Gisela Alvarez came to the motel two days after I got out. She sat in the one chair and I sat on the bed and she cried for about ten minutes before she could speak, and the first thing she said was that she was sorry for how she had looked at me, every day, for forty-one days of trial, in 2003.
The woman whose husband was murdered apologized to me.
I told her she had nothing to be sorry for. She said she did. We both sat with that.
Before she left she said that for twenty-three years she believed Tommy’s killer was in prison, and that it was the only thing that let her sleep, and that now she had to start over at sixty-one with a man who had been dead a year before anyone ever caught up to him.
So Earl Rooker got away with it. That’s the part people don’t like, and I understand, but that’s how it ended. He died in a bed with his daughter holding his hand.
