I was trying to find the website for David Thorne, the humorist, and instead, I found the website of David Thorne, the (allegedly) wrongfully incarcerated prisoner who’s serving a life sentence for the murder of a 26-year-old woman named Yvonne Layne in 1999.
Of course, that’s one of the big problems with the internet. You can’t control what you might see. And you often can’t unsee whatever it is you never wanted to see in the first place.
Since I’m always up for a good crime story, I proceeded to read David Thorne’s page on a website called Actual Innocent Prisoners (not the world’s greatest name for a website, but hey, everybody’s a critic).
The facts of the case are spun to play on the reader’s sense of outrage and injustice. If you take the page at face value, the man was clearly railroaded. And maybe David Thorne actually is innocent. I have no idea. He certainly wouldn’t be the first and he won’t be the last actual(ly) innocent prisoner in America.
But the point of all this isn’t David Thorne.
The point is that, as I read, I finally came to the line where Thorne’s parents paid $100,000 for “the best criminal defense attorney in the county”, a lawyer named Jeffrey Haupt.
I knew Jeffrey Haupt. But I didn’t remember knowing him until I went in search of David Thorne, the humorist, because I wanted to read that famous bit about his drawing of a seven-legged spider, and instead found David Thorne, the murderer, who suffered the (allegedly) ineffective assistance of Jeffrey Haupt at his murder trial.
I was suddenly back at court, sitting behind my desk, with Jeffrey Haupt plopped down in a chair across from me. It was 1999, or 2000, or 2001, and he had a case in my court. Alternatively, he was just visiting the bailiff for a quickie in the witness room.
The witness room saw a lot of action.
And remembering that, I remembered the story the bailiff told me once about the time she and Jeff borrowed a local sheriff’s condo for the weekend. When the sheriff showed up unexpectedly, they sauntered down the stairs buck naked and sat down nonchalantly at the dining room table to converse.
My memory is bolstered by a newspaper article about Haupt’s death that mentions a pontoon boat. Somehow the naked story and the pontoon boat go together, and over the years I’ve retained a very clear memory of being on a pontoon boat that nearly capsized because everybody on it, including the driver, was hammered.
I assume it was Jeff’s boat, and I assume Jeff was hammered.
Because that’s how he died — curled up in the snow in his backyard with a blood alcohol level of .27 (more than three times the legal limit), 20 feet from his back door.
I didn’t know Jeff Haupt was dead until I read that story about David Thorne, the murderer I had never heard of. I didn’t remember the blow jobs in the witness room or the naked condo story or the pontoon boat until I randomly clicked on a website looking for a story about a cartoon spider.
Memory is weird. It lurks in the dark crevices of your brain, waiting to spring. I didn’t particularly want to remember Jeffrey Haupt, or really anything to do with the bailiff or the court. Memories like that trigger a trauma response that’s normally the result of having survived a bear attack.
But there it is. These are the kinds of stories everyone wants me to tell, but it’s a fine line. Say too much and you’ll never eat brunch in this town again.
The mind is a beast, a chained beast.
Bev, you have such a delightful way of telling a story. This was surprising and hilarious!