Shannon Adamcik has written a book that hauntingly brings back one of the darkest episodes in Pocatello history — the vicious murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart.
Stoddart was a pretty and popular 16-year-old Pocatello High School student who was stabbed to death while house sitting at the home of her aunt on a fateful September night in 2006. The murder shocked Southeast Idaho and left the author’s son behind bars for the rest of his life.
Adamcik has captured details and private moments in her novel about the events surrounding a crime that a jury decided her son, Torey, had committed with a classmate, Brian Draper. Both boys were 16 years old when the deadly stabbing took place. Both are serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for first degree murder.
It is a novel written through the eyes of a frustrated and grieving mother.
“This is a real hard decision,” Adamcik said about her choice to write and self-publish the book which is titled, “The Guilty Innocent.”
“It is important to me that people who want to know what happened have the opportunity to know what happened,” she said.
Adamcik said she has been writing most of her life, a habit that began when she began keeping a journal as a young girl. In the emotional whirlwind that followed the arrest of her oldest son for murder, the mother of the accused started writing what would become her book during the trial of both her son and Draper.
“It took me three years to write it,” she said.
The finished work is 361 pages that provide a personal journey into the heart of a murder case. It explores the crime itself, the investigation and trials that followed and the impact the entire episode had and continues to have on the Adamcik family — especially Torey’s mother.
Adamcik said she needed to explain what a nightmare the murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart and the subsequent punishment for the crime became for all the people involved.
Prior to the fall of 2006, the Adamcik family had never had contact with police officers or the criminal justice system.
“We were completely naive about the criminal justice system,” Adamcik said. “It’s really a very political process.”
Her novel relives, through her eyes, the first night police detectives came to the Adamcik home to interview their son about the death of Stoddart.
In chapter six of the book, Adamcik writes the following about that first brush with the investigation of her son. Detective Andy Thomas of the Pocatello Police Department was in the kitchen with her husband and son discussing the death of Stoddart whose body had been discovered the previous Friday.
“We know that Torey was at the house on Friday night and we need to ask him some questions,” Adamcik quotes the detective saying in her book.
What she writes next reveals the personal take on the events portrayed in her novel.
“There are no words to describe what it was like to hear those words,” she writes. “Shocked, horrified, only begin to capture the feeling.” That moment in the kitchen was the first time Adamcik knew her son had been involved in Stoddart’s death.
Adamcik’s book pulls no punches as it relives all the events surrounding the Stoddart murder and the people involved.
“In my book I really put everything in there,” Adamcik said. “I didn’t try to shield anything.”
Her personal assessments of people involved in the case are unflinching and not always flattering. Former Pocatello police lieutenant and now chief of police, Scott Marchand is described as a “Rottweiler” and in the book Adamcik characterizes her son’s attorneys’ choice of Sixth District Judge Peter McDermott to hear the case as “a grave mistake.”
Adamcik also does not flinch on her assessment of who was responsible for the death of Stoddart. Physical evidence proved Draper stabbed Stoddart and Adamcik is adamant that her son did not participate in the actual physical act of murder. It was a video tape that Torey Adamcik and Draper made with portions of dialogue before and after the murder about the thrill of killing someone that helped lead a jury to convict her son.
The book does not discount the lies Torey told police, the fact he drove Draper to the crime scene or the joint attempt to bury the evidence after the murder.
It is the premise of the author that no one really understood the diminished role her son played in the actual death of Stoddart.
“No one was really interested in the truth,” Adamcik said.
The author said she didn’t want to inflict any more pain on Stoddart’s family by writing the book, but she felt compelled to tell her story.
“For us, this is not an old wound,” Adamcik said. “There is no closure for us.”
As expressed in the book, the mother is convinced that her son was simply acting on his desire to make movies when he struck up a friendship with Draper, wrote plots about murdering students and participated in videotaped conversations about the thrill and liberation of being a murderer. Adamcik shares her belief that her son was simply engaged in make-believe that went out of control in the hands of his friend that bloody night in September.
She presents her argument that Corey had no intention of actually harming anyone.
Adamcik does accept her son’s culpability in the events that did take place, but doesn’t believe he deserved a sentence of life without parole.
“I refuse to believe that Torey could die in prison for his role in what happened to Cassie,” she writes in the final chapter. “It simply isn’t justice and our justice system cannot allow it to happen.”
The Adamcik family now lives in north Idaho so they can visit their son in the state prison in Orofino each week. He’s been there for most of the past six years and will turn 22 this year.
“I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t get easier,” Adamcik said about visiting her son and realizing he will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars.
It also doesn’t get any easier for Stoddart’s family who have maintained a “Pumpkins for Cassie” booth on North Main in Pocatello each Halloween for the past five years as a way to honor her memory.
Adamcik confesses she can’t comprehend the murder of a daughter, but addresses the impact the murder had on both families.
“...I think that I can truthfully say we are both in a world of pain,” she wrote. “That this has changed all of our lives forever. And as one day slips into the next and one year passes into another ... it is still there. The pain. It never goes away.”
‘The Guilty Innocent’
Former Pocatello resident Shannon Adamcik’s book about her personal observations and feelings during the arrest, trial and incarceration of her son, Torey, and Brian Draper for the 2006 murder of Cassie Jo Stoddart, a 16-year-old classmate at Pocatello High School is titled, “The Guilty Innocent.” The eBook can be purchased at Amazon.com and will be available through other online retailers soon. The book is available now in print from https://www.createspace.com/3917769 It will also be available in print from Amazon next week.