My wife was the dri­ving force behind my deci­sion to become a lawyer, but John­ny Car­son actu­al­ly clinched the deal. My wife and I were school teach­ers at the time. We thought we couldn’t sup­port a fam­i­ly on our salaries, so we looked around for alternatives.

“Why don’t you go to law school?” she said.

“Too much tedious detail, por­ing over com­pli­cat­ed doc­u­ments, wrestling with bor­ing rules and regulations.” 

“I bet you’d like it.”

“I don’t think so.”

Over the next few months, she sug­gest­ed law school again and again. I brushed her off each time with­out telling her the real rea­son. I thought I wasn’t smart enough. My G.P.A in col­lege was a lack­lus­ter B-/C+. I didn’t think I could sur­vive a law school cur­ricu­lum, but my wife believed I could do it and I’d learned to trust her judgment. 

Her gen­tle prod­ding had almost over­come my lack of con­fi­dence by the time John­ny Car­son got into the act. I was watch­ing The Tonight Show when he intro­duced F. Lee Bai­ley, Richard “Race­horse” Haynes, and Melvin Bel­li as the best lawyers in the coun­try. They sparred with one anoth­er. Bai­ley was impres­sive, but the oth­er two came across as com­plete duds. Years lat­er I learned they were both great lawyers, but that night Race­horse was slow­er than a crip­pled mule and old Mel was almost comatose. If those two guys could rise to the top of the legal pro­fes­sion, I thought I’d be able to scratch out a mod­est liv­ing at it.

UVA’s law school, one of the best in the nation, was right down the road, but I fig­ured my G.P.A. would dis­qual­i­fy me. My wife’s friend worked for the Dean of Admis­sions. She said the law school was required to take half its stu­dents from Vir­ginia res­i­dents and the appli­cant pool for that group was thin. She thought I would make the cut.

I applied. UVA turned me down. They put me on a wait­ing list, but the call nev­er came. Our friend thought I should try again. “Com­ing off this year’s wait­ing list,” she said, “they’ll give you pri­or­i­ty.” I took her advice, taught for anoth­er year, and reap­plied. As she pre­dict­ed, UVA accept­ed me.

We pen­ciled out a bud­get. My wife’s salary and the small amount we had saved up would cov­er tuition and liv­ing expens­es if we pinched pen­nies. That sum­mer, to cut costs, we moved from our house in Crozet to an effi­cien­cy apart­ment in Charlottesville.

At law school ori­en­ta­tion in the fall, every­one I met was an Ivy League School Phi Beta Kap­pa, a vet­er­an who had served as an offi­cer in Viet­nam, or an M.B.A. grad­u­ate. I had been reject­ed on my first try for admis­sion, and I seemed to be the least qual­i­fied stu­dent in the incom­ing class. I fig­ured I stood a good chance of flunk­ing out even if I gave it every­thing I had.

Abject fear proved to be a great moti­va­tor. My wife dropped me off at the law school every morn­ing at eight and picked me up at five. I sat in the back of my class­es, kept my mouth shut, and took copi­ous notes. The rest of the day, I stud­ied in the library. At night, I manned the desk in our bed­room until eleven.

One three-hour exam at the end of the semes­ter deter­mined the entire grade for each course. Five exams would decide whether I would sink or swim.

In Jan­u­ary, the results of the exams were post­ed on bul­letin boards, social secu­ri­ty num­bers on the left of the page, grades on the right. I was a dead man walk­ing when I approached the first board. My eyes ran across the page from my num­ber to the grade. I froze. It had to be a mis­take. The grades post­ed on each suc­ces­sive board pro­voked the same reac­tion: This could not be happening. 

I sat my wife down and broke the news to her. “We’re going to be okay,” I said. When I told her my grades, she jumped up and down and cheered. 

The fol­low­ing semes­ters went just as well. Doors opened that we nev­er dreamed we could walk through. Law firms recruit­ed us lav­ish­ly. On our first inter­view­ing trip, a firm put us up in a fan­cy hotel in Atlanta. Glass ele­va­tors zipped up and down a col­umn inside the sky­scraper. We rode to the top, stared wide-eyed at the lob­by way below us, then rode down, and up and down again, like kids in a roller coast­er park.

Those heady days passed quick­ly; grad­u­a­tion approached; and we had to decide what to do with our lives. In almost every firm I’d inter­viewed I’d met a weak link, and I used the Racehorse/old Mel ratio­nale to reas­sure myself: “If that lawyer can suc­ceed here, I can too.”

Lath­am & Watkins in Los Ange­les was the sole excep­tion. I’d met thir­ty attor­neys. They were all great lawyers. No weak links.

I lev­eled with my wife. “I don’t know if I’m good enough to make it there.” The rea­sons not to accept Latham’s offer were daunt­ing: Nei­ther of us had been west of the Rock­ies until we inter­viewed Lath­am. Los Ange­les was 3000 miles away from our fam­i­lies and every­one and every­thing we knew. We’d spent only six days in the city, not enough time to know if we’d like liv­ing there. And I might fail.

On the oth­er side of the ledger stood a sin­gle, stark fact: I was con­vinced Lath­am was the best law firm in the country.

I was fifty-fifty on the deci­sion. My wife tipped the balance.

After grad­u­a­tion, we wres­tled our five cats into a cage, loaded it into our Pin­to sta­tion wag­on, and set out for Los Ange­les. At the top of Afton Moun­tain, we stopped and looked back at the val­ley, not know­ing if we’d ever return to this place we had loved so much. And we cried.

Six days lat­er, we arrived in Los Ange­les. After a week of argu­ing with land­lords about our cats, I did what I had to do. I com­mit­ted fraud. I signed a No-Pets lease and we smug­gled the cats into an apart­ment on Gret­na Green Way in San­ta Mon­i­ca, three doors down from the court­yard where O. J. Simp­son would slash Nicole’s throat and stab Ron Gold­man to death nine­teen years later.

I went to work at Lath­am in June. In July, I took the Cal­i­for­nia Bar Exam, the most dif­fi­cult bar in the coun­try with a fail­ure rate of fifty per­cent. At that time, no attor­ney at Lath­am had ever failed it, and I assumed they would fire me if I washed out.

I entered an audi­to­ri­um the morn­ing of the exam ner­vous and over­wrought and left three days lat­er, feel­ing no better.

While we wait­ed anx­ious­ly for the results, a para­le­gal who worked at Lath­am told me he’d failed the bar exam eight times. At a cof­fee shop, I met a Har­vard Law School grad­u­ate who’d failed it twice. As the months dragged on, I met a small army of impres­sive grad­u­ates from good law schools who had failed the exam once or more.

I was on the verge of a ner­vous break­down when the bar final­ly released the results to the press in Decem­ber. My hands shook when I paid the old guy at the news­stand.  I swal­lowed hard and found the page with the O’s on it.

Back at the apart­ment, I showed my wife the news­pa­per. She cheered again, but being eight months’ preg­nant, she had the good sense not to jump up and down this time.

I prac­ticed law at Lath­am for eigh­teen years. I did okay, and I liked it a lot. 

John­ny and The Tonight Show gave me the last shove across the line, but my auburn-haired blind date is the one who called the shot and got it right. She knows me bet­ter than I know myself.

My new book, The Judas Mur­ders, was inspired in part by a dou­ble mur­der case from the 1960’s. Here’s what hap­pened in that case.

Dr. Carl Cop­poli­no, an anes­the­si­ol­o­gist, and his wife Carmela, a research physi­cian, lived in an afflu­ent seashore com­mu­ni­ty in New Jer­sey in 1961 when, at the age of 30, Carl had a heart attack. Due to his poor health, he quit his job and began col­lect­ing dis­abil­i­ty pay­ments while Carmela con­tin­ued to work to sup­port their lifestyle.

Colonel William Far­ber and his wife Mar­jorie lived across the street from the Cop­poli­nos. In 1962, while Carmela was preg­nant with Carl’s sec­ond daugh­ter, Carl and Mar­jorie Far­ber plunged into a tor­rid sex­u­al affair.

On the morn­ing of July 30, 1963, Colonel Far­ber com­plained of chest pains. Carl thought he was hav­ing a heart attack and told him to go to the hos­pi­tal. He refused to go and died that after­noon. Carl con­vinced Carmela to sign the death cer­tifi­cate, list­ing coro­nary throm­bo­sis as the cause of death. There was no autopsy.

By 1965, Carl had suf­fered three more heart attacks. He and Carmela moved to Sara­so­ta, Flori­da, hop­ing the mild cli­mate would improve his health. Mar­jorie Far­ber also relo­cat­ed and moved into the house next door to them.

In August, Carmela com­plained of chest pains. Carl awoke on the 28th to find that she had died in her sleep. He told Carmela’s doc­tor that she had a heart attack, and the doc­tor signed a death cer­tifi­cate indi­cat­ing coro­nary occlu­sion as the cause of death. No autop­sy was per­formed. Carmela was 32 when she died.

Short­ly before her death, Carl had joined a bridge club. His reg­u­lar play­ing part­ner was Mary Gib­son, a wealthy divorcee. He mar­ried her twen­ty-two days after Carmela’s death.

Carl’s jilt­ed mis­tress, Mar­jorie, was not pleased. She told the police Carl had mur­dered both their spous­es. She said he helped her give Colonel Far­ber an injec­tion of the anes­thet­ic drug suc­cinyl­choline, but the shot didn’t kill him so Carl smoth­ered him with a pil­low. She claimed that Carl killed Carmela with the same drug.

Marjorie’s alle­ga­tions made sense from a med­ical stand­point. Suc­cinyl­choline has benign pur­pos­es. Anes­the­si­ol­o­gists use it to intu­bate patients pri­or to surgery, par­a­lyz­ing the throat so a doc­tor can insert a breath­ing tube pain­less­ly, but mega-dos­es of it are fatal. Vet­eri­nar­i­ans euth­a­nize ani­mals with it, and some states include it in a three-drug, lethal-injec­tion cock­tail to exe­cute cap­i­tal defendants.

Most impor­tant­ly for a mur­der­er, suc­cinyl­choline con­verts almost instant­ly after injec­tion into metabo­lites that nor­mal­ly exist in the body. Until the 1990’s, there was no reli­able method for deter­min­ing in an autop­sy that it was the cause of a victim’s death, mak­ing it the per­fect mur­der weapon. As an anes­the­si­ol­o­gist, Carl would have known this.

Based on Marjorie’s alle­ga­tions, the courts ordered the exhuma­tions of Colonel Far­ber and Carmela Cop­poli­no. The med­ical exam­in­er found no evi­dence of heart prob­lems in either corpse. Both states indict­ed Carl for murder.

The New Jer­sey tri­al went for­ward in 1966 with F. Lee Bai­ley as Carl’s attor­ney. Farber’s body had been in the ground for more than two years when the autop­sy was per­formed. Its results were ambigu­ous. The med­ical exam­in­er could not find suc­cinyl­choline in the corpse and he couldn’t tes­ti­fy with cer­tain­ty that Far­ber had been smoth­ered. The pros­e­cu­tion depend­ed almost entire­ly on Marjorie’s tes­ti­mo­ny. In a sav­age cross-exam­i­na­tion, Bai­ley por­trayed her as a “woman scorned,” who would say any­thing to take revenge on Carl. After only four hours’ delib­er­a­tion, the jury found Carl not guilty.

The Flori­da tri­al in 1967 about Carmela’s death was a dif­fer­ent sto­ry. The pros­e­cu­tors based the case on objec­tive cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence, rather than Marjorie’s tes­ti­mo­ny. A doc­tor tes­ti­fied that he gave Carl six vials of suc­cinyl­choline a few weeks before Carmela’s death because Carl said he need­ed the drug for research, although Carl was not a licensed doc­tor at the time. Carl increased his ben­e­fit under Carmela’s life insur­ance pol­i­cy just before she died. Her med­ical records con­tained no his­to­ry of heart prob­lems. Carmela turned down Carl’s request for a divorce short­ly before her death, and Carl’s bridge club mem­bers said that he moved in with Mary Gib­son the day after Carmela died.

The foren­sic evi­dence was stronger, too. The med­ical exam­in­er spot­ted a punc­ture in Carmela’s but­tocks con­sis­tent with a syringe wound and found abnor­mal lev­els of the metabo­lites deriv­a­tive of suc­cinyl­choline in her organs.

After only six hours’ delib­er­a­tion, the jury found Carl guilty of sec­ond degree mur­der. Tech­ni­cal­ly, the ver­dict made no sense. Poi­son­ing requires pre-med­i­ta­tion and plan­ning, but sec­ond degree mur­der is an inten­tion­al killing that is not pre­med­i­tat­ed. Bai­ley filed vig­or­ous appeals based on that incon­sis­ten­cy and on a host of oth­er legal issues.

The appeals were unsuc­cess­ful, but Carl’s wealthy sec­ond wife, Mary, some­how con­vinced a Flori­da leg­is­la­tor over­see­ing the parole board that Carl was inno­cent, and the board released him in 1979 at the age of 47, after serv­ing 12 years.

The next year, Carl pub­lished a book enti­tled The Crime that Nev­er Was. It begins with Carl and Mary mak­ing love in bed in the Buc­ca­neer Motel the morn­ing before the Flori­da jury ren­dered its ver­dict. A three hun­dred page dai­ly diary of Carl’s jail time fol­lows, salt­ed with rants about his vicious per­se­cu­tion.  He claims the med­ical exam­in­er man­u­fac­tured the foren­sic evi­dence against him, Bai­ley com­mit­ted mal­prac­tice, the Flori­da judge and pros­e­cu­tors knew he was­n’t guilty, his jail­ers were sadis­tic, and so on. He doesn’t address the events lead­ing up to the deaths of Colonel Far­ber and Carmela or attempt to explain the cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence against him. In The Crime That Nev­er Was, Carl, and not Carmela, is the vic­tim, a mar­tyr burned at the stake of a cor­rupt jus­tice system.

I don’t think so. Based on the evi­dence adduced at the tri­als, I think he was a nar­cis­sis­tic cold-blood­ed mur­der­er. That evi­dence, cou­pled with the known effects of suc­cinyl­choline on the body, tell us exact­ly how he killed Carmela. He plunged a syringe into her hip while she lay in bed. He held her down while she strug­gled against him for the one to three min­utes it took for the Clydesdale–size dose of suc­cinyl­choline to kick in. Then she lay still, the drug hav­ing par­a­lyzed every mus­cle in her body. For the next three to five min­utes, she was trapped inside a liv­ing corpse, ful­ly con­scious, but immo­bile and help­less, even unable to move her eyes, as her diaphragm froze up and her breath grew short­er and short­er until she couldn’t breathe at all. Through it all, she knew exact­ly what was hap­pen­ing to her, right up to the moment of her death.

Know­ing full well as an anes­the­si­ol­o­gist what the drug was doing to Carmela, Carl stood over her and cold­ly watched the woman he had met and mar­ried in med­ical school, his wife of nine years, and the moth­er of his two daugh­ters die a hor­rif­ic death by his hand.

Post Script: Carl died in 2017 at the age of 84. There was no autop­sy. Too bad. I won­der if a med­ical exam­in­er would have found evi­dence of those five heart attacks Carl claimed to have suf­fered fifty years before he died, back when he was too sick to work but well enough for red-hot sex­u­al liaisons with Mar­jorie and Mary.

When I was six years old, Robert West told me there was no San­ta Claus. It was a cou­ple weeks before Christ­mas, a sun­ny warm day for that time of year. We had climbed an old oak tree on his grandfather’s farm and we were sit­ting side by side on a big branch, tak­ing turns spit­ting at a wheel­bar­row down below. The wheel­bar­row stood about ten feet from the tree, so it was a long spit. Robert could beat me at almost every­thing, but it turned out he wasn’t much of a pro­jec­tile spit­ter. All his attempts fell short. I hit the mark every time, and it was get­ting under his skin.

We hadn’t been talk­ing about Christ­mas when he dropped the bomb on San­ta Claus. It caught me off guard. “What?”

“There’s no San­ta Claus. Your par­ents buy the presents and put them under the tree while you’re asleep.”

I didn’t believe him. We had a big argu­ment, where­upon Robert pro­ceed­ed to dis­man­tle brick by brick the fortress I had built in my sub­con­scious mind to pro­tect Santa’s mag­ic from the real world’s cold logic.

Rein­deer can’t fly, he point­ed out. A fat old man can’t slide down a nar­row chim­ney, much less claw his way back up to the roof. No way he could vis­it every house in the world in a sin­gle night even if he flew on a jet plane. And so on.

By the end of it, I knew Robert was right, and I was on the verge of tears, which seemed to be what he want­ed. He couldn’t stand los­ing to me at any­thing, even a spit­ting com­pe­ti­tion, so he used the truth about San­ta to put me in my place. 

I climbed down from the tree and slouched home. On the way, my grief over San­ta turned into anger at my par­ents for play­ing me for a fool. By the time I found Mom in the back yard, hang­ing clothes on the line, I was out­raged. I con­front­ed her with what Robert had said. “You and Dad lied to me about San­ta!” I shout­ed. “What else did you lie about?”

Mom didn’t take much guff off any­one, least of all me. “Don’t you dare say we lied to you,” she said angri­ly. “We didn’t lie. We told you a sto­ry. A good sto­ry about a nice man who does right by chil­dren. We went to a lot of trou­ble to make Christ­mas fun for you and you should be grate­ful for it.” She picked up her clothes-bas­ket and marched away.

I didn’t have the temer­i­ty to argue with her. It was a good sto­ry, like she said, but it was also a lie, and it didn’t take me long to fig­ure out they’d lied about a lot of oth­er stuff. San­ta was the big one, but the East­er Bun­ny ran a close sec­ond. That sto­ry nev­er made sense to me. Rab­bits don’t grow to be six feet tall and walk on their hind legs, thank God, but I had bought into it any­way, naive­ly believ­ing every­thing my par­ents said.

The Tooth Fairy was anoth­er lie, but I didn’t care much about him/her/it. At only a quar­ter per tooth, there wasn’t a big enough pay­off to wor­ry about. 

A host of addi­tion­al minor char­ac­ters also fell like a row of domi­noes – the Sand Man, Jack Frost, the Lep­rechaun with the pot of gold at the end of the rain­bow. One guy I was glad to see bite the dust was the Boogey­man. My uncle claimed he lived under my bed. “You’d bet­ter behave your­self, or the Boogey­man will get you.” I nev­er real­ly believed in the Boogey­man, but I looked under my bed every night before I turned off the light just to be safe. It was com­fort­ing to know with cer­tain­ty he wouldn’t kill me in my sleep just for sass­ing my uncle, who usu­al­ly deserved it. 

I felt betrayed by all these lies. My bond of trust with my par­ents had been bro­ken, and I was angry and hurt for a while, but as best I can recall, I for­got about it with­in a few days.

Over the six decades since then, I hadn’t giv­en the death of my child­hood myths much thought. Then last month a news sto­ry broke that remind­ed me of those days long ago. A sub­sti­tute teacher at Cedar Hills School in New Jer­sey told twen­ty-three first graders that San­ta Claus didn’t exist, con­fronting them with the same cold log­ic Robert had heaped on me. After that, she mowed down the East­er Bun­ny and the Tooth Fairy. “Mag­ic does not exist,” she told the kids. “There is no such thing as mag­ic anything.”

This set off a firestorm among the children’s par­ents, result­ing in the school super­in­ten­dent ban­ning the sub­sti­tute from teach­ing in the dis­trict. Cable news pun­dits pounced on the sto­ry as anoth­er skir­mish in the War on Christ­mas. In the debates that fol­lowed, most every­one agreed the teacher’s actions were wrong, but spir­it­ed bat­tle lines formed around a dif­fer­ent ques­tion: Should par­ents trick their chil­dren into believ­ing the San­ta story?

I was sur­prised to learn that a lot of experts believe San­ta is tox­ic. Pro­fes­sor David John­son thinks the San­ta sto­ry impairs a child’s devel­op­ment of crit­i­cal think­ing skills and that learn­ing the truth, after so much parental decep­tion, trau­ma­tizes chil­dren. He tells the sto­ry of a child who defend­ed San­ta in front of his school class on the sole basis that his moth­er wouldn’t lie to him and then burst into tears lat­er when read­ing to the class an ency­clo­pe­dia entry about San­ta that proved she had indeed lied. “Lying to chil­dren about San­ta,” John­son con­cludes, “is immoral and unjustifiable.”

Pro­fes­sor Christo­pher Boyle and Dr. Kathy McK­ay believe lying to chil­dren about some­thing so spe­cial and mag­i­cal could under­mine their trust in their par­ents for­ev­er, throw the children’s moral com­pass per­ma­nent­ly off-kil­ter, and leave them vul­ner­a­ble to “abject dis­ap­point­ment” for the rest of their lives.

Pas­cal-Emmanuel Gob­ry may be the most mil­i­tant of the anti-San­ta advo­cates. In his arti­cle, I Tell My Kid San­ta is a Lie and You Should Too, he prais­es an event at a Catholic dio­cese in France where church offi­cials told chil­dren San­ta was not real, denounced him as a heretic, and hanged him in effi­gy. “Join the move­ment,” Gob­ry says. “Togeth­er, we can kill Santa.”

Seems a lit­tle extreme to me. My mom used to say, “Some peo­ple are too smart for their own good.” The San­ta Truthers may have fall­en into that trap. I agree lying to chil­dren is usu­al­ly wrong, but the San­ta sto­ry makes Christ­mas a lot more fun for a lit­tle kid, and chil­dren are more resilient than the experts seem to under­stand. Look­ing back on it now, I wouldn’t for­feit my child-hood belief in Christ­mas mag­ic just to avoid the short-lived dis­ap­point­ment that came from learn­ing the truth.

Of course, every child is dif­fer­ent, and each par­ent should make an informed, care­ful deci­sion about Santa.

My parental deci­sion was nev­er in doubt.

I was watch­ing the weath­er report on tele­vi­sion Christ­mas Eve forty years ago when my four-year-old son came bounc­ing down the stairs. I told him the weath­er­man was track­ing San­ta Claus on radar. “He’s over Pomona right now, head­ed our way!”

We ran out in the back yard and stood by the pool, star­ing up at the sky.

“There he goes!” I shouted.

“Where?!!!

“There!” I point­ed. “He just streaked over the house!”

“I didn’t see him!”

“Dang! Maybe we can see him from the front yard!”

My son ran around the house as fast as he could, des­per­ate for a glimpse of the fly­ing rein­deer and the jol­ly old man, who didn’t exist.

It’s not a lie, I told myself as I jogged along behind him. It’s a sto­ry. A good sto­ry about a nice man who does right by children.

Post Script: Hey, Robert, wher­ev­er you are, I still hate you.