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After all that's happened, it still amazes me when people lie.
Last summer our neighbor, Hadley Ferguson, invited my mother and me for tea and talked at great length about the drug dealing and distasteful habits of our next door neighbors. Though they were freeloaders who lived off their parents, didn't celebrate Christmas, and allowed children to commingle with pot brownies, all of these ill qualities did not dissuade friends of her and her husband from buying their pot from the Goodmans. Hadley also brought up religion -- specifically Mormonism. And much more. Topics that people liked to hear us talk about, apparently because it begot funding.
Mom and I recognized this as elicitation. It was sad, because we really enjoyed Hadley and her family. We believed they were genuine, kind people. But after the surreal treat of having pot blown into our hotel room, having the car broken into to add or remove things, and having my own lawyer attempting to get me to talk about a nonexistent drug habit on tape, we were super attuned to efforts to get us to talk about or buy drugs. (If all would have gone according to plan we would have tried to buy from them? But we don't. Buy. Drugs.)
So, we avoided the Goodmans. Mom sent a partial summary of the conversation with Hadley to her via email on a day when she behaved particularly strangely and we knew it was time to start documenting. Hadley did all she could to avoid acknowledging that she had ever received it.
And now, when questioned by a police officer about it, she denies having ever told us that the neighbors are drug dealers. This was completely shocking to me until I did a little research. It looks like it's not actually a crime to lie to a police officer. She would only have to worry about it if she were committing perjury, I guess. Still, if it reached that point it would look pretty bad that she actually lied to the police. I would be terrified to do something like that -- she must still be enjoying the pervasive Missoula impunity vibe.
So... Perhaps we are still meant to be discredited to such a degree that no one will believe our word against anyone else's. I'll be interested to hear the explanation for why we supposedly waste our time creating fake documentation of people saying this stuff to us. We're masochists? Why would we invent a story about our neighbors lying to us? All it achieved was making us studiously avoid those neighbors. Why would we send an email documenting it for any reason other than a desperate attempt to cover our asses as everyone around us seemed intent on the whole drug entrapment/foreclosing on Mom's property plan? We had no idea how drug entrapment worked until we were seemingly combating it.
Thank god we did document as much as we did. Because apparently all it takes for the police to believe you is to not be either of us.
We are working with the hate crimes specialist and boy does he not want to look at all the religious- and politically based elicitation and harassment. He wants it to be about us being paranoid: end of story. Yep. All of the troubles we've been having are about us. We're just these ladies living in this lovely neighborhood and so can't we just enjoy it? Apparently, the problem is our documentation of our neighbors, and our violations of their privacy. John Ferguson would never call my mother a "motherf***ing p*ssy" across his fence in an apparent drunken rage. We just like to make that sh*t up. (Hence, the need to document...)
I guess we can expect anyone with any symbiotic relationship in this town and in this state and with any involved federal agency affiliation to go with the "Paranoid/crazy/self-aggrandizing ladies with nothing better to do" (than attempt to document the Kafkaesque reality they've been trying to escape) line. It's an authority problem. Or something. Some pathology.
I guess we can expect people to keep lying. Because it can't be about greed, corruption, or distaste for our political/religious beliefs or lifestyles. Or the foiled plans of fake environmentalists.
Also -- I'm pretty sure Hadley was taping that conversation. If so, I guess it was done illegally without any investigative authority for her own purposes. Or she lied to the officer with full confidence that the evidence had been destroyed.
