An interview with Michelle Theer: 'Life in the joint'
Q. What's life like here?
A. Pure hell.
Q. Have you adjusted at all?
A. What is adjustment?. . . I don't believe in our justice system, I don't believe there's justice in our legal system, not after what I saw at my trial.
Q. Do they keep you in a cell, or do you have you in a barracks type of set-up?
A. It's like a barracks. . . two people to a room.
Q. You have rooms within a barracks?
A. Yes. . . bathroom down the hall, shower down the hall, day room, a TV.
Q. Now, why did they put you in isolation?
A. They [prison officials] claim here that they were misquoted. And, let me tell you, they won't give me a straight answer about why I was kept in isolation for so long. So, don't ask me, ask them.
Q. How long were you kept in isolation?
A. Eleven weeks.
Q. And what is isolation like here?
A. He–lllllll.
Q. What do you do?
A. The inner circle of hell. You don't do anything. You sit in a hot, unair conditioned room that's infested with ants. You get your meal three times a day slid through a slot in the door. And, that's about it. . . .
Q. Is it a cell with a toilet, bunk?
A. [She nods, Yes.]
Q. How long were you in here before they put you in isolation?
A. When I got here. . . December 3 [2004]. . . .
Q. How did you end up in isolation?
A. Well, everybody that has a sentence over 15 years has to do 45 days of a long-term adjustment. . . but I get treated differently than everybody here so, of course, I did 11 weeks.
Q. Why do you get treated differently?
A. I don't know, they seem to get special enjoyment out of punishing me, extra hard.
Q. Who is responsible for that?
A. I don't know, but you know what they–[expletive] rolls down hill, so, whoever started it, I don't know how high up it started. . . but–
Q. What do you do with your days here?
A. Well, I work in the clothes house, where we hand out uniforms to new people when they get here, and, I have arthritis in my hips, and. . . I have a medical waiver for no standing over four hours that I've gotten from three different doctors, but apparently it's more important that I work in the clothes house because every time I get this medical waiver, they still put me back in the clothes house where I have to stand all day.
Q. You are having a hard time adjusting here?
A. Uh-huh. . . I wasn't raised to live in prison. . . I don't have the upbringing. Oh, there's some people here who were raised for prison life, trust me. All their life. . . they were trained just for this kind of life. . . .
Q. What is a typical day here?
A. Well, I go to work all day [in] the clothes house. . . Every week the dining room workers come in and pick up a bundle of their clean clothes, and so we make up each dining room worker's bundle. . . so we pull off the shelves. . . uniforms [and] put together everybody's individual sizes. And when they bring in their dirty clothes, we just roll those up into a big bundle, and those get sent out to be washed.
Q. So you go to work, how long do you spend there?
A. 7:30 to 3:30. . . Then, I go back to the dorm. . . until 5:30. I usually don't go to dinner because the food's pretty bad. And, in the summertime, we get to go outside from 6 until 8. . . .
Q. Michelle, what is your hope, what are you banking on?
A. I don't think about it. . . .
Q. So, you don't think about it, I am going to win on appeal?
A. I don't think about it.
Q. Not at all?
A. No. . . I don't want to have my hopes dashed. . . . I was so hopeful before, I was just so sure that the truth was going to come out. I was just so sure that the jury was going to see that this was all BS. Yes, I had an affair, yes, I thought about leaving my husband, yes, I moved out, yes, we had problems, but none of that makes me a violent killer. How can you make the leap from one to the other? Forty percent of the marriages in this country have problems similar to mine, but they don't end in violent death. Nobody came forward to say they heard us screaming and throwing plates, nobody came forward and said that they heard me say I'm going to kill you for this, nobody. . . . See the complicated thing is that you can't prove a no–there's no facts to show you didn't do something. . . .You can have facts that show you did do something, but there's no facts to show you didn't do something. . . .
Q. You can't prove a negative is what you're saying?
A.Yeah. I mean, the DA's [District Attorney] did a great job in showing that I had an affair, that I talked to John on the phone all the time. In fact, you know, I talked to John on the phone all the time even up to the day Marty died. If I was planning his murder, wouldn't I stop talking to John for at least a day or two?. . .
Q. Have you thought about writing a book?
A. I've thought about writing a book about my case, and I have thought, even more, really, I have thought that if I was going to write a book, I'd like to write a book–shorter stories about some of the other women here. . . There are women who are here for murder under very unique circumstances, and I think that society looks at women who have killed–and I just say women because I'm not, I don't have any personal experience with these men, so I can't say–but I think that society just looks at these women and just sees monsters. And I don't think they understand. And I'm not saying an excuse–I'm saying that I don't [believe] they understand these women or how they got that way or how they are now. . . .
Q. Do you think you gave me this interview because you feel defeated, that you want to get your story out?
A. I don't know if I feel defeated, but I can tell you that, what I can say is that I feel like I have been silenced for too long, and there is just some part of me that needs to speak out in my own defense, you know. I can understand Kirk's [her trial attorney Kirk Osborn] reasoning for not wanting to put me on the stand, but now at this point, I feel like my silence has just basically become a burden. . . . I guess, in some ways, I do feel defeated. In jail, one girl who has been in several times, she said, I just want to ask you one question. She said, you know, obviously you didn't love him [Marty]. Why did she say that? Because I was having an affair, and she thought I killed him [Marty]. I guess everyone thinks that, that I didn't love him, and obviously I killed him, that's what they think. . . .
Q. If you got off on appeal, would people think you were innocent?
A. I would go around the rest of my life, and people would say, that is the woman who killed her husband. . . . People will always say, yeah, she killed her husband, and her boyfriend took the fall. . . .'
Q. Was there any one thing that convicted you?
A. No. They brought in troops and troops and troops of people–piling these grains of sand up until eventually you have a mountain. It was circumstantial–all it proves is that I had an affair. It did not prove that I planned and perpetrated a murder. . . .
Editor's Note: For more information on this story, see an appeal brief filed by John Diamond with the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals.