Innocent

I know I should be grateful to finally be free, but it's not easy to forgive the jury for the three months stolen from my life, for a crime I didn't commit.

As a jeweler, I am well aware how crucial it is to make sure that I never handled stolen property. I argued in court that I had no way of knowing the diamond ring was stolen. I explained how the man had shown proper ID and that his story of how he came to possess it sounded reasonable. I had even tried to help the police by sitting with a sketch artist to describe him in great detail, but no leads came from that.

Even though they found me guilty of knowingly receiving stolen property, I was extremely grateful that I was found not guilty of the far more serious charge of accessory to murder, the true owner of the ring having been killed during the robbery.

The one thing that might have resulted in both charges being dropped was if I had had surveillance tape of the man who brought in the ring. Alas, that was not to be. I normally always had my security cameras running, but not that day. That was the day the power company were installing an electronic meter onto my electricity, so they had shut off the power, right before the man came in.

That surely could not have been a coincidence. The jury figured the man somehow knew about the power, surmising that maybe he knew someone from the power company, or that maybe he even worked for them, and had planned the whole thing in advance.

The prosecution tried to argue that I had to have known the man, and that I was the one who had arranged for him to come into the store at that precise time. I swore that I had never met him, or seen him before. I was telling the truth, and my phone and email records backed up my claim. Without that connection between us, the prosecution had nothing, and yet they still managed to convince the jury that I should have somehow known the jewelry was stolen. I considered an appeal, but the judge was sympathetic, giving me just three months under house arrest, so I decided to do the time and be done with it.

I could never have anticipated the off-duty cop coming into my store to buy an engagement ring, and asking if I had anything unique. I had shown him the stolen ring, with its cluster of white diamonds around the large pink one, and he had immediately recognized it as being from a robbery he was investigating.

That was when I invented the mystery man, who I made sure looked a little like me, for the police to chase. Although, in hindsight, after the old lady surprised me and I had to kill her, it would have been much smarter if I had simply left the ring behind.