Chapter 9 - THE TRIAL
The trial started in January, in a federal courthouse in Fresno. Vance’s new lawyer—some public defender who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else—tried everything. He tried to get the journal thrown out as evidence (the judge denied it). He tried to get Josephine’s barrette camera footage suppressed, claiming it had been obtained illegally (the judge denied that too, pointing out that Josephine had every right to record a conversation she was part of). He tried to paint Vance as a victim of small-town gossip, a respected doctor whose life had been ruined by a lying, attention-seeking teenager and her money-hungry mother.
It didn’t work.
The prosecution had too much evidence. The journal. The barrette footage. The hidden camera footage from my house. The testimony of twelve different women, all telling the same story—Vance grooming them, manipulating them, assaulting them, threatening them to keep quiet.
Josephine testified on the third day.
I sat in the front row of the gallery, holding Rebecca’s hand so tight I think I broke a blood vessel in her finger. Jax was on my other side, Mrs. Gable on Rebecca’s. Chloe and Lila and all the other victims were there too, filling two whole rows, a wall of support.
Josephine walked up to the witness stand like she owned the place. She was wearing a simple black dress, her hair pulled back, the pink streak still bright at her temple. She raised her right hand, swore to tell the truth, and looked Vance dead in the eye.
He was sitting at the defense table in an ill-fitting gray suit, his hair dyed a bad shade of black, his face pale and angry. He stared at her the whole time, trying to intimidate her, trying to break her with his eyes the way he’d done so many times before.
Josephine didn’t flinch. Not once.
The prosecutor—an intense woman named Karen Chu who’d made a career out of putting men like Vance away—led her through her testimony gently, step by step. The first time Vance had paid attention to her. The lies about my construction permits. The eight months of fear and isolation. The day she’d found his journal. The confrontation in the exam room.
Josephine told everything. She didn’t cry. She didn’t stammer. She didn’t look away. She just told the truth, plain and simple, and let it land where it would.
When the prosecutor finished, Vance’s lawyer stood up for cross-examination. He tried the same old tricks—trying to confuse her on dates, trying to get her to admit she’d “led Vance on,” trying to make her sound like a confused kid who’d made the whole thing up.
Josephine shut him down in less than five minutes.
“Mr. Henderson,” she said, when he tried to ask her why she hadn’t told anyone sooner. “I was fifteen years old. A man twice my age, a man my mother worked for, a man everyone in this town respected, told me that if I said a single word about what he was doing to me, my father would go to prison, my mother would go to prison, and I’d end up in foster care. I had no reason to believe he couldn’t make that happen. He had made it happen for twenty years. Who was I supposed to tell? The sheriff who played golf with him every Sunday? The principal who’d gone to Vance for dental work since he was a kid? Or my dad, who was working twelve hours a day just to keep a roof over our heads, who I didn’t want to burden with my problems? I was alone, Mr. Henderson. Completely alone. And I still found a way to stop him. What’s your excuse?”
The whole courtroom went dead silent. Then someone in the back—Chloe, I think—started clapping. The judge banged his gavel and threatened to clear the room, but he was smiling a little when he did it.
Vance’s lawyer sat down. He didn’t have any more questions.
Josephine stepped down from the witness stand and walked straight over to me. I hugged her so hard I think I cracked a rib.
“I’m so proud of you,” I whispered in her ear. “So, so proud.”
The jury deliberated for four hours.
When they came back, the foreman stood up and read the verdict: Guilty on all forty-seven counts.
Sexual exploitation of children. Sex trafficking. Blackmail. Witness tampering. Money laundering. Conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Forty-seven guilty verdicts.
Vance didn’t move. He didn’t show any emotion at all. He just sat there, staring straight ahead, as the judge remanded him into custody without bail, pending sentencing.
As the marshals led him out of the courtroom in handcuffs, he looked over his shoulder. His eyes met Josephine’s. For a second, I thought he was going to say something—threaten her, curse her, anything. But he didn’t. He just looked. And then the doors closed behind him, and he was gone.
Forever.
Sentencing was six weeks later. The judge gave him twelve consecutive life sentences plus four hundred and seventy-five years. No possibility of parole.
“Marcus Vance,” the judge said from the bench, his voice shaking with anger. “You are the worst kind of predator. The kind who hides behind a white coat and a smile, who preys on the most vulnerable among us, who uses trust and power to destroy lives. You have shown no remorse. No empathy. No humanity. You will spend every remaining day of your natural life in a maximum-security federal prison, surrounded by men who will show you exactly the same mercy you showed your victims. Which is to say: none. Take him away.”
We walked out of the courthouse into the bright February sunshine. A dozen reporters were waiting, but we walked right past them. We didn’t need to say anything. The verdict spoke for itself.
That night, we had a party at our house. Mrs. Gable brought her famous peach pie. Jax brought a case of good beer. Chloe, Lila, and a few of the other victims came, along with their families. We ate, we drank, we laughed, we cried. We told stories about how far we’d all come in the last year.
At one point, I looked over and saw Josephine sitting on the couch, surrounded by Chloe and Lila and a few of the other girls, all of them laughing so hard they were snorting. Josephine’s head was thrown back, her pink streak falling in her face, and in that moment, she looked happier than I’d ever seen her.
Rebecca came over and stood next to me, holding two glasses of wine. She handed me one.
“We did good, didn’t we?” she said quietly.
May you like
I thought about it. We’d almost lost everything. Our marriage was still fragile—we slept in separate bedrooms half the time, still went to counseling every week, still had days when we could barely stand to look at each other. But we were trying. For Josephine. For the family we’d once been. For the family we might become again, someday.
“Yeah,” I said. I clinked my glass against hers. “We did good.”
