Practice to Deceive

dropping from a height, and someone who has been unconscious and hoisted up over a beam of some sort by a killer standing behind him or her. The petechiae (small burst blood vessels) in the deceased’s eyes and face usually occur in both cases.
    For whatever reason, Brenda was gone.

C HAPTER T HIRTY-TWO
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    T HE FALL OF 2011 was not the happiest time of Greg Banks’s career. One of his prime suspects was flying—somewhere—around America, the second was locked in the Island County Jail, unable to make bail, and the victim’s widow—a woman who rumor said was part of a murder plot—had yet to be charged with anything.
    Greg Banks grew up in upstate New York and Connecticut, and graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in engineering in 1985. At the time, there were few engineering jobs in that area. Banks had a brother living in Portland, Oregon, who encouraged him to come west and consider moving there.
    In many ways the Northwest and New England are vastly different, but Banks liked the lifestyle he found in Oregon and Washington—ocean beaches, mountains, and skiing. The Pacific Ocean was an easy drive from the cities on the west side of the Cascades, and Banks and his wife appreciated the casual friendliness of the people they met.
    He ended up being hired by the Boeing Company as an engineer, and later took a job with a software company. By 1990, Greg Banks realized that his career as an engineer wasn’t where he was meant to be, and he entered law school, graduating with a law degree in 1993.
    Banks worked as a deputy prosecutor at the King County Prosecutor’s Office in Seattle, and then in Island County. And he knew that the law was where he fit in.
    Banks is a brilliant attorney, much respected in Island County and among other prosecutors in Washington State. He is a kind man who thinks always of the victims and the survivors of crime. He understands the pain that families who have lost loved ones to murder feel, and he often consults with them before he makes major decisions on how to prosecute defendants. If and when he feels that accepting a plea bargain rather than going to trial is the wiser choice, he will consult not only with the detectives on the case, but with the victims’ survivors to assess how they feel before he makes the final decision.
    Either way, Banks goes with what he thinks is right and that justice will be done. In the death of Russ Douglas, Greg Banks had worked with the investigators throughout the probe. He knew every twist and turn of the frustrating case.
    Banks’s family grew to include three children ranging in age from late teens to midtwenties. While they were growing up, he coached a lot of soccer. Like Detective Mark Plumberg, with whom he has worked so many years on the Russel Douglas case, Greg Banks is an avid vegetable gardener, a pastime that many islanders share. And he is also an athlete who runs, swims, and bikes.
    Banks has had so many challenging and tense cases during his tenure in office that he needs the healthy pursuits he practices.
    There is the case of a young man who killed both his grandfathers. He left the first crime scene and drove to the second house where he repeated his killing spree.
    In 1997, Jack Pearson, sixty-seven, lived with a woman friend, Linda Miley, fifty-eight, after he had invited her to move into his home. It seemed to work out well for about six years. But when he suddenly kicked her out, leaving her a note, “Don’t drag your feet . . . just get out of here!” she was enraged.
    Miley did not leave quietly. Instead, she bludgeoned Pearson in the head and then shot him five times in the chest. She ran to their neighbors and told them that a burglar had broken in and killed Jack. Later, she claimed that Pearson had raped her and she had no choice but to fight back in her own defense.
    In her 2008 trial, Linda Miley’s attorney argued that she suffered from a dissociative mental disorder that prevented her from having the capacity to plan and carry out a premeditated murder.
    She made a lengthy statement claiming that she had been tricked by an investigator to admit things that weren’t true while she was under the influence of her medication. She insisted that evidence had been lost that would have made the jury come back with an innocent verdict.
    Found guilty of second-degree murder, Linda Miley faced a sentence of from fifteen years and three months to twenty-three years and four months. Greg Banks