04.Die.My.Love.2007 (42 page)

When Mac next saw Piper, Fred was dead, and Piper hugged him and said, “I love you. Please don’t tell the police about the gun range. It will just complicate things.”

312 / Kathryn Casey

When Cari gave Piper her condolences, Mac heard her reply, “I’m sorry for the way Fred died, but I’m not sorry that he’s dead.”

Mac’s testimony was damaging, and Janus attacked it with force. Had Mac smoked pot with Carol Freed? the defense attorney asked.

“I don’t remember smoking marijuana with her,” Mac responded.

“At one point you worried you could be charged?” Janus asked.

“Yes, sir,” the disc jockey with his long hair anchored in a ponytail replied.

But in the end it would seem as if Janus relied on bad information, perhaps ideas he’d been given by his client.

“You’re a gun freak, aren’t you?” he said to Mac.

“No, sir,” Mac said.

“How many guns do you own?”

“One,” Mac replied.

Perhaps one of the more touching moments of the trial came when Mac said he still cared for Piper and that he hadn’t wanted to testify. It would seem that both the Rountree sisters, Tina and Piper, had a strong pull on the men in their lives.

“You still had feelings for Tina, didn’t you, sir?” Janus said, suggesting Mac had a reason to protect her.

“Yes, and I still do,” Mac responded sadly.

That fourth day of the trial, someone was missing from the courtroom, another of Piper’s siblings, Bill Rountree. He’d been a constant presence, seated next to their mother, Betty, taking notes. But the day before, police offi cers contended that they’d seen him sharing information with defense witnesses congregated in the hallway. Since they would testify, like all witnesses, the defense witnesses had been banned from the courtroom and were barred from hearing the evidence being presented.

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Called before the judge, Bill Rountree maintained he wasn’t talking about the trial but about problems at home in Harlingen. Still, the next day, Bill Rountree had left for Texas, and Piper had one fewer supporter in the gallery.

The gun evidence opened the trial that Friday, as another witness—a clerk at the 59 Gun Range—put a .38 caliber revolver, consistent with the type of bullets recovered from Fred’s body, in Piper’s hands. Then the jury learned Piper hadn’t practiced her shooting not just once, but twice. Yet Janus pointed out that at the Sportsman’s Outlet no one had been able to identify the woman who’d used the practice range, and the receipt wasn’t signed Piper Rountree.

“The name of the shooter is Tina Rountree?” Janus asked.

Yes, the witness agreed.

Yet, there was more. The damning Hobby Airport records showed that Piper’s Jeep Liberty was in the airport parking lot during the time she said she was in Houston.

Why would her car have been logged in at the airport if, as she claimed, she’d been driving it around Houston?

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the prosecutor’s decisions were being fi nalized.

Many of the witnesses had given their testimony and left for home, leaving fewer in the witness room. Soon, Carol Freed was dismissed. Kizer, Ashman, and Reid had mulled over her value to the case versus her erratic behavior and decided she couldn’t be counted on to remain calm while on the stand. And then there was Charles Tooke, who’d grown to realize without being told that his participation was in limbo.

The other remaining prosecution witnesses had been shepherded up to a room on the second floor, but he’d been left alone in a fi rst-floor library. With time to consider the past months and his ongoing scuffle with the prosecutors, Tooke realized why: He was no longer a witness for the prosecution but a liability to them.

314 / Kathryn Casey

* * *

On the stand, Crider insisted she’d never been convinced that Piper had been in the bar the night before the murder, but that Piper had brought in a notary, asking her for a statement that said she was. When Kevin O’Keefe took the stand, he looked over at the defense table and thought about how different Piper looked, heavier and pale.

Under cross examination by Janus, O’Keefe admitted that at first he believed he had seen Piper at the Volcano on that Friday night, and that it was only after checking “my invoices, etcetera, and made sure of what day it was,” that he realized it had actually been Saturday, the eve ning after the murder.

On redirect, Kizer asked O’Keefe, “Were you at the Volcano at all on that Friday, October twenty- ninth?”

“No,” O’Keefe said.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Positive.”

With that, at 1:00 p.m. on the fourth day of the trial, Wade Kizer announced: “The Commonwealth rests.”

As he left the courtroom for lunch, despite all the evidence he’d heard, Bill Bootwright still didn’t believe Piper Rountree was guilty of murder. The father of Paxton’s good friend judged the prosecutors’ case as purely circumstantial.

For all their rec ords and witnesses, in his opinion Kizer, Ashman, and Reid hadn’t delivered “a smoking gun” proving Piper had murdered Fred.

When court resumed that afternoon, at 1:45, Janus argued before the judge precisely what Bootwright had been thinking, that the evidence was too circumstantial and the prosecutors hadn’t proven their case. He asked Judge Harris for DIE, MY LOVE / 315

a directed not-guilty verdict. “There’s no evidence this defendant, Piper Rountree, shot and killed Fred Jablin,” Janus contended.

After a moment’s thought, the judge agreed, “Obviously, it’s a circumstantial case.” But then he ruled that the evidence, while circumstantial, was strong enough for the trial to continue.

Then, before the jury was brought in, Janus put something else into the court record, that although he and Stone had advised Piper that she wasn’t required to testify, that they had made it clear that it was her absolute right not to, she had made her own decision. After a few prosecution witnesses, they said, Piper intended to testify on her own behalf.

At the prosecution table, Ashman, Kizer, and Reid all felt a sense of excitement. They had hoped for but not expected the opportunity to question Rountree on the witness stand.

With that, Murray Janus called the first defense witness, a man the prosecutors had brought to Virginia as their witness: Charles Tooke.

As Taylor Stone asked the questions, Tooke explained that he’d worked with Piper and what they, as landmen, did.

He then talked about their relationship, and that he’d never known her to drink beer, which contradicted the testimony of Tina Landrum at the Miller Mart, who’d said Piper had wanted to buy a six-pack on the morning of the murder.

Then Stone asked Tooke to recount the e-mail he’d received from Piper at 3:21 that afternoon. It was an attempt to show she could not have been on the airplane, as the prosecutors maintained, until 4:40 p.m. Tooke confirmed that he had in fact received an e-mail from her that day, while the plane was still in the air.

All of Tooke’s testimony was important to the defense, but then came the coup de grace: Stone asked if Coby Kelley’s notes on his meeting with Tooke were accurate.

316 / Kathryn Casey

Tooke answered, “Uh, I found three, I believe three things in them that I found to be inaccurate.”

There it was: the assertion that the police hadn’t been truthful.

On cross examination, Owen Ashman asked Tooke what Piper had responded to him after he’d replied to her e-mail that Saturday. “Well, there wasn’t one,” Tooke said.

“There’s no response?” Ashman repeated.

“No,” he said.

It was the same regarding the phone message that afternoon from Piper, in which she again said she had a question for him. “No question was ever asked of you by Piper Rountree, is that correct?” Ashman asked.

“Correct, in this regard,” Tooke answered.

With that, Ashman led Tooke through a series of questions that nailed down for the jury what many of them probably already knew: that an e-mail could be sent from any computer, anywhere, by anyone. As to the squabble with Kelley, Ashman made it seem more a simple misunderstanding.

In the end, much of what Tooke testified to would be more damaging to the defense than helpful. Yes, Piper had told him that she had things on her computer she didn’t want the police to see. The jury had already been told that by the time the search warrant was executed, the computer cords hung down loose, and Piper’s computer tower was missing.

Despite the tumult over the Adderall, Jean took the stand as the defense’s second witness. As Janus asked the questions, she explained that all three Rountree sisters were close and that she’d planned to have Callie in her wedding party the previous November. But that was unimportant. What Janus wanted the jury to hear was what Jean said next, that she’d sometimes called Piper on her 7878 cell phone and Tina had answered, and that on the telephone, the Rountree sisters all DIE, MY LOVE / 317

sounded much alike. “We used to fool our boyfriends, and call them up and pretend to be the other sister,” Jean said.

Could the witnesses be wrong? Could it have been Tina, not Piper, on the phone in Virginia that weekend?

While Jean may have scored points for Piper, the next witness up proved to be more of a liability: Loni Elwell Gosnell, Piper’s old friend. She, too, testified that Piper and Tina sounded similar on the telephone.

Yet on cross examination, Duncan Reid led her through a series of questions that ended up hurting Piper rather than helping her.

Yes, Loni admitted, she had called Piper the afternoon of the murder on her 7878 cell phone, with no response.

“You did in fact call, contact her, and speak with her at 6:21 eastern time on October the thirtieth?” Reid asked.

“Yes,” Loni said.

“And the person you talked with was whom?”

“Piper.”

“Are you sure you weren’t talking to Tina?”

“No sir, I was not talking to Tina.”

“Not a scintilla of doubt in your mind?”

“No sir.”

On the stand, the white-bearded Marty McVey looked like the Santa Claus he played at a Houston children’s hospital over Christmas, and he was about to deliver to Piper Rountree what many would see as a gift. To begin, Janus had McVey list his credentials: a former assistant district attorney who had once worked with the DEA. Janus asked McVey for his legal opinion about the letter to Jerry Walters. How long did a couple have to live together to be common-law married in Texas?

McVey answered that there were no time limits, and that the couple simply had to present themselves as husband and wife.

Yes, he said, Piper had once given him a .38 caliber. “It 318 / Kathryn Casey

has remained in the top drawer of my dresser,” he said.

Then McVey said something that could have thrown into question the linchpin of the commonwealth’s case. According to the witnesses who’d testified for the prosecution, Piper was on a flight to Houston that Saturday after the murder at 4:30 p.m., but McVey maintained that wasn’t possible. Because at that precise time, he said, Piper Rountree was in his office seated across from him.

“She just dropped in?” Janus asked.

“Yes,” McVey answered.

“Can you tell us how you are certain today . . . that this was the time you saw her?”

“That was the day before Halloween . . . and my son was going to a very large Halloween party on that Saturday night. The party started at seven . . . He came home just a little bit before five o’clock that day.”

“Could you tell us whether or not Piper Rountree was there at that time?”

“Yes,” McVey said.

“Had she been there for some time?”

“Yes, sir.”

On cross exam, Ashman asked, “You did not tell the attorneys, or anyone for that matter, that you saw Piper on Saturday afternoon, October thirtieth, until February, is that correct?”

“I don’t know,” McVey answered. “I don’t recall the fi rst time anyone asked me that question . . . if you’re asking me if I volunteered the information, no, ma’am. I don’t volunteer information. I answer questions.”

“So when the investigators were in your office on Sunday, October thirty- first, you knew they were talking to Piper . . . about the death of her ex-husband . . . and you did not tell them you saw her Saturday afternoon? Is that true?”

“That’s correct.”

“Did you tell any of the police that day?”

“No, I did not,” McVey said.

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There was a major discrepancy in McVey’s testimony and what Piper had told the court and prosecutors, however.

“Well, do you know why Piper Rountree would have fi led an alibi in December stating that she was at home [in Kingwood] all day on Saturday [the day McVey contended he’d seen her in his office]?” Ashman asked.

Janus interrupted. “No, he would not.”

“I have no knowledge of that,” McVey said.

“You are Piper Ann Rountree, is that correct?” Janus asked when his client took the stand after a short recess.

“I am.”

“Ms. Rountree, did you shoot and kill Fred Jablin on Saturday morning, October thirtieth, 2004?”

“I did not.”

At times, on the stand, as she had throughout the trial, Piper cried softly. She talked of her children and her marriage, saying she and Fred hadn’t “seen eye-to-eye,” but that by 2004 all was amicable, and that the calm had been

“an answer to my prayers.” She even claimed that Fred had agreed to let all three children spend their entire vacation with her that coming summer, in 2005.

When it came to her sister, Piper said she was four inches shorter and much thinner than Tina, and that Tina, not she, was the one with blond hair. Unlike Tina, she said, she had never owned a .38 caliber revolver. Tina, Piper testifi ed, was also the Rountree sister who had a collection of wigs.

“Any blond wigs to your knowledge?” Janus asked.

“Yes.” Then she went on to say that the wigs she’d ordered had never been for her, but for Tina.