04.Die.My.Love.2007 (38 page)

Meanwhile, in Houston that December, Mac and Tina broke up. Perhaps it was the pressure of the impending trial. Tina 280 / Kathryn Casey

would later say Mac had bought “into the Cari stuff.” Whatever happened, Mac moved in with Charles for a month, then got his own place. By then Mac was working full-time as a landman on the Galveston project Piper had been researching in the months before the murder. Tina, it would seem, lost no time in recouping her life. In less than a month she’d married again, this time to a Birmingham, Alabama, physician who she said she’d met on Match.com.

“We connected and fell in love,” she’d say. “Sometimes, it just happens that way.”

In the Henrico jail, Piper was pursuing other interests. She wrote to Jerry Walters, although he didn’t write back. In one letter, she claimed she’d taken a mail-order course and become an ordained minister. “For years I’ve ministered to my own family . . . Sometimes in jail, I help [other inmates]

with questions on spiritual matters,” she’d later say. “I really try to keep a low profile on that front because I don’t want everyone to know the spiritual side of me. I’ve already had two women ask me if I can marry them.”

When she wrote to Charles Tooke, she asked for reading material. He mailed her a Bible. Despite her self-proclaimed spirituality, she wrote back saying, “You can only pray so much,” and asked for a copy of
The Da Vinci Code.

Throughout December and January, Piper wrote letters to the children. She said she loved and missed them and pleaded with them to write her. She recounted the tedious details of jail life, lunches of bologna and potatoes and Tuesday uniform changes, the particulars of her cell and how she was staying fit by running around her room. Somehow, she’d estimated that forty-two laps equaled a one-mile run. The jail was noisy, and she said she slept on the floor. Not having to cook was the only good thing about being in jail, she said, yet she lamented limited coffee and no soy milk, yogurt, or fresh fruit.

DIE, MY LOVE / 281

Overall, she said, the jail reminded her of a high school slumber party, and she amused herself by cutting out snow-flakes with toenail clippers, since scissors weren’t allowed.

In her letters, Piper told her children she’d been ill and that it made her cry to think of them without her. She wrote of Jean’s wedding, saying they were missed, and asked them to call her mother—their grandmother—and the other Rountree relatives: aunts, uncles, and cousins. And she recommended they fi nd healthy ways to cope with all that had happened in their young lives, suggesting they express their feelings through their artwork.

She even coached them on how to pray and accept Jesus into their lives. God was there, she said, they just needed to reach out to Him for help. He had a plan for all of them, she advised, despite the recent sadness in their lives.

When Callie’s birthday approached, she asked what the soon- to- be nine- year-old wanted, then sent a card with handwritten musical Happy Birthday notes that said she wished they were together, followed by X and O kisses and hugs.

At Christmas, she quoted Bible verses and apologized for not working out a way they could all be together. Always, she said she slept with them in her dreams, and signed her letters with Momea and hearts.

What she never mentioned was their dead father.

Jocelyn wrote back in mid-December. Understandably, she said she missed her mother and that she worried about her. She asked if she could send her food and earplugs, so Piper could block out the prison noise and sleep. Throughout the letter, Piper’s oldest sounded upbeat and happy, saying she was settling in to her new school, making friends.

She was living farther north, and she commented that it was colder there than in Richmond, and said she hoped Piper was warm.

Of them all, Callie, mourning her father, was the one who wrote to tell Piper how sad her life was. The youngster’s 282 / Kathryn Casey

words bled onto the pages of a Christmas card:
To the Mom
I Love Most of All.
She said that her heart was broken, because now she had neither a mother nor a father.

In her response, Piper ignored the little girl’s anguish.

Instead, Piper gushed about her joy at receiving the card, and told Callie of her Christmas in jail, with “fake” turkey and all the fi xings.

Only Jocelyn would go to the jail to visit her mother.

Later, Piper would say the meeting was “joyous,” a wonderful event. “You just can’t separate us,” she said. Yet, Piper also claimed she understood why the others hadn’t come, blaming it all on her dead ex-husband. Fred, Piper said, had used her to control the children. Despite her having spent a long weekend with them just weeks before the murder, she claimed: “Fred told the children, ‘If you don’t behave, you won’t see your mother.’ ” She then launched into a legal argument she said proved she should be allowed to be with them: “The Constitution guarantees me my children, and it guarantees my children their mother.”

As 2005 began, Piper wrote the children again. She’d been transferred to another jail, where she said the food was better and fresher, and she was allowed outside during the day.

For the past four years, ever since the divorce, the children had had one new address after another for their mother.

Now her official address was the Henrico jail off the New Kent Highway.

Meanwhile, Murray Janus and Taylor Stone were receiving large brown envelopes from the Henrico Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Offi ce filled with discovery evidence against their client. As it began to pile up, the extent of the evidence must have been disheartening: flight rec ords, cell phone rec ords, ATM charges, the wigs, the hotel and car rental rec ords. “They had a shitload of evidence,” says Stone, who went to see Piper at the Henrico jail. She still insisted DIE, MY LOVE / 283

all the rec ords, even the videotape, were wrong. She’d been in Houston that weekend.

In one folder the prosecutors delivered to Janus in mid-December there were thirty- six different tabs detailing different pieces of the prosecutors’ evidence.

As the defense attorneys combed through it, Stone and Janus surmised that only two rec ords appeared to help them.

One was the packet of rec ords from Houston’s Hobby Airport. They showed that the Jeep with Piper’s license plate checked in at 5:00 a.m. that morning. That didn’t jibe with another record that showed Piper had made a deposit at her bank in Kingwood at 9:25 that same morning. In a trial, all Janus and Stone needed to clear Piper was reasonable doubt.

Enough such discrepancies and maybe they would have it.

To collect more evidence to help their client, in January the defense team followed the prosecutors’ route and fl ew to Houston. It would turn out to be a grueling trip. Charles Tooke agreed to be their chauffeur, driving them to talk to witnesses. Beforehand, he’d told the prosecutors of his intent. Piper was his friend, but he didn’t want to favor one side over the other.

Tooke first drove Janus and Stone to Piper’s Kingwood house, by then locked and deserted. They knocked on doors to talk to neighbors but found no one who saw Piper at the house that weekend.

At Tina’s house, Tooke stayed outside in the car while Janus and Stone went in to meet the woman whose name was all over the case, on airplane, rental car, and hotel records. Inside, Tina ranted about Fred and claimed Piper was innocent, yet she told them in no uncertain terms that she would not put herself in further jeopardy by testifying at her sister’s trial. If they called her, she insisted she would take the Fifth Amendment: refusing to testify on the grounds that it could incriminate her.

After an hour and a half the two defense attorneys left the 284 / Kathryn Casey

house. Tooke thought they looked green from the experience.

Since it was a sunny, warm day in Houston, Janus and Stone walked, while Tooke followed in the car, to Under the Volcano. There, they talked to the own er, bartender, and a few customers, asking if anyone had any knowledge that could help their client. Did anyone remember seeing her there the Friday eve ning before the murder? Had they heard of anyone who remembered seeing their client in the bar that night? Janus and Stone again came away disappointed.

No one came forward to shore up Piper Rountree’s crum-bling alibi.

From the Volcano, they went to McVey’s office, where they talked to the boisterous attorney about Piper, Tina, and what he knew about the case. They asked to see the .38 Piper had given him years earlier, the one Mac had asked her to dispose of. McVey obliged, pulling it out of a chest of drawers.

“I know it wasn’t this .38,” he said. “This one has never left this drawer.”

An hour or so after they arrived at McVey’s, Tooke saw Tina pull up in her car. She went up to him and started ranting, talking about Mac, detailing aspects of their love life and how she’d had other lovers during their time together.

She spouted conspiracy theories about who had killed Fred Jablin, including one Piper had been promoting, that someone at UR was behind the murder.

As they walked out of McVey’s front door, Stone and Janus saw Tina and headed directly for the car. Neither looked pleased. When McVey came out, Tina cornered him, ranting about things Charles couldn’t make out. While Tina was busy with McVey, Charles hurriedly drove off with Janus and Stone in the car.

As their time in Houston wore on, it seemed the defense attorneys would get no good news.

When Janus asked Charles about the e-mail and call he’d DIE, MY LOVE / 285

received from Piper the afternoon of the murder, Charles told him, “Of course she could have sent that from anywhere, as long as she had access to the Internet.”

“Is that true?” Janus asked Stone.

“It is,” Stone said. “You can even send e-mails from a cell phone these days.”

When Taylor Stone called Cheryl Crider, the bartender, she refused to talk to them. Kevin O’Keefe was more oblig-ing, but when he finished answering their questions, he said to Janus, “Doesn’t seem like you have a lot that points to her innocence.”

While many of those who talked with the defense attorneys told them that they didn’t believe Piper was capable of murder, none offered any proof that could be benefi cial in the upcoming courtroom battle.

Two days after they arrived in Houston, Janus and Stone flew back to Richmond.

As the days progressed and the trial neared, Janus appeared to grow even more apprehensive about the case. At one point, when Wade Kizer approached him about the trial, the aging attorney looked at the prosecutor and shook his head. “Wade, I hope one day you have a lawyer for a client,”

Janus said.

Kizer chuckled softly.

Still, he understood where Janus was coming from. By maintaining her innocence in the face of so much evidence, Piper Rountree had tied Janus’s hands. If she admitted she’d killed Jablin, her attorneys could have mounted a defense based on the police reports at the house, claiming she’d been an abused spouse. Or Janus could have used her substantial psychiatric rec

ords to her advantage in a not-guilty-by-

reason-of-insanity plea. If it didn’t earn her an acquittal, it could sway a jury to recommend a light sentence. When Piper insisted she was innocent, that she was in Houston at the time of the murder, neither argument was an alternative.

286 / Kathryn Casey

Her pleas of innocence also blocked any possibility of a plea bargain, although Janus doubted that was in the offi ng.

He knew, with all the evidence against her, with Fred Jablin’s stature in the city, that Kizer would be criticized if he offered Piper Rountree a plea bargain. One day he said as much to Kizer.

“I know there’s nothing you can offer that she’d take,”

Janus said.

Kizer answered, “Murray, you’re right.”

Then, just when all looked darkest for the defense, something happened.

The hearing began on January 28, 2005, three weeks before the beginning of the trial. At issue were motions Murray Janus had filed on behalf of his client, Piper Rountree. He had four requests. The first two were a reduction in Piper’s bond, so she could get out of jail until the trial, and a change of venue, moving the trial to another county, due to the heavy local media coverage of the case. A feature article had run in the
Richmond Times- Dispatch
just weeks earlier by reporter Paige Akin, one in which she recounted the contentious divorce and interviewed people out of Piper’s and Fred’s pasts, along with a handful of the potential witnesses.

Janus had also filed motions to suppress the evidence supplied by Carol Freed and all the witnesses who’d identifi ed Piper as fl ying under Tina’s name and being in Virginia that weekend. In his briefs, the defense attorney argued that the identifications were overly suggestive, since police had shown potential witnesses not a spread of photos but only one, a photo of their main suspect, Piper Rountree.

While not overly confident, the prosecutors, Kizer, Ashman, and Reid, weren’t particularly worried about the hearing. They believed Virginia law was on their side, including in the case of the photo identifications. Reid had written his own brief for the judge, one that cited state law that sanc-DIE, MY LOVE / 287

tioned the use of one-photo identifications under certain conditions—if the IDs were soon after the sighting; and the witnesses were not emotionally distressed, with ample time to observe the subject—all factors that fit the Rountree case.

Yet even before the hearing began, Kelley was worried.

He’d seen Piper in the jail, and she’d put on weight, nearly twenty pounds in the past three months. “I had to take a double take. I barely recognized her,” he told Kizer. “She’s trying to mess with our witness IDs.”

It would turn out that some of the witnesses would have as much trouble recognizing Piper Rountree as Kelley did.

That day in the courtroom, the three prosecutors sat at a table on the left of the courtroom, and Janus, Stone, and Piper Rountree sat at a table on the right. The room was formed in a semicircle, with all the chairs pointed toward the witness stand and the judge. Although the jury box was empty, the room was crowded, filled with reporters from the local newspaper, the
Times- Dispatch
, and local and national tele vi sion stations.