The morning we went to the zoo, Mr. Evans stopped at Starbucks. He returned to find that the barista had written “Billy the Kid” on his coffee cup. Mrs. Holmes did not understand the reference.
Mr. Evans took some work calls while I was visiting. I asked him what he does. “Lots of different things, investing, starting companies,” he replied, without elaborating. How does Mrs. Holmes pay for her legal expenses? “I can’t,” she said. “I have to work for the rest of my life to try to pay for it.” I asked if Mr. Evans’s family was helping to cover his legal expenses. She shook her head.
A previous legal team resigned after Mrs. Holmes was unable to pay them. One pre-sentence report by the government put his legal fees at more than $30 million. Ms. Holmes did not detail how those fees would be paid, and her current representatives at Williams & Connolly did not respond to emails inquiring about her financial arrangement.
Their youngest son, William, recently came down with a 105-degree fever, the couple said. He was rushed to the emergency room. The first thing the attending physician said was: “You look a lot like that horrible woman.” Mrs. Holmes looked at him with her piercing blue eyes and said, “I’m sure you’re a better person than she is.” The doctor seemed to realize who she was talking to. She continued: “Then he said: ‘Are you Elizabeth Holmes?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and I said, ‘Don’t be, all you know is what you’ve read.’”
By the count of Billy’s father, William L. Evans, there are “more than 67,600,600” web results for Ms. Holmes, all of them negative, compared to “21 million results, many of which are positive” for Osama bin Laden, figures he wrote in a letter to the court. Holmes’s mother, Noel, said she stopped dead at a Barnes & Noble when she saw her daughter characterized at a book exhibition as a “paranoid psychopath” who “lacks a conscience.”