It was to move her to a protective custody holding cell, to keep her safe, pending an immediate evidentiary hearing.

And outside the prison walls, in the wet dark, state troopers were already mounting up, because a felony arrest warrant, charging capital murder and aggravated perjury and obstruction of justice, had just been signed in the name of Richard Cole.

The transformation of Elena’s status in those few minutes is almost impossible to fully absorb.

At nine o’clock that evening she had been a condemned murderer, hours from execution, the subject of a closed case and a denied clemency petition, a woman the entire apparatus of the state had agreed should die.

By ten o’clock she was a protected witness and a presumed victim of one of the most serious miscarriages of justice the state had ever seen, and the machinery that had been arrayed to end her life had pivoted, in the space of an hour, to protecting it.