04.Die.My.Love.2007 (40 page)

As the trial date approached, Owen Ashman played the case over and over again in her mind, in bed at night, in the shower in the morning. The prosecutors had heard from Janus that Tina would not be called to testify, but Owen wasn’t certain. What if Tina took the stand and, without admitting any guilt, implied she
could
have committed the murder?

What if Tina said just enough to inject reasonable doubt?

In the beginning, Owen had believed that Tina Rountree could have been involved in the planning. But as they investigated, the police had found no evidence that even suggested Tina had been involved with the actual murder. Nothing beyond perhaps helping her sister dispose of evidence after the fact, the offense she was charged with in Texas. “We’d had 296 / Kathryn Casey

lots of suspicions, but that’s all they were, just suspicions,”

says Ashman. “The bottom line was that everything we had pointed to Piper committing the murder alone.”

Across town in their cluttered Franklin Street offi ces, Janus’s vast collection of owl figurines staring at them through saucer-wide eyes, Murray Janus and Taylor Stone planned strategy and readied their witnesses for trial. They saw the Rountree case from an entirely different angle. “Tina Rountree was the name that repeatedly kept popping up,” said Janus. “Many of the witnesses described a woman who was taller, heavier, with blond hair. That description fit Tina, not Piper.”

The defense strategy was simple: plant reasonable doubt by continually reminding the jury that there were two Rountree sisters, and suggest that the guilty one might not be the sister sitting before them in the courtroom.

18

Of course, I wanted to be with Piper, to support her during the trial,” Tina said thoughtfully. Then she frowned, perhaps recalling all they’d been through together, two sisters who

were integral parts of each other’s lives from childhood on. Yet Piper described Tina as more than her sister; rather, a surrogate mother. With eight years between them, perhaps Tina saw her little sister in the reverse, almost as one of her children. “Piper and I were
always
there for one another,” she whispered. “I wanted to be by her side, but I just couldn’t. I had my own issues to consider.”

While Tina remained in Houston facing evidence tampering charges, Richmond readied for Piper Rountree’s trial.

Jury selection began on the morning of February 22, 2005.

Many on the jury panel said they’d heard of the case, as Murray Janus had predicted, but most insisted they could put what they’d heard aside to listen to the evidence, and within a few hours a jury of seven men and seven women was seated, including two alternates.

At two that afternoon Wade Kizer rose to give his opening statement. In the audience, Michael Jablin sat behind the prosecutors, guarded from the media by a Henrico County victims’ advocate. On the front table on the right side of the curved courtroom, Janus and Stone sat with Piper. Behind them, often clutching a tissue and dabbing at tears, was 298 / Kathryn Casey

Piper’s mother, Betty Rountree, and her oldest son, Piper’s brother Bill, a Harlingen, Texas, attorney.

For much of the trial Piper, dressed in a severe, double-breasted, navy blue business suit, struck a professional pose, taking notes like the lawyer she was, on a yellow legal pad she slid back and forth with Stone. At other times, she was the

mail-order minister, her head bowed and her hands folded before her face, as if in somber prayer. Occasionally, she sobbed, her face, pale from the months in jail, fl ushed and twisted in pain, especially when her children were mentioned. Throughout the trial, when anyone uttered their names, Piper became visibly rigid.

On the bench, Henrico County Circuit Court Judge L. A.

Harris, an avuncular middle-aged man with an ample double chin and a dour expression, peered down at the crowd gathered before him. The red power lights on the television cameras shone steady, indicating they were recording, and reporters scribbled quick notes in steno pads as Kizer addressed the jurors, thanking them for their service and explaining his role and the roles of his fellow prosecutors along with those of Janus and Stone.

“I would like you to have a road map of what we expect the evidence is going to show,” he said. Accompanied by a Pow-erPoint pre sentation, Kizer, in a matter-of-fact manner, his halting voice booming through the courtroom, systematically laid out the commonwealth’s case, beginning by introducing each of the main characters in the drama that would unfold before the jury: Fred Jablin, the victim; Piper Rountree, his wife and the accused; Jerry, Piper’s oilman lover; Tina, her devoted sister; Mac, Tina’s live-in boyfriend; and all the evidence, from the debit card receipts to the wigs and the cell phone rec ords. What were Piper’s motives for the murder? As expected, Kizer pegged them as twofold: reclaiming her children and getting her ex-husband’s money.

Piper Rountree had left so many “crumbs” behind, as Cap-DIE, MY LOVE / 299

tain Stem had referred to the evidence, that it fi lled Kizer’s allotted hour. When the prosecutor projected a photo of her ex-husband’s dead body, Fred’s shirt cut away by paramedics in a failed attempt to revive him, Piper lowered her head, not looking at the screen.

In conclusion, Kizer asked the jury to “give both sides a fair trial. Piper Rountree is entitled to a fair trial, and the opposite side, the commonwealth, is equally entitled to a fair trial.”

When it came to tangible evidence, Janus had remarkably less to work with, yet, as a counterpoint to Kizer’s calm deliberate manner, he delivered his opening with an emotional fervor.

Defense attorneys have a twofold mantra: First, that the state or, in the case of Virginia, the commonwealth, bears the burden of proof. Second, perhaps the jury’s most important duty: They must presume the woman across the room from them, the defendant, is innocent until proven guilty.

Listen to the evidence, the grandfatherly Janus said: “Does one person say, ‘We saw Piper Rountree not a fl eeting shadow running away?’ . . . Identification is key.” No one, he said, could point to his client and say, “We saw her pull the trigger.” None of the evidence in the case tied Piper forensically to the murder scene, much less the murder. All the prosecutors had, he held, were shreds of circumstantial evidence, not enough to convict and lock a woman away in prison.

Janus pointed out that Piper had made a child support payment to Fred in early October, weeks before the murder.

“She wouldn’t have paid child support if she’d been intending to kill her ex-husband,” he said.

With all the vigor he was known for, the defense attorney chipped away at the evidence Kizer had stacked before the jury. The wigs were nothing. Tina had many wigs she lent to her cancer patients who lost their hair, he said, and the ones in question, Piper purchased for an innocuous reason: simply 300 / Kathryn Casey

to wear on Halloween. The gun range? Piper had gone at Mac’s insistence. He was a “gun freak,” and “Texans shoot guns all the time.”

What about those who said they could identify Piper, like Kathy Molley, the Southwest Airlines ticket agent? Don’t be surprised if Molley can’t identify Piper in the courtroom, Janus said, pointing out that Molley had failed to recognize her at the pretrial hearing. In fact, Molley’s description of the blond woman she saw fit Tina better than Piper.

As to the cell phone calls, Piper and Tina had many cell phones, he argued, and they were used interchangeably by both sisters. The airline tickets, car rental, and hotel? They weren’t in Piper’s name but in the name of Tina Rountree.

“One name you’ll hear over and over and over again:
Tina
Rountree,
” he said with conviction. “The name that will keep popping up is
Tina Rountree.
”

To tear down the prosecutor’s case, Janus pointed to mistakes in Kizer’s opening, including the wrong date for Piper and Fred’s marriage, the misspelling of Jerry Walters’s last name as Walker, and a zero missing from the address of the Homestead Suites in an exhibit.

“In the end,” Janus concluded, “you’re going to fi nd there are too many discrepancies.”

There were things Janus didn’t want said at the trial. In murder cases, the victim is often vilifi ed, his or her character dismantled by the defense, to suggest that even if the jury believes the person on trial pulled the trigger, their guilt is of little consequence, for the victim wasn’t worth society’s retribution. The murder had, in some way, been justifi ed.

It was obvious to everyone who talked with her that Piper was eager to paint Fred in such a bad light, to say he wasn’t the devoted father and dedicated husband he’d been portrayed in the media. She charged he’d been psychologically, emotionally, even physically abusive, not only to her but to the children. To do so, however, could hurt her case, DIE, MY LOVE / 301

by supplying prosecutors with further motives for murder.

Perhaps Piper felt so manhandled by her ex-husband in the divorce, they’d argue, she’d murdered to exact revenge.

“I saw what appeared to be someone running right in front of my house toward the corner,” Bob McArdle, Fred’s next-door neighbor, told the jurors, beginning the prosecution’s pre sentation of their case. Including McArdle, prosecutors used the fi rst witnesses who took the stand to set the scene the morning of the murder: the shots in the darkness, the search for the source, and the discovery of Fred Jablin’s cold, dead body.

With each witness, the prosecutors supplied the jury with nuggets of evidence they’d later link into a chain they hoped would support their case: The person jogged; Piper was a jogger. No cartridges were found, suggesting the gun was a revolver. Piper used a .38 revolver at the gun range, and witnesses would testify that she’d carried one onto the airplane.

During cross examinations, wherever he could, Murray Janus whittled away at the prosecutors’ evidence. “Was there any attempt made to get fi ngerprints off the bullets?” Janus asked the forensic officer, Danny Jamison.

“No,” Jamison answered.

When Kizer questioned Jamison on redirect, he countered, “Can you get fingerprints off a bullet that has traveled through somebody’s body?”

“No, sir,” Jamison answered.

Standing before the jury, an assistant Henrico medical examiner, Dr. Deborah Kay, a plain woman with bouffant blond hair, demonstrated the paths the two bullets had taken through Fred Jablin’s body. The one through the lower back, she explained, exacted severe damage to his internal organs.

The result: Fred had lost nearly half his blood into his ab-dominal cavity. The damage, Ann Davis, the commonwealth’s ballistic expert, testified, wasn’t unexpected, as the type of 302 / Kathryn Casey

bullet used, a .38 special, was designed with a hollow point that mushroomed inside the body, making it exceptionally lethal.

“It does more damage?” Kizer asked.

“Yes, sir,” Davis answered.

After the murder scene and Fred’s death had been explored, the prosecutors turned their attention to the second phase of their plan: proving that Piper Rountree was not in Texas, as she’d claimed, but in Virginia on the day of the murder.

The first such witness to take the stand was the airline ticket agent, Kathy Molley. As she had at the pretrial, Owen Ashman led Molley through her encounter with the blond woman with the cute shoes who checked a .38 revolver on the Southwest Airlines flights that brought her from Houston to Virginia. Nothing in Molley’s testimony was truly at issue, as far as the defense was concerned, except for one point: the identity of the woman with the gun.

Molley explained how, when shown a photo of Piper Rountree, she had identified her as the woman at the airport.

Then Ashman held her breath and asked, “Do you see that woman in the courtroom today?”

As at the prior hearing, Molley quietly surveyed the courtroom. This time, however, the result was different.

“That lady looks familiar, but her hair didn’t look like that at all,” she said, pointing at Piper.

“Would it help if you got closer?” Ashman asked. Molley said it would, and she got up and walked toward the defense table, standing right before Piper Rountree, who stared down at the legal pad on the table.

“Is that the woman you dealt with?” Ashman asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Let the record refl ect she identifi ed the defendant, Piper Rountree.”

DIE, MY LOVE / 303

At the defense table, Piper looked up, shaking her head an exaggerated no.

When he took over, Janus pointed out that Molley, who’d returned to the witness box, hadn’t been able to identify Piper at the pretrial hearing. Molley didn’t disagree. It was true, and Janus had made his point.

Yet on redirect, when Ashman took over, she asked Molley why the result had been different on this day than at the previous hearing.

“I saw her closer today,” Molley said. “. . . It’s the shape of her face.”

With that, the judge adjourned the courtroom, ending the first day of trial.

In Houston that eve ning, Team Martini met at the Volcano. Many had friendly wagers on the outcome of the trial, their usual bet, a martini. Each day, they’d check the
Richmond Times- Dispatch
website for the newspaper’s updates on how the trial was progressing. Kevin O’Keefe and the bartender, Cheryl Crider, were both in Virginia waiting to testify for the prosecution. No one who’d seen Piper when she came in to the Volcano to ask if they recognized her agreed with Murray Janus’s description of the event in his opening statement: that Piper wasn’t trying to set up an alibi but simply looking for someone who remembered her from that Friday night. “The lady came in here with a notary, into a bar with a notary, and she was peeved when Kevin and Cheryl refused to sign a statement,” says Ace, a tall, middle-aged business exec leaning on the bar while swirling his martini under a hanging tin light. “Sure looked like she was alibi shopping to all of us.”

At the University of Richmond, news reports of the trial played in dorm rooms and gathering areas throughout the campus. “Many of us felt there had to be justice,” says one of Fred’s students. “We felt like his death needed to be accounted for.”