Unintended Consequences (Innocent Prisoners Project Book 1)

Nineteen years ago, Indiana police found the body of a young girl, burned beyond recognition and buried in the woods. They arrested George Calhoun for murdering his daughter, and his wife testified against him at the trial. George maintains he didn’t do it. That the body isn’t his little Angelina. But that’s all he’s ever said—no other defense, no other explanation. The jury convicted him. Now his appeals have been exhausted, and his execution is just six weeks away.

Dani Trumball, an attorney for the Help Innocent Prisoners Project, wants to believe him. After all, there was no forensic evidence to prove that the body in the woods was George’s daughter. But if the girl isn’t Angelina, then who is it? And what happened to the Calhouns’ missing daughter? Despite the odds, the questions push Dani to take the case.

For nineteen years, George Calhoun has stayed silent. But he’s ready to talk, and if the story he tells Dani is true, it changes everything.

Revised edition: This edition of Unintended Consequences includes editorial revisions.

Unintended Consequences Interview

Excerpt

© 2012 Marti Green. All rights reserved. Excerpted from Unintended Consequences, Yankee Clipper Press. Used with permission.

Forty-Two Days

I didn’t kill my little girl. The body in the woods—that wasn’t my daughter. The words on the page kept ringing in Dani Trumball’s ears. I loved my little girl and only wanted to help her.

Most of the letters on her desk Dani went through quickly, spotting the scams easily enough and tossing them aside for a quick response from her secretary. “Dear (fill in the blank): We regret that the Help Innocent Prisoners Project is unable to assist you at this time.”  Others rang true and might warrant some added sentences. “While we appreciate your circumstances, the many requests for our limited services mean we can only accept a few cases.  We wish you the best of luck in finding someone else to help you.” Only a few, a very few, were taken on.

This letter—it stayed with her. I sure hope you can help me because they are going to kill me soon, and maybe I deserve to die, but it’s not because I killed my little girl. Six weeks until his execution. “Impossible,” she kept muttering to herself, shaking her head. She pushed her hair away from her face and wiped her forehead with a tissue. It was warm for early April, too early for the air-conditioning in the office to be turned on, and she felt limp from the heat. She unbuttoned an extra button on her blouse and then reread George Calhoun’s letter. I kept telling them she wasn’t my daughter, but they didn’t believe me. I don’t know why Sallie—that’s my wife—said she was. She must have gone crazy, from worry about Angelina. That’s our daughter’s name. We named her that because she was our little angel.

The Help Innocent Prisoners Project—HIPP—operated out of a converted warehouse on 14th Street in the East Village. It received letters from inmates throughout the country, and each attorney reviewed some of them. Dani had been going through a stack of folders, each containing an inmate’s plea for help, when she came across the letter from Calhoun. She’d already scribbled, “Sorry, no,” across the top, put it in her out box, and moved on to other letters. For the third time, she rummaged through her pile of replies and pulled his letter out. After staring at Calhoun’s words once more, she started to put it back yet again but wavered. Finally, she stood up and strode out of the office, glancing up at the framed embroidery over the door on her way out. It read, “Everyone on death row claims they are innocent. Once in a while they are.” Her mother had sewn it for her after she began working at HIPP. Over time, Dani had witnessed the truth of the saying. The difficulty was in figuring out which ones really were innocent. Sometimes, when she felt most overwhelmed, she wished for a magic ball—perhaps in the form of DNA evidence—that could provide the answer. Without it, the truth was often elusive.