After Before and After

Phase 4: Chapter 71

March 31, 1993. 3:34 PM.

Midway through the third week of Barnes' lengthy case against Roger Conroy, Ralph Langley was beat. He knew that it was necessary to lay everything out on the table in order to get a conviction. He also knew better than anyone how dire it was to ensure that Roger gets convicted. But still, Ralph was tired of listening to it all. Barnes spent the first two days of this week interviewing the last of Roger's friends and their parents, as well as the adults at the academy who spent the most time with him before the plane crash. The last witness to testify the day before this one was Roger's paternal grandmother. His grandfather then testified first thing this morning, and by the time the lunch recess came around, his father had testified too. Court was back in session at one o'clock, and that was when Barnes called Malcom Conroy to the stand.

At no point before today did Ralph see Malcom Conroy in the courthouse, or even in Savannah for that matter. He knew from chasing after Jack when the latter ran away in December of 1991 that Malcom, the eldest Conroy sibling, didn't live in the same house with Roger and their parents. Ralph tracked Jack down at Malcom's sketchy apartment on the west side of Brookhaven the day after he went missing. It was on Malcom Conroy's doorstep that Jack broke up with Ralph for the first time, and it was one of the most excruciating non-island memories stored inside young Ralph's mind.

Watching Malcolm take the stand brought up a lot of stuff for Ralph, stuff he couldn't really talk to his parents about given that he lied about finding Jack to them and to the police. Ralph recognized Malcom from that fateful day now, just over a year older than he was the last time their paths crossed. Ralph remembered being baffled by how alike Roger and his brother were on the outside. They carried themselves in the same careless manner, lazily leaning up against doorframes and staring at Ralph as if they were questioning whether they could legally shoot him with an assault rifle just for knocking on their doors.

After hearing Malcom testify, Ralph noticed some of the subtle and the more obvious differences between the two now. He could tell that Malcom Conroy was bad news, just like his brother was, but in a far more ordinary way. Malcom had gone down a bad path in life; poor grades, high school dropout, hanging with the wrong crowd, making bad decisions because he believed it made him cooler and more appealing to unappealing people. But unlike Malcom, Roger didn't go down a bad path, he was born on it. He was the wrong crowd all by himself, the kind of unappealing person that knocked kids like his own brother off the straight and narrow. Malcom was who he was because that's who he chose to make himself into. Roger, on the other hand, was who he was because he was born a psychopath. There was never a straight and narrow path for him to fall off of. His behavior was concerning the moment he could walk and talk, without any misguidance from other delinquent kids. His poor parents saw that right away, and it took a lot of attention away from Malcom, who was at an age where he was testing boundaries and seeing just how much he could get away with. And with all eyes on Roger, that turned out to be an awful lot.

Barnes questioned Malcom about his relationship with his younger brother. Being five years older and five years ahead in school, their parents never expected they'd grow up all that close. Malcom was coached by the Conroy family's well-paid attorney, and was prepared to speak about the way he looked out for his little brother in the few years they attended the same school. When Barnes asked him in what ways he looked out for his younger brother, Malcom froze. He was only twenty years old, and had forgotten or chosen not to process how their lawyer advised him to avoid sharing that he gave wedgies and pummeled kids who messed with Roger in the younger boy's kindergarten and first grade years. When Barnes pulled the school's records of these incidents, Malcom was cornered. Later reports from the school revealed that as Roger became more violent, it was the younger brother who started beating kids up for the older brother. With the evidence slapped onto the table in front of him, Malcom choked pretty hard on the stand. His demeanor didn't resemble the confident one Ralph remembered from when he knocked on the boy's door all that time ago now.