threats against Victim. Yet here they all are, acting as if everything is just hunky dory.[REDACTED]] Camera pans over Victim for six seconds. Fast, incidental. This is the only video footage of the Victim from this day.

When rewound and paused: Victim appears serene, detached, wearing a patterned sleeveless blouse and knee-length shorts, sunglasses perched on top of her head. Victim does not acknowledge camera or McReynolds. Victim looks straight ahead through the sliding glass door to the patio.

As camera moves away, Victim says, “Erin, you got grass all over your back.” The proximity of Victim’s voice suggests that she has stood up and walked to her daughter’s side. She asks, “Do you want to go out?” as if to accompany her and brush off her shirt.

[McReynolds now thinks Victim may have been looking for an opportunity to talk in private. At some point in the day’s events, McReynolds took Victim aside and asked her why she had brought Defendant and if she was still moving ahead with the escape

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plan. Victim affirmed she was, and that Defendant was being “sweet” and she was “trying to keep the peace.” [See: Summary of Prosecution Witness Testimony.]

Camera moves with McReynolds outside and we hear S. commenting on the amount of grass on McReynolds’s back. It is assumed that he intervened and is the one brushing McReynolds’s shirt. From somewhere behind McReynolds, we hear Victim say, incredulously, that she needs a nap before they go look at the fireworks. Defendant’s laugh is loud.

This concludes footage of the last time Victim was seen alive by the family.

Defendant has admitted to stabbing Victim to death on Saturday, 07/10/2004, and has entered a plea of Not Guilty to the charge of murder in the first degree for reasons of self-defense.

Prosecution requests permission to enter videotape into Discovery. What it intends to establish, in terms of this case, is not yet decided. Footage of Victim may be deemed insufficient.

Correction: Footage of Victim is, and will always be, insufficient.

We move that McReynolds rewind the tape and let her mother’s hands brush the grass off her back. We move to rewind all the tapes, everywhere, to the shrouded and mundane moment our mothers touched us for the last time.

NOTE: Following will not be entered into Discovery and is included only to account for entirety of videotape content: Footage cuts to the following Saturday, 07/10/2004.

McReynolds and her boyfriend S. are at a fairground in the evening, midway through a chairlift-style ride. Lens points toward the asphalt and tops of the food tents, some thirty feet below, then swings up, over the rooftops of houses. The stillelectrified blue of the sky indicates time is about 7:30–8:00 p.m.

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Beyond the blackening hills to the south, the Victim is dying, or is about to die, or has already died.

McReynolds tries to calm S., who is fearful about the height.

She makes jokes, but the camera she holds is shaking. She talks about trying to enjoy the moment, about making the most of it, but the talk is a nervous jabber. “I have a job to do,” she says. “I have to film. I must be brave. Just think how much stronger and better we’re becoming. Overcoming our fear! And it will all be caught on camera.” Suddenly she feels the cold dread of something slipping away. Is it her sandal, she asks. Oh please hurry up and end, she begs. The camera pans to the crowd below and she takes a sharp breath. We hear: Okay, we’re okay, we’re okay, we’re okay.