Revenge14 min read
"I didn't kill them" — A courtroom, a bar, and the truth
ButterPicks14 views
I am Joselyn Riley. I grew up being "the perfect child" people compared to others. I went to the city's top university, I was a ten-time debate finalist, I scored almost perfect in the GRE. I should have had a future everyone envied.
"I killed my parents," the headlines screamed.
"I hid the bodies in the freezer."
They were right about the freezer. They were wrong about why. The world had already decided what I was before the law had finished speaking.
"August fourth," I say now, because facts have to live in order.
"I opened all the windows," I told myself quietly. "Let the carbon monoxide go."
I looked at them—my parents—lying on the kitchen floor without moving. For a second a memory—my father's laugh, my mother's tired smile—rose up like a small, cheap coin in the gutter. It was a blink. I felt nothing more than a plan.
"I wrapped them both in plastic bags," I tell the plate glass of the interrogating room. "I wrestled them into the freezer. I had to force my father's arm because rigor had set in." I remember the sound. The freezer door finally shut, heavy as a last judgment. The house smelled like death and detergent.
"Why did you do it, Joselyn?" a reporter asked later, but in the interrogation room the questions were cleaner.
"I took their phones," I said. "Their passwords were my birthday. I sent messages to a few relatives. I asked for money."
"A hundred thousand?" said Henrik Albert, leaning forward in the chair across from me.
"It was five hundred thousand in two accounts," I said. "Fifty thousand made it to my accounts in the next two hours. That bought me ten days I didn't have to count."
"My god," Henrik whispered. "You—"
"Don't moralize for me," I said. "I had to buy those days to do the thing my father started."
In the ten days I had, I transformed into the celebrity they wanted me to be: I rented a convertible Porsche with a fake ID, I wore a Dior dress, I drank until the music dissolved. I went to Gerry Vasquez's club—Vas—and spent like a person with money but no past.
"One night at Vas," I say, "a man sat too close."
"Did you know him?" Henrik asks.
"No." I smile. "I told him he couldn't afford me. He slapped me. I hit him with the beer bottle. Security took us to the back."
"Vas doesn't call the police," I remember telling the scar-faced man who ran the room. "Vas handles things."
"You paid two thousand for the man," Henrik said dryly. "You got out of it with money."
"Money buys forgiveness there," I said. "They called me 'Miss Riley' and 'South Sister'—I liked the sound."
"I suppose that explains some of the footage," Henrik muttered.
They arrested me ten days later. The city lights died for a while as the livestream cameras clicked on. Four officers in blue appeared at my table. Henri—no, Henrik Albert—stood in the doorway of the interrogation room for the final handshake. His face was not the face of a man who wanted to crush me; it was the face of someone who kept his heart in a bottom drawer.
"You are under arrest for the homicide of two people found at your residence," the officer read. "Your parents."
On camera I was a poster child for everything the internet loved to hate: a brilliant, privileged, cruel 00s girl who had murdered for money and pleasure.
"Why did you confess?" friends asked. "Why did you admit anything at all?"
Logan Hicks sits across from me, the lawyer who used to be one of my older law-school brothers. He said, "You agreed to the public? The trial must be public, Joselyn."
"I agreed," I tell him. "Let the world come."
"You are sure?" he said, like he could change my mind.
"Positive," I said. "I want the truth to be messy. I want the truth to be live."
The first trial was a furnace of cameras. They read the charges like a death knell.
"You killed your parents to get money?" the prosecutor asked.
"I had motives that look terrible," I said. "But motives are not verdicts."
I stood on the dock and told a story no one expected. "After I took the money I went to Vas. I met a man who insulted me, called me a fake. I lost my temper. I injured him and then I buried him." The courtroom tittered. "I thought I was remembering someone named P. I wanted to get rid of someone who had humiliated me—"
"Stop," said the judge.
"I was scared," I said. "When the cameras rolled, I said I had done it because the prosecutors were hungry for a confession. I could not think straight. I panicked."
"Then why didn't you retract?" the judge asked.
"Because I had to give the police time to find the person my father had been chasing."
"Who?" the judge asked.
"A teacher," I said. "York Hughes. He had been working to expose an illicit exchange between a school and a club. My father—he was a defense lawyer who prided himself on chasing the small threads that lead to big truths—he found something and kept the footage. He put it on his hard drive. Someone took it. Someone stopped him before he could show it to the world."
There were murmurs in the gallery. Somebody in the back took a photo that went viral in seconds. The prosecutor's mouth tightened.
"Are you claiming someone else killed your parents?" the prosecutor snapped.
"Yes," I said. "And I can show you evidence."
I showed the video clip my father had kept. The clip was a hand, a gloved wrist, reaching to turn on a gas knob. The hand was recorded on one of my father's cameras. The image was grainy but enough. The frame revealed a unique ridge on a cigarette lighter the man used—a lighter brand sold to a small list of companies.
"Find the fingerprint," I told Henrik.
Henrik did what the police do. He stayed awake and fed coffee like a machine. He sent his team after every lead. They found the scar-faced man in the Vas smoking area—Colton Combs, deputy enforcer for Gerry Vasquez. They cuffed him in the dark of a youthless afternoon. They took him to an interrogation room, sat him under the light, and asked about my father's days.
"Who hired you?" Henrik demanded.
"That's none of your business," Colton said, voice like gravel.
"Was Landon Cole involved?" Henrik asked suddenly.
Colton's eyes flicked. "You have no idea who you're poking," he said, the grin dropping.
"We have a video," Henrik said. "The hand in it has a mark that matches your lighter. We have witnesses. We have your presence at Vas the night your fingerprints came into play. Who paid you?"
Colton curled his lip. "Ask Mr. Cole," he said.
"Who is Mr. Cole?" Henrik barked.
"Who else?" Colton sneered. "The one who owns half the town."
It rippled. The name Landon Cole started as a rumor and became a headline in less than an hour.
"I will not let them hide," I said to Logan. "I will not let them own the narrative anymore."
"You're not safe," Logan said. "Once you peel the ribbon on that kind of box, everything that crawls out is poisonous."
"Then let's watch it crawl out," I said.
The arrest of Colton Combs led to the unspooling. With pressure from an alert police team and the bravery of a disgraced informant—Wang Qingming—who had once betrayed my father, the police assembled the frame-by-frame mosaic of a criminal arrangement spanning a nightclub, the school's administration, and an industrial family.
"Who is behind the bar?" people asked.
"It is Gerry Vasquez," was the start. "Gerry owns Vas. He knows a lot." Many shouted. The internet hunted. A small account found a photograph in which the school principal, Edgar Mohammed, sat freezing into an extravagantly young man, smiling over expensive bottles. Another user found purchase documents linking the headmaster's name to a lakeside house. The dust settled over accusations.
"We are not ready to publish," Henrik said. "We still need evidence."
"Publish it," I said. "They are stronger in the dark."
Henrik kept working. He found Wang tied to a trunk in a roadside ditch. Wang confessed. He had detailed the meetings, told who had spoken about "shipments", about "compressors" that moved goods to Europe. He said the names Landon Cole and Cole Neves came up in conversations about "parts" that were never just parts.
"You must promise me," Wang said when he turned state's evidence. "If I speak, they will want me dead. They will send men."
"We will protect you," Henrik said.
He kept his promise.
The city leaned forward. The chief of police walked into the press room. "We can confirm," he said into the rows of microphones, "that this is now a major investigation into cross-border smuggling and organized murder."
"Show us the defendants," a reporter shouted.
"Coming," the chief promised.
One by one the men were called. First, the school principal—Edgar Mohammed—who had been painted as stained and then guilty for the murder of York Hughes. He had been exposed for his role in covering up the link between the school and the bar. He stood in front of cameras with a face like a man whose teeth had been taken out politely.
"Mr. Mohammed, did you know about the underage girls at Vas?" the journalist asked.
"I... I plead not guilty," he said, voice small. "I cared for my students."
"Then why is your signature on those contracts?" the journalist persisted.
"I don't recall," he said. "I thought—"
His voice was swallowed by a chorus of outrage.
Then the big one: Landon Cole and his son Cole Neves. They entered the courtroom like men who had never seen a door without a red ribbon at the top. Their lawyers were nineteen in number and polished like armor. They believed money could buy silence. Instead, money bought attention. The courtroom was full. The press gallery swelled to a blue sea of cameras.
"We charge Landon Cole and Cole Neves with multiple counts," the prosecutor read. "Counts of trafficking, conspiracy, ordering murder."
Landon came to court with the haughty calm of a man who had owned futures since before the futures had been created. He looked like a photograph of old money. Cole Neves—his son—looked like a man who had never learned to be small. They sat side by side as evidence marched onto the stage: invoices, shipping logs, footage, emails, voice messages—each a nail.
"Your Honor, they will say the invoices are a mistake," Landon's lead attorney said. "They will say they are victim to opportunists looking for headlines."
"Then let us see," the prosecutor answered. "Let us show them the video."
We played the video where my father had been filming—my father's hand shook because he was afraid, but the camera kept rolling. A cold hand pulled a gas knob. A face hid behind a hat. The face belonged to someone who worked for Landon Cole. The fingerprint matched. Colton had confessed and given the names. Wang corroborated.
I watched every frame with my palms on my knees and my breath flat.
"Do you recognize your voice?" the prosecutor asked from the witness stand. "Do you recognize your face?"
The film showed a man—Landon's company executive—speaking in a hushed voice about a "shipment" and a "cleanup." The words were small and fatal.
"Why?" someone in the gallery cried. "Why would they do that?"
"Because they make more money when the law is blind," Henrik said. "When men like them own part of the town, they can shape justice like a coin."
The press had been kept back for days to let the police gather evidence. When the case finally burst into public space, it did so like a dam. Social networks exploded. People wanted to see the fall.
Then came the public punishment.
We did not get blood-retribution. We got something worse for them: a moment of total exposure in front of every eye.
Outside the courthouse, the plaza filled with people who had followed the story for months. A stage was set for the press briefing. Cameras perched on cranes, drones hovered like birds starved for motion. The case had been live-streamed in parts; the final judgment—this was not the sentence, only the first day of the trial that would lead to sentencing—was streamed on every major channel.
"Order, please," the judge's clerk called through the echo.
"Let the record show," the prosecutor said into his microphone, "that evidence linking the defendants to coordinated criminal activity will be submitted..."
The crowd outside adjusted their phones, fingers hovering. The two defendants sat in a glassed box. Their faces were pale. They had been warned that the first day could be ugly, but lawyers rarely prepare men for the particular ugliness of witnessed downfall.
The prosecutor requested that the courtroom be kept open, and that viewers could watch on live stream. The judge agreed. Cameras panned across the faces of the crowd, froze on the profile of my mother's photograph left on the jury box, and then zoomed onto Landon Cole.
"Mr. Cole," the prosecutor said, "we will play a recording. This is a business meeting from lasts year in which you and your son speak about 'parcels' and 'purity.' We will play the video of your orders regarding the removal of an inconvenient man."
The playback began. In the auditorium the sound was loud enough to flay leather. The voice on the tape said, "We cannot risk exposure. Remove the problem. Make it look like an accident."
Landon's mouth went slack. He looked not at the speaker but at his own hands. For a man who had always had handlers to smooth his face, the rawness of his shock was new.
"That's not me," he mouthed. "That's not my voice."
"Mr. Cole," the prosecutor asked calmly, "whose voice do you say that is?"
"It is doctored," Landon's attorney cried.
"Explain," the judge demanded.
The prosecutor played a second recording. It hadn't been doctored. It was a file recovered from a server controlled by Cole Holdings. The company's automated assistant transcribed the meeting. The room swallowed as the voice said exactly what the earlier tape had. The judge turned his head slowly. Cole's eyes reflected fluorescent lights like a child's eyes reflecting streetlamps; he had no place to hide.
People outside the courthouse began to chant. "Shame!" they called. "Shame!" The chant rose and then broke into a thousand camera feeds.
"Denial," the prosecutor said quietly into his microphone. "Now we have the ledger, the shipping invoices, the signature approvals."
The prosecutor then pointed to Cole Neves' phone. "We also have a message," he said. "From Cole Neves to a trusted man: 'Get it done.'"
Cole Neves laughed once, a brittle sound. "That could be anyone!" he shouted. He looked at his father for help. Father looked away.
A voice from the gallery cried, "You killed two good people!"
"I didn't!" Cole Neves screamed. "I have nothing to do with—"
The crowd outside demanded to be let in. They wanted to see the faces of the men who had been accused of sitting above law. They wanted to spit. They wanted to record the shock and send it to every social feed.
The judge called for order. "This is an open court," he said. "This is where the law is done."
"Then let it be public law," a woman yelled, and the screen showed her face large and red.
In the box, Landon Cole's complexion had been stripped of color. He went through the stages of denial like chapters read fast. First the silent smugness. Then surprise. Then the brittle denial. The lawyer's mouth moved; his hands searched for legal phrases like bandages. When the proof piled up beyond even legal double-think, the first heat of panic came.
"This is fabricated. This is a set-up!" Landon's lead counsel screamed. "This evidence is tainted!"
"Objection!" the defense cried, each lawyer a trained hawk.
The judge banged his gavel until his knuckles whitened. "Sustained in part, but the recordings and internal documents are admitted."
The cameras had already been live. The world watched as Landon Cole's last shields fell. His employees looked at him like a man who had been given too much power and then shown it couldn't stop the truth from finding him.
Cole Neves stood when the accountant testified. He tried to look fierce. He tried to shout. Each attempt to control the narrative slipped like oil through fingers.
"Why did you pay the men?" the prosecutor asked.
"I didn't," Cole Neves lied.
"Then why did your ledger show transfers to 'cleanup' accounts?" the prosecutor asked, holding up a ledger torn open like evidence from a crime novel.
"For legal services," the son blurted.
Laughs in the crowd. Applause. Someone yelled, "You bought silence. You bought murder."
I watched them. My chest was tight but steady. This was not joy. It was not satisfaction. It was a small, bitter settling of an account my father had left open when someone had slammed a hand over his mouth.
The judge, when he finally leaned forward, looked older. He said, "This court will not assign guilt now. That is for the jury. But make no mistake: the evidence will be evaluated in public."
Outside the courtroom, the world moved as one—comments, hashtags, and fingers tapped faster than breathing. The two men were not dragged through fire. They were placed under the most modern damnation: the light of cameras, the sentence of social memory. Every lie they told was recorded. Every denial was rebroadcast. Their reputations eroded in real time.
When the verdict finally came months later—two life sentences for the trafficking and the ordering of murder, full corporate seizures, their names scrubbed from company boards—it felt like the country had delivered a public excoriation.
The public punishment I had been promised was not a mob lynching. It was a gallery of consequences: the companies they once owned were stripped, their portraits removed from office walls, boardroom chairs empty; investors pulled funds in public statements; news anchors read the indictment like scripture. At the sentencing hearing the gallery was bursting.
"How do you feel?" a journalist asked Landon as he walked out with guards.
He spat in the face of the camera. He tried to look angry. He had once thought he could buy the world. He had spent a lifetime building a façade. Now he was a man whose papers read "convicted."
"Denial," he mouthed, and then the eyes watered.
"Please!" Cole Neves begged on national television. "This isn't what it looks like. I'm sorry!"
He tried to grab at the lens of the cameras. The public recorded every second. He fell from smugness to pleading, then to a blankness I had seen before on the faces of smaller predators.
People in the courthouse packed out into the square and cheered. A woman in the front row cried out, "For my daughter!" Another man posted a video of a board meeting where he'd been forced to sign a deposition and wrote, "Finally."
Edgar Mohammed—also guilty—was forced to step down from the school. Parents marched. The school principal lost his title, his car, his friends. He gave a short televised apology that read like a script: "I thought I covered things that I shouldn't have." But his words had no weight. His name was on every news scroll.
The punishments were different. Landon Cole lost his empire and his freedom. Cole Neves lost his status and was given a life sentence. Gerry Vasquez, the club owner, watched his businesses get raided, his licenses revoked, his safe cracked. Edgar Mohammed lost his job, his home audits found discrepancies, and he was convicted in court for the murder and advocacy to conceal. Colton Combs (the scar-faced man) was imprisoned with long years ahead and a broken jaw from one night when an inmate decided he didn't deserve his face.
Their reactions were the human trajectory of a fall: a smile that never reaches the eyes, a slid denial, a frantic scramble for lawyers, a humiliated plea, and finally a hollow collapse. The public watched each stage. They took photos, they recorded, they whispered down timelines.
"Is this justice?" someone asked me in the parking lot after the verdict parade, the smell of roasted chestnuts in the air.
"It is something," I said. "It is the law catching up. It is the small, quiet settling my father never got a chance to see."
A year later the court sentenced me. For destroying evidence, for the fraud, for the messy crimes that grew from panic, I was given a short term: one year, because the court considered context and my cooperation. I served my time. I walked out different. I changed my name and left the city like someone shedding a tired skin.
When I returned, I found small comforts. Victoria Thomas—the wife of York Hughes—invited me to dinner. Henrik Albert came. Logan Hicks came. We ate like survivors. Victoria said, "You are family now."
"I know," I said, holding Henrik's hand when he squeezed it under the table.
"Don't smile too soon," Henrik whispered under his breath.
I laughed. "I won't."
The world had tried to kill me with its verdict. Instead, the world had torn open someone else's crimes, and the light had been a public punishment for those who thought themselves above consequence. My parents would never come back. But the men who had used money and cruelty to silence truth were exposed in the kind of punishment that matters now: public unmasking, loss, disgrace, and the slow, relentless mechanisms of law.
When I stand now before a small table, I do it differently. I do it quietly, with a memory of the freezer's heavy door and the moment the market of sin had to sell itself for parts. I do it with the knowledge that public punishment is not always flames. Sometimes it is a thousand cameras and a hundred thousand fingers pointing. Sometimes it is the emptiness left in a boardroom where a man's portrait used to hang.
"Do you regret?" Victoria asked one night, as wind moved the curtains.
"I regret the cold," I said. "I regret what took them. But I do not regret expecting justice."
We lifted our forks.
Outside, the city moved as it always did—impatient, hungry, ready for the next story. Inside, at our table, we made one small peace.
The End
— Thank you for reading —