In 1997, Audrey Iacona was accused of giving birth in her parents’ basement and then “suffocating” the baby (assuming it was alive at the time, which is open to debate) in a plastic bag.
It was one of the biggest trials to ever hit Medina County, Ohio, population 160,000 give or take, and I had just started my job at the Medina County Court of Common Pleas.
I got the job, like everybody else at the court, by having the right political affiliation and knowing somebody. That’s just how it works.
I was a secretary. I worked for the judge who heard the Audrey Iacona murder trial, and I had no idea what I was doing. I barely avoided getting fired and Audrey barely avoided a prison sentence.
All the major networks sent camera crews and the courtroom was packed every day. It was a zoo. The news show 20/20 produced an episode about the case that featured a glimpse of my eventual husband, a K-9 officer at the court.
We kept that episode on a VHS tape for years. For all I know, he still has it. Good luck playing it.
One day during the trial, I needed to get something from the court reporter’s office, which was on the other side of the courtroom from my office and the Judge’s chambers. Thinking nothing of it, I cut through the packed courtroom where people were milling about during a recess, through the opposite door, and into the similarly packed hallway.
I had keys in my hand and used them to open the court reporter’s door.
For about two minutes, I knew what it was like to be the Pope. A hush fell. Every single eye, or about 200 of them, was on me, watching my every move.
I had keys. I was somebody doing something that might be interesting or important.
I mean, I wasn’t. But I could’ve been.
They probably should have been more interested in the close personal friendship of the county prosecutor and the judge. But that’s not that interesting.
Just assume that everything bad you’ve heard about the court system is true.
The thing that is interesting right this moment in Medina County, Ohio, is the fact that our deceased domestic relations judge, The Hon. Mary Kovack, was slumped over in a coma for several days, in a recliner at her house, when she was supposedly making rulings and signing orders.
That’s a problem.
My boss actually called it first, and I poo-pooed him since I had worked at the court for six years and I guess I assumed everybody knows the judge doesn’t always actually sign or even read orders.
See, everybody thinks their case is so special and unique. But it’s not. A truly unique, interesting case is a unicorn to be treasured and parsed.
Almost everything the court does is just so much hamburger being ground up and spit out in uniform patties dressed with legalese.
So, no, Channel 8, there is no “mystery” surrounding how dead Judge Mary signed orders.
She was basically incommunicado for years and the court just went on about its business as courts do, especially with the advent of COVID and the introduction of electronic signatures. Somebody else typed the orders, somebody else pushed the “sign here” button.
Do you see a doctor every time you go in for something? No. Now you see a physician’s assistant, or a certified nurse practitioner, or somebody else who knows as much or almost as much as your doctor.
It’s the same with the court system. Some underling makes the decisions and an actual judge rubber stamps it.
The problem in Medina started when the actual judge turned out to be just barely alive in her nightmare hoarder house.
Heads have subsequently rolled and will continue to roll. Things get ugly fast when the truth that everybody in the system already knows becomes a more general, widely-known truth.
Mostly it’s an excuse for everybody on the losing side of a domestic relations case for the last couple of months to demand a do-over. The results will be the same, but these are voters, dammit, so they’re going to get what they want.
I’m just happy I don’t work there anymore. I’ve got many, many more stories I could tell.
And knowing me, I probably will.
How The Law Really Works
Yes, please. More. Fun fact: one of my first jobs was in the Medina County Administration Building. (I was not a good employee)
The scary thing is that this kind of thing is going on at the local level in a small town. If the curtain were pulled back all the way up to the top of the government, I suspect we would be shocked at the level of corruption, incompetence, and illegal activity. As the system begins collapsing from all the internal rot, we'll see a lot more of this.