Lethal Guardian (32 page)

On the other hand, any good detective cannot sit on what he knows to be a bogus accusation or, better yet, an outright lie. So Turner did some checking. He called the public information office (PIO) of the state police and asked if it had tipped off the media about Beth Ann’s return trip back to the States.

No, the spokesperson told him. But a reporter from the
Hartford Courant,
the PIO said next, had informed them that
he
had gotten a call from Hugh Keefe’s office about when, where and what time Beth Ann was going to be checking in at the “Troop F Hotel.”

The first order of business in the
State of Connecticut
v.
Beth Ann Carpenter
was for the court to consider the evidence against Beth Ann and determine if it was sufficient to proceed with a murder trial. She was being held on a $1 million bond at York Correctional Facility for Women in East Lyme, and there was no way she was going to be able to post it. Hugh Keefe had fought to have bail reduced, but after hearing arguments on both sides, Judge Susan B. Handy denied the request, saying how “bothered” she was by Beth Ann’s having left the country at a time when suspects in Buzz’s murder were being arrested.

By December 17, 1999, Judge Handy ruled that the state had enough evidence to try Beth Ann, who had just turned thirty-six, for capital felony murder and murder. Leaving the courtroom, Dee Clinton, who had waited for five and a half years to see those responsible for her son’s death be brought to justice, told a newspaper reporter, “It’s another good holiday. This is like…thank you, God.”

Hugh Keefe began his campaign to undermine the state’s case by saying it was building the foundation of it on a witness who was nothing more than a “liar, cheater, thief and scumbag.” Indeed, Keefe knew his biggest asset was Haiman Clein’s lack of credibility as a witness. Clein had robbed clients of hundreds of thousands of dollars; he’d had sex with women while others watched; he’d allowed friends and clients to have sex with his wife; he’d admitted to conspiring with Mark Despres to have Buzz murdered; he’d been abusing drugs and alcohol for years. When Keefe got his chance to attack Clein on the witness stand, he vowed to rip his credibility apart, layer by layer, using every means possible to create doubt in the jury’s mind.

And from the outset, it didn’t appear like Keefe was going to have such a hard job doing just that.

Kevin Kane, however, who had taken over as lead prosecutor in the case, working diligently with Peter McShane, had his own thoughts about Clein’s credibility as a witness. He admitted that Clein “had more baggage than the Ghost of Christmas Past,” a trite analogy that would only grow with clichés as Kane began to present Clein to the court. But he also trumpeted the notion that if Clein was going to “manufacture a case” against Beth Ann for turning him in, he certainly would have “done a better job of it.”

It was a fair argument. Clein had every possible opportunity to say anything he wanted about Beth Ann’s role in Buzz’s murder. Yet he gave only certain facts that when matched up against Mark Despres’s, they only appeared to be more truthful. There were things Clein could have made up, and no one ever would have known—but when he didn’t remember something, he told detectives and the state’s attorney’s office he simply didn’t remember.

Kane viewed this as a positive sign of Clein’s truthfulness. He felt the jury would agree.

As the case moved forward, Keefe promised to smear Clein as much as he could and prove he had acted alone in Buzz’s murder because his obsession with Beth Ann had grown to such an uncontrollable level he would have done anything for her—including murder.

Be it fate or luck, during the last week of October 1999, Hugh Keefe received a letter from a convict named Paul Francis, who was serving a ninety-year sentence for killing a sixty-three-year-old Portland, Connecticut, woman and setting her house ablaze to cover up the murder.

At first blush, the letter turned out to be a defense attorney’s wet dream.

After introducing himself, Francis admitted why he was incarcerated and said he had five cases pending. But then he quickly said he was writing to Keefe because of something one of his cellmates—Haiman Clein—had said to him. “I know him personally,” Francis wrote. “I’ve talked with him at least one hundred times.”

This got Keefe’s attention.

“We were discussing his case,” Francis continued, “when he started to cry….”

According to Francis, Clein said he had “lied about Beth Carpenter and set her up because he was so in love with her and that in order to get out of the death penalty, he would do anything.”

If it were true, this was exactly what Beth Ann had been saying all along: Clein had taken it upon himself to kill Buzz; she had never asked him to do anything.

“Clein told me,” Francis wrote, “he took it into his own hands and set up the murder….”

Francis ended the letter by stating he was coming forward only to clear an innocent woman’s name.

“I have nothing to gain by this.”

Months later, Francis wrote to Keefe again—but this time he perhaps sounded a little bit confused by the recent turn of events. In the interim, Keefe had sent someone to interview Francis. But Francis said he hadn’t yet received a copy of that interview, which he had requested. Then he told Keefe he also wanted copies of newspaper clippings regarding Mark Despres, another cellmate of his, and “
his
willingness to testify….”

Francis wanted to learn, he said, about the “deal” Despres had cut with the state’s attorney’s office. He was also worried about being labeled a rat inside prison.

“Can you send me statements [Despres] made?…If I cannot obtain any statements, I will not testify.”

A week later, Francis, after receiving a letter from Keefe, wrote again. He said he had been shipped to Virginia because of overcrowding in Connecticut prisons. Then he indicated that he had received the clippings Keefe had sent him, and thanked him.

“I will be helping Beth and you…. I will be there for you.”

On July 20, 2000, Francis wrote Keefe yet again, letting him know he was back in Connecticut, and was “still [there] for Beth.” But he also mentioned, according to the state’s attorney’s office later, one of the main reasons why he was so interested in contacting Keefe to begin with.

“Mr. Keefe, can you help me with something? Soon I will be filing a habeas for my case….” Because of that, Francis said he wanted Keefe to look for a few law students who would work pro bono for him. “I need the best place in which to receive help, for I am truly innocent.”

The most pressing issue as fall 2000 approached was where the trial was going to be held. Keefe had argued that there was no way his client could get a fair trial in New London County. There had been too much publicity about the case. Keefe had submitted no fewer than three hundred newspaper articles, television news clips and radio news transcripts about the case to the court during a hearing that lasted about a week. The local newspaper, the
New London Day,
had covered the case as front-page news whenever something broke. The
Hartford Courant,
Connecticut’s largest newspaper, along with the mass media coverage the case received, had also turned Beth Ann Carpenter into a sort of cult figure, following the case every step of the way. How in the world, Keefe wanted to know, was his client going to be certain an untarnished jury would be chosen? Keefe even blasted Dee Clinton at one point during the hearing, noting that she continually had told media Beth Ann was guilty.

ASA Paul Murray countered with the argument that the case had not garnered nearly half the attention Keefe was proclaiming. The coverage, Murray told the court, had been “unbiased and fair.”

Murray added, “I believe the impact on New London County is virtually nonexistent.”

On Tuesday, October 10, 2000, Judge Handy ruled that Beth Ann’s right to a fair trial had not been jeopardized and a change of venue was out of the question. Later that day, Murray filed a motion to have Keefe disqualified from the case, arguing that Keefe had information about the case and might be called as a witness. With jury selection set to begin on November 14, nearly a month away, Murray didn’t want anything to hinder the case he, his staff and the ED-MCS had been working on now for six and a half years.

Keefe, so as not to cause any further burden to his client, voluntarily withdrew himself from the case.

With Keefe out, Hubie Santos, from Hartford, a sought-after defense attorney cops feared when they got on the witness stand, stepped in and met with Beth Ann one morning. Santos was a special public defender. He wanted to talk to Beth Ann about how and why she should keep Keefe on the case. Keefe had been with her since June 1994. He knew the case; for another attorney to step in now would delay an already much-delayed trial.

Tara Knight had a movie star air about her and resembled
Legally Blonde
actress Reese Witherspoon in more ways than one. With her Marilyn Monroe–like figure, Knight, a stunning-looking blonde, was seductively attractive, charming, intelligent and crass—all in one package. Founder of Knight, Conway & Ceritelli, in New Haven, she had been appointed as Beth Ann’s co-counsel during her probable cause hearing in 2000.

Unabashedly honest, Knight, who had been on Court TV and MSNBC as a legal analyst during a few high-profile cases, had a reputation for being persistent, thorough and tenacious, especially when she believed she was right.

Immediately Knight filed a motion to have Kevin Kane disqualified. Kane, Knight argued, had himself worked with Keefe in getting Beth Ann to help capture Clein, and he could be called to testify at trial also.

To make matters even more confusing, on Monday, November 6, Beth Ann’s bail was reduced from $1 million to $150,000, which she quickly posted. Under the court’s order, she would be monitored by an anklet and mandated under house arrest.

For the first time in years, she would be able to go home.

The entire Clinton family, as one might expect, was appalled by the court’s decision. Beth Ann had already, in theory, fled the country once to avoid prosecution. What would stop her from doing it again?

From Beth Ann’s view, however, one of the main reasons why she wouldn’t run was that she was innocent—and a court of law, she vowed, was going to prove that.

To assure that she wouldn’t flee, her entire family was stripped of their passports. The court agreed with her argument that in order to prepare for trial, the best place for her was at home, working with her attorneys. The terms of her release were as strict as any court could have ordered: She was not to leave the house except for a medical emergency. Law enforcement and court officials were given complete access to the home anytime they wanted. Any visitors to the house had to be preapproved.

Like the previous year, for the next twelve months, both sides continued to set the stage for what one newspaper billed as “the case of [Beth Ann Carpenter’s] life.” One motion after the other was filed. Everything was discussed in open court, from the sexually explicit letters Clein had written to the time Beth Ann had spent overseas to letters Hugh Keefe had written to her while she was in England.

As far as Hugh Keefe and Kevin Kane’s being allowed to try the case, the court finally ruled during summer 2001 that both could indeed continue. If it came down to either of them being called to testify, the court would deal with it at the appropriate time.

Jury selection took a lot longer than expected. Each member of the jury had to be thoroughly questioned about his or her biases, along with how much of the media coverage he or she had been exposed to. It was a tedious process, but by the end of January 2002, a jury of eight men, four women and three alternates was chosen.

People around town were already saying it was one of the most sensational cases New London Superior Court had ever heard. The Associated Press was there, along with the local newspapers and television stations. With television cameras not allowed in the courtroom, Court TV planned to run daily updates on a Web page dedicated exclusively to the case.

An hour south of New London, in Stamford, Connecticut, however, the entire country focused on the pretrial hearings of another sensational murder trial that had been under way for nearly a year now. Michael Skakel—“the Kennedy cousin”—was being tried for the death of his former neighbor Martha Moxley, a fifteen-year-old Greenwich, Connecticut, girl who had been bludgeoned to death with a golf club on October 30, 1975. CNN, FOX News, ABC, CBS, MSNBC and Court TV were all there, broadcasting live from the scene. Dominick Dunne, a Connecticut resident and guru of true crime, was covering the trial for
Vanity Fair
magazine. Sitting alongside Dunne on most days was his close friend Mark Fuhrman, a former detective and a writer of true crime books, who had broken the Moxley case wide open and sent it to the grand jury with the publication of his book
Murder in Greenwich.

The allure of the Skakel trial was obvious: America was sold on anything involving the Kennedy family. To see one of them go down was to watch royalty fall from the throne. But what drew people toward Beth Ann’s trial was something entirely different—something extremely rare: lawyers being accused of murder.

As officers of the court, Beth Ann Carpenter and Haiman Clein had been sworn to uphold laws and live by a court’s ruling. They knew better. They were professionals. They weren’t your run-of-the-mill scofflaws with criminal records. They were respected members of the community. For many people, to be involved in such a horrific crime was a sign that anyone was capable of anything.

What was even more bizarre was that a few years prior to the start of the trial, a man named Scott Pickles had been arrested and held on a bond of $3 million and was facing the death penalty for murdering his wife and two small children. Mrs. Pickles had died of multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen. One child had died of asphyxiation and the other of blunt trauma to the head. Pickles, like Beth Ann, was not only from Ledyard, but he had been a lawyer at one time, too. Some of the same ED-MCS detectives had even worked on both cases simultaneously.

Beth Ann had changed somewhat during the three years since she’d returned from Ireland. For one, at thirty-eight, she now had red hair that hung down below her waist. She was thin, attractive and professional-looking. And now that she had been afforded the privilege of prepping her case from home, she was completely ready to do battle with Kevin Kane and Peter McShane.

Despite her knowledge of the law or her insistence that Clein had acted alone, Beth Ann’s fate was in the hands of Hugh Keefe and Tara Knight. To his credit, Keefe was no slouch of a lawyer who wore cheap, wrinkled suits and represented lowlifes. Keefe, some said, was one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the Northeast. He had been admitted to the bar in 1967 and mainly had tried civil and criminal cases ever since. Since 1979, he had taught trial advocacy at Yale Law School, one of the more prestigious law schools in the country. In 1990,
Connecticut Magazine
named Keefe one of the state’s five best lawyers. His ties to politicians and wealth were endless.

At about five feet eight inches, slenderly built, Keefe wore an almost inflated-looking heap of bright rust red hair that spoke greatly of his Irish heritage. Usually soft-spoken and easy to get along with, he could sometimes let his temper rear its ugly head. There was no middle ground between Keefe and his colleagues; one either liked Hugh Keefe and respected him or hated how he practiced law. And, some later claimed, Keefe enjoyed that part of the game immensely.

On February 5, Keefe filed a motion to have Chris Despres submit to a voice analysis. In what had turned out to be a surprise move on Mark Despres’s part, he had made it known that he wasn’t going to testify against Beth Ann. In fact, he was now telling people he wanted out of his plea bargain with the state.

Why?

Mark was saying that he wasn’t the person who had pulled the trigger on the night Buzz was murdered. Instead, he was claiming it had been Chris, his own son.

Chris Despres was not the fifteen-year-old boy he was back in 1994 anymore. He was a twenty-two-year-old man now. He had been married back in 1999 to Margaret Long, and had bought a house in Windsor, Connecticut, on the opposite side of the state. Further, Chris was no longer a long-haired, hippie-looking teen, full of fear and angst; he wore his hair cropped in a quarter-inch military style, and he had put on a considerable amount of weight. Rarely caught smiling, Chris had a stoic and dark aura about him. It was obvious the years hadn’t been good to him. He had suffered, both emotionally and spiritually. He had spent years beating himself up over what had happened, yet he refused, a friend later said, to get any psychiatric help for it.

Mark said he had proof that his son had pulled the trigger. While confined to his cell back in the fall of 2000, Mark said he’d just happened to be listening to the Dr. Laura radio show one day and heard Chris call up and ask Dr. Laura for advice. In the process of talking to Dr. Laura, Mark was saying Chris admitted to the murder.

When Mark heard the show, he asked Jocelyn Johnson to get a copy of it. Johnson later said she went on-line and accessed Dr. Laura’s Web site and downloaded a file of the show. When she told Mark she had the show on tape, Mark told her to “hold on to it.”

In December 2001, Johnson, under orders from Mark, turned the tape over to the state’s attorney’s office. From there, John Turner took over and immediately contacted Premiere Radio in Sherman Oaks, California, the company that produced the show. It told Turner that Dr. Laura had her own Web site that might archive files, but it wasn’t policy to keep files of the show on-line. Furthermore, the Web-master for the station, Radio Owen Sound, in Canada, said it “never provided audio files of the show on [its] Web site.”

By the end of January 2002, Turner had a copy of the show in his hands. What he heard, however, gave him pause to speculate that the entire incident was just one more fabrication by a man who was determined to get out of jail any way he could.

After Chris hung up, Dr. Laura did one of her famous reenactments of the call. In a mocking, squeaky voice, she said, “Mommy, I’d like you to meet my boyfriend. He killed people several years ago, but he’s
really
nice now.” Then she spoke directly to her audience: “That would…make your average mother break out in hives. I’m Dr. Laura.”

With the news of the tape made public, Hugh Keefe wanted Chris to submit to a voice analysis to see if he indeed had called the show. Chris had denied calling the show, and most assumed that Mark, in desperation, had put someone up to the call. Kevin Kane argued that the state’s case against Beth Ann had no bearing on who actually pulled the trigger.

Still, from Hugh Keefe’s standpoint, Chris was going to be a key witness for the state. Anything that could undermine his testimony might help Beth Ann.

Someone close to Chris later said there was no way it was Chris who had made that call; the mannerisms and speech patterns in the voice were definably different from Chris’s. What’s more, the caller had made it a point to tell Dr. Laura that the reason he was calling her show was because he wanted to come clean with his in-laws about being involved in a murder for hire. Not true. Chris’s in-laws had known about Chris’s involvement in Buzz’s murder shortly after they met him almost four years before the call had been made. The ED-MCS had even tailed Chris’s in-laws at one point. On top of that, Buzz’s murder had been all over the news for years.

The most compelling evidence, however, was that Chris and his wife had split up at the time and were talking about getting divorced. In fact, a year later, in 2001, they filed for divorce. Why would the caller, if he were Chris, be worried about telling his in-laws a disturbing fact like that if he was in the process of divorcing himself from the family?

None of it made any sense.

In the end, the judge agreed, ruling that the court had no jurisdiction to make Chris submit to voice analysis.