The Texts Michelle Carter Sent Sam Boardman Played a Huge Role in Her Conviction
By Pippa RagaJul. 10 2019, Updated 6:Eleven p.m. ET
Content warning: This story accommodates details on a case involving death by means of suicide and eating disorders that could be triggering to a couple readers.
If you are unfamiliar with the suicide-texting case of The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter, catch up on all the facts here because we're going to jump right into Carter's friendship with Samantha "Sam" Boardman and what their text conversations mean for her conviction.
HBO's I Love You, Now Die two-hour special on Carter's case examines the events that resulted in Conrad Roy III's dying by way of suicide on July 12, 2014. And it seems that it was one textual content message Carter sent to her buddy Sam that grew to become this situation from a sad suicide to the involuntary manslaughter charge that she was once in the end convicted of.
Michelle Carter and Sam Boardman solid a friendship over their shared eating disorders.
Unlike the myriad of 20-year-olds who had been asked to testify on the prosecution's behalf that Carter used to be a needy adolescent who persuaded her boyfriend to kill himself for sympathy and attention, Sam Boardman admitted that the two in reality formed a friendship.
Whereas Ali Eithier, Olivia Moslogo, and other classmates of Carter's claimed that they would turn down or outright forget about Carter's common requests to head out or textual content into the night time, Boardman explained that the two shared problems round consuming and would continuously give each and every other recommendation and consolation about binging and limiting. “I watched out for her, what she was consuming,” Boardman said in court docket.
In fact, in the year between October of 2013 and October of 2014, the two exchanged on the subject of 4,000 text messages, which can be learn in their entirety here. And whilst it's clear that their friendship begins with their shared fight "with eating disorders that basically no one knows [about]," it temporarily devolves into much more.
Did Carter confess to Boardman?
Soon, we see Sam get fed up with Carter's incessant texts, pressure about strolling her thru foods, and demands to hang out. "U just want me to be a friend that can always be there, and I can't," Boardman texts an exasperated Carter. "U like to talk a lot about serious stuff and how u feel, which is great! It [just] might make it hard to become [friends] with a lot of people."
"Like some people [may be] overwhelmed with that," she continues. "Like first u have to be friends before ur best friends." But Carter, having nobody else to turn to, continues to badger Boardman. On July 10, 2014, she ropes Boardman into what prosecutors are calling the "dry run" of her alleged plan to get boyfriend Roy to kill himself.
Then on the night of his suicide, round the time when Carter is texting and on the phone with Roy, who is sitting in his automotive having doubts about ending his lifestyles, she continues to textual content Boardman. "Sam, he just called me and there was a loud noise like a motor and I heard moaning like someone was in pain and he wouldn't answer when I said his name I stayed on the phone for like 20 min and that's all I heard," she wrote.
Then, "I think he just killed himself." But prosecutors pointed to every other collection of messages (which Carter's legal professionals known as an "uncorroborated confession") that Conrad despatched Boardman to convict her of involuntary manslaughter.
In the days after Roy's dying, Carter texted Boardman, "Sam, his death is my fault like honestly I could have stopped him I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car because it was working and he got scared and I f---ing told him to get back in."
"Sam, because I knew he would do it all over again the next day and I couldn't have him live the way he was living anymore I couldn't do it. I wouldn't let him," Carter persisted. Boardman also testified in courtroom that Carter feared she'd be held accountable for Roy's death if the police ever discovered the former couple's conversation.
"I just got off the phone with Conrad's mom about 20 minutes ago," she texted, "and she told me that detectives had to come and go through his things and stuff. It's something they have to do with suicides and homicides." She persisted, "And she said they have to go through his phone and see if anyone encouraged him to do it on texts and stuff."
"Sam, [if] they read my messages with him I'm done. His family will hate me and I could go to jail," she texted.
Carter is recently serving a 15-month sentence at the Bristol County House of Correction after a judge found her in charge as charged.
I Love You, Now Die airs in two parts on HBO, July 9 and July 10.
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