Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [206]
JOSH SINDER If saying the truth gets you kicked off the tour—oh well, I guess that’s how it goes.
STEVE MORIARTY The Gits actually played one of our first shows in Seattle with TAD and Nirvana, at the HUB Ballroom at the University of Washington. There were like 2,000 people there, and we played brilliantly. So they kind of welcomed us to town and showed us out of town. The benefit was great. We made like five grand.
I always knew that we would find the guy who killed Mia eventually. That’s how I maintained my wits, really. So when we did, I was obviously really psyched, but it also brought back a lot of repressed and horrible memories. And having to go through the trial was like reopening all those wounds, and I knew that I had to be there and to testify as a witness.
At the time they gathered the DNA from the crime scene, the technology was not created to test it. It wasn’t until 10 years later, but the medical examiner who did the autopsy had the foresight to save particular samples, thinking that maybe the technology would catch up one day, and lo and behold, it did. It was the first case in the state that a conviction was made using DNA from saliva from teeth marks.
The guy had gotten a felony assault on his girlfriend who was pregnant. He kicked her in the stomach and gave her a bloody nose. That’s when they entered his DNA sample into the database. I think the only reason the cold-case detectives picked up the case—there were only two detectives for the entire region—is because of all that media attention and all those bands and all the organizations, the self-defense group. Joan Jett really went out of her way to help us out. It was a movement.
The guy was as far away from Seattle as you could get—he was in the Florida Keys. He disappeared just as quickly as he appeared in Seattle. He wasn’t anyone that anyone knew. He had stalked other women, who came forward during the trial. He was a sociopath and felt no remorse.
ELIZABETH DAVIS-SIMPSON I remember going online to look at a picture of him and thinking for a long time, Do I click the site? Do I do this? Do I look at this fucker’s face, the last face that Mia saw? And I did. I looked at his face, and I looked at his eyes. That was pretty intense. He’s a monster, huge.
VALERIE AGNEW I wasn’t there for the trial because I was out of the country, but Selene ended up testifying. I was there for the sentencing. I accidentally walked into the courtroom behind him at one point. They had him shackled out in the hallway. We were on his heels right behind him. It was totally an intense experience. Man, he’s enormous. It was very emotional. I think he got like 36 years. It was so frustrating to know that the amount of time is never enough to compensate for what your friend or her family goes through. But it was at least no longer a question mark.
STEVE MORIARTY The trial was the first time I’d seen the pictures of the crime scene, and it was blown up to the size of a door: where she was laid out and the blood dripping from her mouth. Like horrible, horrible shit in the courtroom, and it sure didn’t seem like it was 10 years earlier. It seemed like yesterday.
MIKE INEZ I flew over to London with my girlfriend at the time, and Alice in Chains are coming from Brazil, and we scheduled three rehearsals in London. The first day we didn’t do anything but smoke hash together. And here is my jumping in the pool for Alice in Chains—I think it was 27 gigs in 32 days and 16 countries. It’s so funny, like Layne would say, “All right, here’s a song called ‘Rain When I Die,’ ” and then I’d run up to Layne and whisper in his ear, “Which one’s that?” He’d sing me a little of the song. “Okay, I got it. Go.”
We finished that cycle and I was still thinking it was temporary, and then we got an offer to do this Arnold Schwarzenegger movie soundtrack, which was the first time I ever wrote with Jerry, Sean, and Layne. And then the guys asked me, “Hey, do you want to stick around and be our