He didn’t call the police or an ambulance that night. He claims his mobile phone battery was dead. He admitted that he could have taken her to the hospital in the back of his station wagon. He didn’t. He was afraid that he’d get jammed up. Perhaps be accused of raping the girl himself. Or get hit with a vagrancy and trespassing charge. This is a man who’s spent so much of his life in prison that he doesn’t trust the authorities to leave him be.

So he watched K to make sure she was safe while he was hiding in the boat shed. Peering through the cracks in the timber slats, he saw Scott Blair walk onto the beach from his sports car. Scott was carrying a small navy sports bag. The girl had woken by then. The shirt Vince Knox left on her body slid off as she sat up, visibly disoriented. From his hiding place in the shed, Vince Knox assumed that Scott was there to help the girl. Instead, Scott kicked her lightly in her thigh with his sneaker. Like he was rousing a stray dog.

Scott ordered her to get up. He told her to shower in the icy outdoor beach shower. He gave her soap and shampoo, which he’d brought in the sports bag. He told her that if she didn’t wash off all the evidence, then he’d do it himself. “Better be careful,” he threatened with a smirk as he groped her naked body. “One thing might lead to another. I might get carried away.”

When she’d showered and dressed, Scott pushed her against the boat shed where Vince Knox was hiding. Scott warned her not to tell anyone what he’d done to her. Vince Knox recalled that Scott took specific pleasure in mentioning some of the sex acts he’d forced on her. He heard Scott tell the girl that he’d destroy her reputation if she told on him. After that, Scott gave her cash and told her to use it to catch a bus home.

Because K’s testimony was struck from the record, whatever she said that day in court does not exist. It never happened. The jury can’t refer to it. They can’t even remember it. This is why Vince Knox’s eyewitness testimony is so crucial. And his testimony was damning.

Despite his gruff, abrupt manner, I think the jurors found him sincere. A simple man who spoke from the heart in simple words. They appreciated his candor. They realized that he had nothing to gain from coming forward, other than telling the truth. The jury, like all of us, is suffering from trial fatigue. I could tell they liked his authenticity.

When it was his turn, Dale Quinn threw everything he had at Vince Knox. He accused Knox of being a voyeur who spied on two teenagers having a romantic interlude at the beach. He suggested Knox’s testimony was motivated by anger against Scott Blair’s dad, who’d hired him in the past to do ground maintenance work but never followed through with a full-time job. Once he was done casting aspersions on Vince Knox’s character, he focused his attention on finding inconsistencies in his testimony. In trying to trap him in lies.

“Are you asking the court to believe you slept through a rape?” Quinn asked.

“The wind rattles those sheds something awful,” Knox responded.

“If the shed rattles so loudly that you can’t hear a girl being raped, then how did you miraculously hear the defendant discussing his crimes with the complainant, as you have claimed? Isn’t it true that you’re lying when you say you overheard this purported conversation between my client and the complainant?”

“I’m not lying. I heard every word because he pushed her against the side of the boathouse where I was hiding. I was right on the other side of that thin wall. Less than an inch away from them. I heard every word. I ain’t deaf. Not yet, anyway.”

“Why did you not mention any of this when you were on the stand last time?” Quinn asked.

“You didn’t ask me if Scott Blair did it. If he raped that girl. You just asked me about how he rescued that drowning kid all those years ago. If you’d asked me whether he did it, then I would have told you.”

It went on like this for a while, until Dale Quinn was handed a folder of notes from the associate whom he’d sent out earlier. Quinn skimmed the notes in the file and then asked the judge’s permission to have a sidebar conversation with the associate who’d prepared the material. There was obviously something that he wasn’t expecting. We all watched and wondered what was going on as he turned to Scott Blair’s father and the two men whispered to each other angrily. It ended with both men looking furious. The judge intervened. He said Quinn had enough time to consult and he should continue with his questioning.

“Why should the jury believe a man who killed two of his friends by driving drunk into a tree?” Quinn asked. “You were in jail for killing those boys, weren’t you, Bobby Green? Then you came back here and changed your name so that nobody would know your criminal past.” There was an eerie silence in the court among those who remembered the story of Bobby Green.

“I changed my name just like I said earlier, because I wanted a new beginning. I served time with Vince Knox. He saved my life. More than once. I wanted to honor his memory. That’s why I use his name. I knew that nobody here would have given me any peace if they’d known I was Bobby Green,” Knox responded.

When he was eighteen, Vince Knox, who was then known as Bobby Green, drove a pickup into a tree one summer night. His blood alcohol content was twice the legal limit. The vehicle turned into a fireball. His friends died. He was badly burned. He almost died. He was hospitalized for months and underwent multiple lifesaving surgeries. He’ll carry those scars to his dying day. After he recovered, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served time. In the years that followed, he spent more time in prison than out of it until he returned to Neapolis to start his life afresh several years ago.

If Quinn thought that delving into the open wounds of Vince Knox’s past would provoke him to explode on the stand, then he couldn’t have been more wrong.

Vince Knox stood up, a burly man with thinning brown hair and a protruding belly. His tattooed neck and scars from being stabbed in prison attested to his troubled life.

With tears in his eyes, he turned to the jury. “I’ve never said I was a good man. I’ve done plenty wrong in my life. Plenty to be ashamed of. I killed my friends. Drove that truck straight into a tree. But that’s got nothing to do with what happened that night. Scott, he did something bad to that girl. He raped her. And then he told her he’d do it again if she ever told anyone. I heard him say it. Every word of it.”

Vince Knox’s testimony was enough for Judge Shaw to reject Dale Quinn’s request to dismiss the case due to lack of evidence. Quinn looked crestfallen. He’d walked into court that morning expecting the case would be over by lunchtime. He walked out like the rest of us, unsure where the verdict was headed.

Mitch Alkins and Dale Quinn gave powerful closing arguments. In Alkins’s version, Scott Blair was a predatory rapist. Cruel, calculating. He knowingly and with full premeditation entrapped a teenage girl and raped her to win a competition. His conscience was guilty from the start. He tried to arrange an alibi and did his best to wash away the evidence. In Dale Quinn’s account, Scott Blair was, at worst, an immature jock falsely accused after a consensual sexual tryst that the girl regretted in hindsight, spurred on by her angry, vengeful parents and a prosecutor’s office trying to use Scott as a high-profile scapegoat to satisfy a public lust to jail men accused of sex crimes.

As the jurors filed out of court to deliberate the verdict, I felt as if I were saying goodbye to old friends. At the start of the trial, the jurors were strangers. To each other. To me. To everyone in court.

Over the course of the trial, I’ve come to know them as individuals. Their facial gestures. Their nervous tics. I’ve seen them cry. And laugh. Roll their eyes in disbelief. Mostly I’ve seen them stifle yawns while they discreetly checked the time. After two weeks of testimony, they’re now tasked with determining whether Scott Blair is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of rape and sexual assault.

There are some who say that the reasonable doubt burden is one of the reasons why so few rape cases end in a conviction. It’s a difficult standard to meet when it comes to sexual assault, because rarely are there witnesses other than the parties themselves.

The idea that guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt dates back to the eighteenth-century British jurist Sir William Blackstone, who wrote in his seminal works that underpin our legal system: “Better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.”

Studies show that rapists tend to be repeat offenders more than other criminals. They go on to rape again, at a rate of around five rapes in their lifetime. That means the ten guilty rapists who escape, to paraphrase Sir Blackstone, might go on to rape another forty innocent women. I wonder what Sir William Blackstone would say about that?

The jurors will review the evidence and argue the merits of the case. Then they will vote until they reach a unanimous verdict. Either they will find Scott Blair guilty. Or they will find him not guilty. We will find out in the coming hours or days.

I’m Rachel Krall and this is Guilty or Not Guilty, the podcast that puts you in the jury box.

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Hannah