Images for the Night of Beau’s Birthday Chapter

References to these images will be found in the chapter in Aggravated titled, The Night of Beau’s 21st Birthday Party.

On the 13th and 14th of February, 2004, the National Weather Service reported that a winter storm “swept across all of North Texas,” leaving “some of the heaviest snowfalls” in that area in over a decade. They accompanied that report with a weather graphic similar to this one. I have edited it slightly, and removed some names of towns to help disguise Deep Springs’ location. There were icy bridges and traffic accidents and delays at airports, and in the Deep Springs area a quarter inch of freezing rain and/or melted snow fell on the 12th, and 1.5 inches of it on the 14th, including freezing temperatures. That does a lot to negate Hanna’s claim that Beau’s party was held on the 13th or 14th. The most likely date was the one that Robin claimed, which was the next Friday, the 20th. That was ten days after Beau’s birthday and just a few days short of Hanna’s, but the celebration was just for Beau. Deep Springs is on the edge of the light blue area (1.5 inches of freezy, slushy precipitation).

This shot of Steve’s living room is another of the defense exhibits which was photocopied multiple times before I got it. The important object in the image was a cabinet Steve built to hold their small TV and some VHS tapes. Hanna claimed that this “entertainment center” completely blocked the twin bed she was sleeping on from view. She testified that “You couldn’t see anybody or anything” that was in that bed. She also said that Marri “was asleep in the twin bed that was actually in the living room,” as if to indicate that her bed was in a different room, and was so well-concealed that no one else could see anything that happened on her bed. This image and the next few should help dispel that lie. Also, take a look at the rack of trucker caps by the right hand door.

You might want to have this image (and the ones below) on another monitor while you read about that night in the book. In mid-2019, I visited the house again to take some measurements and pictures of the rooms to create the floor plans you see here. I had thought I might recreate the scene in the black and white image above, but someone had broken into the house and had thoroughly trashed it. I did take a single shot of the TV cabinet, though, cropped the cabinet out of the image, and placed it on a patterned background. I also pasted a similar sized TV onto the shelf because I wanted to point out a couple of things. The cabinet is clearly too small to block an entire bed from anyone else in the room; unless, perhaps, they were facing the cabinet directly. But even if someone were sitting right in front of the TV, and the cabinet was shoved up against the wall, they could see along the 4-inch gap on the right. Also, they could see through the cutout on the back wall of the cabinet. That’s hard to see in the black and white photo farther above, but you can if you try.

This is just here as an overview image, something that will let you see how the house was laid out.

This floor plan is just of the living room, so you can see where everything was located the night of Beau’s 21st birthday.

And this one is of the same room with sightlines to show what the other people in the room could probably see from their respective sleeping locations. The “Alternate Sightline” represents how much someone might be able to see through the cutout in the cabinet. What should be obvious is that Hanna’s bed wasn’t hidden from the rest of the room, no matter how often she might claim it had been.

Michael Sirois

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