The state of Alabama charged a mother with capital murder of her child. Her family, her church, and her attorney believed she was innocent. So did I.
By the time I met Amanda House (all names have been changed), she was eight years into her awful sojourn through the Alabama legal system, with little hope left. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m dreaming. I’ll wake up soon,’” she said. Tears filled her eyes. “Please help me.”
I wasn’t sure anyone could help her. It was nearly too late.
I reached over and grasped her manacled hand. “Tell me your story,” I said.
The Nightmare Begins
On the night of September 23, 2003, Amanda picked up her daughter Carrie from day care. The usually cheery toddler was cranky and listless. The daycare owner was out of town and had left the nursery in the hands of her daughter and a friend, both teenagers. Amanda asked them if Carrie had napped that day.
“She played and tried to walk a little,” one said. “Then she had a long nap.” The other girl said Carrie had fallen while trying to walk. Amanda thought that was odd: at sixteen months, the child wasn’t walking yet, and was hesitant to try. A pediatrician had urged her to give Carrie a little more time to catch up to her peers before testing for developmental problems.
I made a note to get Carrie’s pediatric records.
“Carrie was clumsy and chubby, heavy for her age,” Amanda said. “She had no muscle tone, and she couldn’t balance herself.” Her little body was often a map of bruises from her collisions with walls, furniture, and the more rambunctious toddlers at daycare. Weeks earlier, Amanda and the owner had moved Carrie back to the baby room, for her safety.
Amanda suspected the teens in charge that day had put Carrie in with the toddlers, but she was too tired to press the issue.
Carrie’s biological mother had surrendered custody earlier that year. Bedridden with hydrocephalus and spina bifida, she could not lift or bathe the baby and was unable to care for her. Carrie entered the foster care system. Her caregivers were neighbors of Amanda and her husband Scott, both of whom instantly fell in love with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby girl.
“She was a little doll, a gift from God,” Amanda said. She and Scott had been trying for a year to have a baby. Ironically, Amanda learned she was eight weeks pregnant the day they adopted Carrie, on May 12, 2003, nine days shy of her first birthday.
After leaving the nursery, Carrie drove to Scott’s parents’ home to pick up her five-year old son, John, who stayed there each day after kindergarten. Scott’s mother and sister commented on Carrie’s low energy. She looked tired and withdrawn. Her forehead was warm. She didn’t even want a cookie. They figured the little girl was cutting a tooth.
Amanda brought the children home and microwaved plates of lasagna. Carrie was lethargic and not interested in eating, another indication something wasn’t right. “She always cleaned her plate,” Amanda said. She gave her daughter a dose of children’s Tylenol and bathed Carrie, then put her down in her crib. It was nearly 7 pm.
At around 8, Amanda put John to bed in the room he shared with Carrie. A little while later, she checked on Carrie again. “She and I had a game we’d play. I’d say to her, ‘Say ma-ma,’ and she’d always respond,” said Amanda. “But that night, she didn’t respond to me at all. It was dark in the room, so I took her to the bathroom. I saw she had pink, frothy foam coming out of her mouth. She was breathing, but she didn’t respond to my voice or my touch.
“I took a washrag and kept talking to her as I cleaned her mouth. There was some of this foam on her tee shirt. I took off the shirt and Scott walked in. He saw that she was breathing, but non-responsive. He took Carrie to the kitchen and flipped the light on. Scott took her to the couch, and I called 9-1-1.”
What Amanda didn’t know at the time was that the first responders immediately suspected her of harming the child.
Within minutes, the house was full of firefighters and paramedics. Initially there were no police officers present, but Amanda recalled a woman asking to see the baby’s crib. The responders left and took Carrie with them. “No one would talk to me or let me touch her,” Amanda said. “The paramedics put Carrie on a gurney and took her away and wouldn’t tell us anything.” What Amanda didn’t know at the time was that the first responders immediately suspected her of harming the child.
Amanda and Scott followed the ambulance to the ER. After an initial examination, Carrie was airlifted to Children’s Hospital (now Children’s of Alabama) with a grim diagnosis: severe head trauma.
Carrie was placed on life support while doctors ran tests. Six days later, on September 29, 2003, specialists said that the brain injury she suffered was so profound she would never regain consciousness. There was no brain activity. The little girl with golden blond curls was removed from life support and pronounced dead.
She was 16 months old.
The State Steps In
The official cause of death was blunt force trauma to her head. An autopsy was done the next day, along with numerous tests, including drug and toxicology panels, before her body was released to a funeral home.
Several months later, Amanda gave birth to a baby girl, who did much to soothe their broken hearts. But the question of how Carrie had been fatally injured plagued everyone, and especially tortured Amanda. Carrie had fallen many times, and a month before her death she’d cracked her head so hard on the coffee table at Scott’s parents’ home, that everyone who heard the sound felt sickened. But the little girl caught her breath and kept playing.
Soon after Carrie died, social workers took both of Amanda’s children into protective custody and briefly placed them into foster homes. Eventually the children were placed with Amanda’s parents, and later they were returned to Scott.
The lab tests on Carrie’s body didn’t come back until December 22, 2004, more than fifteen months after her death. In January, Amanda was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. The judge set a cash bond of $100,000, which was raised within 24 hours by members of their church. She was bonded, released, and allowed to remain at home with her husband and children until her next court appearance. The families pooled their funds and refinanced their homes to pay an additional $100,000 to hire a criminal attorney, Rich McClellen, to defend Amanda.
On March 29, 2004, Amanda appeared in court to be arraigned on murder charges. She planned to enter a not guilty plea. But prosecutors ambushed her: Amanda was charged with capital murder instead of first-degree murder, because the victim was under 12 years of age. Amanda’s bond was revoked, and she was taken to the Jefferson County Jail, where she would remain for a very long time, essentially forgotten.
The Case
As this was a capital case, the American Bar Association required McClellen to bring in a second lawyer. He tapped Jim Thompson, who specialized in real estate transactions, wills, and divorces. Jim had never worked on a criminal case.
Nearly 14 months later, on May 17th, 2005, Amanda was formally arraigned on the capital murder charges. She pled not guilty and was returned to jail, where she waited for another six years before a trial date was set for October 24, 2011.
Subpoenas were issued for the prosecution witnesses shortly before the trial. The defense now knew exactly who would be testifying against Amanda. In a pro forma move, the judge authorized funds to hire a mitigation specialist.
This should have occurred when Amanda was charged with capital murder way back in 2005.
McClellen had already spent the $100,000 retainer — on what, no one knew. The family was out of money, so Amanda and her attorneys petitioned for indigent defense status, meaning the State of Alabama would pay her legal fees — at a much lower hourly rate than either McClellen or Thompson routinely charged their clients.
Baby Carrie had been dead for eight years. Amanda’s daughter and son had lived for eight years without their mother, while she sat in jail awaiting trial. Scott and the extended family remained steadfast in their support for Amanda.
Taking the Case
One day in late summer of 2011, Jim Thompson called me. I was on a Cancun beach with a novel, drinking my second margarita. He’d been referred to me by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. I heard him out, then explained that my husband’s job was relocating him to Utah, and I wasn’t long for Alabama. I had thirteen open cases and would commute back monthly to work those cases, an expensive and exhausting commitment. I could not, in good conscience, take on another client.
Jim asked if I could recommend another mitigation specialist. I knew several, but none did pre-trial work in Alabama, simply because they could not afford to. The state indigent defense fund didn’t pay until cases were resolved, so the legal team might wait years to be paid and reimbursed for expenses.
Maybe it was the tequila, or Jim’s skills of persuasion, but he wore down my resolve. I agreed to come to Gadsden the following week to meet with him, Rich McClellen, and Amanda.
On September 22, 2011, eight years to the day after Carrie was fatally injured, I drove to Jim’s office in Baker County. I was determined not to sign on as an investigator. But the timeline of the case puzzled me. If prosecutors had enough evidence to seek a death sentence, why had they waited so long to bring the case to trial?
The timeline of the case puzzled me. If prosecutors had enough evidence to seek a death sentence, why had they waited so long to bring the case to trial?
Jim and I sat at a conference table loaded with files, reports, police and witness statements, and stacks of legal pads scrawled with the strategy notes he’d made over the years. I was impressed by his dedication to freeing Amanda, whom he believed was innocent. McClellen called to say he was running late, so Jim and I went on to the Baker County Courthouse.
Two guards escorted Amanda to a table at the back of an empty courtroom. She was handcuffed, her ankles bound by a chain and lock. At my instruction, the cuffs were unlocked and her wrists reattached in front of her, so she could sign release forms. At 36, she was still an attractive woman. But her light brown hair was long and unkempt. Her skin was blotchy from terrible nutrition and hygiene. Her jumpsuit was dingy and wrinkled. A spark of anger surrounded her, like an aura. She stood tall, fists clenched, shoulders squared, daring someone to confront her.
Once the guards retreated, Amanda gave me a glorious smile. “Thank you for coming to see me,” she said. She told me the story of Carrie’s brief life, and then we launched into the mitigation questions.
Amanda was unlike my other clients. Most of them grew up in chaotic family environments, amid substance abuse, poverty, trauma, violence, severe and often untreated mental health disorders. Amanda, in contrast, had a loving childhood. She was close to her parents, and her sister was her best friend. She’d attended a private Christian academy from kindergarten through graduation. The only trouble she’d gotten into in school was once for chewing gum and twice for talking and laughing in class. Amanda’s mother was a volunteer at the school. Amanda’s father was an auto mechanic. She had no criminal history.
Midway through our meeting, Amanda asked the guard, who was playing on his phone in the judge’s chair, if he would please take her to a women’s restroom. “If I have to take you, I’m not bringing you back here,” he yelled across the courtroom. “Meeting’s over.”
“Wait a minute,” I yelled, looking at my watch. “We’re scheduled for three hours, and we have at least 90 minutes left.”
He explained that if Amanda went to the bathroom, he’d have to call for a second guard to escort her back to the jail. Then he had to find a female officer to take her into a restroom. “She’ll need to be searched for contraband,” he said, insinuating that either Jim or I had slipped her a cell phone or a weapon. “I don’t have time for that.”
Amanda was mortified by this exchange. I suggested that I accompany them to a restroom in the courthouse, to make short work of this issue. “Ma’am, with all due respect, I don’t know who you are,” he said. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t trust you, and I’m not going to break protocol for a prisoner, especially her,” he nodded at Amanda. “She’s a…”
Baby killer. He didn’t say the words, but I bet he wanted to. I mentally dared him to say it. I suddenly realized how unsafe Amanda was in that jail. The adage about prisoners went through my mind: Cop killers are worshipped; baby killers are beaten to death.
Furious, I approached the guard. He dropped his hand to his sidearm. I realized he saw Jim and me as threats to his safety. I stopped a dozen yards away from him. “Ms. House needs to use a restroom,” I said. “Her lead attorney is not here yet. We are in the middle of an important meeting, one that I cannot reschedule. Please get a second guard and escort her to the jail. Then bring her back here. We’ll wait.”
“That will take about 30 minutes,” he said. I nodded. He radioed for another guard.
In that moment, Amanda became my client. We had to get her out of that jail.
The Work
Over the next year, I gathered her records and interviewed family members, friends, teachers, and church members, often over the phone — not ideal for determining who would make a good sentencing witness. Jim and I brainstormed, by phone, or in his office when I traveled to Alabama for other clients.
Amanda’s safety was a huge concern. We discussed filing a request to move her from the Baker County jail to the DeKalb County jail in Fort Payne, a town near the Georgia border where I was working a post-conviction case. I was impressed with the DeKalb County jail. The personnel were kind and professional. The small facility was new and kept clean by the prisoners, and not one of them knew Amanda was charged with capital murder in the death of her baby.
Amanda jumped at the chance to leave Baker County.
I visited her several times while working in Fort Payne, and the difference in her was remarkable. Someone had cut her hair, her jumpsuits were clean, and she was free to move within the facility. The jail personnel liked her, as did the other inmates. She was even teaching some of them to read.
At my urging, Jim reached out to Raoul Schonemann, an attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights. Raoul provided invaluable assistance to Jim, at no charge. Meanwhile, primary attorney Rich McClellen had gone AWOL. I suspected that earning a capped payment from the state didn’t hold his interest.
The Trial
The trial was set for August 27, 2012. Jim issued subpoenas for our mitigation witnesses, which included Amanda and Scott’s parents, Amanda’s sister, and the family minister. Two specialists who had reviewed Carrie’s medical records planned to testify to the possibility of underlying health issues and scenarios that might offer alternative explanations for the fatal injury.
Jim also issued a subpoena for the day care owner. His secretary had found a newspaper photo of the woman riding a motorcycle to an event the morning of Carrie’s final day. We expected her to testify that Carrie had not suffered an accident sufficient to fatally crack her skull at the daycare. The photograph should be enough evidence to dispute her testimony. She wasn’t even present. She’d left the center in the hands of two teen girls.
Jim and I conducted a crucial interview with the director of the funeral home. Unfortunately, the embalmer who handled Carrie’s body had since died, but the director had Carrie’s file, which contained a curious detail: the embalmer noted that Carrie’s skull bones were so brittle and inflexible, he couldn’t work with them — a strange occurrence in a toddler. In his report, he likened the toddler’s skull bones to the ossified bones of an 85-year-old woman. Could that hardening be indicative of an undiagnosed health problem? Her biological mother had encephalitis and spina bifida. Could the baby have craniosynostosis, a condition which causes the bones to fuse and harden too quickly, often resulting in deformity and seizures?
The second crucial interview was with another prosecution witness — a woman who’d worked at the first daycare Carrie had attended. She had noticed bruising on Carrie’s body and reported this to child protective services. During our conversation, the woman admitted to having suffered several mental breakdowns and to being hospitalized shortly after making the report. She gave us the names of her doctors and the facilities where she had received treatment and signed HIPAA-compliant medical release forms so I could obtain her records. As much as Jim detested the thought of forcing this woman to discuss her mental health struggles in court, we needed everything we could find to impeach, or at least discredit, what this woman, and other witnesses, would say.
It didn’t take long for prosecutors to learn we were questioning their witnesses. We braced for their response.
A Break in the Case
Suddenly, two weeks before the trial was to begin, the court date was rescheduled to January 28, 2013. Jim re-issued subpoenas on December 20th.
Then the case took a turn.
The prosecution was suddenly willing to negotiate.
Over the course of 2013, prosecutors floated an agreement with Amanda and her attorneys: they would drop the capital murder charges if she pled guilty to variations of murder — first-degree, or second-degree negligent homicide or manslaughter.
Amanda was torn. She wanted to maintain her innocence in the death of her child, but she also wanted to go home.
On January 21, 2014, Amanda entered an Alford plea, also called a “best-interest” plea, in which a defendant does not admit guilt to a specified crime, but states it is in her best interest to plead guilty. By agreeing to this plea — in this case, manslaughter — Amanda admitted the evidence produced by the prosecution would have likely persuaded a judge or jury to find her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Prosecutors declared a victory, but so did we.
After being behind bars for 9 years and 18 days, Amanda was finally free to go home. She would serve two years of unsupervised probation, but she was out of jail. I’d waited all morning at my home in Utah for news, and finally Jim’s call came.
“Someone wants to talk with you,” he said, and handed the phone to Amanda. Emotionally overwhelmed, Amanda thanked me for my support, my work, and my friendship. Tears soaked my smiling face. It was a good day, a rare day when you do this work.
Epilogue
From the beginning, I was shocked by how long Amanda’s case languished in the system with no resolution. Jim and I always believed the capital charge was politically motivated: the sheriff, DA, and judge were elected officials, and by handing down the death penalty, they could claim that they’d saved the community from a baby-killing monster. But they underestimated Amanda’s support system — the church and family that raised bail and hired a defense team. And they perhaps underestimated how vigorously Jim and I would defend our client.
I don’t believe Carrie’s death was deliberate. I think it was a terrible tragedy that fell far short of murder. Her injuries probably occurred at the daycare that day, and the girls panicked and did not call a doctor. We’ll never know for sure, and neither will the State of Alabama. Still, they pursued the death penalty as if they were certain, without any ironclad proof that a murder had even occurred.
And that is something I simply could not let stand.
This essay is excerpted from Southern Lies and Homicides: Tales of Betrayal and Murder, with permission of the author.
About the author:
Susan Waller Lehmann is a private investigator, a criminal defense and capital mitigation specialist, a journalist, and an award-winning author. She lives in the western U.S. with her husband, two golden retrievers and a black cat.