The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (21 page)

“Jealousy. Envy. The green monster that has been the source of
so much hatred and violence from the Bible to today was breathing loudly in that apartment, and Sarah Dixon paid the price. She was caring. She was bright. She was generous. And she was pregnant. It is this final factor that makes this case so important, so serious, and so devastating. I want you all to think about that as I speak and as Mr. McCall speaks to you and as the trial progresses. You will hear witnesses talk about how the defendant couldn’t have children. You will hear evidence about how the defendant consistently lies—about her jobs, her friends, her family, and most important, about this murder. You will hear testimony from the officer who arrested her, who questioned her about the murders she claimed were by a masked intruder—a mummer from the parade. You will hear witnesses tell about the defendant’s estranged relationship with her father, who was Sarah Dixon’s boyfriend and the father of her unborn child. You will hear so many different stories all leading to the same conclusion that the painting you start to see will be so clear, it might as well be a photograph. And in that photograph, you’ll see the defendant, jealous and enraged, forcing her way into Sarah Dixon’s home with a gun, shooting her execution style, ending not only a vibrant young life but also the life of her unborn child.”

I sat back watching Tom Davies create his fictional narrative for Shanaya and Beverly and Lavonne and the rest of them, and tried not to laugh. It was almost embarrassing the way he was turning my trial into a Lifetime movie. Women don’t actually act that way. Between the four lawyers trying my case, only one of them was a woman, and she was sitting second chair to Tom Davies. She had to have been fresh out of law school and barely even rose from her chair the entire week we were in court. No doubt had she been first-chairing the trial, the state’s theory would have been different.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he concluded. “The defendant will give you only one way to vote to stop her unconscionable rage once and for all. Not even a prison society would be suitable for her. She killed Sarah Dixon and her child in a depraved and heinous act,
and you will see, after the evidence has been presented and the testimony has been given, that the only decision you could possibly reach will be guilty. Thank you.”

If the jury members listened to Tom Davies’s opening statement with more detail, they would have picked up on the diminutive inconsistencies and blatant fallacies. But they were distracted. They were distracted by the heat. They were distracted by each other, particularly Lavonne and Felipe. They were distracted by the team of Dixon supporters and their moans in triplicate, scatting sighs in a round of confused emotion. Mostly, though, they were distracted by Marlene’s balding head, shining in the center of the room like a fluorescent disco ball. Marlene had a wig, despite her presentation to the jury. I know she had a wig. A woman like that would never be seen in public without presenting her absolute most confident and powerful image to the rest of the world. But no doubt, she removed it each time she stepped foot in the courtroom so that the pathos she so seamlessly, so effortlessly evoked among the twelve individuals sitting in judgment of me, fell slanted to her like crisp fall leaves. I couldn’t blame her. I probably would have done the same thing. After all, they were sitting in judgment of Marlene and Sarah, too, even if they didn’t realize it.

“Mr. McCall?” the judge called, shortly after Tom Davies took his seat.

Madison McCall nodded, tapping his shoes on the floor three short times (almost like a weak drum roll), and stood up without looking my way.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” he said.

He was the only person not to try and lock eyes with me before his next move. He walked over to the jury box and stood two feet from the wooden bar.

The tag at the top of my shirt was tickling the skin behind my neck and it itched. I scratched my neck with my index finger and could hear the scrape inside the courtroom as the sides changed. Marlene tilted her head over to me when I moved. All twelve jurors
and the soporific alternate glanced my way, too. Everything I did, from sneezing to clearing my throat to scratching an itch, would be memorialized in thirteen different ways.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am not here to try to persuade you that my client is perfect. I am not even here to persuade you that she has suffered a traumatic life that should give you cause to understand her actions. No. I am here to introduce you to a woman with a name beyond ‘defendant.’ ”

He looked over to me for the first time and held out his hand, as if presenting me to society in a swollen white dress made of tulle.

“Please stand,” he instructed.

I stood from the defense table while the dozens of individuals in the courtroom ogled.

“This is Noa Singleton. She has already worked with the police and the district attorney and all investigators to facilitate the progress of this case. She has not done any of this in great opposition or in vocal protest. She has done all of it because she is not guilty of this crime. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Please look at her. Is this a woman who the prosecution will have you believe is a cold-blooded, calculating killing machine? A woman who, given the chance, would do so again? That is simply not the case. She is a normal girl. She did well in school, participated in many extracurricular activities, was a friend and a girlfriend and a sister with just a normal upbringing. Nothing in her history will lead you to the result that Ms. Singleton would kill Sarah Dixon, and nothing that the state will present will illustrate a motive.”

McCall motioned for me to sit down. I acquiesced.

“The state will be unable to present any evidence of what transpired that day,” he continued. “They are only able to argue one story that has very little evidence. But I can tell you the evidence that you will see. You’ll see evidence of a terrified woman, shocked and catatonic, convulsing on the floor of a police station as she lay bleeding. You will see a woman held by the police for hours beyond their capacity.
You will see a woman who lost a sibling that day. That woman is my client, Noa Singleton. You’ll hear evidence of how the police arrested her and left her without food and water and how they withheld legal representation and medical attention as she bled from a bullet injury for hours. Because you see, ladies and gentlemen, my client was also a victim of the same murderer who killed Sarah Dixon.”

“Objection,” Tom Davies said. “Relevance.”

The judge agreed.

Madison McCall looked annoyed, but continued.

“The prosecution was right about one thing. My client indeed developed a new relationship with her father when she moved to Philadelphia. However, that relationship was not severed because of Sarah Dixon. It was severed long before. Nevertheless, my client still cared about her father and did what she could to help him. She checked up on his pregnant girlfriend when she called looking for him. Unfortunately for my client, she didn’t know what apartment she was walking into.”

I looked over to Marlene who held her gaze with Madison McCall the entire time, nodding with his comments every so often, twisting her neck to disagree with others. But as Madison McCall stumbled through his opening, painfully flogging each sentence so strangely, I was sure even Tom Davies would have done a better job on my behalf. His words didn’t flow, his logic was flawed, and at times, I wasn’t even sure he believed what he was saying. It was at that point, for the first time since I pulled the trigger, that I realized that there was a strong possibility I might be sentenced to death. It was at that point that I started questioning my decisions in life, notably with respect to Marlene Dixon. Even during his hapless opening, I contemplated telling them what Marlene’s part had been, but I didn’t. Sitting there delusional in her power and bald as a ninety-year-old man, she was suffering enough. Nothing I said would change that.

“This case isn’t as complicated as the prosecution would have you believe,” he concluded. “It is about a solitary, introverted girl who
sadly never lived up to her expectations. None of this means that she is a killer. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time when an intruder entered the apartment, shooting them both.”

He stepped closer to the jury box, and I don’t think they appreciated it. He had neither the looks nor charisma of a Tom Davies.

“Now, you are here for one reason only. You have been groomed, you have been filtered and ultimately selected because of your interest or your religious tendencies or your past relationship with law and order, or because of that little voice inside of you that says that executions are okay.”

The tag at the top of my neck was still irritating me. And my feet began to swell. And my nose itched.

“You are here for no other reason than to gawk at Ms. Singleton’s entire past so that you can judge each of her choices in life from birth through … well, through today, to find a motive that doesn’t exist. You have no other role to play and no other decision to make. Guilt or innocence. It’s not an easy task, but you have all been selected to complete it, and you will do so with a conscience. And because the state cannot prove that my client, Ms. Singleton, shot Sarah Dixon in cold blood, you’ll have no choice but to find her ‘not guilty.’ ”

When he was finished, Madison McCall sat down beside me, unbuttoned his blazer, crossed his legs, and watched Tom Davies call his first witness. He never once turned my way. I think that if he looked at me, he’d have to admit that he was sleeping through the trial. He’d have to lock eyes with me and realize that my life literally was held in his hands. Who knows how he might feel when he got nervous and it just slipped out.

I
T
’
S A FUNNY PHENOMENON
. Y
OU CAN NEVER VISIT YOUR OWN
funeral, but if you want to see how people feel about you, commit a crime. The parade of personalities that intersects with yours over the years is a voyeuristic thrill that few people experience. And it usually begins with the earliest chapters.

For example, Andy Hoskins was flown in from California and asked about our relationship. He said that I never lived up to my potential. He claimed that I was always trying to get him to do things that broke the rules. Most important, he testified that I never told him about the baby—the first instance, they claimed, in my long and malignant line of deception. They got Andy to say things I never knew he was capable of verbalizing, let alone even thinking.

“I … I … I loved her,” he sputtered, wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands. He kept glancing over to me while he said that, as if he were apologizing for my actions. “I have five kids now. I would have loved to have had another one. I just never knew. She never told me about the baby.”

The baby. The damned baby came up at nearly every turn.

A psychologist got on the stand and testified that I had borderline personality disorder—not psychopathy as Tom Davies speculated earlier. She argued that I was a pathological liar who felt strength and superiority from telling things that weren’t wholly true. She used examples like the fact that I told a few people that I ran a marathon
instead of a half marathon, or the fact that my boss from the School District of Philadelphia thought I graduated from Penn when I only went for a few months—that sort of thing, spuriously focusing on the irrelevant minutiae of my fabricated past. She also claimed that I slept with any man in my path because it was the only way I could feel whole. She testified that, while I didn’t want Sarah dead, I also didn’t want her to have the baby. It was the baby, after all, that led to the disintegration of my relationship with my father. It was the baby, after all, that separated me from him. That made our relationship—the first real one for me—broken. This and the lies led seamlessly to the Psychologist-Approved Theory in the flesh.

My court-appointed psychologist got on the stand and claimed that it was also the baby that changed me—just not Sarah’s. She argued that I had been suffering from a persistent case of posttraumatic stress disorder ever since the incident in Van Pelt Library and that I never came to terms with the loss of my baby, my femininity, or the future I’d never have. It was this, however, that caused my Jekyll personality to form. It was the trauma from losing my baby that led me to believe that Sarah, my father’s new partner, could not have one either, as it would create a fallacy of identity. Sarah, after all, was the “phantom me,” and this set me off into a rage. And there we were, face-to-face with the Cain and Abel Theory.

My obstetrician got on the stand, too, telling Lavonne, Felipe, Amir, Shanaya, Samuel, Lakeisha, Russell, Nancy, Charlie, Beverly, Ronaldo, Melissa, and Vincent about the Van Pelt incident freshman year. He talked about how painful it could be and how the type of emergency hysterectomy I survived usually strikes older women, or at least women without children. Ahh, my beloved Victim Theory. All theories presuming I did it intentionally, just trying to explain it away. Mitigate the circumstances, despite the fact that I had not yet been found guilty.

Sarah’s OB from Planned Parenthood also took the stand, explaining that she was proceeding well at nine weeks at the time of death. Not only did her baby have fingers and toes, but bones and
cartilage were even starting to form. Eyelids, too, and the tip of the nose. She looked straight at me when she said that as if I could see into Sarah’s belly the one time I came face-to-face with her. But the girl was bulimic. She ran. She wore baggy clothes and spent half of her time behind a desk and the other half with an aging alcoholic who owned a bar, carried guns, and spent a majority of his adult life in prison. Most people didn’t even know she was pregnant. I didn’t know how pregnant she really was. But her obstetrician argued otherwise. She was nine weeks along. She had examined Sarah just a week earlier, and her beta hCG levels were on point with healthy fetal development. Her ultrasound was strong, and the fetus was moving around appropriately in utero. Sarah was gaining weight commensurate with the growth of her child.