Wayne Haller’s criminal trial was in December.
I testified on a Tuesday. I wore the navy dress again. I sat in the witness box and told twelve strangers exactly what I’d told Detective Moody on March 14th. Every word. I didn’t change a thing.
The prosecutor showed my photographs on a big screen. Wayne Haller’s face in the rain, twisted and furious. The license plate. And a little head of dark curls through the back window, two small hands pressed against the glass.
One of the women on the jury started crying when that picture came up.
The defense lawyer, a different one this time, a court-appointed one, asked me if I wasn’t just a confused old woman who’d jumped to conclusions.
“No, sir,” I said. “I was a woman with a sticker roll who knew that baby’s face. And she told me that wasn’t her daddy. And she was right.”
The jury was out for less than two hours.
Guilty on all counts.
Judge sentenced him to twelve years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Plus additional time for violating the protective order. The DA’s office was still reviewing the witness intimidation charge when I last heard. Teresa says they’ll get to it.
His mother lost her house in Killeen when he violated the terms of his bond. I’m sorry for her. I truly am. That’s a hard thing to lose because of your child. But I can’t carry that one.
Bradley Strand withdrew from representing Wayne Haller the week after my hearing. Teresa told me she heard the State Bar of Texas had some questions for him about that affidavit. I don’t know how that turned out. I didn’t ask. Some things you let go.
The week after the lawsuit was dismissed, my phone rang at nine o’clock on a Monday morning. A Dallas number.
“Mrs. Loretta Bixby?”
“Speaking.”
“Mrs. Bixby, my name is Andrea Whitfield. I’m the regional vice president for ValuMart’s South Central division. I’m calling to apologize to you.”
She apologized for twenty minutes.
I mean it. Twenty minutes. I timed it on the stove clock. She said corporate hadn’t known the details of my termination. She said Gary Darby had written it up as “insubordination and customer harassment” and never mentioned a child, or the police, or a kidnapping. She said she found out about the whole thing from a newspaper reporter in Waco who called the corporate office asking for comment about the lawsuit.
“What happened to you was wrong,” she said. “What you did was right. And we failed you. I’m so sorry.”
I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “Thank you.”
“Mrs. Bixby, we’d like to offer you your job back.”
I was quiet for a long time.
“With a raise,” she added quickly. “Two dollars and fifty cents an hour more than you were making. And full back pay for every week since March 14th. And we’ll reimburse your legal expenses, whatever they were.”
“My lawyer was free,” I said. “Central Texas Legal Aid.”
There was a pause on the line. “Then we’d like to make a donation to Central Texas Legal Aid,” she said. “Would ten thousand dollars be appropriate?”
I thought about Teresa Ochoa’s dying ficus and her cardigan with the worn-through elbows.
“Make it fifteen,” I said.
Andrea Whitfield laughed. “Fifteen it is.”
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