Finding Andy – Part Two
“Now Doctor,” I asked, “given all your learning, given all your experience, given all your studies in the field of psychiatry, do you, anywhere account for the concept of EVIL?”
The witness, somewhat renown in his field, must have swallowed wrong. Perhaps his throat tightened at the question. At any rate, he started coughing.
While I waited for him to get control of his breathing, I looked down the row of jurors. They were staring intently at him, awaiting a reply. A few were smiling at the audacity of having such an inquiry put to someone of his ilk. They suspected he had just been presented with an ultimate question. One he was ill-prepared to answer.
He tried to evade. “Well, it would depend on one’s definition of evil.”
“Well, Doctor,” I replied, “if a woman and her partner used a hammer and screwdriver to violently attack and murder her husband in the middle of the night, wrap his body in a tarp, drag it out to a truck, drive it miles away to a remote location and bury it deep in the ground, hoping it would never be found, and, further, she did this out of a callus desire for financial gain, Would you say that is Evil?” He paused a long time and then said there could be many reasons.
He would never directly answer. But the jury answered the question themselves. When they returned their verdict.
We were in the penalty phase of the trial in which the jury was being asked to decide whether the punishment would be Life Without the Possibility of Parole or Death.
That we were at this point in a trial was largely the result of a grievous error in judgement on the part of the defendant and her attorney.
My prosecution of this murder case had started without a body. Thanks to some excellent work by detectives from the Tulare Police Department the defendant and her brother had been arrested for the murder.
The case against the brother, based on some admissions he made, was the stronger of the two. He accepted a plea to first degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years to life. The case against her was weaker. During her interrogation by the police, she had managed to avoid directly implicating herself. And she had attempted to pin all the blame on the brother. After some negotiations, she had accepted a plea to second degree murder and was looking at 15 years to life.
On the day of sentencing, however, she and her attorney made a motion to withdraw her plea. As grounds, they alleged that before she had entered her plea, she had been advised she would be eligible for parole after 7 ½ years. In fact, it would be 10 years before she was eligible. The motion was granted.
The real motivation was they had made a strategic decision she could beat the case if they could talk her brother in to taking the stand and assuming all the blame himself. Although it was doubtful, he would do so, it was a chance for her to escape any punishment. Unfortunately for her, something happened she didn’t anticipate.
We found the body.
There is an old saying, “Dead men don’t talk.”
Oh, yes, they do!
The wounds to Andy’s body spoke the truth. The truth that she had been more than a mere bystander to the murder. In a rather macabre scene, I literally laid that proof before the jury.
As the trial proceeded, my investigator made a comment about how the defense attorney had a habit of returning late to court after the noon recess. It gave me an idea. I picked the right day and had a surprise waiting for him.
As soon as everyone vacated the courtroom, headed out to lunch, by prearrangement with the bailiff, my investigators and I set up a table in front of the jury box. We covered it with white butcher paper. We then placed the evidence we wanted the jury to see on the table. Physical evidence one doesn’t see in every case. A rib cage, a shoulder blade, various other bones, and the skull of the victim.
The jury, as they filed back into court after lunch, had to pass by the table to take their seats in the jury box. And once seated they were met with a stare from Andy’s skull, I had arranged just so.
The jurors were in place and the clock was ticking up on 1:30 when I heard the outer doors to the courtroom opening. In strolled the defense attorney. To say he was angry and screaming objections would be putting it mildly. The judge right at that moment took the bench and he too saw the display. He glared at me and called for a conference in Chambers.
It took a while for the defense attorney to calm down, but I had already prepared a brief on how the relevance of each item of evidence would be explained by the array of experts I had waiting in the hallway.
The judge wasn’t pleased with the way I had sandbagged the defense attorney, but he couldn’t deny the relevance of the evidence. And since the jurors had already seen the actual evidence rather than a photograph or chart, I was allowed to proceed.
I quickly called an important witness in the case in chief. Although I would present detailed evidence from the usual pathologist, one didn’t see this kind of witness in every murder case. A Forensic Anthropologist. Andy’s body had laid so long in the ground, wrapped in a tarp, large portions of his body remained intact and some of it had mummified. This witness was only too happy to work with us in uncovering and painstakingly recreating the conditions of Andy’s death.
I had the witness leave the witness chair and walk over in front of the jury. Wearing gloves, he lifted and held the skull up so jury could see a large hole on one side. It appeared to have been crushed inward. However, the anthropologist explained there was no crushing blow. Instead, during the months he was buried, insects had eaten away the brain and the skull had caved in. The pieces were still there when the body was recovered. He then showed enlarged photographs of how he had literally removed the pieces of the skull from the cavity and then put them back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Once put back together an analysis of the cracks and fractures showed how many blows had been administered and in what sequence.
By aligning his testimony with that of the pathologist, the injuries to the skull, the shoulder blade, the rib cage, and other bones, allowed me to establish there two instruments of death, a hammer, and a screwdriver. Further, the blows came from two different directions.
There could be but one conclusion. Two people were involved in the attack. She and her brother were the only two adults in the home when Andy was killed. She could no longer convincedly argue only her brother was involved. She had actively participated in the physical murder of Andy.
Proving it was done for financial game proved to be simple.
Andy had stated he was leaving her after finding her “in flagrante delicto” with some drunken cowboy in the parking lot of the old Sequoia Club. She had also made statements that she married him for the support his income would give her and her own kids. She continued to cash his social security checks after his disappearance and the day after he was murdered she showed up at his place of work and picked up his paycheck, which she cashed on the way home.
Because we had alleged the murder was done for financial gain, it meant we could seek the death penalty.
Although after I became District Attorney, I established a panel of senior prosecutors to review the case, invite the defense to submit reports and argue on behalf of their client against us seeking the Death Penalty, at the time of the case, it was left up to the case prosecutor. Me. I decided I would seek the ultimate punishment.
Death Penalty cases have two phases: the Guilt phase and the Penalty phase. By the time I got to the penalty phase the jury had found the defendant guilty of premediated murder, done for financial gain.
It was inevitable at the penalty phase that the defense would trot out at least one, often more psychiatrists, sociologists, and their ilk. Testimony, A U.S. Supreme Court Justice had recently referred to as “gobblygook.”
Hence, I found myself cross-examining a psychiatrist who was prepared to testify to all the reasons why this murderer should not be put to death for her crime.
Most of us, trying serious cases had experience in cross-examining these so-called experts.
There were two basic approaches. We could engage in a battle of experts by calling our own psychiatrist to contest the underlying premises of the defense expert’s opinion or we could take the tact that psychiatry doesn’t belong in the courtroom at all. I had, in past cases, done both to good effect. Because of the nature of this crime, I chose the latter strategy. The so-called science of psychiatry could not explain murder done for reasons of pure Evil.
The verdict was Death.
For a short period of time, the defendant was one of only two women on death row in California, so in effect 50% of the women on death row were from Tulare County. However, the Superior Court Judge at the formal sentencing hearing set aside the death verdict returned by the jury and imposed Life Without the Possibility of Parole.
And, yes, her conviction and sentence was affirmed on appeal.
This Judge on the case was a fair-minded man of integrity whom I admired a great deal. Months later, in a private conversation he initiated, he told me he lost a lot of sleep as the sentencing date approached and when it got down to it, he just could not impose a sentence of death on a young woman.
At the time, I thought, “Fair enough.” That’s why they wear the robe.
The important thing was Andy had been found.
Andy had been brought home.
Justice for Andy had been secured.
Courthouse Tales is published Sundays. For more writings by Phil Cline, visit philcline.com.
The photographs show are of Andy’s shirt placed on a mannequin and used during the trial. The visible tears corresponded to the stab wounds on his body.
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