The Story That Will Not Let Go
When the subjects who once derided the book you wrote about a murder start looking to you for answers
We are going to take a short break from Portland reporting here - and we’re not. I am dipping back to May 23, 2009, to a very short item I read that morning in the metro section of The Oregonian, about two children found in the Willamette River shortly after 2am that morning. Aside from stating that a child, a boy, was found drowned, and an older girl had been admitted to the hospital, nothing was known, not the children’s ages, their names, whether they’d fallen off a boat, whether what happened had been an accident or an act of deliberation and if so, by whom.
By the next day, we knew their mother, Amanda Stott-Smith, had been arrested in a downtown Portland parking garage and was being held. We knew, also, that the children had fallen or been thrown from the Sellwood Bridge, about 12 miles south of downtown Portland. Though an investigation was underway, Amanda was the only suspect in the murder of her son Eldon, age 4, and the attempted murder of her seven-year-old daughter Trinity. This information allowed the public to immediately make a binary decision about about Amanda and what should be done with her: she was evil and should suffer the same fate as her children, or she was crazy and must be treated with compassion.
And that, as they say, was that, or was that for most people. The summer of 2009 saw a spate of child murders in Portland, a baby cut out of a woman’s womb; two children shot to death by their father while out for a hike. It was a long hot dangerous summer, and it was more than understandable that people wanted to spend as little time thinking about murdered children as possible. I will pause here to mention that summer in Portland is a magnificent thing, clear and clean and bright, dip into the river at Kelley Point in the late afternoon, sit on your porch drinking tequila at night.
I did some summering in 2009, but mostly I tried to understand how and why Amanda Stott-Smith found herself, at 1:23 in the morning, dropping two children she loved from a bridge. I would look for six years. I would find things people did not want me to find. I would be told during the investigation that I was a liar, that only one of the preferred narratives was true, that, variously, Amanda was a monster or a victim and why was I complicating the picture? It was not my job to tell people, people in deep grief, that I thought uncomplicating the picture might lead, even inexorably lead, to more tragedy; that I could only write what I found, in a book called, To The Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder, and let the readers decide for themselves.
They decided. There was gratitude from unexpected places, and condemnation from expected ones. The book has shown itself to have a forcefield I did not anticipate, one that circled back around this month.
But let’s go back to 2018, to a few weeks before To the Bridge was to be published. From a piece called “The Lightening” that I published later that year:
I am I making a connection in the DC airport when an email comes through on my phone. Reception is poor, and I can see only the subject line:
I have some important things to discuss with you about your new book coming out, “To the Bridge.”
This is not necessarily what the author of a work of nonfiction wants to see six weeks out from publication. Had this person gotten an advance copy and was now going to tell me the book contained a major flaw that threw the whole thing off true? I reloaded the message until it came through:
Hi, my name is Christine ______. I’d like to first tell you that I am a child of Amanda Jo Stott-Smith. I was kept as a closed adoption so I wouldn’t be surprised if my name has never come up to you even with your research and studies. I was born November 2nd 1999. I’ve known about my adoption my entire life but just found out about the actions of my birth mom back in 2016 and have been following up on the articles written since I’ve heard about it. I want to talk to you because I’d love to buy your book and maybe get some insight with you. I would love to hear back from you!
I stared at the email. Contrary to what Christine wrote, I did know who she was. I knew the circumstances of her birth and adoption. I knew her father had killed himself before she was born. And I knew that several months before dropping her two youngest children from a bridge in Portland, Oregon, Amanda Stott-Smith wrote, of giving up Christine as a newborn, “I’ve never had so much joy and peace.”
I had four minutes before my flight boarded and could not properly respond to Christine’s email. I did have time to forward it to my editor, who replied, “Holy smokes.”
I would visit Christine in Phoenix, would write about what happens when you find out the mother you never met has thrown siblings you didn’t know you had off a bridge. I would, at Christine’s request and with his permission, put her in touch with an older son of Amanda’s. Years later, when Trinity reached out seeking to be in touch with Christine, I would attempt to put them together. I had not anticipated becoming the point person for Amanda’s surviving children and was glad to be, to answer their questions, to send each a copy of the book, which they wanted to read and in one case had been forbidden to read, told it was full of lies, that I had made everything up.
It is the case that people will lie to reach their own ends. My friend Ben Price wrote a piece this past weekend about how a certain public figure (okay, AOC) was “gravestanding” on the tragic NYC subway killing of Jordan Neely in order to meet her own political objectives. I find this gross, and worse, I find it dangerous. I will mention here that when Jason Smith, the father of Eldon, spoke at his son’s memorial, he sounded, according to someone who loved Eldon and who’d thought Jason a close friend, as though he were giving a Powerpoint presentation.
A year and a half after the children were dropped from the Sellwood Bridge, the city of Portland held a ceremony on the Willamette River. More than a hundred people gathered as a new rescue boat, the Eldon Trinity, was launched. A press boat would follow. I had no intention of getting on it, nor on the Eldon Trinity, which was small and would carry only Trinity, Jason and a few others to the spot where the children had been found, where Trinity would throw a few of Eldon’s favorite toys into the river. As the family boarded, a woman by the boat gestured toward me, apparently telling a city councilperson that under no circumstances was I to be allowed near the family. I was eighteen months into reporting and things about Amanda’s past, about Jason’s, were coming at me, often stealthily, people calling me from a parking spot at work, in the middle of the night. Amanda’s grandmother Jackie Dreiling made a sour face when I asked at the boat launch if we might speak, only to tell a confidante later that day, “Give Nancy my number.” This led to Dreiling and I meeting many times in her sunken living room, daytime TV in the background as she told me about the cons and erosions, the little lies and the enormous ones, things the family had not wanted to see, and by the time they took action, or tried to, it was too late.
What led Amanda Stott-Smith to kill and try to kill her children took many people not believing what they were seeing. While no one else had a direct hand in the murder, for more than a decade people looked away; they made up stories to try to make things make sense; they called things what they were not; they abetted a fabulist who with great persistence robbed Amanda - whose own pathologies made her susceptible to his, which he knew; it’s why they collided in the first place - of her psyche, her home, her children, any sense that she had value or reason to believe she had a future. With her foundations eroded, she drove to the bridge. You can see vengeance in the call she made minutes after she dropped the children, or you can see dependance. I think at that point the world had been blotted out, there was only one person to call.
“Help me. Help me,” Amanda told Jason. “You’ve taken all my joy away.”
Which brings me to the texts I have been receiving this month, from the woman I saw by the boat.