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prove valuable.
One afternoon she went to Louise’s house and—despite their ongoing
legal dispute—convinced her to ride down to the nearby Baxter
Springs police station and give a new statement. Why her mother
agreed to it is entirely unclear. Later she’d claim that her
daughter had “kidnapped” her—raising the question of whether the
statement was written under duress. But at the station that day,
Louise hand-wrote and signed an affidavit witnessed by a clerk. “My
entire family blackmailed M. A. Wright for money for gas and oil
stocks property trust fund,” she admitted.
    The document, like all the scraps that Judith had gathered,
seemed at once to suggest everything and add up to nothing. But at
the very least, someone had admitted, on paper, to blackmailing
Wright. 

Twelve
    In early 2009, Judith’s lawsuit in
Missouri was thrown out. If the family had stolen money from M. A.
Wright, the court concluded, the proper place to pursue the claim
would be in Harris County, Texas, where Wright’s estate had
originated. Judith found a lawyer there and filed suit in Houston,
where Wright’s will had been adjudicated back in 1994.
    It was at this point that I began to discern a pattern in
Judith’s legal representation. Her lawyers almost always took up
her case on contingency, hoping to make their money back when she
won—Wright’s estate, after all, had been worth millions, and in its
basic outlines Judith’s case seemed like a promising one. But
Judith would inevitably part ways with them along the road to
justice. Whether the attorneys somehow lost faith in the cause or
just grew weary of struggling with Judith’s story wasn’t always
clear.
    Every time I talked to her, it seemed, she’d added one lawyer
and subtracted another, to the point where, after several years, I
had trouble keeping them straight—even as she continued to bring up
names I’d not yet heard. There was Terry Funk, of course, and a
character named Jim Lloyd who had once represented her mother.
There was Daniel Whitworth, a local attorney, and Gene Balloun, out
of Kansas City. There’d been Michael Olver and Richard Wills in
Washington, and then there were others who seemed to pop up in our
conversations once and then never appear again. “Gary Richardson,
attorney in Tulsa, I’m going to see if he can’t line up with this
attorney that I have here,” read my notes from a conversation with
Judith in September 2008. Richardson never did. Judith once
suggested she was going to engage the famed celebrity lawyer Robert
Shapiro. Nothing ever came of it.
    When I tracked down Judith’s lawyers and investigators, they
usually told me versions of the same story. “She gets excited and
she just kind of goes on a roll,” Whitworth told me. “Normally,
when you talk to people like that, you weigh it with a grain of
salt. But the interesting thing is that when you dig into it, there
appears to be merit in what she is saying. My opinion is that she’s
right.” He paused. “I suppose I represent her, so I’m supposed to
say that.”
    When Michael Olver first heard Judith’s story, it sounded to him
like “a Friday night movie of the week.” But over time, he told me,
he came to trust her. “I can tell you that in dealing with Ms.
Patterson, every time we’ve heard her describe something and we’ve
checked it out, it’s been accurate,” he said.
    Then there was Joseph Norwood, another Tulsa attorney who
briefly seemed like the man to talk to about the case; Judith had
described him to me as “kind of like my spokesperson” at one point
in 2008. “Right now I’m still kind of getting my head wrapped
around it and figuring out where to take the deal,” Norwood told me
when I reached him at his office. “I do believe there is merit.” I
began running through the litany of accusations and conspiracies
that I’d piled up in my notes. “Here’s the problem,” he said.
“Judith has been completely overwhelmed and