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“When were the police called?”
“Senator Armbruster called the sheriff’s office. When the officers got there…” She began to cry. Barrie didn’t probe. She gave her time to compose herself before starting again. “Senator Armbruster lied to them. He told them I’d killed my baby. He told them to arrest me. They took me downtown and started questioning me. They wanted me to sign a confession, saying I’d committed manslaughter. I refused. For a while.”
“And then, you did.”
“Yes, ma’am. Just so they’d leave me alone. My head was hurting so bad. I’d vomited a couple of times. I was bad off. So I signed a paper saying that I’d killed my baby. But I didn’t. David Merritt killed him, and he left thinking he had killed me.”
With Barrie offering very little guidance, Becky Sturgis told of the miscarriage of justice orchestrated by Senator Armbruster. He called in political favors. Within a matter of days, a judge sentenced her to life in prison. She was transferred from the county jail to the state prison, and there she had remained until two days ago, when Barrie learned of her existence from Charlene Walters. Attorney General Yancey had interceded with Mississippi authorities to have her brought to Washington.
Barrie asked, “Do you think Senator Armbruster believed David Merritt over you? In your opinion, did the senator honestly believe he was seeing justice served by putting you in prison?”
“I don’t know,” she replied honestly. “But I suspect he double-crossed me so David wouldn’t get into trouble.”
“You’re aware that David Merritt has believed you dead all these years?”
“I didn’t know that until yesterday. I guess the senator double-crossed him too.”
To protect her objectivity, Barrie refrained from stating the obvious: Senator Armbruster had kept Becky Sturgis in abeyance should he ever need to use her as leverage against his son-in-law. Barrie had discovered her before Armbruster became desperate enough to need her.
“You’ve been in prison all this time, Miss Sturgis?”
“Yes, ma’am. My parole’s been denied twice.”
“Why? According to your records, you’ve been an exemplary prisoner.”
“I don’t know why, ma’am. The board just rejects me.”
Barrie let the silence stretch out so that her audience could reach another obvious conclusion: Armbruster had seen to it that Becky Sturgis would never get paroled.
“A few years ago, you shared a cell with a woman named Charlene Walters. You told her your story.”
Becky Sturgis nodded. “It was after David became president. At first Charlene didn’t believe me, thought I was making it up. But when his baby died in the White House nursery, she began to think maybe I had told her the truth. Especially after she saw your series on SIDS. It got Charlene to thinking that maybe Robert Rushton Merritt was one of those babies who’d been murdered and it was made to look like SIDS.”
“Miss Sturgis, this is the most difficult question I’ll ask you tonight. I’m sure everyone wants to know why you didn’t come forward. All these years you’ve been in prison, why didn’t you bring it to someone’s attention that you’d been framed and then coerced into signing a false confession?”
She shrugged, as though fully accepting the inconsequentiality of her life. “Nobody gave it a second thought when I disappeared. Nobody ever came looking for me. I hadn’t lived in that town long. I guess folks figured I’d drifted out just like I’d drifted in. I don’t have a family. Who was I going to tell?”
“Didn’t you have a lawyer?”
“Yes, ma’am. They appointed me one that night in the sheriff’s office, but he kept telling me that I’d be better off signing a confession. He said they might upgrade the charge to murder if I didn’t confess to manslaughter. In a murder trial, he said, I might lose and get the death penalty.
“And besides, I was sick for a long time. I had headaches that would put me in the prison infirmary for days at a time. Sometimes I had blackouts and couldn’t remember sections of time. It was a couple years before I felt like my head was on straight.
“That’s when I started writing letters to the lawyer, but he only answered a few of them. Then he stopped writing back altogether. I tried reaching him by phone, but I was always told he wasn’t there and he never returned my calls. One day this other lawyer—I’ve got his name written down somewhere—came to the prison to see me. He said my lawyer had died and that I wasn’t to bug them no more. If I did, there’d be hell to pay from Armbruster, he said. By that time, David was a congressman. I didn’t see the point in carrying on about it. Who would believe me over David Merritt and Clete Armbruster?”
“That’s a good question, Miss Sturgis. Why should we believe you? What proof do you have that David Merritt killed your baby, beat you, and left you for dead?”
“None. But I can prove that he was my baby’s daddy,” she said proudly. “The day my baby was killed, I clipped a curl from his hair and trimmed his fingernails. I’ve kept them all these years in a little papier-mâché box. Mr. Yancey has them now. He said they can run tests on them that’ll prove whether or not David’s the daddy. I didn’t want to let ’em go, ’cause that’s all I have of my baby. But Mr. Yancey promised to give them back soon as the lab is finished with them. People might think I’m lying, but my baby will tell them the truth.”
Barrie couldn’t think of a more fitting note on which to end the interview. “Thank you, Miss Sturgis.”
She turned and faced the studio camera as it rolled in for a close-up. “According to Attorney General Yancey, preliminary DNA testing of the hair and fingernail parings has indicated that David Merritt fathered Becky Sturgis’s son. This should go a long way toward getting her arrest and confession reviewed. Officials indicate that she’ll be granted a long overdue trial. It’s as yet undetermined whether David Merritt will be prosecuted for murder, although he’s already been charged with obstruction of justice, along with Senator Armbruster.
“Senator Armbruster has been placed under house arrest. He officially resigned his Senate seat this afternoon. President Pietsch was sworn into office after Congress impeached David Merritt and demanded his resignation.
“The former president is also under arrest inside Blair House, where he will remain until Attorney General Yancey has had an opportunity to organize two full-scale investigations, one involving the crimes in Mississippi, the other the death of Robert Rushton Merritt.
“It’s too early to speculate what the final outcome of this incredible story will be. Over the course of our nation’s history, other presidents have weathered scandals, but there has been none to rival this.
