Dennis Murphy

As my youngest gets older, we'll tell her the NASCAR Nana story about when she was born and just never let her memory die.

Search Glass Half Full with Craig Melvin from today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

And Blaine, Brad and I are going back to the same courtroom in Tallahassee, Florida, every couple of years.

And...

We look at the tables to the right and the left of the prosecutor, same, or the same, but the defendants keep changing with different lawyers, and the years go by, and Ruth and Phil Markell, the parents of the murdered man, are still there, and you get a sense of the elapsed time.

But it always crookedly blames something Shakespearean about it, where there's a tragic flaw that brings down an entire family.

That kind of a thing can wear out its welcome, but I think we got away with it.

I mean, the signature for her defense is this phrase, she's a meddler, not a murderer.

But there is evidence that she meddled in her children's lives for years and years and years.

And that's my Shakespearean flaw, this desire for control of all elements of your life in a

very uncontrollable kind of world we live in.

Blaine, I think of the strategy here as something like a pool break shot where you're there going to make the balls scatter and you fire a shot and there they go and they're in the pocket and they're moving around the table.

Let's scatter the balls and see what happens.

And what happened was precisely what they hoped, which is that she started making calls, not to the police, not to her husband, but to her son, Charlie, was the first one.

What's going on?

Let me tell you what's happening here.

Brad, I think it produced maybe the best single bit of evidence in the trial, which is this monitored wiretap phone call between Charlie and his mother after the bump, where Charlie's asking, is it about me?

She said, well, and Brad, here's the quote I think is the quote of the trial.

It's about us.

It's about the two of us.