In more than 40 years as a journalist, I’ve interviewed some terrifying people. Manuel Contreras, Chile’s chief of secret police, who ordered the torture and murder of tens of thousands of people. Roberto d’Aubuisson, head of El Salvador’s right-wing death squads. I’ve sat face-to-face with rapists, dirty cops, Ku Klux Klansmen, neo-Nazis—and yet only one person I’ve written about has truly haunted me.
When I met Judi Singer in 1981, she was a 32-year-old, stay-at-home mother of three in kitten heels and former chapter president of the national Jewish women’s fundraising group, Hadassah. I was 23, and a novice reporter covering criminal courts for the San Jose Mercury. Judi’s husband, Robert Singer, was a franchise restaurant owner standing trial for the contract murder of Judi’s ex-husband. The victim had been gunned down at his doorstep by a stranger. Judi was not facing charges in the crime.
I was drawn to Judi immediately. With her perfect blonde bob, single strand of pearls, and ever-present Louis Vuitton tote, she seemed so much more familiar than the seedy stream of folk normally frequenting criminal courtrooms. She could have been one of my cousins, or a friend from our synagogue. Specifically, she had a lot in common with my mother, who like Judi was a native Midwesterner, a talented cook, and a fashionable dresser who proudly made her children her life’s work. Later, I saw the similarities didn’t end there. Both women were hiding secrets behind their perfect housewife veneer.
The trial lasted nearly a month. Judi attended every day, training her eyes on her husband as she sat next to his attorney. During breaks, she charmed everyone, from the prosecutor to the judge to, well, me. “I love your writing!” she told me one day. “It’s so clear and concise!”
Robert Singer’s lawyer mounted a dramatic defense, claiming his client had been framed by a murderous drug gang who had recently threatened both the lawyer and Judi. Several of my stories landed on the front page, but on the last day of the trial I made an awful mistake. I misquoted the prosecutor, making it seem as if he’d said that Judi had conspired in the murder. Judi responded by suing me and my newspaper for libel, for $11 million. She claimed my error had exposed her to “hatred, contempt, ridicule, and obloquy,” making her “unemployable in any field whatsoever, possibly forever.”
My first response was anger. Judi was surely exaggerating, playing the victim—and I felt she had victimized me. But there was no sugar-coating my mistake. The prosecutor had warned us several times that he had no evidence against her. I’d committed journalistic malpractice—like a surgeon removing the wrong kidney—smearing an innocent woman and threatening my newspaper’s financial health.
Making matters worse, it wasn’t my first reporting error. Leading up to this doozy was a series of smaller blunders involving names, dates, and other minor facts. Instead of firing me, as I’d feared, the managing editor suspended me for three days, suggesting I get professional help for what he saw as my self-destructive behavior.
It was mortifying advice but I took it. I spent the next four years in therapy, two to three times a week, where I learned my blunders were the tip of a dysfunctional iceberg that included some complicated feelings toward my mother. I was struggling, along with millions of other young women, to follow a different model—to be more straightforward, less dependent on a man, and no one’s victim. My mother, a kind and giving woman loved by friends and family, chose to stay with a man who drank too much and beat his children. Making it worse, she insisted on keeping the family violence a secret, often even denying it had happened. Long after I left home, the strength of her taboo made it almost impossible for me to put my feelings into words, initially even with my psychiatrist. At one point he asked whether I thought this could have played a part in my error, a possible Freudian slip. Had I tamped down my anger to such a degree that I’d unconsciously lashed out at a stranger who vaguely resembled my mother?
Therapy was hard and painful. My therapist coached me to give the process time. His mantra, “mistrust your sense of urgency,” helped me train myself to slow down sufficiently to get things right. Luckily for me, Judi soon stopped pursuing her libel suit, after which a judge dismissed it. In 1982, Robert Singer was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole. The triggerman, Andrew Granger, a 20-year-old potato-chip deliveryman, was also given a life sentence. Judi divorced Robert, went back to using her maiden name, Barnett, and moved away, to a suburb of Flint, Michigan, with her children. I spent my vacations during those years trying to redeem myself with my bosses by reporting freelance stories from Central America and Africa. The strategy worked. In 1987 they promoted me to chief of the newspaper’s Mexico City bureau.
* * *
While I was covering trade talks, immigration, and armed conflict in El Salvador and Guatemala, the Singer murder case took some surprising twists. In 1986, Robert’s case was reopened after an explosive revelation—Judi was alleged to have committed adultery with Robert’s lawyer during his trial. An appeals court reversed the murder conviction, ruling the affair had compromised the lawyer’s judgment.
In 1991, Andrew Granger’s former lawyer called me in Mexico with an even bigger surprise. Outraged by his wife’s betrayal, Singer had told the District Attorney that the murder had been her idea all along. Judi, according to Singer, had been panicked and desperate over a custody battle with her ex-husband and had nagged Singer relentlessly until he did her bidding. This new evidence, along with supporting testimony from two witnesses who’d overheard her, was enough for prosecutors to build a case against her. That fall, she had surrendered to police in Flint. Now she was in jail, fighting extradition to San Jose.
During Singer’s trial, Granger’s lawyer and I had often talked about how the case deserved a book. Now he urged me to write one, promising to show me all his files. At first I balked: why would I leave a job I loved to dive back into this case that had nearly ruined me? Yet I knew I was still obsessed with Judi, even though I couldn’t quite explain why. I dimly suspected that getting to the bottom of her family’s secrets might help me understand my own.
Head-spinningly soon, I had a contract with a six-figure advance from a major publisher. Bingo! Everyone loves a black-widow tale. My editors generously granted me a leave, and I spent two-thirds of that advance traveling all over California and Michigan.
The reporting went smoothly. From Judi’s parents’ divorce documents, I learned that she, like many narcissists, had been wounded in childhood. Her mother had neglected her and her stepfather had abused her, once even tying her to a hot furnace. I felt new compassion for her: she really had been a victim, somewhat as I had, although of course that didn’t excuse what she had done. I was especially shocked to hear from her daughter that she herself had been a violent parent. Perhaps her lack of self-awareness made it inevitable that she repeat what she’d learned.
I sent her a letter to ask if I could talk to her in jail. To my astonishment, she agreed.
For five successive days, one hour a day, we sat together, alone, in the warden’s office. Of course, her pearls and heels were gone; instead she wore a light-green cotton jail jumpsuit and white Converse sneakers.For five successive days, one hour a day, we sat together, alone, in the warden’s office. Of course, her pearls and heels were gone; instead she wore a light-green cotton jail jumpsuit and white Converse sneakers. She’d painted her eyelids teal, with, as she disclosed with girlish pride, “wet n wild” eyeshadow from the inmate commissary. I was decked out in a cashmere sweater and skinny black jeans I’d bought with my advance check, but next to her I still felt less womanly and confident. This feeling too was familiar, from growing up in the shadow of my glamorous mother.
Judi denied any guilt in the murder case. And when I asked about her stepfather’s mistreatment, she insisted I’d been misinformed. Perhaps she shared my mother’s old taboo. “My parents were wonderful to me,” she said. “I had a very happy childhood.”
Closing the door on those questions, she leaned forward to offer me writing advice. She couldn’t hide her interest with how I’d tell her story.
“Will you start with the murder?” she asked. “That’s how I’d start!”
The former Hadassah chapter president was a natural leader in jail. The other inmates called her “Mom,” and the guards let her use the jacuzzi when she complained of a pinched nerve. She even won over the warden, Joe Wilson, who brought her to speak to his community-college class on “an insider’s view of the jail.” When I invited Wilson to dinner to thank him for letting us use his office, he chuckled as he cut into his veal. I reminded him of her, he said, and before I could chalk that up to his probably not having met that many Jews, he added, with what sounded like admiration, that Judi was “very goal-oriented.” She was doubtlessly guilty, he added, but he was sure she’d wriggle off the hook. “It’s an old case,” he said. “People’s memories get weaker over time.”
* * *
I returned to Mexico with a suitcase filled with notebooks from my interviews and photocopied court documents and arrest records. I rented a house with a pool outside the city and stayed there for a heavenly month, with just my dog and laptop and my new husband visiting on weekends. I was indeed very goal-oriented. The book, I told myself, was going to be a piece of cake.
Note to would-be authors: Never tell yourself that.
Judi delayed her extradition for four years. But then her appeals ran out, and a San Jose jury proved Warden Wilson wrong, convicting her of murder, with a sentence of life without parole. I turned in my manuscript one week after her sentencing. But despite all the time I’d had to work on it, I had a sinking feeling. After reading the draft, so did my New York editor.
I couldn’t find my voice. I didn’t intend to follow Judi’s guidance about starting with the murder, but I couldn’t settle on any other sequence of events.“You’re having trouble with this,” she growled. She gave me suggestions. I couldn’t seem to follow them. Only as I look back on those awful weeks and months can I see that as I kept trying to fix that book, my brain was failing me once again. This time it wasn’t instantaneously, as had happened with my error, but torturously slowly. I couldn’t find my voice. I didn’t intend to follow Judi’s guidance about starting with the murder, but I couldn’t settle on any other sequence of events.
“I hate to say it, but you’re a first-class reporter,” my editor said. I knew what she meant. I had all the facts but couldn’t come close to expressing why this story, and this woman, had taken over so much of my mind. Panicked, I stupidly kept sending in clumsy drafts.
My editor retired, after which the publisher canceled my contract and withheld the last third of the advance. I put my notes aside and returned to my day job. Three years earlier, I’d jumped ship to the Miami Herald to head their bureau in Rio. I stayed there seven years before my husband and I moved back to California, now with two children in tow. I quit newspapers to freelance and keep a flexible schedule for parenting.
Over the next 20 years, I authored and co-authored half a dozen other books. But thoughts of Judi kept nagging me. Each time I met new friends, I’d tell them the story. They always seemed engrossed, especially when I came to the $11 million lawsuit. Their enthusiasm revived me, and whenever work slowed down during the week, and sometimes on aimless weekends, I’d wander out to my garden writing shed and tinker with the chapters. “Polishing the turd,” is the old journalist’s saying.
Judi was serving her term at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, 160 miles southeast of my new home. I’d kept in touch with old friends on the court beat who were still gossiping about her. They told me she’d become a leader yet again, a liaison between inmates and prison officials. She had also studied Hebrew, becoming the facility’s first-ever bat mitzvah. In 2012, I impulsively wrote her a letter, which she perhaps just as impulsively answered. We started corresponding, and that summer I drove down for another visit. She was so much grayer and heavier than when I’d last seen her. I bought her a 7-Up. She told me she was working on an appeal, and continued to deny any responsibility for her husband’s death.
“I was very surprised when I learned that Bob was behind this,” she primly insisted. “I’d always trusted him when he told me he didn’t have anything to do with it.”
I looked at her in amazement. The DA’s case had been strong. I almost admired her strength in holding onto a lie for that long. Perhaps, like my mother had sometimes seemed to do, she had convinced herself that it was true.
* * *
My kids would soon be going to college. My husband was earning a newspaper editor’s salary. The responsible thing would have been to keep my focus on work with a guaranteed income. Instead I kept thinking about Judi. I wrote a new proposal which my agent sent to publishers, none of whom bit. The agent pulled out and I tried again with a new agent. No dice. My writer’s group told me they couldn’t bear to read another draft. I found a new writer’s group. Doors were closing, but I kept knocking my head against them. The story wouldn’t let me go.
Then something happened that pushed thoughts of Judi out of my head. My mother and father, now 89 and 92, fell seriously ill. Despite our history, I loved them deeply and never questioned my duty to help care for them. In 2017 and again in 2018, I sat beside each of them as they passed away, in vigils that felt like loving closure. And then I had all this extra time. My sons, now grown, had moved away; my husband had his day job. Nobody needed me to care for them. What’s more, for the first time in 20 years, I couldn’t find a paying gig. At first this was alarming. Then I realized: the universe had opened a window.
To cope with my complicated grief, I tracked down my psychiatrist from the early 1980s. He’d retired to Washington State but was still seeing a few patients over FaceTime. We began once-weekly sessions, and soon talk about my parents morphed into talk about the book. My parents’ lives, and my own, were part of the story I had always needed to tell, and now my mother’s old taboo was finally moot. What’s more, I was now old enough to be able to look back at my flawed younger self with less censorious judgment. I saw more clearly why Judi had always been so terrifying and also so irresistible. The jail warden was right, much as I’d pushed the thought away: we were similar. Among other things we shared a buried but profound sense of having been wronged, and an anxiety that led us to behave compulsively. Mine, despite all that therapy, had been a lifelong problem, complicating relationships in and out of the office, although thank heavens it stopped short of murder.
“Mistrust your sense of urgency,” my therapist reminded me. I went back to my writing shed vowing I wouldn’t send out another draft until I knew it was really ready. When it was, I found a publisher.
In October, a couple weeks after my book was released, Judi Barnett was released from prison after serving more than 25 years. At 73 years old, wheelchair-bound, partially deaf, and suffering from lupus, she’d been granted parole—even as she steadfastly continued to deny any responsibility for the murder of the father of her children.
She was still holding onto her story, but I at last was ready to let mine go.
