The Book of Matt Read Online Free

month pregnant, no DNA tests were performed on the embryo to determine whether the sperm had, in fact, come from Kevin Robinson. It was an omission over which prosecutor Cal Rerucha and police wouldn’t lose any sleep, since they had abundant evidence incriminating Robinson.
    Those who knew Daphne described her infectious enthusiasm, but recalled that she was also fragile and troubled. The youngest of five children, she had just started ninth grade at Laramie Junior High. Roberta Sulk, her mother, surmised that Daphne might have first met Robinson on the street “on her way to her teen support group.”
    Before Daphne’s body was discovered in the woods, she had been missing from home as a runaway for eleven days. Police later determined she had spent a few of those nights at an abandoned trailer in town with another female runaway.
    At Kevin Robinson’s trial the following year, witnesses would testify that Daphne boasted of a “secret friend.” She had revealed that she was in a sexual relationship with “Kevin,” they stated, and that he frequently made her perform pregnancy tests in his presence. One of Daphne’s classmates named Miranda, who said she had accompanied Daphne on a visit to Robinson’s home, described his eyes as “glazed over” in a manner that frightened her — as if he were high on drugs. Daphne told Miranda that if she ever wanted drugs, alcohol, or tobacco, Kevin was the man to see.
    For Cal Rerucha the question of motive was answered when other friends of Daphne, as well as a few of her teachers, said she had confided in them that she was pregnant. She allegedly had told several individuals that Kevin Robinson was the father, and that he was very upset about the pregnancy and wanted it aborted. But what most convinced Rerucha of Robinson’s guilt were the spots of Daphne’s blood on the door and inside the trunk of Robinson’s gold Honda found by detectives from the Laramie Police Department and the Albany County Sheriff’s Office.
    Of all the officers and deputies in both departments, Rerucha relied first and foremost on Detective Sergeant Rob DeBree of thesheriff’s office, whose instincts he trusted “above all other cops in the county.” The two had teamed up on case after case.
    A sturdily built man in his forties with a mustache and a curt disposition, DeBree spent most of his off-duty waking hours tending to his ranch on the Wyoming-Colorado border. In local law enforcement circles it was well known that the two men argued incessantly while preparing for a trial, driven in no small part by Rerucha’s belabored, if not compulsive, insistence that “not a single witness or piece of evidence get away from us.” But as teammates, they shared an aggressive determination to win in the courtroom. Rerucha would be first to admit that he could push DeBree’s patience to the limit, not to mention the rest of his staff’s.
    “You’re paranoid, Cal,” DeBree groused to him on many an occasion, “and you’re driving both of us nuts.”
    Usually Rerucha got up from his banker’s-style oak desk, already damp under the collar of his oxford shirt, and began pacing the floor of his office.
    “God-darn-it, Rob, the defense is going to hang us out to dry,” he’d snap back peevishly. “I want to go back over every witness statement, a hundred times if we have to.”
    These routine jousts with DeBree “had nothing to do with second-guessing his judgment,” Rerucha recalled in an early interview. “If Rob said something was so, you could pretty much go to the bank with it.”
    By early summer 1998, seven months of legal wrangling and delays had elapsed since Kevin Robinson had been charged with Daphne’s murder, but there was still no trial date. As Rerucha sized up his crowded court schedule and slate of civic duties, he was hopeful he could finish the case by the time his sons went back to school in the fall. Luke, his lanky and athletic older boy, would be in seventh grade,