They started making a low-budget pornographic film. White, who liked to carve wood and write poetry, became friends with them, too. Taylor reunited with a group of classmates from high school who were sexually unconventional, poor, and self-loathing. She recalled her state of mind as “wasted, moody, and easy to snap.” She carried whiskey in her jacket pocket and, when she drank, she acted like a little girl, skipping and singing. “I come from a very suicide-attempting home,” she’d announce to strangers.Īt night, she drank at the R&S, a bar in downtown Beatrice that attracted bikers and misfits. A police officer described her as “some sort of Amazon.” She drew attention to herself by making casually provocative statements. A closeted lesbian, Taylor typically wore bluejeans and men’s black button-front shirts. She enrolled at Beatrice High School and brought up her daughter, Rachel, alone. Taylor, who grew up on a cattle farm in Leicester, North Carolina, followed her boyfriend to Beatrice in 1981, when she was eighteen and pregnant with his child. On their boss’s orders, they stay quiet and pulverize the body. In one, construction workers, digging near an Indian burial ground, have uncovered a corpse. The poet Weldon Kees, who grew up in Beatrice, wrote a series of loosely fictionalized stories about the city. Its economy relies on the state hospital for the mentally disabled, originally called the Nebraska Institute for Feeble-Minded Youth. You are not a bad person.” But the memory of holding the pillow still makes her cry.īeatrice is a city of twelve and a half thousand people in southeastern Nebraska, surrounded by wheat, corn, and soy fields. “You’re not there, JoAnn,” she tries to tell herself. Taylor still worries that her family and friends are secretly thinking, You are a murderer. “Their new beliefs superseded their previous life experiences, like paper covering a rock.” “You have a group of people who are led to share the same delusion, at the same time, with major consequences,” he said. The situation is a study in the malleability of memory: an implausible notion, doubted at first, grows into a firmly held belief that reshapes one’s autobiography and sense of identity.Įli Chesen, a Nebraska psychiatrist who evaluated Taylor and her co-defendants after their release, told me, “They still believed to varying degrees that they had blood on their hands.” He compared the case with the Jonestown Massacre, in 1978, when a cult leader persuaded more than nine hundred people to commit suicide in Guyana. In no other case in the United States have false memories of guilt endured so long. She was one of six people accused of the murder, five of whom took pleas two had internalized their guilt so deeply that, even after being freed, they still had vivid memories of committing the crime. She served more than nineteen years for the crime before she was pardoned. Taylor confessed to the woman’s murder in 1989 and for two decades believed that she was guilty. “I feel for her,” Taylor told me recently. She is gripping the edges of a pillow, more tightly than she means to, and suffocating a sixty-eight-year-old widow. She imagines herself in a small apartment in Beatrice, Nebraska. Taylor has suffered from tactile flashbacks for three decades. When Ada JoAnn Taylor is tense, she thinks she can feel the fabric of a throw pillow in the pads of her fingers.
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