STRANGER THAN FICTION

Randle Aubrey
Aug 24, 2017 · 4 min read
Michelle Carter. (PHOTO: Boston.com)

Michelle Carter’s manslaughter trial for convincing her boy/friend Conrad Roy to commit suicide would probably have been one of the more compelling stories of 2016 were it not for Darth Cheeto’s insurgent presidential race sucking what oxygen remained in the news cycle after the Standing Rock Rebellion and a thousand dead celebrities. Thankfully, Esquire had the foresight to keep someone on the trial beat until the bitter end; and Jesse Barron’s definitive account of the whole affair, innocuously titled “The Girl From Plainville,” is as compelling as it is heartbreaking:

In the winter of 2014, Conrad was suspended from school. They accused him of fighting. Thinking it might help to be around someone close to him, Conrad went to visit Tom Gammell at Fitchburg State. The boys were tight, but their relationship followed narrow lines: They were baseball teammates and played Madden together.

The visit was a bust. “I haven’t slept good,” he texted Lynn. “I’m feeling anxious I’m feeling down. I don’t know why I can’t just be normal.” He texted Michelle: “I wasn’t comfortable and I’m feeling depressed again, and feels like everythings switched around.”

That June, Michelle went to McLean Hospital in Belmont to be treated for anorexia. She told Conrad that he should join her, to get help for his depression. Being admitted to McLean, she said, “would be so good for you and we would get thru our issues together. Think about it. You aren’t gonna get better on your own, you know it no matter how many times you tell yourself you are. You need professional help like me, people who know how to treat it and fix it.”

Conrad didn’t take her up on it. Three weeks later, he told her he was suicidal.

“We should be like Romeo and Juliet,” he said.

“I’d love to be your Juliet.”

“But you know what happens at the end.”

“OH YEAH FUCK NO!” Michelle wrote back. “WE ARE NOT DYING. That’s not funny. I thought you were trying to be romantic.”

“I know I tricked ya,” Conrad said.

On June 29, Michelle began to conspire with him. “What about hanging yourself or stabbing yourself?” she said. The next day, she asked: “Why don’t you just drink bleach?” Conrad eagerly participated. He found websites that gave you the odds on different methods. “Carbon monoxide or helium gas. I want to deprive myself of oxygen,” he said. “I WANT TO DIE.” He worried about leaving his family. Michelle said that if her kid sister died, she would be “extremely upset for a week or two” but would get over it. “Are you gonna leave a note for me?” she asked.

On July 3, Conrad told Michelle that he was going to do it. Then he was awake the next morning. She was furious; she thought he was jerking her around. “YOU KEEP PUSHING IT OFF!” She gave him other ideas. A gunshot to the head had a 99 percent chance of working. Hanging, 89 percent. “Carbon monoxide is the best option,” she told him, “if you fall asleep in your car while it’s running.” Conrad worried that rescuers might inhale the CO and get sick. Michelle said it wasn’t a problem. Conrad said he was doing circles in his mind about where to go. What if someone found him before he died?

“You better not be bullshitting me and saying you’re gonna do this and then purposely get caught,” Michelle said. She asked whether, when he died, she could say she was his girlfriend. Conrad said okay.

On the evening of July 12, he pulled his truck out of Lynn’s driveway with a water pump he’d collected from his grandfather’s shed. He pulled into the lot behind Kmart. It was dusk. He spoke to Michelle on the phone twice. Late the next afternoon, Conrad II called Lynn. “There’s yellow tape around our son’s truck,” he said.

No recordings of either call between Michelle and Conrad existed, but the detective located an account of them, in Michelle’s own words. Two months after Conrad’s death, she sent her friend Samantha Boardman what looked like a confession. “I could have stopped him,” the text read. “I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car because it was working and he got scared and I fucking told him to get back in. I could of stopped him but I fucking didn’t. All I had to say was I love you.”

The piece is long, but morbidly fascinating for all of its moral ambiguity, along with series of competing narratives that all fail to account for Michelle Carter’s motives. Was she trying to kill him as a desperate ploy for attention? Was she just trying to help him in the only way she knew how? How serious was any of this, really? The whole story asks more questions than it answers, about everything from morality to literal case law.

If there’s was ever a story tailor made for a true crime docuseries like Serial or Making A Murderer, it’s this one. At this risk of sounding grotesquely voyeuristic, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

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Randle Aubrey

Written by

Founder/host of Pink Elephants, the 100-proof podcast. Blogger-at-large. I solemnly swear I am up to no good. Find me on Twitter (if you dare) at @100proofpink.

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