answer. It was part of the rules, along with, Do not contact me first.
Marie remembers a time when Aaron was talking to Maggie on the phone and as usual the girl was being dramatic and Aaron’s phone was dying so he said, Here, take down my wife’s number and call it if we get cut off and you need to get hold of me.
So that’s why Maggie had Marie’s number. It was not because Aaron gave it to her to program in as Do not answer, because it is my wife.
During the cross-examination, the court finds out that Marie Knodel didn’t cooperate with the district attorney’s investigation. The prosecution asks her why she elected not to be interviewed by the Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Marie says it was because she had heard things about Mike Ness, the lead investigator for the State. And on the phone he didn’t come across to her as objective. With her own training in law enforcement, she says, she would have to be a dummy to speak to him without a lawyer present.
Byers says that, with her training, Marie should have known that if she’d told Ness the same things she told the court under oath, she wouldn’t have to be here at all. Her testimony was so damaging to Maggie’s timeline and claims that if they had Marie’s side of the story during the investigation, they might never have brought the case to trial in the first place.
“I didn’t think that it would,” she says.
Later, in his closing statements, Byers will intimate what she may have gained by saving her story for the courtroom. During discovery Marie, via her husband’s lawyer, could have had access to all the facts of the case. Byers will point out the fact that Marie could have known she would have the ability to study the prosecution’s timeline and the witnesses’ interviews. Then she could tailor her testimony to counter Maggie Wilken’s claims. Because of her training in law enforcement, she might have known from the beginning that she had only one chance to tell her story, the most important one of her family’s life.
“For instance,” Byers continues, “the fact that your cell phone number was apparently voluntarily given by you to Maggie Wilken.”
“I didn’t give it to her,” says Marie.
“You gave permission for your husband to?”
“Yeah.”
“And the State has never known that fact until the time of the trial?”
“No.”
“Why would your cell phone number be in Maggie’s phone under the contact listing of Don’t?”
“I don’t know.”
Byers asks if any other students had her phone number and she says no. He asks if she knew about the calls and how long they were. She says she knew there were long calls but didn’t know the precise durations. Byers asks if she knew there were twenty-three calls after ten at night.
“I was aware of the phone calls,” she says.
“Every time I ask you a question, then you pop back, I knew there were phone calls. My question is, Did you know there were twenty-three calls as late as after ten at night?”
“No.”
The room goes very quiet, feeling the weight of that response.
Next he asks about the layout of the house. He asks about the sheets on the bed downstairs and the colors of the comforters. The reason he is asking is that Maggie Wilken has made a drawing of the house to prove she has been there, but the defense is arguing that she could have drawn the picture from photographs posted by the Realtor on the internet. In any case the Knodels live in a new house now, in the nicer part of town, near the new school, Sheyenne, where Aaron now teaches. New napkins and napkin holders. A new child.
The trial breaks for the weekend. When it resumes on Monday, Byers repeats much of what he asked on Friday to make sure the facts are fresh in the jurors’ minds. Byers repeats one of Hoy’s questions, asking Marie if she was ever out of town on weekends for work. She again says no. How about not for work, says Byers. He means at the peace officers’ bowling tournament on a certain Saturday in Mandan, a tournament she had attended prior to 2009 and also after 2009. She says that, yes, she went almost every year but not that year.
When asked, Marie reaffirms that she knew about the calls. Byers asks, Did you know about ninety-odd calls, and all those hours, to which she replies she didn’t know