She said she drove home from the funeral and sat in her car in her own driveway for an hour.
She said she called the Mercer County Public Defender’s Office the next morning and they transferred her three times and the last person gave her the number for the Second Look Project.
Noelle Whitaker took that call. She told me later that Dana’s first words were, “I don’t know if there’s a name for what I need to do.”
Noelle spent five months corroborating it before anyone told me a thing. You can’t just walk in with a recantation. Recantations are the weakest evidence in the world, legally speaking, because everybody knows a scared witness can be bought or pressured in both directions.
What made it stick was the rest of it.
Dana knew where the tire iron went. A culvert off Beacon Road, nine-tenths of a mile from the Sunoco, a detail that never appeared in any file because no weapon was ever recovered. The county pulled it in April. It was rusted into something barely recognizable as a tool, and no, there was nothing testable left on it after twenty-two years in standing water.
