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I’ve been holding off on this post for a while due to both personal and legal considerations, but I think now is the time to put it out there. Maybe by putting this tale in writing it will help me to make sense of it all.

I met Andrew Douglas Dalzell some time during my junior year of high school. He was a sort of peripheral character in my life then, a friend of a friend. I can’t tell you exactly the first time we met but the earliest memory I have of him is he and my friend Donnie smoking a cigarette outside one of the classrooms, posing in their black leather jackets like a pair of James Dean’s with chips on their shoulders.

Some time during my senior year in high school Andrew’s father died. I still didn’t know Andrew very well but I went to his funeral with Donnie as a show of support for the friend of my friend.

I really didn’t begin to know him as a friend until after I had left for college. During the long summers at home I would spend a lot of time hanging out with Donnie and Andrew, shooting pool at the masse lounge, watching movies, or just screwing around as 19 year old guys do when they have some time on their hands and nothing specific to do with it.

Andrew was always a clown and a charmer in his own way. He was also the quintessential “bad apple.â€? He dropped out of high school and lived at home with his mother. He would steal things if he thought he could get away with it, although never from friends. He wasn’t even able to hold down the most simplistic jobs– He’d either get fired for taking stuff or failing to get to work on time. He was a pathological liar who would make up a lie and stick with it as if it was the gospel until it was discovered to be false. Sometimes I felt like I was hanging out with a cross between a 4 year old child and a guest on the Jerry Springer show.

Despite his obvious problems Andrew was a good guy to know. He was entertaining and always willing to help out others, assuming he could do so at no cost to himself. I think everyone knows someone who is a failure at nearly everything yet somehow manages to struggle on with a smile on his face, the proverbial lovable loser. That’s him. That’s Andrew. I hate to admit it, but in my own mind I often considered him my karmic payback for being moderately successful in my own life. I helped him where I could, a few bucks here and there, a job interview at wherever I was working if I could swing it, and as much advice as I could offer on how to turn his life around.

In the past few years Andrew seemed to make progress. His mother got re-married and the new father type figure seemed to do him good. He had moved into his own place, finished his high school degree, held down a job, and had a steady girlfriend. I was happy to see him finally making headway in “the real world� as they say.

Then it all went horribly wrong.

The first thing I heard was from our mutual friend Donnie via instant message. He told me Andrew had been arrested by the police and was being charged with murder.

The next morning this news article told the story:

CARRBORO — Nearly seven years after Deborah Leigh Key was last seen outside a downtown bar and pool hall, a man who had been a suspect in her disappearance and presumed death was arrested Thursday and charged with second-degree murder.
Andrew Douglas Dalzell was booked into Orange County jail, according to police. Investigators, who have questioned the suspect previously, arrested Dalzell after a search Sept. 2 of his Carrboro apartment and a search Wednesday of a Lincoln County home where he was staying with friends.
During the search Sept. 2, initiated on an unrelated matter, investigators discovered evidence they believed to be related to the Key case, police said. With that information, investigators obtained a warrant to search the Lincoln County home, where sheriff’s deputies made the arrest without incident…(rest of article cut, click the link above to read it)

There is nothing in the entire world as scary as thinking you know someone, and finding out you may have been dead wrong. Could Andrew really have done this? I never knew him as violent, quite the opposite in fact– he was a coward. Every time I had seen him threatened with violence he would back down, or outright run away. He was very destructive, but never dangerous. I knew from talking to Donnie and from my own experience that Andrew had become extremely depressed following his fathers death, was he that affected that he could have killed someone? I wasn’t sure. I was so depressed and confused that I had to take a few days off of work.

My first reaction was to try to do something to help him, but really there wasn’t anything I could do. I don’t make enough to offer monetary support, I had no first (or even second) hand knowledge of the events of that evening (I was 1/2 way across the state in Asheville studying the night it happened), and I now live in Chicago so I couldn’t even go visit him in North Carolina. I was left to simply follow the case as best I could and try not to stress out too much. It was out of my hands.

As the weeks and months went by various facts came to light. The story unfolded like something out of law and order, a coerced confession, a fake arrest warrant, posturing by the police, and a controversial judgment on vital evidence. My emotions went on a little roller coaster ever time there was a new development, but there was still nothing I could do.

Then came Christmas.

Christmas is always a special time of year for most folks. As the holiday neared I made a resolution to visit Andrew since I was going to be in the general area visiting my folks for a week and I couldn’t stand the thought of him sitting alone in a cell while the rest of the world opened presents and drank eggnog. After doing some research, I found that the only possible day for me to visit him was Christmas day. “Christmas day in Jail!â€? I moaned to friends, “This is going to be weird, and probably depressing as hell.â€? I had images of more scenes from law and order; a giant industrial building filled with screaming inmates. I thought I was prepared for the worst.

Christmas day I left my parents house where I was staying and made the 40-minute drive to Hillsboro. The jail it’s self was a small and unassuming building made of brick. It looked more like a library than a jail. I walked in and a police officer behind a heavy plate glass window took my ID and checked it against her list of allowed visitors. “Go in through the door on your right”, she said.

The door led to a small hallway. Along one side of the hall were panes of glass and barred windows to an interior room. At each station there was a small steel seat. I sat down and within a few moments Andrew walked into the other room, handcuffed and accompanied by a guard.

I was so shocked to actually see him, in his orange jump suit and slippers that I don’t remember much of the conversation. The cold hard reality of it hit me all at once seeing him like that. We had to shout through the glass because the jail had removed the phones (apparently one of the inmates decided it would be fun to try to assault one of the other inmates with one, so the handsets were removed.) “I thought I was ready for this� I thought to my self, obviously I wasn’t.

I was most affected by the change in his demeanor. He had the look you see on homeless guys and street derelicts, a certain vacancy in the eyes that says “I’m not living in the same reality you are man, and it sucks in here”. He was bored, no he was way beyond bored, and he was starting to lose his mind a little. With nothing to do but reflect on his life for 108 days, I can’t say I blame him.

We talked for a while and before I knew it his allotted time was up. As the guards were about to take him out he reached through the interior bars and touched the Plexiglas, I touched it too and I could just barely feel the warmth of his hand on the other side. As I left the building I thought about that touch– I have never felt so utterly helpless in my entire life. It was as if I had become a ghost somehow, capable only of observing the events in the world but unable to effect them.

==

Andrew is still in jail. A judge will rule on his confession on January 10th (Or so they say. There have been delays innumerable thus far and I have no reason to believe it won’t happen again). People who know this story, or parts of it ask me “Do you think he did it?� The answer is; I hope not, but I just don’t know.

It’s a terrible feeling not knowing, one that I have started to get used to, as strange as that sounds.

This hasn’t been easy to write, and I apologize if it has come out as a rambling mess but sometimes you just have to get it out of your system– purge it to the world and hope that feels better.

Special thanks to John Allore who’s blog has helped me follow this case.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 3rd, 2005 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.