The defendants’ own attempt to destroy the truth became the thing that authenticated it.

This is the pattern I have come to understand about people who hurt others and expect to get away with it: they are undone less by their crimes than by their frantic, guilty efforts to hide them.

The assault might have been called an accident.

The cover-up could not.

Sigrid wiped a counter, Lars took bolt cutters to a garage, and both of those acts of concealment left marks far harder to explain than the original harm.

Guilty people cannot stop tampering, and the tampering is what convicts them.