This was the afternoon Daniel Cole stood on the front steps of the Suffolk County Courthouse, a prison letter from 1981 quivering in his hand, with the answer to a question he’d stopped asking when he was eight years old: “Why did my father leave us?
His mother had always told him the same thing. "He was a coward, Daniel. He didn't want any kids. He picked freedom above us. Don't waste another second thinking about him. Daniel had believed her for thirty-seven years. His whole career was built on it. He’d become one of the most aggressive defence attorneys in Massachusetts, fighting for the very kind of men he’d been raised to despise. He told himself it was vengeance. He never allowed himself to believe that it was really about his father. Till that afternoon. Until Margaret Cole, a woman he had never met, handed him an envelope and in under 60 seconds demolished 45 years of his mother’s lies.
Here’s what the letter said. In December 1981, Margaret Cole was 24 when the State of Massachusetts executed a young man named Thomas Daniel Hart.