In custody, their story fell apart the way structures fall apart when the central support is removed. They had initially hired the same attorney, who dropped them both within a week because their defenses were going to contradict each other. Leo’s angle was that his mother had pressured him. Freya’s angle was that she had no idea what he was doing. Both of those stories cannot simultaneously be true, and an attorney cannot argue both in the same courtroom. Now they each needed separate lawyers, and all of their assets had been frozen.
Leo was denied bail. The forged insurance policy, the secret apartment, the signed-out solvents, taken together they established premeditation and flight risk in terms that no argument could soften. He sat in the Kenton County detention center wearing orange instead of the chili cookoff shirt. Freya could not post her five-hundred-thousand-dollar bail. She sat in a holding facility twelve minutes from her son, and they could not contact each other.
The full reinvestigation into Raymond Gutierrez’s 2011 death was authorized. A forensic toxicologist was reviewing the original medical records. The district attorney’s office had filed for potential exhumation.
With the poisoning stopped, my body began the slow work of recovery.
The neurologist explained it honestly. Peripheral nerves regenerate at approximately an inch per month. Some of the damage from five months of methylene chloride exposure might be permanent. I might always have some numbness in my feet. I told her I could live with that. Living was, after all, more than Leo had planned for me.
The first two weeks were the hardest emotionally, because lying in a hospital bed processing the fact that your husband had been trying to kill you with your own bedtime tea is not something there are adequate cultural scripts for. There is no greeting card for it. But my body was healing. Sensation returned to my upper legs first, that warm prickling feeling of blood returning to something that had been asleep, then my knees, then my shins.
After three weeks I stood up in the hospital corridor and took four steps, Noel beside me holding my arm and crying the good kind of crying, the kind that happens when something you were afraid you had lost turns out to still be there. Four steps does not sound like much from the outside. From inside, when the last time you were on your feet someone was standing over you telling you to stop faking it, four steps is everything.
The legal proceedings moved with a speed that surprised me. Leo faced attempted first-degree murder, assault, insurance fraud, and forgery. His employer handed over complete records of every solvent sign-out for the past two years with the cooperative speed of a corporation that understands the alternative is being named in a poisoning case. Leo’s attorney attempted to negotiate a plea. The district attorney was not interested.
Freya was charged as accessory to attempted murder, with the 2011 investigation adding weight to the case against her that her refusal to cooperate with prosecutors did nothing to diminish. Text messages are patient witnesses. They do not revise their testimony under pressure.
The three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy was voided immediately. The forged signature was a separate felony. My divorce attorney filed for emergency dissolution and full asset seizure, and under Kentucky law, when a spouse commits a felony against you, the court’s division of marital assets does not proceed from a presumption of equality. The house, the savings, everything in the joint accounts, mine. The twelve hundred dollars taken for imaginary car repairs, mine. Total assets recovered came to roughly one hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars, including house equity.
I sold the house two months later. I did not want to live on a street where the concrete had been that hot, where fourteen people had stood in a backyard listening to classic rock while I lay outside unable to move.[]
