Body Parts (40 page)

Dietz concluded that the evidence concerning the head injury from 1980 could not be “associated with the onset of emotional collectivity, impulsivity, temper, or aggression” because such symptoms do not grow over time; they tend to come on immediately. This, he said, conflicted with the testimony by Wayne’s wife, Kelly, who said he was nicer after the head injury, and also with Wayne’s history of starting fights with men and showing aggression to women before and after his head injury.

Although Dietz said he agreed with Meloy’s diagnoses of Antisocial and Borderline Personality Disorders, he disagreed with the labels of “impulsive” and “explosive.”

With impulsive aggression, he said, “there is no gain, no apparent motive.” But in this case, Wayne did have a motive—to gain sexual arousal. He was able to function well in the marines for a time and also to hold a series of jobs and control his aggression when his wives or girlfriends asked him to.

Also, Wayne told Dietz that “he taught himself how to look like he had an explosive temper to avoid being pushed around,” modeling on his father’s behavior.

Asked to discuss how paraphilias are developed, Dietz launched into a lengthy explanation, saying the cause was unknown, but the specifics seemed to be learned, primarily by males, between the ages of eight and twelve.

Paraphilias are thought to develop by chance association, he said. He gave the jury an example of a man he’d treated who couldn’t sustain a healthy relationship with women. Dietz was able to trace the man’s problem years back to when he masturbated while looking at his father’s detective magazines, which often featured a sexy woman with a knife to her throat or tied to the radiator.

Similarly, he said, Wayne had access during puberty to the porno magazine
Screw,
which Dietz said “had some unusual pictures in it, and that he found exciting, used for this purpose, and still remembers to this day.” (Wayne had also told Meloy that he’d looked at bondage and sadomasochism magazines when he was about nine years old. Gene said they weren’t his and he had no idea where Wayne would’ve gotten ahold of such publications.)

Dietz did concur with Meloy’s opinions about the partialism and sexual masochism, revealing that Wayne had not only performed erotic asphyxiation on women, but also on himself, using a necktie to enhance his own orgasms and asking women to strangle him during sex. He told Dietz that he’d bound, burned, and pierced his own genitals for pleasure.

“Could that be a way of him trying to explain why he does certain things to women in these cases, because he says he does it to himself?” Mazurek asked.

Mapes objected to the question. “Calls for speculation,” he said.

“Sustained,” Smith replied.

Dietz acknowledged that Wayne was a sexual sadist, but he explained that even sadists can satisfy their needs without hurting anybody—by using fantasy, masturbating to pornographic images, or simulating acts with consenting partners. Violent crime, he added, was “the gratification of last resort” and, thankfully, the rarest.

Asked if paraphilias could cause a man to act a certain way and remove his self-control, Dietz said, “No. All the paraphilia does is dictate what causes erection, not what one does with the erection or what one does in the rest of one’s sex life.... A person can’t help what turns them on. They do control what they do about it, if anything.... Overall, only a tiny, tiny fraction are going to commit any crime.”

Countering Meloy’s statement that Wayne’s case was unique because he turned himself in, Dietz said he knew of at least eight other cases of sexually motivated serial killers who did the same thing, two at the urging of siblings.

Furthermore, he said, “Remorse at a subsequent point does not inform us of the mental state at the time of the crime.”

Canty began his cross-examination on June 1, using some of the same impeachment techniques against Dietz that Mazurek had used on Meloy, sparring with Dietz over semantics and arcane psychological jargon.

For example, Canty brought up a comment Dietz made on
60 Minutes II
as he tried to cast the psychiatrist and his philosophy in an unsympathetic light: “Treating private psychiatric patients means listening endlessly to people with fairly normal lives whine about why their lives aren’t as great as they wished.”

In particular, Canty battled with Dietz over his definition of depression, attempting to prove to the jury that Wayne was psychotic and that his extreme fear of abandonment caused him to make decisions from an abnormal perspective.

Canty pointed out that Wayne’s military medical records show a diagnosis of “acute psychosis” in September 1984. Dietz shrugged that off, saying no symptoms fitting that diagnosis were recorded, even after Canty showed him a second notation by a nurse.

“So your assessment is that he was probably malingering in order to get out of the Marine Corps?” Canty asked.

“No. I’m saying that’s a possibility,” Dietz replied.

Noting that Wayne disliked the side effects of Haldol, Canty suggested that Wayne wouldn’t keep throwing angry outbursts in the hospital if he knew he’d be forced to take the drug.

Canty also noted that Rodney had said Wayne was babbling and talking incoherently the day he turned himself in.

“Would that be consistent with what you refer to as a thought disorder?” Canty asked, referring to one of the necessary components of psychosis that Dietz had listed.

“It might be,” Dietz said, but he still wouldn’t commit, saying he would need to interview Rodney to know for sure.

Ultimately Dietz acknowledged the possibility that Wayne was psychotic in 1984, but said that didn’t necessarily mean Wayne was still psychotic in 1997.

“Psychosis is . . . a mental state that’s time limited,” Dietz said, adding that some people could go for years without symptoms.

After Dietz finished testifying on Wednesday, June 7, both sides rested.

CHAPTER 25

H
AUNTING
W
HISPERS

Mazurek delivered his closing argument on June 14, three months after the trial began, taking two hours and fifteen minutes to sum up his case for the jury.

He started by harking back to his childhood, when he loved watching horror movies that featured monsters, even though they made him terrified to get out of bed in case he ran into one on his way to the bathroom. When he became an adult, he said, he decided there were no such things as monsters.

But he was wrong.

“There are monsters in the world and they don’t look like monsters in the movies,” he said. “They look like human beings and sometimes they look exactly like Mr. Ford. ’Cause Mr. Ford is, in fact, a monster. He devoured young women to satisfy his sadistic—”

Mazurek had barely gotten started and Canty was already objecting. Canty said he didn’t like his use of the word “monster,” because it suggested that the defendant was somehow less than human and therefore entitled to less consideration than other defendants.

Smith told Mazurek to tone down his rhetoric, but overruled Canty’s objection.

“As I was saying,” Mazurek continued, “the defendant devoured these vulnerable young women to satisfy his sexually sadistic appetite, leaving their dead, decomposing, and sometimes dismembered bodies scattered like trash throughout the state of California. And when you look at those pictures, you know in your heart . . . this was nothing other than cold-blooded murder.”

Mazurek quickly ran through the highlights of the evidence for each of the victims’ deaths, wading through the legal terminology to help the jury understand its instructions.

He also explained the three elements of first-degree murder the jury needed to reach a guilty verdict and to confirm the special circumstance allegation: 1) the defendant caused the death of another person; 2) he had a state of mind called malice aforethought, or intent to kill; and 3) he didn’t have a lawful excuse or justification.

Even though the pathologists testified that they couldn’t definitively determine the cause of death for two of the victims, Mazurek said, other evidence showed that all four deaths shared a common cause and motive: strangulation to achieve sexual gratification through sadism and to express anger over Wayne’s wife leaving and taking their son.

“Causing somebody’s death is absolutely the ultimate act of sadism,” Mazurek said, adding that strangulation was one of the most “personal ways” to do it.

“You’re squeezing the life out of them. Think about how long it takes to do that. Not how long it takes to render somebody unconscious . . . but how long it takes to kill them. . . . What do you think is going through your mind for those three to seven minutes?”

Even if these victims were more physically vulnerable to death because they were prostitutes, had heart conditions from drug abuse, or had been drinking, that’s no defense for murder, he said. Besides, he added, the defendant admitted that he was responsible for causing at least two of the deaths.

He said the jury could draw inferences about Wayne’s intent and mental state during the killings from the testimony of “Sonoma County Doe.”

“There is a basic pattern, a basic plan. It’s common to all the girls. . . . You can also use it to negate the claim . . . that the defendant was doing something accidentally. . . . It’s not something that just suddenly occurs to him.”

After reminding the jury that Wayne cut up Jane Doe in his bathtub, kept her body parts, and used them to masturbate, Mazurek asked rhetorically, “Does that sound like an accident?”

He used the same rationale with the other victims, noting that Wayne dumped their naked bodies miles away from where they lived, so they couldn’t be identified.

“If this were truly an accident, would you go through that much effort to dispose of the evidence?”

Trying to repair whatever damage the defense had caused to the credibility of “Sonoma County Doe,” Mazurek acknowledged that she was “a little rough around the edges,” but he said she had no agenda or motive to lie in court about what Wayne had done to her.

“I wish I could bring in twelve nuns and a priest [as witnesses], but twelve nuns and a priest aren’t what the defendant associates with,” he said.

Mazurek said Wayne was lying about not remembering how these women died, leaving the jury “no option but to conclude that he intended to kill them.

“At the time he acted, he knew his act was dangerous to human life and he deliberately acted with . . . reckless disregard for the health and safety of another person,” which constitutes murder, he said.

“He selected his victims based on their young age, size, and vulnerability—choosing ones he knew he could control—using goal-directed behaviors to satisfy his sadism,” he said.

“Strangling somebody, we all know, is dangerous to human life. They die. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. . . . If he didn’t know this was dangerous . . . or could potentially cause them death, he wouldn’t be doing it.”

After the lunch break, Canty objected once again to the monster reference and also to the prosecutor’s implication that Wayne’s failure to testify was somehow questionable. The judge said that statement caught his attention as well and offered to give additional jury instructions to explain that that decision could not be held against Wayne.

Canty argued the point again after Mazurek’s closing and moved for a mistrial. The judge denied the motion, offering again to talk to the jury, but Canty declined, saying it would only “highlight the issue.”

Next, Mazurek disputed Wayne’s claim that he squeezed these women’s necks to intensify their orgasms, underscoring Meloy’s testimony that Wayne distrusted, devalued, and hated women.

“Do you really think that makes sense, based upon what we know about the defendant, or is that a lie to make what he’s done . . . not sound so insidious or sinister, but to sound more like an accident? . . . How many guys pay prostitutes so they can pleasure the prostitutes?”

The evidence presented in court, he said, and the diagnosis of sadism proved that Wayne was not “concerned about other people’s pleasure. He’s concerned about their pain,” because it excites and arouses him.

Summing up, Mazurek asked the jury once again to provide the justice that these four young women deserved: 4 first-degree murder convictions and confirmation of the special circumstance allegation.

Mapes and Canty split up their closing argument so that Mapes gave his forty-minute portion that afternoon, laying the foundation for Canty’s statement the next day.

After delivering a broad-brush explanation of the law and jury instructions, Mapes asked jurors to try to put themselves in Wayne’s shoes—and in his mind—so they could determine his mental state.

“You took an oath to follow law, no matter what it is. No matter how it comes out, even if you don’t like it,” he said. “If you find that it’s not his fault—even then, you have to find him not guilty, whether you like it or not.”

That meant the jury should consider the four deaths separately, he said, not lump them together as Mazurek did in his closing.

“He wanted to supply facts from one to the other, and the law doesn’t allow you to do that,” Mapes said.

Nor, he said, were the jurors allowed to speculate, as Mazurek suggested. “He’s trying to make up for his burden of reasonable doubt. . . . Don’t assume. . . . Look at the facts first and decide. . . . Apply the law as you see fit, not as the DA sees fit.”

To determine whether Wayne premeditated and carefully planned his crimes, Mapes said, jurors needed to consider his recent divorce, his depression, the loss of his son, his Borderline Personality Disorder and his alcoholism. Only then could they decide if Wayne had carefully weighed the pros and cons and realized the consequences of what he was doing.

Mapes suggested that the jury try to imagine drinking ten shots of alcohol in a contest, doing wild things at a party, then waking up the next morning and thinking, “‘Oh, my gosh, did I say that? I hope I didn’t say that.’”