the case against the doctor

Finally after seven years of wrongful incarceration, an innocent
man, convicted of murdering his wife of three years would get his
appeal and I was determined that he would succeed and attain his
freedom.
Doctor Josiah Adi was a reputable cardiologist and a very handsome man
in his early forties. A sartorial dresser; he was always well turned
out in expensive suits, crisp shirts and leather shoes with neatly
buffed and manicured finger and toe-nails. He towered above six feet
and with his broad shoulders, baldhead and soft brown eyes, he appeared
more like an entertainer than a doctor and indeed; in the few years
before his practice blossomed, he had released a moderately successful
Rhythm and Blues album. A year later, he met and married Tina, first
daughter of an eccentric multi-billionaire real-estate mogul. She was a
mousy-looking thing and two years older than her husband but no one
could fault their mutual devotion and love. With his wife's fortunes as
a foundation, Josiah opened a huge and well-equipped specialist
hospital, which rapidly became the haunt of the rich and famous.
You would be forgiven for wondering why I am so enthralled by the good
doctor and the circumstances of his wife's murder but I will shortly
explain. If modesty will permit, I will tell you that I am considered
to be one of the bright, 'hot-shot' lawyers in the country and I happen
to be only twenty-eight years old. Also, I am passable in appearance (I
think!).
Ever since I heard the events surrounding Doctor Adi's arrest on the
news two years ago, I was intrigued by his story and carefully started
to unearth the real facts of the case. Of course, it had nothing at all
to do with his dark good looks. I was fascinated by his steadfast
refusal to admit his culpability even when the police offered to reduce
his sentence from ten years to five if he opted for the guilty plea.
That suggested to me that this man considered himself innocent of this
crime.
The particulars are thus:
Eight years ago, on the evening of the 28th of April, at 15 minutes
past eight, Mrs. Tina Adi's battered corpse was discovered lying in a
pool of blood on the polished wood floor of their hallway. The trail of
blood led from the garage below, up a short flight of stairs to the
hallway. Beside her lifeless body, lay a bloody claw hammer, which had
obviously been used to commit this gruesome murder. No fingerprints
were found on the claw hammer; clearly the murderer had won gloves.
There was no evidence of a break-in, except for the broken window in
the garage.
Now, I will state the prosecution's case against the doctor.
Doctor Josiah Adi was arrested a few months later and a year after; he
was tried in a court of law and found guilty of first-degree murder.
They claimed that he had the most to gain from her death because she
had willed all the fortune inherited from her father to her husband. He
was nothing without her: all the right connections and immense wealth
he possessed was due to his wife. Obviously, he had married her for her
money and when his patience had run out, he decided to kill her and
have all the money to himself. Worse still, they had a witness who saw
him enter the back door of the Adi's mansion at ten minutes past eight.
Tiny spatters of Tina's blood were also found on Doctor Josiah's
clothing.
With all this evidence accumulated by the prosecution, the case against
him appeared very bleak.
His defense was that at thirty minutes past seven, he had left his wife
at home and headed with some colleagues to a fashionable restaurant,
which was a ten-minute drive from his home. He returned at nine that
night to discover her dead body in the hallway. Overcome with grief, he
knelt down beside the body to check for any signs of life. That was
probably when some of her blood got onto his clothes. His colleagues
would corroborate his time of exit from the restaurant?
Well, they did corroborate it but by that time, the police were
thoroughly convinced of his guilt. Persuaded that the eminent doctors
were lying, the police hit on an ingenious scheme to interview each of
them one by one. After each had spent forty-five minutes experiencing
the police's unique interrogation methods, they were suddenly no longer
certain if Doctor Adi had left the restaurant at nine p.m. Also, none
of the waiters on duty that day could positively identify him and the
police interviewed all but one. Unfortunately, the missing waiter was
involved in a serious hit-and-run accident on the evening of that
fateful dinner and fell into a coma two nights later.
And that was a summary of the case against Doctor Josiah Adi.
But what intrigued me were the facts in his favour. One day, I was
struck with a hunch to dig further into the story of the witness who
claimed to have seen him entering his house through the back door at
ten minutes past eight and it paid off handsomely. Five years into the
doctor's sentence, I managed to hunt down the witness's daughter, as
the witness herself had died some months before of bowel cancer. From
the daughter, I learned that she had been at loggerheads with her
mother, even up till her mother's death. She cooperated totally;
stating that her mother had lived in the house beside the Adi's for
three years and throughout that time, was overwhelmingly besotted with
Doctor Adi. He did not appear to return her feelings, despite her
desperate phone calls and e-mails. Slowly, this unrequited passion
evolved into hatred and from then on, her mother swore to make him
pay!
Perhaps, I thought, she was bitter enough to implicate the doctor with
a lie?
The next day, I drove to the posh, tree-lined neighbourhood where the
Adi's lived, though their three-story mansion was now uninhabited. I
was more interested in the house next door. Careful not to arouse
suspicion from any prying eyes, I strolled to the back of the Adi's
house and glanced to my right. Sure enough, the window of the next
house faced this direction, though it was on the second-floor and about
twenty metres away. I earnestly wished I could climb up to that window,
look down on this back door and estimate the accuracy of the range of
my vision from that distance. Would the embittered witness have been
able to clearly identify the features of the man at the back door as
those of Doctor Adi? There was an element of doubt here?
Finally, I had enough facts to argue reasonable doubt in court.
By this time, the good doctor and I had been corresponding regularly
and I was struck by the fluency and passion in his letters. Initially
he was skeptical and I did not blame him. For years, he had been
insisting on his innocence and calling for an appeal and no one
listened. But when I began detailing the outcome of my investigations
into his case, his letters slowly warmed up and soon, he was writing me
bits of poetry and revealing snippets about his life in prison. I was
amazed by his unflinching hope in his eventual release, despite his
wrongful conviction. All he cared about was clearing his name. It riled
him so much that his patients would think he was guilty of murdering
Tina!
But we did not always talk about depressing things? he was extremely
curious about me, drilling me about my personal life. When I explained
to him that my last boyfriend had dumped me two months to our wedding,
he was deeply sympathetic and encouraging. Was it surprising that I
fell for him hard? He soulfully outlined how much he sincerely believed
that I would be the only one capable of whitewashing his reputation.
Poignantly, he penned that he was dreaming of the day when he would be
free to embark on a romantic first date with me. My heart trilled with
anticipation; I could not wait for my darling Josiah's release!
Cries of outrage welcomed the revelations about the police's coercive
interrogation of the medical doctors who provided the alibi for Josiah
on the evening of the murder. It was all over the news! The public
protested en-masse: 'how dare the officers of the law bully innocent
citizens and obstruct the course of justice? Heads must roll!'
And heads did roll. The commissioner of police was forced to resign in
the wake of these degrading allegations. This, more than any other
fact, contributed to Josiah's new appeal and his eventual release three
years before the end of his sentence. During this period, he had
proposed to me and I gleefully accepted.
Our wedding day was gloriously perfect. As I stood beside my tall,
strong lover and gazed into his liquid, charcoal-black eyes, I still
found it hard to believe that this god-like specimen of manhood was
going to be mine forever.
A week after our whirlwind honeymoon in the Cayman Islands, I was
preparing lunch in the kitchen and my husband was napping in the
bedroom upstairs when the phone sitting on a table in the hallway rang.
This phone was connected to another located in our bedroom and I did
not want Josiah's nap to be disturbed. I was in the process of turning
over some pieces of chicken that were frying in hot oil so I could not
immediately dash over to the phone. The caller did not seem to mind
that the phone had not yet been picked up as the ringing continued
insistently. Some seconds later, I reached the shrilling phone, out of
breath.
" Hello?" I muttered impatiently into the handset.
For a minute, no one answered but then, just before I was about to slam
the phone down in irritation, a whispery voice asked:
" Am I speaking to the lady of the house? Is that the new Mrs.
Adi?"
For the record, nothing irritates me more during phone conversations
than when a caller asks me to identify myself. I always want to yell: '
You called me, remember?'
But this time, I just snapped, " May I know who is speaking?"
A brief hesitation and then, " I am the waiter who attended your
husband and his friends at the restaurant on the day of the murder. I
am only just recovering after being in coma for many months and after
that, battling with semi-paralysis of my lower body for years. Last
year, I regained the use of some of my limbs and slowly started
rebuilding my life. I have been following the doctor's case and your
involvement in it and at first; I decided not to contact you. But my
conscience has troubled me immensely and I will not forgive myself
until I let you know."
At this point, my curiosity was aroused. I remembered the missing
waiter who was never interviewed by the police. If he was calling to
confirm my husband's innocence with some new evidence, then he was too
late. But it would not hurt to hear what he had to say.
" What is it that you want to tell me about that night?"
His next words congealed my blood and filled me with dread.
He explained how he was assigned to their table when the group entered
the restaurant at half-past seven that evening. After taking their
drink and food orders, he returned a few minutes later with the drinks
to find that the one of the doctors was not on his seat. That doctor
was Josiah Adi. The others at the table explained that their missing
colleague was outside, making a call on his mobile and would come in
soon. But throughout the time he ferried plates of food and extra
drinks to their table, the doctor's place remained vacant. He stated
that he noticed this Doctor's absence because he remembered wondering
about the length and the urgency of the gentleman's phone call while
his food grew cold.
Through stiff lips, I dared to ask this vital question:
" How long was he absent from the table?"
The answer left me shuddering in devastation.
" About twenty or thirty minutes?"
These words suddenly danced in my head: enough time for him to jump
into a taxi and head for his house, kill his wife and then return to
the restaurant!
Without warning, my ears picked up a sound on the stairs behind me.
Fearfully, I swerved around to see my husband standing silently on the
bottom step of the stairs. I gazed into his face and at this precise
moment, I knew my time on earth was up.
A queer light bearing more than a hint of madness shone from his cold
eyes while a knowing grin twisted his lips. At that moment, I knew with
a certainty that he had eavesdropped on my phone conversation with the
waiter. The handset fell from my suddenly limp grip.
He stood stiffly, hands by his side, still watching me like a ravenous
hawk would do to a defenseless chicken and at this point, I noticed the
thickly woven rope loosely wrapped around his right hand. The moment he
observed my glance at the rope, he slowly and tauntingly unfurled it
and then pulled it tight with his hands, rendering it taut and very,
very lethal.
With the rope held up in front of him, he advanced.