The Unraveling

What happened at the Thompson house that night has never made sense to Clarance: not through twenty years of sitting with it, of turning it over in his mind, of trying to reconstruct from the outside a sequence of events he had no part in. The prosecution avoided, at every turn, the most important fact about the man they were using as their star witness: Ronald had admitted to police that he was so high that night he was blacking out.

Ronald had been sent home from Walmart earlier that day because he was visibly unable to function. He told investigators himself what was in his system: ecstasy, cocaine, meth, Xanax, likely marijuana on top of everything else. Xanax alone is a blackout drug. In sufficient quantities, it erases hours. And yet this same man, who told police outright he could not remember what had happened, became the foundation of a death penalty case.

Ronald’s account changed every time he told it. First, he said he wasn’t there at all. Then he said he was present but unarmed. Then, trying to minimize his exposure, he admitted to having the .22 pistol, believing it was the least culpable of the weapons. He was wrong. When investigators told him that the .22 was the weapon that had killed ten-year-old Kayla Burchett, the interrogation video captures what happened next: Ronald’s head dropped. He sat there with that knowledge for a long moment. He knew what he had just said. The footage exists. It can be watched.

The prosecution made a deal with him anyway. In exchange for his testimony against Clarance, he would avoid the death penalty. He received three life sentences: two with the possibility of parole, one without, for Kayla’s murder. When he realized the full weight of what he was facing, he tried to appeal. The court denied him.

He couldn’t be both a coerced bystander and a cold-blooded murderer.