“I was thinking, 'No, you're not, this is crazy. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

“There was nothing I could do except say, 'I'm sorry', to the universe, you know?”

I believed that a certain guy had killed my friend and he didn't.

Moderator: What was the dramatic premise of 'Shibai'?

Don Mitchell: On one level, the dramatic premise was the murder of my friend, but that had happened 50 years before. And although I'd thought about it for a long time and had toyed with writing a novel about it, it wasn't until investigative journalist Becky Cooper came to Hilo to interview me, and Sergeant Sennott came, that it suddenly turned into something else. It was no longer a memory of a dear friend who had been murdered, but it was instead an almost 50 year old past jumping up and grabbing me. [...] That's what got it started. And so the dramatic premise was not just, 'Who killed my friend?', but, 'What were people going to be doing about it right now in 2017?'

Moderator: How would you describe your emotional journey as you wrote this book?

Don Mitchell: Let me talk about fear, because that was a part of the emotional journey. When I knew that Peter Sennott was coming to get my DNA, I was afraid. At first it was just a general fear, like, 'Oh, they thought I might've done it in 1969 and now they think it again. And they're going to get me.' I thought, 'They're going to get me', but it didn't take too long -- not measured in minutes, though -- but measured in a few days when I realized, 'No, they're not going to get you because you can't fake DNA very easily.' And I began to think this would take a cooperation of a great many people in Massachusetts who said, 'Let's get that Mitchell guy', and that's not something that could ever happen. So I put that aside.

What was interesting to me at the time and since then, about the fear, was that it was genuine fear, but at the same time I was sort of thinking, 'I'm scared', I was thinking, 'No, you're not, this is crazy. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. What's the matter with you? It doesn't work that way. The D.A. does not reach out and frame some guy in Hilo for murder.' But I couldn't put those two things together. I was still frightened.

But the thing that troubled me emotionally for a long time was the same thing that had troubled me for almost all of those years, which is, around the time of the murder, I was told by people who had a connection into the grand jury that the D.A. had tried to get the grand jury to indict me but had failed. Now I was told that, but it turned out that that was not the case. But I carried that with me for a long time. And that was one source of the fear that I felt in that summer of 2017. What did the D.A. think he had on me? You know, what had I done that made him think that?

So I learned from Peter Sennott that that was false and that it had never happened. The grand jury never got to that point. And I remember being in the interview room at a Hilo police station, having just been told that somebody had falsely accused me of murder, because I had said about the D.A.'s thing, and that shocked me. And then five minutes later, I learned that the thing that had been used against me was false. And so that was the emotional journey or, let's say, a rough part of the emotional journey.

Moderator: Would you say something about the narrator's progression?

Don Mitchell: I'll just say part of it would be, overcoming adversity, adversity meaning something quite specific. I think one of the most important growth parts was when I was forced to realize, because of what Peter Sennott had found out, that the man I thought had killed my friend had not. I believed that a certain guy had killed my friend and he didn't. And I had to come to terms with that in 2018 when the case was solved. And I had to say to myself, 'He didn't kill her'. And he was dead. So I couldn't apologize to him, which made it even more difficult. There was nothing I could do except say, 'I'm sorry', to the universe, you know? 'I'm sorry that I believed all those years and got angry at you and everything, then wished every bad thing to happen to you because I wrongly thought that you had killed my friend.' So I had to deal with some of those kinds of things. I had to say to myself, 'You falsely accused somebody for almost half a century. And so I had to take responsibility for that.'

Part of the growth was that I think I now understand more than I did two years ago about ... you know, don't be so sure about things. Don't be so sure about things that might have a surprise in them or might be based on uncertainty. So I guess I've become more comfortable or, I should say, more alert to uncertainty than I was before.

I had to deal with things that were both therapeutic and traumatic. I'll just give one example. When I learned from a series of phone calls in 2018 who the killer had been and how Jane had been killed, I realized in a moment that I had never ever put myself in her head while she was being attacked and then killed. I had just drawn a curtain over that. I sanitized it. I assumed that she had been knocked out, and then the rest she would never have experienced. But then I was forced by what I learned, I was forced to realize that there were times in which she had to have been experiencing what happened to her. She fought her killer, and what was going on in her head there? And so that was traumatic for me to think about.

And then I also have to realize why, all those years, you never thought about your friend's feelings and what was going on in her head. The therapeutic part was that I felt much better after that. You know, so things had left left me at that point. 'Okay. Now I know what happened in those few minutes in her apartment, you know, 30 feet from where I was asleep. Now I know what happened', and it was better.