Nobody planned for him to die. The investigators were clear about that and so was the prosecutor. The plan — and the plan was bad and stupid and it came out of a man who was two hundred and eleven thousand dollars underwater — was for that car to be found burned and empty.
What they got instead was a man in it.
And when the identification came back wrong, because of how bad that fire was and because Laura’s purse and phone were in the vehicle, they did not correct it.
That’s the whole crime, and it is so much smaller and so much worse than what the internet says.
There was no five-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance payout. There was a policy, and it was for a hundred and twenty-five thousand, and the carrier paid it in March of that year.
And the biggest correction, which I have to make even though I’d rather not: my daughter did not assume a dead woman’s identity and there was no offshore account. She never had a job. She never had an ID that wasn’t hers in a drawer. She lived for seven years in a rental house with the utilities in Mark’s name and she almost never left it in daylight.
