Solo, Hope Solo [best non fiction books of all time .txt] 📗

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. And it wasn’t as though the league had been successful and highly professional before he arrived.

I made my first start for the MagicJack on May 1. I’d told them I was ready in late April, but I wasn’t—that way, that idiotic one-game suspension for my Twitter comments about the officiating was served while I was still rehabbing. I was happy to be playing in the WPS this time; it was good to get some more games under my belt, considering how few opportunities were left to play for the national team. A bunch of my national-team teammates, including Abby and Pearcie, were playing for the MagicJack.

But the experience was bizarre. The MagicJack coach quit after the team won its first three games, so our team was coached by Pearcie and Dan. It was strange but really not all that much of a departure from the screwball behavior that had marked the league’s entire existence. And I was too focused on my shoulder and the World Cup to worry about anything that happened in the WPS. I was trying to prioritize everything in my life. I broke up with Jesse that spring. He wanted a commitment that I had never been able to give him. When I was back in Seattle rehabilitating, I was—of course—spending time with Adrian; we couldn’t stay away from each other. I knew I wasn’t being fair to Jesse but even though I was twenty-nine now, I was scared of settling down. My inability to commit made me wonder yet again if I was like my father—unable to have a grown-up, functioning relationship.

On May 14, I finally got my first national-team start in Columbus against Japan. Mentally I was ready, but my arm felt terrible. At least I was tested—I had a good tip-over save and some tough balls on set pieces. We beat Japan 2–0 that day and by the same score four days later in North Carolina.

VI.

As we counted down the days to the World Cup, I got a call from my dad’s old friend Mark Sakura. “Hope, did you know the murder of Mike Emert has been solved?” he said. “Did you know your father was no longer a suspect?”

And then he proceeded to tell me a story straight out of CSI. In the fall of 2010, Mike Emert’s widow, Mary Beth, was told there was a DNA match—they had found her husband’s killer. But the killer was now dead. A retired Seattle cop named Gary Krueger had been involved in a home invasion in March, 2010. Krueger tried to force his way into the upscale home of an orthopedic surgeon; when the police were called, Krueger fled, stole a boat in Lake Washington, and capsized it. His body wasn’t pulled out of the lake until September. At that time, his DNA was put into a database and came up as a solid match for DNA found at the Emert crime scene: skin under Emert’s fingernails and blood in his stolen SUV.

I was stunned. We had never even been told there was any DNA at the scene that could have cleared my father. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Krueger had been a rogue cop in the late 1970s. After he retired in 1980, he turned to criminal schemes and was a suspect in a couple of murders, including Emert’s. Krueger was finally convicted for a series of bank robberies and went to prison, where his DNA should have been collected and entered into the database. But it wasn’t collected until he was released on parole in 2007, and then it was never entered into the database. There was no explanation about the cause of the three-and-a-half-year delay. Marcus had made some phone calls. One of his sources in the police department told him that it was clear that my father had been framed. Krueger had intentionally dressed like him, adopted a New York accent and a limp, and arranged to meet Emert at a place where my dad hung out.

In addition, there was another cop, John Powers, who had been fired several years earlier for a number of offenses, including improperly using a department computer to get information on individuals and sharing his findings with people outside of the department. One of the individuals he gathered information on was my dad. Powers ran my father’s criminal history, printed it out, and gave it to a pawnshop owner named Rob Chandler, who was Mike Emert’s brother-in-law. That was how so many people involved in the case knew so many private things about my father—a fact that had always confused him. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t unravel the connections between Krueger and Powers—the rogue cops had worked for Seattle PD in different eras. But it was apparent that my father had somehow been the victim of corruption, and it seemed to me that the department was eager to sweep the connections under the rug because the crooked police officers were two of their own.

THE MORE WE learned, the angrier I became. My dad was officially cleared now that the murder was solved, but that should have happened years earlier, while he was alive. My father died with that accusation still haunting him. He had been the victim of the Seattle police. I guess he’d been right to never trust authorities to do the right thing. No one from the police department ever called to apologize or explain why they had harassed the wrong man for almost seven years.

CHAPTER TWENTY

It Just Takes One

The granite Alps sliced the cobalt sky behind us, a stark symbol of the heights our team was trying to reach. We were on a practice field near our hotel in Leogang, Austria. For ten days, we stayed at a high-end spa, getting acclimated to the time change and focusing on the weeks ahead. We hiked and practiced yoga and took gondola rides to the snowy tops of the mountains.