Her Husband Was Released From Prison After 15 Years And Infected Her With 𝐇𝐈𝐕 — It Ended In 𝐌𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫 | HO

The US flag outside Blackstone Correctional Facility hung limp in the thick June heat, colors a little dull, metal rope clinking softly against the pole every time the wind thought about moving. On the other side of the razor wire, guards swapped shifts, coffee cups in hand.

Near the parking lot, a faded yellow line marked where families were supposed to wait, where people took those awkward “welcome home” photos for Facebook. On June 11, 2023, at 8:02 a.m., a man in a state-issue khaki shirt and jeans stepped through the final gate with a plastic property bag in one hand and a set of release papers in the other.

His name was Marcus Ellery. He was 41 years old. Fifteen years earlier, a bar fight turned bad and one man died. The judge called it voluntary manslaughter. The Department of Corrections called it a 15-year sentence. Now the system said he was free. The ink on the paperwork was barely dry when his wife, Celia, 39, pulled up to the curb in a silver 2012 sedan, a little air freshener shaped like that same US flag swinging from the rearview mirror.

She had put gas in the car the night before. She’d laid out a shirt for him on the bed at home. She’d reheated coffee four different times that morning because her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. When she saw him walking out, leaner, grayer at the temples, shoulders tighter, she thought: He’s home. We can start over. We can fix this.

He climbed into the passenger seat without a word.

According to her later statement, they didn’t talk on the drive from North Alabama to the outskirts of Birmingham. No “I missed you.” No “I’m sorry it took so long.” Just the sound of tires on I‑65 and the hum of the A/C on low. Celia drove, fingers clenched on the wheel, glancing sideways at the man she’d visited through thick glass and scratchy phones for a decade and a half.

He stared straight ahead, hands folded, like he was waiting for a CO to bark a command.

The apartment they went home to was a worn two‑unit brick building just outside Birmingham city limits. Celia had lived there alone since 2008, paying rent on a place big enough for two because she’d refused to downsize her hope. She’d taped their wedding photo to the fridge. She’d kept his old paintbrushes in a jar by the back door, bristles stiff with dried color.

Marcus barely looked around when they walked in.

“You can shower,” Celia said, voice careful. “I’ll make us something. You want eggs?”

“Whatever,” he muttered.

The first parole contact came a week later. Detective Marlon Haywood, 47, knocked on their door with a badge on his belt and a clipboard in his hand. He’d been there fifteen years earlier, at the bar, at the trial, at sentencing. Now he was back, wearing a different hat: parole supervisor.

“Marcus,” he said at the threshold. “Mind if I come in?”

Marcus stepped aside. Haywood’s notes from that home visit would later say: “Subject cooperative, withdrawn. Avoids eye contact. Speech slow, limited. Demonstrates hypervigilance, low affect. Unresolved institutional adjustment.”

In person, what that meant was this: Marcus sat on the edge of a thrift-store couch while Haywood walked him through conditions of release—curfew, employment, no weapons, mandatory check-ins. Celia hovered near the kitchen, pretending to wipe a counter that was already clean.

“We’ve got a re‑entry program in the city,” Haywood said. “Counselor, job training. I recommend you go. It helps.”

“I don’t need doctors,” Marcus said quietly. “They can’t unlearn what’s inside my head.”

Celia flinched at the bitterness in his voice, but she kept her smile up when Haywood looked at her.

“We’ll work on it,” she said. “We’ll get him settled.”

She tried.

She cooked his favorite meals. Fried chicken the way his mother used to make it. Red beans and rice on Tuesday nights. She turned the TV to baseball even though she didn’t care about baseball. She suggested walks in the evening, just around the block.

“It might help,” she said. “Fresh air. Getting out.”

Sometimes he went. Most days he stared at the wall or stood at the window, looking out like the street was another tier and someone had just yelled “yard.”

That first week, Celia woke up three times to Marcus thrashing beside her, gasping, eyes wide but not seeing her. In the morning, he’d sit at the table, scrubbing his hands with industrial cleaner until the skin went red.

“Marcus, stop,” she said once, grabbing his wrist. “You’re hurting yourself.”

“Can’t get it off,” he muttered. “It doesn’t come off.”

“What doesn’t?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. His silence filled the small kitchen like smoke.

Across the street, their neighbor, 44‑year‑old Ebony Price, watched the comings and goings. She’d known the Ellerys before the conviction. She’d brought over casseroles when Celia first moved in alone. After church, she’d sit on her porch with a glass of iced tea and see Marcus sometimes, just standing by the window, his face half‑hidden by the curtain.

“He kept his distance,” she later told detectives. “Didn’t talk much. Just watched.”

In early July, Marcus converted the basement into a workroom. Before prison, he’d painted in his spare time—mostly landscapes and street scenes, bits of color on canvas that Celia had hung proudly in their first apartment. Now the canvases that stacked up between July 3 and July 15 were different.

Celia brought several to the investigators later. They were abstractions of confinement—bars, narrow corridors, square shapes inside square shapes. Dark colors. One image repeated over and over: a tall man with a vertical scar on his left cheek, rendered in harsh strokes.

“Who is he?” Celia asked one night, holding up a painting.

Marcus didn’t look up from the canvas in front of him. “He never left the cell,” he said.

On July 20, after weeks of trying to be patient, Celia called the parole office.

“Something’s wrong with him,” she told Haywood over the phone. “He can’t sleep. He won’t eat. He talks about someone being ‘still here’ even when we’re alone. I don’t know what to do.”

“You did the right thing calling,” Haywood said. “Get him to the county behavioral health clinic. Ask for an evaluation. I’ll back it up in my notes.”

“He says doctors can’t change what’s done,” Celia said. “He won’t go.”

“Do what you can to keep the environment calm,” Haywood told her. “Secure anything dangerous. I’ll flag his file.”

Marcus refused the evaluation. He moved deeper into the basement, painting at night, sleeping during the day. The house flipped. Celia woke up to the sound of his footsteps overhead at 3 a.m. She fell asleep to the scrape of his chair across concrete.

On July 24, just after midnight, Ebony saw lights flickering in the Ellery basement and worried about an electrical fire. She called Celia.

“Girl, your lights are acting crazy down there,” she said. “You might want to check before something burns.”

Celia went down the basement steps slowly, one hand on the rail. The air smelled like turpentine and sweat. Marcus sat on the floor surrounded by torn canvas pieces, breathing hard, eyes wild, paint splattered on his hands like dried blood.

“Marcus,” she said softly. “What happened?”

“They let me out,” he whispered, staring at a bare patch of wall, “but he’s still here.”

“Who?” she asked. “Who’s still here?”

He didn’t answer.

The next morning, Celia locked the basement door when he finally fell asleep. Then she called Haywood again.

“He’s not safe,” she said. “I don’t know if he’ll hurt me. I don’t know if he’ll hurt himself.”

“Keep the basement secure,” Haywood advised. “Remove anything he could use to harm himself. We’ll push again for a mental health evaluation.”

August came and went. Marcus’s body shrank inside his clothes. He moved with stiff, precise steps, like each one had to be negotiated. He stared at windows without opening them. He stared at walls without seeing them.

“We can’t stay like this,” Celia said one evening over untouched plates of food. “You need help.”

“Help?” Marcus echoed. “They had fifteen years to help.”

In October, Celia made an appointment herself. Not for his mind. For his body. She drove him to Ridge View Family Clinic to see Dr. Leseawn Carver, a local practitioner who’d treated Celia before.

In the exam room, Marcus sat on the paper‑covered table, eyes on the floor, while Dr. Carver looked over his chart.

“You’ve lost weight,” she said. “How’s your appetite?”

“Fine,” Marcus muttered.

“Sleep?”

“Fine.”

Celia spoke up. “He barely eats,” she said. “He’s up all night. He shakes.”

Dr. Carver ordered standard blood work. When the results came back on October 18, she called Celia first.

“Mrs. Ellery,” she said carefully, “your husband’s bloodwork shows markers for HIV infection. We need to test you as well.”

Celia sat at the kitchen table, the phone pressed to her ear, staring at a crooked painting of a lake Marcus had done before prison.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“The test is conclusive,” Dr. Carver said. “Please schedule your own screening as soon as possible.”

Celia went in on October 21. She sat in the same chair Marcus had, arm extended, watching the needle slide into her skin. She went home after and waited.

On November 3, the clinic called.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Carver said. “Your results are positive.”

According to Celia’s later deposition, she stayed in that chair for hours. The clock on the wall ticked. The fridge hummed. The light outside went from afternoon to evening.

Finally, she stood up, walked into the living room, and called down the basement stairs.

“Marcus.”

He came up slowly, hand on the rail, eyes dull.

“What?” he asked.

“How long have you known?” she said.

He didn’t pretend not to understand. He didn’t ask “Known what?”

“A few weeks,” he said. “Since the clinic.”

“You didn’t tell me?” she asked. Her voice didn’t even sound like her own.

“What was I supposed to say?” he muttered. “ ‘Welcome home, I brought you this too’?”

“How did this happen?” she asked. “Tell me the truth.”

Marcus looked past her into the middle distance.

“It happened in there,” he said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

He repeated that line to his parole officer, Haywood, three days later when Haywood called him in after getting a notification from the clinic.

“It happened in there,” Marcus said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Medical confidentiality laws kept Blackstone’s full infirmary records sealed, but internal notes from 2019 to 2022 painted a partial picture: unexplained injuries, night terrors, psychological trauma. A counselor’s log from March 14, 2020 mentioned something else: “Inmate Ellery reports ongoing physical and sexual victimization by cellmate. Refuses to name others involved. Expresses fear of retaliation if transferred.”

The counselor wrote “victimization.”

The system wrote “no transfer.”

Celia’s mind wrote something else entirely: a story with perpetrators and an open ledger.

Shock hardened into something colder. She started asking questions. She called old lawyers. She requested redacted records. She left another message for Haywood, this time not about Marcus’s nightmares but about his past.

“Who was his cellmate?” she asked when they met in a small interview room at the parole office on November 15. “The one who hurt him.”

Haywood stared at his notes before answering.

“I can’t tell you everything,” he said. “There are rules. But I can tell you this much: his long‑term cellmate was a man named Clifford Knox. Fifty‑seven. Used to be a steelworker. In for armed robbery and assault. Life sentence, until it wasn’t.”

“What else?” Celia asked.

Haywood hesitated. “There’s also a connection,” he said. “The victim in Marcus’s case? The man who died in 2008? That was Knox’s son. Dean.”

The room felt smaller. The air felt thicker.

“So the father ended up in a cell with the man who killed his boy,” Celia said slowly. “And Marcus came home with scars and nightmares and a virus that’s going to kill him and me.”

“I didn’t say that,” Haywood replied. “I’m saying there was potential for hostility. The rest is… inference.”

“Did anyone protect him?” she asked. “When he reported the abuse?”

“He refused transfer,” Haywood said. “He was afraid it would make it worse.”

“It got worse anyway,” she said.

Haywood’s memo from that day noted: “Spouse demonstrates increasing agitation, preoccupation with Knox connection. Advised against private investigation.”

Marcus’s paranoia ramped up. He told Celia a gray pickup had been parked near the building “too many nights in a row.”

“I know that truck,” he said. “He’s watching.”

“Who?” Celia asked.

“You know who,” Marcus said. “They don’t forgive.”

On December 4, Celia called Haywood again.

“He keeps talking about a gray truck,” she said. “Says someone’s coming.”

Local patrol units checked the area. No vehicle matching the description was logged. No citations were written. Haywood’s field note said: “Subject may be experiencing residual institutional fear. No corroborating external threat.”

On December 12, Marcus came upstairs from the basement carrying a folded piece of paper and a look Celia hadn’t seen before. Not rage. Not terror. Something like resolve.

“What is it?” she asked.

“There’s a clinic,” he said. “In Montgomery. Private. Experimental program. They say they’re doing something new—something that can reverse some of this. I’m going for an intake next week.”

“What clinic?” she asked. “Who referred you?”

“Guy I know from inside,” he said. “If it works, we can finally live again.”

“And if it doesn’t?” she asked.

“Then nothing changes,” he said.

Celia checked state registries. No such program existed. No experimental clinic was licensed at the address he scribbled on a scrap of paper. That night, walking past the basement door, she saw him sealing a small envelope with her name written on the front in his blocky handwriting.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“For you,” he said. “Don’t open it until after I go. When it’s quiet, you’ll understand.”

On December 17, at 5:10 a.m., Celia woke up to the sound of their truck starting. She listened as it backed out, as tires rolled over the cracked driveway. In the kitchen later, crime scene techs would find a half‑finished cup of coffee on the counter, still faintly warm when Celia touched it.

All day, she waited.

She called his phone. Straight to voicemail. She texted. No answer. By 7:42 p.m., her worry curdled into a cold certainty.

She called Haywood.

“He’s gone,” she said. “He left before sunrise and never came home. He said he was going to that clinic, but I checked. It’s not real.”

“Sometimes parolees disappear for a bit,” Haywood said. “It’s not supposed to happen, but it does. Give it 24 hours. If he doesn’t show, we’ll file a missing person report.”

On December 18, at 2:20 p.m., Jefferson County dispatch took a call from Lakewood Marina, thirty miles southwest of Birmingham. Two fishermen had found a body tangled in debris near an old pier.

Deputies pulled him out. Fingerprints confirmed: Marcus Ellery.

Time of death: between midnight and 3 a.m. that morning.

The coroner’s preliminary report noted ligature marks on the neck, evidence of restraint, and sexual assault. No drugs. No alcohol. Cause of death: asphyxiation from prolonged ligature compression.

Haywood was reassigned from parole supervisor to lead detective on the case. He drove to the marina, stood on the rotting boards, and watched the water slap against the pilings. Evidence techs pointed out two sets of tire tracks in the mud 20 feet from the access path.

“Older pickup,” one tech said. “Rear left tire looks chewed up.”

They pulled footage from a FuelMax gas station 5.4 miles away. December 17, 6:18 a.m., the camera over pump three showed a gray pickup pulling in, Marcus in the passenger seat. The driver was a thick‑built older man with close‑cropped hair and a scar on his left cheek.

The forensic imaging unit cleaned it up. The face matched state records.

Clifford Knox. Age 57. Recently paroled from Blackstone Correctional Facility on October 10, 2023, after serving 22 years for armed robbery and assault. Address: mobile home off Route 19 in Shelby County. Supervision: limited.

His parole officer said Knox had been compliant. Showed up for meetings. Passed random breath checks. Then missed a check‑in on December 16.

“We put in a request for a welfare check,” the officer said. “It hadn’t happened yet.”

On December 19, Haywood and his partner, Detective Amy Curran, drove to Knox’s trailer. No signs of forced entry. Dishes in the sink. Refrigerator running.

On the kitchen table: a torn photograph of Marcus and Celia on their wedding day, folded straight down the middle between their faces.

A fingerprint sweep picked up only Knox’s prints and a partial that would later be matched to Celia.

Brought in for questioning, Celia sat in a hard plastic chair at Birmingham PD, hands folded in her lap.

“When did you last see Marcus?” Haywood asked.

“When he left for that clinic,” she said. “He was gone before I woke up.”

“Did he mention meeting anyone?” Curran asked.

“No,” Celia said. “He talked about doctors, not… anyone else.”

Haywood slid a printed still frame from the gas station security footage across the table. Marcus, passenger seat. Knox, driver.

Celia looked at it, then pressed her hand over her mouth. Her shoulders shook, but no sound came out.

“Did Marcus arrange this?” Haywood asked quietly. “Did he talk about Knox?”

Celia stared down at the photo until her vision blurred. She did not answer. Haywood’s summary would later read: “Subject cooperative but evasive on logistical details. Displays confusion regarding timeline.”

She went home that night to an empty house. Marcus’s truck sat in the drive where he’d left it. She went to the kitchen, opened the drawer where she kept envelopes, and pulled out the one he’d left with her name on it.

She sat at the table under the crooked painting and opened it with trembling fingers.

Inside was a single sheet of paper. Marcus’s handwriting, all caps, just like on his prison forms.

CELIA,

I’M SORRY FOR WHAT I BROUGHT BACK. I’M SORRY FOR WHAT I GAVE YOU. I TRIED TO PROTECT YOU IN THERE AND I FAILED. I KNOW WHO HE IS. I KNOW WHAT HE DID. IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO ME, IT’S HIM. IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO YOU, IT’S BECAUSE OF HIM TOO. I COULDN’T STOP HIM THEN. MAYBE YOU CAN BE FREE OF HIM. MAYBE THIS IS THE ONLY WAY.

HE MADE ME HIS GHOST.

M.

Forensics would later find that same phrase, “He made me his ghost,” scratched into pencil under layers of dark paint on the last canvas Marcus had ever worked on.

December 27, Marcus was buried in a small cemetery on the edge of town. The funeral was sparse—family members, a couple of old friends, two officers there to confirm the body for official records. The preacher spoke of mercy and second chances. Celia stood beside Ebony, one hand clenched around a folded tissue, the other resting over her abdomen where a quiet nausea had started to take up residence.

Officially, the case file labeled Marcus’s murder as an “active homicide investigation with likely retaliatory motive.” Unofficially, everyone in the unit knew what it looked like: a father taking revenge for a dead son.

Three weeks later, road maintenance workers smelled something off near a drainage ditch along Route 41, ten miles from Lakewood. They found the body half‑buried in mud, hands bound behind the back with nylon cord.

January 17, 2024. 6:10 a.m. Haywood arrived on scene.

The injuries were the same. Ligature marks on the neck. Signs of restraint. The same particular pattern of violation.

The coroner, flipping between folders back at the office, wrote: “Replication suggests symbolic or retaliatory homicide. Identical infliction sequences.”

Fingerprints identified the new victim as Clifford Knox.

The last anyone had officially seen him was January 10, reported headed toward Tuscaloosa for a check‑in. He’d never arrived.

Detectives went back to his trailer. Everything looked the same as before. The same dishes. The same torn wedding photo on the table. But this time, the lab pulled a newer partial print from the edge of that photo.

It matched Celia.

At the drainage site, tire impressions in the soft soil lined up with the tread pattern of a 2012 compact sedan: Celia’s car. Plaster casts preserved the shape before the rain could wash it away.

When they went to the Ellery apartment that afternoon, the front door was unlocked. The living room was tidy. The basement smelled strongly of turpentine and damp concrete. On the central worktable lay a single canvas, face down.

Swabs from the frame picked up traces of Marcus’s blood, likely transferred from his hands months before. Under UV, technicians found overlapping handprints: Marcus’s and a smaller one matching Celia’s.

Upstairs, half the closet was empty. A couple of suitcases were gone. Her purse and phone were missing.

Haywood entered Celia into the system as a person of interest and issued a BOLO to surrounding counties. No warrant yet. Not enough direct evidence. Not officially.

Back at his desk that night, he reread old notes. The 2020 counselor’s entry about Marcus’s abuse. Celia’s questions about Knox. Marcus’s paranoia about a gray truck.

Ebony walked into the station at 8:30 p.m., hair under a scarf, eyes tired.

“I think you need to know something,” she told Detective Curran. “Two nights ago, Celia came by. Asked if I had bleach, some latex gloves, and a shovel.”

“Did she say why?” Curran asked.

“Said she needed to clean out the garden,” Ebony replied. “But it’s January. Ain’t nothing growing. She was… calm. Too calm.”

Bleach. Gloves. A shovel. The same items crime scene techs had logged at Route 41.

The next morning, Haywood and Curran went back to Ridge View Clinic.

“Dr. Carver,” Haywood said, “did you prescribe midazolam to a patient named Celia Ellery?”

Dr. Carver swallowed hard.

“She came in after Marcus died,” the doctor said. “Said she couldn’t sleep. I gave her a few sample tablets I had left—expired stock, but still effective. I shouldn’t have. I know that now.”

Toxicology on Knox had come back with midazolam in his system. Enough to sedate. Not enough to kill.

“Did she say anything else?” Curran asked.

“She said she was leaving Birmingham,” Dr. Carver replied. “She seemed… at peace about it.”

Forensics finished with the basement canvas. Under spectral imaging, beneath the dark paint, they saw the words Marcus had etched in pencil: “He made me his ghost.”

January 18, at 1:40 p.m., Alabama Highway Patrol found Celia’s sedan at a rest stop near Selma, ninety miles southwest of Birmingham. The car was locked. In the trunk, inside a black duffel, they found burned fragments of photos—Marcus’s early paintings, reduced to char and ash—and one object wrapped in cloth.

Unwrapped, it was a combat-style knife. On the handle: “BCF,” etched like someone had done it with a nail in a workshop. Blackstone Correctional Facility.

Swabs from the blade came back with Knox’s DNA. Lab estimates said the blood had been fresh within 24 hours of his death. The knife, the sedative, the mirrored injuries—nothing about it was spontaneous.

“Perpetrator ensured control and symbolic equivalence,” Haywood wrote in his field notes. “Methodical application. Minimal impulsive violence.”

Marcus had died from prolonged strangulation, injuries scattered, suggesting a struggle he lost slowly. Knox’s autopsy told a different story: precise, efficient. Bound, sedated, dispatched.

That same evening, Ebony sat down with Haywood again.

“I forgot something,” she said. “Celia left an envelope with me. Said, ‘If something happens, give this to the police.’ I didn’t open it.”

With a court order, they did.

Inside was a single page.

He hurt the man who saved me. I gave him the same silence he gave my husband. Don’t let them call it vengeance. It’s release.

On January 19, a groundskeeper from a cemetery on Birmingham’s southern edge called 911.

“There’s a woman here,” he told dispatch. “Been sitting by a grave since before sunrise. I think it’s the Ellery grave. She won’t move.”

Deputies found Celia on the damp grass, arms wrapped around her knees, eyes fixed on Marcus’s headstone. She didn’t run. She didn’t protest when they cuffed her hands gently in front of her and helped her to her feet.

At 9:15 a.m., in an interview room at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, under fluorescent lights and a little wall clock ticking too loud, Celia waived her right to a lawyer and started talking.

“After the funeral,” she said, voice steady, “I looked up everything I could find on him. Knox. DOC records. Parole listings. Public databases. Marcus told me enough that I could fill in blanks. Route 19. A single‑wide trailer. Same scar as in those paintings.”

“How did you approach him?” Curran asked.

“I said I knew Marcus from a re‑entry group,” Celia said. “That we’d talked about him. That Marcus wanted him to have some of his things.”

“Was that true?” Haywood asked.

“No,” she said simply.

She told them about watching his routine for days: Knox leaving early, stopping at a convenience store, smoking on his steps in the afternoon.

“On January 14,” she said, “I waited for him outside a storage place near Route 19. I had a thermos. Coffee. Midazolam. I offered him a drink. Said I didn’t like to drink alone.”

“He took it?” Curran asked.

“He laughed,” Celia said. “Said, ‘Lady, you don’t want to know me.’ Then he drank anyway.”

“What happened next?” Haywood asked.

“He got dizzy,” she said. “I told him I’d drive him home. He didn’t argue.”

She drove past his turnoff instead, to the drainage ditch off Route 41.

“Why there?” Curran asked.

“Because nobody goes there unless something’s broken,” Celia said. “Because that’s where they dump what doesn’t matter.”

She admitted binding his hands, just like Marcus’s had been bound. She admitted using the prison knife.

“Did you say anything to him?” Haywood asked.

“I repeated what Marcus said,” she replied. “ ‘Fifteen years don’t end.’ I counted. Every minute.”

“What did you do then?” Curran asked.

“I left,” she said.

She never used the word kill. The transcript noted that explicitly. She spoke about “ending it” and “matching what he did” and “release.” Never “I killed him.”

After the interview, a nurse did a standard post‑arrest medical check. Blood pressure. Pulse. Routine labs. She frowned at a test strip, then requested a follow‑up. An ultrasound later that week confirmed it: Celia was eight weeks pregnant.

When they told her, she placed a hand over her abdomen and said quietly, “He’s still here. Marcus is alive in me.”

From a purely evidentiary standpoint, the case was airtight. The weapon tied to Blackstone. Knox’s blood on the blade. Tire tracks matching her car. Midazolam from Dr. Carver’s samples in his system. Her fingerprints. Her letter to Ebony. Her own confession.

In his preliminary report, Haywood wrote: “Evidence supports direct perpetration by C. Ellery. Motive: retaliatory action for spousal victimization, resulting in homicide of abuser.”

He typed “Suspect: Celia Ellery” in the header.

He stared at it for a long time.

Then he deleted “Suspect: Celia Ellery” and replaced it with “Perpetrator: Unknown.”

He changed the classification on Knox’s death from “Homicide—Closed, Arrest Made” to “Homicide—Possible Reprisal, Ongoing Prison‑Related Investigation.”

On February 25, 2024, he turned in his resignation. Officially, he cited burnout. Unofficially, his notes in a personal journal would say: “Too many ghosts. Too many cages that never open, even when the door’s not locked.”

One year later, on February 26, 2025, Ebony answered her door to find a small, unmarked parcel on her stoop. No return address. Postmarked Amarillo, Texas.

Inside were two small canvases.

The first showed still water at dawn, the surface so smooth you could almost hear the silence. The second showed a solitary prison cell. The door was unlatched. A narrow beam of light slanted across the floor and out into blank space.

On the back of that second painting, in Celia’s hand, were four words:

He is free now.