Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

around him. There was a lot of blood pouring out from behind his left ear. I think he died right away.”
    Larry Light said that Doris Mae had just finished cleaning up the blood on the bed and the floor when Pete Getchell dropped in unexpectedly. The two of them had huddled in the kitchen anxiously as they listened to Pete trying to talk to George. They were “scared to death” that he would figure out George wasn’t taking a nap at all, but was lying there dead. But Pete never caught on. He kept having a conversation with a dead man.
    The next day, after the children had gone off to school, Larry had wrestled the now board-stiff corpse of his brother out to its shallow grave. Doris’s only part in the impromptu burial was to hold the back door open for him.
    In the days that followed, they had both turned to liquor to sublimate the horror of what had happened. That hadn’t been a good idea at all because that was when Larry had gotten so drunk that he got involved in the tavern brouhaha. “And I had to go to jail for a month—and leave Doris Mae out there alone, except for George in the ground.”
    One can only imagine what that month was like for Doris Mae, isolated in the farmhouse, alone at night when the March storms flailed at the windows and the wind howled in the treetops, all the time knowing that her husband’s body lay buried a few feet from her back door.
    On February 25, 1971, Doris had a terrible scare when police officers came to her door. But they had only wanted her because she’d failed to answer a traffic citation. She was mugged and printed but released. No one said anything about her husband, and she didn’t volunteer anything.
    Jim Byrnes figured that Doris Light had probably been looking over her shoulder for three years too, waiting for the past to catch up with her. Larry said he didn’t know where she was.
    “She left me,” he said.
    With the terrible secret they shared, it just hadn’t worked out between them as far as romance went. “I don’t know where she is now.”
    Byrnes finally located Doris Mae Light in Chester, Illinois. When he knocked on the front door of the last address he’d found for her, he recognized her at once from her traffic violation mug shot. She was still pretty and very petite. But she gasped when he identified himself and she ran like a deer across the plowed field behind her house. She hid briefly at a small business where a friend worked, but then she agreed to talk with Byrnes.
    First reading her her Miranda rights, the Oregon detective asked her about the murder.
    “Who did I kill?” she asked faintly.
    “Your husband, George, is dead.”
    “George isn’t dead.” She shook her head emphatically.
    “We’ve recovered his body in Oregon.”
    “George went to the store,” she answered in a curious non sequitur. “George was mean most of the time, but good sometimes. Larry said he wanted George dead, that he has hated him all his life.”
    “Did Larry kill George?”
    Doris Mae didn’t answer at first. Jim Byrnes sensed that she had buried the reality of George’s murder so deeply in her subconscious mind that she was truly having trouble accessing it.
    After a long silence, she answered almost mechanically. She remembered living in Oregon. George had been drunk one day and sent her to the store for cigarettes, but she had run out of gas on the way home. When she finally got home, she recalled that “George was gone.”
    It was as if she’d washed the whole thing away, unable to bear the truth, not an altogether surprising reaction.
    Byrnes reminded her that the old Nash Rambler they’d been driving was still at the house. He asked her how George could have left; it was too far to walk anywhere.
    She didn’t have an explanation for that, but even so, Doris Mae continued to insist that she believed George had merely left her. “When he didn’t come back that night,” she said, “Larry wanted to sleep with me—but I wouldn’t. My husband left me, but I was still married.”
    Later, Doris said that they had finally had a sexual relationship. She admitted to Byrnes only that she’d always “thought” Larry had killed her husband but that she wasn’t sure.
    Maybe she was telling the truth—or maybe she was saying what she had to believe now or she would go crazy.
     
    Back in Oregon, Pete Getchell, whose mind had been completely boggled at the thought that his last view of George Light was of a dead man, continued to recall