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Authors: Evan Ratliff
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at the truth is this: That M. A. Wright likely did have that
affair with Ethel Louise Williams, and Judith was the result. That
Louise, by her own admission, tried to obtain money from Wright
after putting Judith up for adoption—money that, it should be said,
she and Judith both would have deserved from him. That her family
tried to get that money, too, an effort that may very well have
metastasized into decades of blackmail and grifting. That Wright
made a mistake of passion fifty years ago and largely avoided the
consequences.
But that’s all it really is, in the end: a guess. I’d be lying
if I didn’t say that sometimes I still wonder if this all could be
some great hoax. That I sometimes wonder how Ethel Louise
Williams’s memory of those days in 1955 could be so cloudy at times
and yet so perfect when it came to the details that mattered. That
after examining the chains of evidence I have concluded that they
are almost all circumstantial, and sometimes even contradictory.
That I, with a vested interest in my guess being correct, am
perhaps no more reliable a narrator of Judith’s story than she
is.
----
One day not long ago, I finally managed
to track down Diana Stiebens, Judith’s half-sister, and reach her
by phone. She had long since stopped talking to everyone in her
family, she said. She’d felt betrayed when Judith named her in the
lawsuits, and she’d spent thousands of dollars defending herself
from accusations she claimed to not even fully understand.
But she was willing to tell me what she remembered about M. A.
Wright. “He came to a boarding house where I was staying with my
mother,” she said. “He was very, very pleasant, kind, spoke to me
very nicely.” She remembered the nice preschool she’d been put
into, but had only been told years later by her mother that he was
responsible for it. I asked her if he seemed like a wealthy man, a
man from another class. “This was from a child’s point of view,”
she said. “It was a man dressed in plain khaki clothes, and he took
his hat off in the presence of ladies. I remember those kind of
things.”
As a girl, she’d heard her family talking about a child that
Louise had given up for adoption, and she pieced together herself
that it was the young girl named Judith in her town. She used to
follow Judith around at a distance sometimes, she told me, curious
about her mysterious sister. Diana had run away from home not long
after, and she ended up in foster care as a teenager.
As for M. A .Wright’s money, she said, she’d never seen any of
it. “Now, if I had all that money came to me, I wouldn’t have ended
up in a foster home, for example,” she told me. “The only thing
that was ever given to me, that I know, was that he bought me a
pretty dress and put me in a preschool.” In any case, she said,
“what difference does it make? My mother is probably about 79 now.
My brother is about three years younger than me. I’m 62. My point
of opinion is, why do we have to continue this on? There’s really
nothing that can be done about it.”
I asked her whether, deep down, she thought there was some
larger conspiracy in her family around Wright’s money. “One person
says one thing, and another person says another, and all I can give
you is what I believe and what people have told me,” she said.
“What is the truth in all that? I know that a man visited my
mother. I know that they called him M.A.”
Seventeen
Early on the morning before I was
scheduled to leave Carthage, I awoke at the Best Western to the
sound of my phone ringing. It was Judith, calling to make sure I
had directions to get over to the police station, where I had an
appointment to catch up with a sergeant there. As always, a brief
call turned into a longer one, and she told me that she’d finally
decided that she needed to get out of town. There were just too
many bad memories here. Her adoptive sister had been in the
hospital for years, unable to communicate
affair with Ethel Louise Williams, and Judith was the result. That
Louise, by her own admission, tried to obtain money from Wright
after putting Judith up for adoption—money that, it should be said,
she and Judith both would have deserved from him. That her family
tried to get that money, too, an effort that may very well have
metastasized into decades of blackmail and grifting. That Wright
made a mistake of passion fifty years ago and largely avoided the
consequences.
But that’s all it really is, in the end: a guess. I’d be lying
if I didn’t say that sometimes I still wonder if this all could be
some great hoax. That I sometimes wonder how Ethel Louise
Williams’s memory of those days in 1955 could be so cloudy at times
and yet so perfect when it came to the details that mattered. That
after examining the chains of evidence I have concluded that they
are almost all circumstantial, and sometimes even contradictory.
That I, with a vested interest in my guess being correct, am
perhaps no more reliable a narrator of Judith’s story than she
is.
----
One day not long ago, I finally managed
to track down Diana Stiebens, Judith’s half-sister, and reach her
by phone. She had long since stopped talking to everyone in her
family, she said. She’d felt betrayed when Judith named her in the
lawsuits, and she’d spent thousands of dollars defending herself
from accusations she claimed to not even fully understand.
But she was willing to tell me what she remembered about M. A.
Wright. “He came to a boarding house where I was staying with my
mother,” she said. “He was very, very pleasant, kind, spoke to me
very nicely.” She remembered the nice preschool she’d been put
into, but had only been told years later by her mother that he was
responsible for it. I asked her if he seemed like a wealthy man, a
man from another class. “This was from a child’s point of view,”
she said. “It was a man dressed in plain khaki clothes, and he took
his hat off in the presence of ladies. I remember those kind of
things.”
As a girl, she’d heard her family talking about a child that
Louise had given up for adoption, and she pieced together herself
that it was the young girl named Judith in her town. She used to
follow Judith around at a distance sometimes, she told me, curious
about her mysterious sister. Diana had run away from home not long
after, and she ended up in foster care as a teenager.
As for M. A .Wright’s money, she said, she’d never seen any of
it. “Now, if I had all that money came to me, I wouldn’t have ended
up in a foster home, for example,” she told me. “The only thing
that was ever given to me, that I know, was that he bought me a
pretty dress and put me in a preschool.” In any case, she said,
“what difference does it make? My mother is probably about 79 now.
My brother is about three years younger than me. I’m 62. My point
of opinion is, why do we have to continue this on? There’s really
nothing that can be done about it.”
I asked her whether, deep down, she thought there was some
larger conspiracy in her family around Wright’s money. “One person
says one thing, and another person says another, and all I can give
you is what I believe and what people have told me,” she said.
“What is the truth in all that? I know that a man visited my
mother. I know that they called him M.A.”
Seventeen
Early on the morning before I was
scheduled to leave Carthage, I awoke at the Best Western to the
sound of my phone ringing. It was Judith, calling to make sure I
had directions to get over to the police station, where I had an
appointment to catch up with a sergeant there. As always, a brief
call turned into a longer one, and she told me that she’d finally
decided that she needed to get out of town. There were just too
many bad memories here. Her adoptive sister had been in the
hospital for years, unable to communicate
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