"The Final Case" is a novel, but closely based on the tragic death of Hana Williams, which I covered as a reporter
In May 2011, a 13-year-old girl named Hana Williams was killed by her adoptive parents in a rural town in Washington state's tulip country, an hour or so north of Seattle. She had been adopted from Ethiopia three years earlier, into an isolated, fundamentalist Christian family, and for much of that time endured almost incomprehensible abuse: Hana was shunned by her adoptive parents and their seven biological children and was made to sleep variously in a barn, a locked shower room and ultimately a locked closet too small to lie down in. She was fed frozen food, compelled to use an outdoor toilet, repeatedly shorn of her braids, and regularly beaten with a variety of implements. When she died, late on a cold and rainy spring night, she had been kept outside for hours until hypothermia caused her to fall down repeatedly, ultimately leaving her face down in the mud. When her adoptive mother finally called 911, she suggested to the operator that Hana had killed herself as a final act of rebellion.
Hana's death is among the most upsetting cases in a small roster — although not small enough — of stories of extreme abuse suffered by adoptees at the hands of the families who took them in. Two years after Hana died, I traveled to Mount Vernon, Washington, to cover the beginning of the murder trial of her adoptive parents, Carri and Larry Williams, who were ultimately convicted of assault, manslaughter and, in Carri's case, homicide by abuse. The trial was an often-searing experience, eliciting cries and gasps from the gallery when autopsy photos of Hana's bruised, emaciated body were shown, or when her younger brother, the only other adoptee in the family, used sign language to testify that he didn't understand where his sister had gone. It was also surreal to emerge from the courtroom into the bright sun of an idyllic Pacific Northwest summer. At times during the weeks I attended, I found myself spontaneously weeping at traffic lights around the town.
I wasn't alone. Besides the parties to the case, and the Williamses' family, a small crew of regular observers filed into the courtroom gallery each day, often including delegations from the greater Seattle Ethiopian diaspora, and a handful of heartsick adoptive parents, who could too easily imagine their children having ended up in the Williams home instead. One of those parents was David Guterson, author of the bestselling novel "Snow Falling on Cedars," who attended all but one day of the seven-week trial — the longest trial in county history, at least that the prosecutor could recall. At first, Guterson says, he came as an adoptive parent, in solidarity with the region's Ethiopian community. In time, he came to feel that Hana's life required a longer-lasting sort of witness.
This January, Guterson published his new novel, "The Final Case," which tracks many of the contours of Hana's and the Williamses' story — rendered in the novel as Abeba and the Harveys — intertwining a story of shocking cruelty with the more pedestrian tragedies of the narrator's life, as his father, an effectively retired criminal defense attorney, assumes the thankless task of representing Betsy Harvey. It's a story suffused with loss — whether in its monstrous forms or as the "eternal human norm" — and the question of how to live a meaningful life in the face of both. The narrator encounters all this as a midlife novelist who thought he'd left fiction writing behind. "If that leaves you wondering about this book — " the narrator says at one point, "wondering if I'm kidding, or playing a game, or if I've wandered into the margins of metafiction or the approximate terrain of autofiction — everything here is real."