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In the end, the charges against Jeffrey didn't stick. His first trial ended with a hung jury. Pam Saunders, a television journalist who was forewoman of that jury, told TIME: "The letter could have been a form of acting out. It seemed like a nasty, emotional outburst rather than a real threat." At the second trial, Jeffrey was acquitted of the charge involving Dorris, and the jury hung in the charge involving Erdrich. The couple's lawyer in the case, Craig Truman, contends that Dorris made an unconvincing witness. "He was too sensitive to go through the hurly-burly world of the criminal-justice system. He was reaching out to Jeffrey [at the trial]. He was always worried--that he was too thin, not eating right, or whatever." According to Dorris' friends, the indignities of the trials were almost too much for the author to bear. Based on that experience, Dorris found it hard to have any hope that he would ever be exonerated of child-abuse charges.
For all that Dorris accomplished, there is much that his suicide leaves unfinished. There were the books in progress and the talks he was committed to give. And there was a creative-writing class at the University of Minnesota that he was supposed to teach this spring. In the school catalog he offered up an intimate, and prescient, course description: "The presumption in this seminar is that characters come to life line by line, experience by experience, and that after a certain point of accumulation their trajectory is, if not inevitable, at least out of the author's direct control." In the case of Michael Dorris' own story, fact and fiction may remain forever intertwined.
--Reported by Kevin Fedarko/Minneapolis, Rod Paul/Concord, Andrea Sachs/New York and Richard Woodbury/Denver