Death Sentence (27 page)

“Well, you knew that Jennings Barfield had never complained,” Britt said, trying to slip one by her.

“I beg your pardon!” she quickly interrupted. “I didn’t put any in Jennings Barfield at all.”

“Didn’t you?”

“I did not.” Her contempt for Britt was transparent.

“You are now saying you did not at any time give Jennings Barfield any poison?” Britt said, his voice rising.

“That is what I am saying.”

“All right. Thank you, ma’am,” Britt said with a look of satisfaction. “I believe originally you didn’t remember.”

Velma was looking withered by Britt’s unrelenting assault, but he didn’t stop, going on to ask about her call to Alice Storms the day after her first interview with the police.

“Do you recall telling her it was all the fault of Southeastern General Hospital that her father had died?”

“I did not say it was the fault of them. I said, ‘It looks to me like they could be more prompt in the way they handle cases.’ Mrs. Storms, on Saturday morning after her daddy died on Friday night, she had gone out to get her hair fixed. When she came back home she made the remark about how many cases that have been taken into Southeastern General Hospital and people had died on their way back home. She was saying that as she drove into her driveway. This is why I commented to Mrs. Storms like I did. We were all making comments about it the whole time.”

“No more questions,” Britt said, and as Velma walked back to the defense table, he looked at her and smiled.

Ronnie was devastated. His mother’s irritability and combativeness had made her appear to be a harridan, perfectly capable of cold-blooded murder. “I was wanting to see the remorse,” he later recalled. “She seemed to have no remorse about what she had done. I saw a mean person, a callous person who didn’t seem to care what happened. She was just like Britt later pictured her, cold and calculating.”

Court adjourned early to allow the judge and lawyers to drive to Fayetteville to take the testimony of one of Velma’s doctors, who was hospitalized with a fatal illness.

But before his mother was returned to jail, Ronnie was allowed to speak with her in a holding room. He was angry, and he didn’t conceal it.

“That was horrible,” he said of her response to Britt.

“Well, he’s the one who started it,” she said. “He was yelling at me. No one’s going to yell at me like that.”

“It doesn’t matter who started it,” Ronnie said. “Don’t you understand? That was exactly what he wanted you to do.”

He was certain that she had put herself on death row, but he didn’t want her to be completely without hope, didn’t want to affect any slight chance she might have during the remainder of the trial. “If you keep on with this kind of display, it’s going to seal your fate,” he told her. “You won’t have a chance.”

15

Bob Jacobson was dispirited after Velma’s performance Thursday, almost certain that she had ruined any chance of a second-degree conviction. Although he still had to cling to that hope, he knew that he had to emphasize her abuse of drugs even more strongly to have a chance of saving her life.

He opened the fifth day of the trial Friday morning by calling Dr. Bob Rollins, a forensic psychiatrist who was the former superintendent to Dorothea Dix Hospital. Rollins described Velma’s six weeks of testing and evaluation after her arrest. Although she was not very cooperative, he said, he determined that she was depressed and had a passive-dependent and inadequate personality.

Jacobson brought out the long list of drugs Velma had been taking at the time and asked if they affected the mind.

“Yes,” Rollins replied.

Britt kept his focus on Velma’s insanity plea on cross-examination. “Dr. Rollins, you are not saying that the defendant was insane, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“Is the word insanity a legal term or a medical term, sir?”

“Well, I think lawyers think it is a medical term and doctors think it is a legal term.”

“Can you give us a definition?”

“Well, the one I use in this particular case is when the patient is able to distinguish between right and wrong, and generally, insanity is thought of as being the same as a very serious mental illness.”

Britt read from Rollins’ report: “‘Based on the limited information I have, I believe she should be considered responsible for her actions.’”

Rollins acknowledged that. “But I would say Mrs. Barfield is a limited individual in that her personality structure is immature and restricted, and I think that could be considered a form of mental illness but not one that interferes with her ability to stand trial.”

A court clerk, Mildred Simmons, took the stand to read answers given by Anthony Sainz in a deposition taken by the judge and attorneys from his hospital room the afternoon before. Sainz, a neurologist with a Ph.D. in philosophy who also had a psychiatric practice, had treated Velma since 1975, first at the mental health center at Southeastern Hospital. She had continued as his patient after her arrest. Indeed, even as Velma sat listening to the transcript, she was under the effects of tranquilizers and sedatives prescribed by Dr. Sainz.

In response to questions from Jacobson, Sainz told of treating Velma for a severe overdose early in 1975 when she was brought to the hospital unconscious. He had diagnosed her as having a “well-established depression with underlying passive-aggressive neurotic reaction,” a person who abused medicine without justified motive. Her depression, he said, was organic, a disease of the body that affected the mind, leaving no initiative and an inability to cope. She was unable to establish an equilibrium between being hostile to her environment or becoming dependent on it.

“In other words,” he testified, “she is either a parasite or a destructor.”

He told of the drugs he had prescribed for her, including Elavil, an antidepressant, and the tranquilizer Tranxene, in January when Stuart was murdered.

Jacobson asked if any of these were habit-forming. “I have to give you a highly personal opinion,” Sainz answered. “I would say that any drug is addictive regardless of the chemical constitution.” He had seen addictions to all the drugs he had prescribed for Velma, he said, sometimes psychological, sometimes physical.

In all the years he’d known her, Sainz said, Velma had “never been without a good bull pen so that she can substitute if she needs a relief pitcher to get somebody to give her a prescription in a hurry.”

“Are you saying that she has a history of abusing drugs by going to other physicians to obtain them?”

“That is right.”

Sainz told of seeing Velma in jail after her return from Dorothea Dix. She was complaining of gross memory defects, severe headaches, insomnia, lack of appetite, inability to cope. “Her ideas were just jumbled in her mind,” he said.

Had that caused him to alter his earlier diagnosis?

“No. What I saw was a patient who hadn’t had any medication for several days, and the symptoms are congruent with the illness that she had.”

“Did she require the medication?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And she requires it now?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, going on to add that depressive patients have to have maintenance doses to function properly.

Had Velma told him anything about the crime for which she was being tried?

“She told me that she did not remember any of the allegations, that she did not remember making any admissions and she was very vague in her reminiscences, but on this she was definite. She remembered that the doctor who examined her at Dorothea Dix saw her on only two brief occasions, and she complained very bitterly of her physical symptoms.”

“Doctor, you are not saying that the lady is insane, are you?” Britt asked on cross-examination.

“There is no such thing as insanity.”

“You understand the meaning of the legal term insanity, don’t you, sir?”

“I understand it, but I don’t feel qualified to pass on it.”

Jacobson now called Ronnie to tell about discovering that his mother had poisoned Stuart and about taking her to the sheriffs department. Then he asked about his mother’s drug abuse, “How far back does this go?”

“At least to 1969, when my father died.”

Ronnie outlined her many overdoses and told of taking drugs away from her on the day of her arrest. Jacobson handed him a wad of tissue. “Would you unwrap it, please?”

Ronnie did and described the pills inside. They were the ones he had taken from his mother that day, he said, and Jacobson had them admitted as evidence. Then Jacobson produced the grocery sack of medicine vials Ronnie had taken from his mother’s room after her arrest and they, too, were admitted.

“Can you tell us how your father died, sir?” Britt asked after Jacobson had surrendered the witness.

“His death certificate said the cause of death was smoke inhalation,” Ronnie replied. Britt knew that to be the case because he had had the body of Thomas Burke exhumed at the end of May, and Page Hudson, the state medical examiner, had found no arsenic but heavy soot in his lungs and trachea.

“There was a fire in the trailer, is that correct?”

“In the house.”

“Your mother was just outside the door when that occurred, is that not so?”

“I don’t know where she was at.”

Had his mother ever told him that the reason she had the pills that had earlier been put into evidence was because she intended to commit suicide but decided she wasn’t ready to leave this world yet?

“Yes, she did make that statement.”

Britt had no more questions, and the judge declared a fifteen-minute recess.

When court reconvened, Jacobson brought forth a succession of doctors to relate the drugs they had prescribed for Velma in December 1977 and January 1978. One was Dr. Horace M. Baker, who had performed breast surgery on Velma on January 25. He didn’t have a record of the drugs he had supplied her, he said, but normally he gave Percodan, Dalmane, and Tylenol with codeine. Velma had returned to have the incision dressed on January 31, he revealed, and again on February 2, the day before Stuart’s death.

Did Velma appear to be under the influence of drugs on January 31? Britt wanted to know.

No, said Baker, not on any of her visits.

Pharmacists from four different drugstores began the afternoon’s testimony, all describing prescriptions they had filled for Velma in December and January, a total of thirteen. Then Jacobson called Velma for a question he’d failed to ask the day before. He knew that he was taking a chance, for he would be submitting her to another verbal assault by Britt. But it was important, and he hoped that she would control her temper after being admonished both by him and Ronnie the day before.

On the day she had poisoned Stuart, he asked, what medications had she taken?

Three Sinequan, three Elavil, six Valium and four Tranxene, she answered.

“Did you take it all at once?”

“Yes, I did.”

Such a dosage of sedatives and tranquilizers would render many people unconscious, and Britt thought she was just trying to make the jurors think that she was completely incapable of knowing what she was doing when she poisoned Stuart.

“You took this around eleven-thirty a.m., you say?” he asked on cross-examination.

“Yes, sir.”

That was the day she had written the check on Stuart’s account, he noted.

“Did you write the check before you took the dope?”

“Yes, sir, I did, the best I can remember.”

But then she said she wasn’t sure. She did remember taking the medicine, did remember going to see Dr. Baker, but she said it was in the morning, and Britt pointed out that Baker said she’d come in the afternoon.

“He testified to that, but I truly couldn’t say,” Velma said.

So far, Ronnie thought, she was restraining herself, doing okay.

“You are not getting tangled up, are you, ma’am?” Britt asked tauntingly.

She recalled Dr. Baker testifying that she had not appeared to be under the influence of drugs when she came to his office but she maintained that she was.

Britt took her again through the events of Thursday, February 2, the day she first took Stuart to the hospital, and this time she included going to see Dr. Baker that day, something she hadn’t mentioned earlier. She acknowledged that she left Stuart alone when she went.

“He was extremely ill at that time, was he not?” Britt asked antagonistically.

“He was feeling better when I left.”

Hadn’t she testified earlier that she had stayed with him all day because he was so sick?

“I don’t recall. I’m not going to say.”

“The only reason you are telling the jury now that you went to Dr. Baker’s office on Thursday is because you heard him testify to that effect, is that not so?”

“No, it is not,” Velma said curtly, and Ronnie could see her anger boiling again. Britt could manipulate her at will, and she seemed not to be aware of it.

Britt went on to her activities on Friday, the day of Stuart’s death. She’d gone to Lumberton to cash the check she’d written on his account that morning, she said. While there, she’d called Dr. Sainz for more medicine, and later she had returned to Lumberton to get it. Stuart was still sick, she acknowledged, but feeling better.