Chapter 4: Wills and Son
Tony checked back with Tim, who reported Josh Wills was sitting in the interrogation room with his head in his hands.
"I'll watch him for a while if you'll do me a favor," DiNozzo told McGee. "Look up the Academy's policy on pregnant midshipmen,"
By the time McGee returned with the print-out, Gibbs and Ziva returned, dragging Joe Wills with them. He was just recovering from Ziva's earlier attention; his attitude now was bewildered more than belligerent. After placing Joe Wills in a second interrogation room, Gibbs outlined the strategy for the questioning for the team. "DiNozzo and I will talk with Josh while McGee and David observe. Then Ziva and I will interrogate Joe."
When the two agents walked into the room with Josh, he looked up with reddened eyes still brimming with tears.
Gibbs said, "Do you want to tell us what happened to Prissy?"
The young man sobbed slightly as he took a breath before beginning to speak.
"She told me last week she was pregnant," he said. "She said she wanted to get an abortion, and I had to help her. I didn't want her to. I told her she wouldn't be kicked out of the Academy for being pregnant, but she didn't want to believe me."
"Was she aware of the Academy's policy on pregnancy?" Tony queried.
"She said they kinda went over that when they talked about ethics ‘n' that," Josh replied. "But she'd have to drop out for a year, and she couldn't go back unless she got someone else to take the kid. She said if she was going to have a kid, she would want to take care of it herself. But she really didn't want to have a kid right now. She wanted to graduate and get a good assignment before she was ready to be pregnant."
Tony held up the print-out on Academy regulations concerning midshipman pregnancy or contribution to pregnancy. "It's true," he pointed out to Gibbs. "Unless they get an abortion, female cadets are required to drop out for a year, and if they want to return, they have to make arrangements for someone else to take care of the child until they graduate. Once they're commissioned officers, Navy regs are pretty liberal, and they can get the kid back."
Gibbs nodded his understanding, then turned back to Josh.
"Are you sure you were the father of the child?"
"Oh, yeah. Prissy took this oath at her church before she entered the Academy—you know, that she wouldn't have sex until she got married."
"And so she was a virgin until you came along and made her break the oath?" Tony asked.
"Yeah," young Wills replied in a whisper, hanging his head in shame.
"What kind of help did she want from you?" Gibbs asked.
"She wanted me to check with some abortion clinics and see how much it would cost. So I did that. The cheapest one was at least $500 dollars before the end of the 12th week of the pregnancy. She counted and figured she was about that far along. But it didn't make any difference. She's from a poor family. She wanted to go to the Academy so her education would be completely paid for, and she didn't have any extra money. And I just finished training so I didn't have any money either."
"What about her parents?" asked Gibbs. "Wouldn't they have helped her?"
"No, they belong to some kind of weird Christian church that doesn't believe in abortion. She couldn't go to them for that."
"And your father?" Tony asked.
"Prissy doesn't…didn't really like him, but we talked it over and decided he was the only one who could help us. He was career Navy. He worked as a hospital corpsman, so he knows a lot about medical stuff."
"Whose idea was it for him to try to do an abortion?" Gibbs asked.
"Well, first we asked if he would loan us the money, but he said he didn't have enough loose cash, and then he said, ‘Well, I can do it.'"
Gibbs asked, "Did you and Prissy think he could?"
Josh looked down at his hands, twisting them together. "Prissy wasn't sure," he told them, "but dad said he'd assisted at lots of D&C procedures while he worked at Bethesda." Josh looked up again. "D&C—you know, that's where women have their wombs scraped out. Dad said it was exactly what an abortion doctor would do. And he said it was really easy—you didn't even have to be a medical doctor to do it."
"So you let him go ahead?" Tony said in a soft voice.
"Well, not at first," Josh replied. "Prissy had to think about it for a couple of days. I mean, she wanted the abortion, but she wasn't sure about dad doing it. Anyway, dad told her it would take some time for him to get the right instruments, and they're kind of expensive, so he didn't want to buy them, which he'd have to do because they're not something you just have lying around the house."
"So where did he get the instruments?" Gibbs pressed.
"He has a buddy, John, who still works at Bethesda. John was able to borrow a set of instruments from the OB-GYN department that was already wrapped and sterilized. The arrangement was John would take them back and sterilize them again and put them back and no one would ever know."
Tony next asked, "Why the motel? Was there some reason your dad didn't want to do the procedure at his house?"
Josh looked as though he might start crying again. "I don't know. He made us pay for it, though. And we went there and dad made Prissy take off her clothes and lie down on the floor with a couple of towels underneath her."
Gibbs asked his next question. "What happened when things started going wrong?"
Now Josh's face scrunched up and tears began sliding down his cheeks. "It happened as soon as dad put the one instrument into her womb. He kinda said, ‘Unh!" and she screamed, and the next thing I knew there was all this blood running out of her…her…uh…her thing down there. And dad got all kinda panicky looking. There were some gauze pads in the pack of instruments, so he tried putting them into her to keep the blood from coming out, and I got a bunch of towels from the bathroom, but there was just too much of it, and it kept coming and coming."
Josh was crying in earnest now. "And I was screaming, ‘Dad, what's wrong?' And he said, ‘I think I might have poked a hole in the wall of her uterus.'" And I said, ‘What are we going to do?' And he said, ‘I don't know. I've never seen this happen before, and besides I don't think I have the right instruments for it.' And Prissy was screaming and screaming. He was afraid someone might hear it, so he got a wet washcloth and put it in her mouth so she couldn't scream out loud. And all this time blood is just pouring out of her. He told me to help him turn her over on her stomach with her butt in the air and maybe the blood wouldn't come out quite so fast."
Josh stopped talking; he was sobbing harder and harder. The two agents said nothing, waiting for him to continue. Finally, catching his breath, he went on, "A few minutes later, Prissy started to quiet down, and she was looking real pale. And then, I don't know how long it was, she started to have a seizure. And dad said, ‘She's lost so much blood her heart's failing.' And a while after that she was dead. And all we could do was watch her die."
Josh broke down completely at that point, sobbing as though he would never stop. Again Gibbs and DiNozzo waited for him to recover, although it took several minutes. He finally looked up to see that someone had set a bottle of water and a box of tissues on the table. He gratefully used both.
"I really loved Prissy. I would give anything if this had never happened." He paused to blow his nose and wipe his eyes again. "What's going to happen to me now?"
Gibbs answered, "That will be up to the Judge Advocate General to decide, but I would say at the very least you'd be considered an accessory to manslaughter. In the meantime, we need to get a tissue sample from you for a DNA test. Then we're going to take you to a holding cell while we question your father.
Tony spoke up. "Will you be all right? Not try to do anything foolish?"
"No, I won't do anything like that." Josh replied firmly. "It won't bring Prissy back. I know I have to take my punishment like a man."
Leaving the interrogation room, Gibbs called Abby to come and swab Seaman Wills' cheek. Having made this request, Gibbs said to the space around him, "I need coffee."
"On it, boss," McGee responded," and rushed off to the break room.
Gibbs turned to Tony. "DiNozzo, you okay?"
"Yeah," Tony replied. "Pretty gruesome story, but I'm okay. Think I'll get some coffee too, before you start questioning Joe." And he was off down the hall as well.
While Gibbs waited for his coffee, he leaned against the corridor wall, staring into space. Ziva stood with her arms crossed, watching him. "Tony said he was okay, but how about you?" she asked Gibbs.
Gibbs thought for several seconds before answering. "Like DiNozzo said, it's a pretty gruesome story."
DiNozzo and McGee returned together bearing four coffees. The team took time for several bracing swallows of the hot beverage. Then Gibbs spoke to Ziva.
"Joe Wills lied about knowing Prissy Newman. He's going to resist answering our questions."
"That's all right," Ziva responded with a slight mirthless smile. "Between the two of us, I think we can persuade him that it's in his best interests to tell the truth this time."
Gibbs and David entered the interrogation room to find Wills senior sitting with his hands clasped together on the table and looking around.
"Hey, is that coffee you got?" he asked brightly. "I could sure use some right about now."
"Maybe later," Gibbs told him. "Right now, we have some questions you need to answer."
"Hey," Wills said, "I told you I want a lawyer before you ask me any questions. And I don't have a clue why you want me here."
Gibbs said, "If you don't know why you're here, then you shouldn't have a problem answering our questions." Gibbs sat down at the table. "We've just spent some time with your son. He was very forthcoming. First of all, he confirmed that, in spite of what you told my agents earlier, you not only knew his girl friend, Prissy Newman, but you tried to perform an abortion on her."
"Hey," Wills protested, "if this is about abortion, it ain't illegal, you know."
"But performing one without knowing how to do it properly and causing the woman to die is a criminal act," Gibbs replied evenly.
Wills leaned back against the chair and crossed his arms over his chest. "Well, I don't know this Prissy person, and I certainly never did an abortion on her."
"And of course, you never obtained a sterile pack of instruments from your friend John over at Bethesda, either."
A flash of worry crossed Wills' face. "What do you mean?"
"We haven't checked with him yet, but I'm sure he'll tell us when we ask him about it."
"He'll never tell," Wills said defiantly, and then deflated as he realized that he had almost confessed. "I think I'm not gonna talk to you anymore until I get a lawyer."
"Fine," Gibbs told him. "We'll get you a lawyer. In the meantime, let me tell you what your son told us, and you can tell us if he's telling the truth."
As Gibbs recited Josh Wills's description of the failed abortion, Joe's face began to shine with a coat of sweat.
When Gibbs finished, Wills protested, "That ain't what happened."
Gibbs said in a reasonable voice, "But you told us you didn't know what happened."
Ziva spoke up. "Mr. Wills, there are a lot of inconsistencies in what you're saying to us. Why don't you just save us all some time and confess?"
Gibbs added, "If you confess to us now, it'll probably help when you come to be sentenced. And not only that, if you don't confess, you're making your son a liar. Is that what you want?"
His body stiff as though he were going to protest again, Wills stared at Gibbs with wide eyes for a long minute. Then his body crumpled, and he put his hands on the table and his head on his hands. "I thought I could do it. I seen it done lotsa times. It's easy. It's s'posed to be easy."
He looked up with tears showing in his eyes. "I'm sorry. I liked her. I never wanted to do anything to hurt her, but it was s'posed to be easy."
"Tell us," Ziva requested.
Joe Wills confirmed he had refused to give Josh and Prissy money for an abortion at a clinic. "That's a lotta cash," he said. "Even if I coulda put my hands on that kind of wad at one time, I didn't want to do it. That's my retirement money."
"I doubt you're going to need it where you're going," Gibbs interjected.
"Yeah, yeah," Wills said dejectedly. "I asked John Sager, he's my buddy over at Bethesda, to borrow a pack of instruments for a D&C. I told Josh to rent a motel room ‘cause I figured there might be blood, and I didn't want to mess up my house. Josh had enough money to pay for the room. I told him to make up a name and pay cash so nobody could trace us."
Ziva spoke. "Perhaps you should have taken Prissy's body with you afterward so no one could identify her from her fingerprints. And perhaps you should have policed the room for your own prints and Josh's before you left.
Wills rubbed his face. "Yeah, you're right. I guess I panicked. It wasn't s'posed ta happen like that."
"Go on," Gibbs urged.
"I didn't have any trouble finding the os." He looked up at them. "That's the canal through the cervix that goes up into the womb. Then I put in the dilators. They're the instruments that open up the os so's you can put the curette into the uterus. But when I put the curette in, it kinda bounced around, so I pushed on it a little, ‘n' then I felt it give. And the next thing I knew, she was bleeding like hell. And I didn't know what to do to stop it."
"Did you try to stop it?" Gibbs asked.
"Yeah, but where she was bleeding from, I couldn't reach. There was nothing I could do but watch her die."
Wills fell silent for a few seconds. "I guess you got me on murder, huh? Or manslaughter?"
Gibbs stood up. "I told your son I didn't know how JAG will want to plead it." He paused. "You're probably also looking at charges for lying to federal agents and practicing medicine without a license and maybe a few other things as well."
At the end, Joe Wills' bravado had completely disappeared. His face was grey with weariness as the agents escorted him to a detention cell next to the one occupied by his son.
Returning to the bull pen and seeing the clock, Gibbs realized it was already well into the evening. It had been a very long day from the time they had headed out earlier in the morning for the motel in Annapolis. It wasn't often that they were able to wrap up a felony case in one day, and the nature of the case was highly emotional and therefore exhausting.
"Okay, people," Gibbs addressed his team. "It's late; the reports and picking up Joe's friend John can wait until morning. Go home, get some rest." He paused. "Good work, everybody."
Tony said, "Thank you, thank you, boss. My butt is vibrating from making three car trips to Annapolis today."
As they gathered up their things, the team chattered lightly, looking forward to some well-earned down time, doing their best to put thoughts of a dead cadet and her dead baby out of mind.
But none of them really slept well that night.
Chapter End Notes:
!!!WARNING!!! The subject of this story is very controversial, and some readers may be uncomfortable with it. Remember--I'm not forcing you to read it.