Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth

The morning we went to the zoo, Mr. Evans stopped at Starbucks. He returned to find the barista had written “Billy the Kid” on his coffee cup. Ms. Holmes didn’t get the reference.

Mr. Evans took a few calls for work while I was visiting. I asked what he does. “A lot of different stuff, investing, starting companies,” he replied, without elaborating. How is Ms. Holmes paying 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 her legal expenses. She shook her head no.

An earlier legal team quit after Ms. Holmes could not pay them. One pre-sentencing report by the government put her 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 asking about her financial arrangement.

Their toddler, William, recently had a 105-degree fever, the couple said. They raced him to the emergency room. The first thing the attending doctor said was, “You look a lot like that horrible woman.” Ms. 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 he was talking to. She continued, “Then he said, ‘Are you Elizabeth Holmes?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘I am so sorry,’ and I said, ‘Don’t be, all you know is what you’ve read.’”

By Billy’s father, William L. Evans’s tally, there are “over 67,600,600” web results on Ms. Holmes, all of them negative, compared with “21 million results, many of which are positive” for Osama bin Laden, figures he wrote in a letter to the court. Ms. Holmes’s mother, Noel, said she stopped cold in a Barnes & Noble when she saw her daughter characterized in a book display as a “paranoid sociopath” who is “devoid of conscience.”