Chapter 12 - The Deposition of Betrayal
Three weeks before the formal trial date, both defendants were brought into the reinforced basement hearing room for mandatory pre-trial depositions.
The state had granted Godfrey’s defense team a limited hearing to transcribe his formal sworn testimony against Selina in exchange for withdrawing capital specifications.
I sat at the end of the long conference table beside Marcus Hayes and DA Bell, dressed in a tailored charcoal suit.
I wanted to look directly into their eyes without the barrier of a gallery rail or a courtroom bench.
The security door buzzed open, and two armed county marshals led Godfrey Vance into the room in orange prison garb and wrist shackles.
His face was sunken, his beard patchy and unkempt, and his hands shook continuously as he sat down in the metal chair at the opposite end.
Two minutes later, the secondary security door opened, and Selina was escorted inside by two female corrections officers.
Her silver hair was completely unstyled, pulled back into a severe rubber band, and her face looked like crumpled parchment.
The moment she spotted Godfrey sitting across the table, her eyes flared with a mixture of desperate hope and venomous reproach.
“Godfrey, my precious boy,” Selina cried out, leaning forward against her belly chains.
“Tell these people that your brother has fabricated these lies! Tell them that we did everything to help that wretched girl!” she pleaded.
Godfrey did not look his mother in the eye; he dropped his head and stared fixedly at the formica tabletop.
“Shut up, Mom,” Godfrey muttered under his breath, his voice trembling with bitter resentment.
Selina froze, her jaw slackening as if she had been slapped across the face with an iron pipe.
“What did you say to me?” Selina gasped, her voice shrill with indignation.
“I said shut up,” Godfrey repeated louder, lifting his head with bloodshot eyes full of pure fury.
“I’m sitting in an eight-by-ten concrete cage facing twenty years in state prison because of your sick, twisted greed!” Godfrey shouted.
“You told me Damian would never come back! You told me he was an idiot who would just keep sending money until he died in a factory!” he screamed.
“Silence in this deposition room immediately!” Judge Vance-Cross’s court magistrate barked, slamming his gavel against the wooden block.
“Both defendants will maintain absolute decorum, or you will be removed and deposed via closed-circuit video in isolation,” the magistrate warned.
Selina sank back into her metal chair, her chest heaving beneath her prison jumpsuit, her knuckles white around her shackles.
DA Bell stepped forward, clicking on the court reporter’s recording device and placing a certified document on the table before Godfrey.
“Mr. Godfrey Vance, please state your full legal name and date of birth for the permanent record,” DA Bell instructed.
Godfrey complied, his voice shaking as he recited his personal information.
“Mr. Vance, I direct your attention to Exhibit 44, the life insurance application submitted to the underwriting board on August 14th,” DA Bell said.
“Who completed the handwriting on the primary policy application?” the prosecutor asked.
Godfrey lifted his cuffed hand, pointing his finger directly across the table at his mother.
“She did,” Godfrey said without a moment of hesitation.
“She sat at the dining room table on a Sunday afternoon and copied Phoebe’s signature from an old anniversary card Damian sent three years ago,” he testified.
“Liar! You vile, ungrateful monster!” Selina shrieked, lunging half out of her seat before the two female officers pinned her shoulders down.
“You begged me for that money! You were crying that your auto shop was going bankrupt because you gambled away the payroll!” Selina screamed at him.
“You told me that if we didn't get that insurance money, the loan sharks from Columbus were going to break your legs!” she roared.
Godfrey slammed his handcuffed fists against the table, the steel links clattering violently against the wood.
“Because you taught me that money solves everything!” Godfrey yelled back at her, tears of rage spilling over his hollow cheeks.
“You told me that Phoebe was already a corpse walking on two feet and that leaving her in the cold was just helping nature take its course!” he confessed.
“You were the one who took the padlock from the garden shed and locked it from the outside every night at nine o'clock!” Godfrey shouted into the record.
“You took away her wool blanket when she vomited on the floor and told her she didn't deserve warmth if she couldn't keep her bowels clean!” he wept.
The court stenographer’s fingers flew furiously across the keys, capturing every syllable of mutual destruction in permanent legal text.
Marcus Hayes leaned toward me, murmuring quietly in my ear: “They are destroying their own defense faster than the state ever could.”
Selina turned her head slowly away from Godfrey, her eyes finally landing on me where I sat in absolute, stone-cold silence.
She looked at my tailored suit, my steady hands, and the unmistakable posture of an unyielding judge.
“Damian,” Selina whimpered, attempting one final, desperate appeal to maternal sentimentality.
“Look at what your brother is doing to me,” she sobbed, tears cutting lines down her unwashed face.
“I am your mother, Damian! I carried you inside my body! I worked three jobs when your father passed away to keep shoes on your feet!” she pleaded.
“How can you sit there in your fine clothes and watch strangers drag me into a dungeon?” she asked, stretching her cuffed hands across the table toward me.
I didn't blink; I didn't shift my posture by a single fraction of an inch.
“When Phoebe was shivering in that dirt forty-eight hours before I arrived, she asked you for a single cup of warm water, Selina,” I spoke, my voice low and level.
“What did you say to her?” I asked.
Selina swallowed hard, her mouth trembling as she looked away from my penetrating stare.
“You told her that warm water cost money, and parasites don't get heated utilities,” I reminded her, repeating the words Phoebe had whispered in the hospital.
“You forfeited your title as my mother the second you locked my wife in an animal pen and stole her medicine,” I said.
“You are not family to me, Selina,” I added, each word falling like an iron curtain between our lives.
“You are simply a defendant in a criminal case that I will see prosecuted to the absolute maximum extent of the law,” I finished.
Selina dropped her head into her handcuffed hands and began to wail, a long, mournful sound of complete, irreversible defeat.
The magistrate nodded to DA Bell, who formally closed the deposition record after four hours of continuous, devastating admissions.
The marshals pulled Godfrey to his feet and escorted him through the western security corridor, leaving behind a trail of broken excuses.
The female officers pulled Selina up by her elbows, leading her back toward the transport vans that would take her back to the county jail.
As the heavy steel door closed behind them, Marcus Hayes closed his leather briefcase with a crisp, definitive snap.
“The plea negotiations are officially dead,” Marcus stated calmly.
“The defense has no witnesses, no plausible theory, and no credibility remaining,” he said.
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“Tomorrow morning, the trial begins,” DA Bell added, looking at me with resolute confidence.
“And by Friday afternoon, this nightmare will be concluded forever.”
