Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (44 page)

"I wanted to get this thing over
with without my kids being involved," I replied. "She had proven
she was capable of sending people over to burglarize my house. I
had my child with me, and it was time I either faced what she was
going to have for me or not. So, I thought I should just go over
there and see what would happen."

"Did she, as a matter of fact,
explode?" Bert asked.

"She, in fact, exploded and
justified every fear I had."

I had seen the jurors watching
intently as I explained my decisions that night. I could feel how
the sympathy toward her from the tapes in the first trial had
shifted to me in this second event. We had forced her to a point
where she would have to neutralize the state's case with her
version of the events. And it wouldn't be easy. Besides trying to
contradict the physical evidence, Catherine had her own domineering
attitude to overcome. Before her testimony would end, I knew, she
would be objecting to questions from her own lawyer and overruling
the judge.

I learned later
from reading the transcript that she wasted no time mentioning the
tape recordings that everyone had been working so hard to ignore.
Neither side wanted to hear that
Exorcist
Tape
again. But there she was, telling
jurors how desperate she had been to recover some tapes that I had
made. She denied orchestrating the burglary but said she played
along with my accusations in hopes of retrieving these tapes, even
though she did not know for certain what was on them. She said she
had just heard from someone that I had some
tapes.

"It sounded like this was my chance
to get the tapes back," she told the jury. "I was sorry they had
been burglarized. I played along."

Then she started laying on the
drama, describing why she began negotiating with Strong for return
of the stolen property: "I said, 'Yes, yes. Whatever you say. I am
sure I can help you.'"

Catherine admitted taking my address book and
also said she had taken a letter I had written to Cindy on an
earlier occasion. She said she thought she could use those to
negotiate for the tapes once she had taken me to her apartment on
the pretext of returning items stolen in the burglary.

"He had a bunch of private numbers
for assistant district attorneys in the book—" she volunteered in
an obvious attempt to hint that I might be somehow connected to a
law enforcement conspiracy against her. But even Skelton cut her
off on that charge and moved directly to the shooting. In her
version, she decided I should leave. When she told me to go,
however, she said I went to the kitchen instead. That was where I
must have found her smaller .22-calibre pistol. To explain why the
police did not find my fingerprints on that gun, she testified I
emerged from the kitchen with it wrapped in a white paper towel and
called her a "rotten bitch."

According to her I said, "Cindy and
you are both bitches."

Seeing me with the gun, she said
she replied, "Gary, I am sorry. I have been all wrong. I will do
anything." Then she told jurors with a sigh, "And you always think
you will be brave if somebody points a gun at you, but you're not.
You will say anything."

To buy time, she said she told me I could find
the missing address book and letter back in the bedroom. Instead of
walking back there to look, however, she said I forced her up from
the couch and made her walk backwards into the bedroom.

"He was trying to keep his eye on
me and the gun and he was still really wanting to go for the
closet," Catherine testified. "I'm not a very good housekeeper,
which the pictures show, and my shoes were all over the floor of
the closet. He couldn't reach the top shelf."

In her version, I held the pistol
with one hand and tried to maneuver that chair with the other so I
could use it as a footstool to see the shelves in the closet. But I
couldn't get past all those shoes in the floor. As I struggled with
the chair, Catherine said she dropped to the floor.

"Everything I have read about
this," she testified, "you make yourself humble to the person
shooting at you, and you make them back down."

In her version, Catherine had
stashed the larger .32-caliber pistol on the floor beneath her bed,
where her kneeling position allowed her the chance to grab
it.

"I know this is going to look
silly," she said, twisting in the chair to demonstrate for the
jury. "I saw this in a movie. You hold yourself sideways, and the
bullets don't hit you. I went like that, and I just shot. Then I
fell on the bed rolling. I was just trying to get out the
door."

In her version, she said I then started
backing down the hall in retreat.

"He wouldn't drop the gun," she
said. She apologized for confusion in describing the scene to the
jury and said, "I was still shooting."

She said she saw me exit through
the front door. Then, she claimed that she was the one yelling,
"Murder!" She said she followed me out the door.

"I thought maybe he might have been
shot, and he might fall down somewhere in the street and die, and I
knew he was crazy and repentant for everything he did probably, and
he was stoned. If he died, I didn't want it on my conscience. I was
going to throw him down on the ground and call an ambulance or
something."

But I ran on to the grocery store, she said.
So, she said, she returned to the house with the teenaged girls to
await the police.

Then Skelton sat down, surrendering Catherine
to Bert, who wasted no time lighting her fuse.

SIXTY-THREE

June 11, 1980

"Ms. Mehaffey, you know how to
shoot a gun, right?"

"Obviously I don't."

Three jurors raised their eyebrows in
surprise, Skelton banged his forehead against the wooden table, and
Bert paused, wondering if he had heard that answer
correctly.

With her first response on cross-examination,
Catherine set the tone for what would be a defensive disaster. Did
she really think she had forged such a bond with the jurors that
they could quickly share an inside joke? She was grinning all by
herself.

"Why did you say, 'Obviously I
don't know how?'" Bert asked, hoping she would dig a deeper
hole.

"I don't know why I said
that."

Catherine's sassy response had
given Bert a quick opening to delve into one of the darker events
of her past. He questioned her further about her use of firearms
over the years and then asked about the time she had shot a pistol
at her first husband, Matt Quinlan, while living in Japan where
Matt had served in the military.

Possibly still
enthralled by her viewing of
The Long
Riders
the night before, Catherine finally
snorted, "If you are making me Jesse James, Bert, I am
not."

Unable to resist, Bert just said,
"Right. Maybe Jessica James."

"I would object to your sidebar
remarks, Jessica James," Catherine said before her own attorneys
could rise to admonish him.

"You don't like that?" Bert
asked.

"I don't think you would like it,
either."

Before Bert could respond, the
judge intervened and ordered: "Both of you keep your remarks to
yourselves."

Catherine finally admitted firing a pistol
while sitting in a living room with Quinlan but argued it had been
accidental while he was teaching her to use it. Then Bert asked her
about firing at an attorney named John Grant on another occasion,
but she denied that one.

"Why don't you subpoena John Grant
and ask him," she said.

Unknown to
Catherine, Bert and his investigator had located Grant, who had
moved to another city. But when the investigator flew there to
deliver the subpoena, Grant had packed up and moved again,
apparently unwilling to come testify against her. Unable to impeach
her denial of the shooting with testimony from the target himself,
Bert changed the subject and started asking about the tapes.
Although he had no intention of introducing the
Exorcist Tape
again, Bert wanted to
force her to repeat her threats from it. If she denied any of it,
she knew he could play it then in an effort to show her as a liar,
forfeiting any sympathy the tape itself might
generate.

Bert asked if she had ordered Tommy
Bell to burglarize Strong's house so he could get those tapes, and
she denied it. So, he started asking about Bell.

"He was a burglar and a robber,
just as his girlfriend testified," she conceded.

"So," asked Bert, "it was just a
big coincidence that Tommy Bell happened to have burglarized
Taylor's house?"

Before she could reply, Will Gray
objected to the question, telling the judge it was "invading the
province of the jury." The judge agreed, leaving jurors to
determine the degree of coincidence, and Bert was satisfied they
would understand his point. So, he asked her about threats she had
made on my life.

"I never said, 'Gary, I am going to
kill you.' I told him I was going to sue him," she said.

When Catherine charged that the
tapes had contained "intimate conversations" between us, Bert
challenged her, saying the tapes actually contained her
threats.

"You never told anybody, 'He has to
beg for my mercy?'"

"I certainly made that statement,"
she admitted, aware that any denial would bring the tape into the
trial in a way that would show her as a liar rather than a victim.
Then she added, "He should have begged for an apology."

"Did you make the
statement, 'I never killed anyone before, but he has done so
much'?" Bert asked, running down the list of threats from
the
Exorcist Tape
.
And Bert forced Catherine to continue admitting her
threats.

"And I am starting to hate him
now," said Bert. "You re saying that?"

"I dislike him
intensely."

"And you are sorry you weren't
successful in your attempts to kill him?"

"I am not sorry I was not
successful in my attempt to kill him. I am very glad he's not dead.
I wouldn't like to have any human being's death on my conscience,
no matter what they had done first."

"Are you saying you had tremendous
hostility, and you cannot forget it?"

"I do have and have had tremendous
hostility, and it's been very hard for me to put out of my mind the
events of that night and what he did."

Bert challenged her further about
the tapes, charging that she actually had wanted a tape that had
exposed her "activities" to the district attorney's office. And
Catherine countered with unrelated comments designed to generate as
much sympathy as possible from the jury.

"Any lawyer in Houston does not
like to have Special Crimes have their wife or husband or
girlfriend go and whine and moan—"she began, but Bert cut her
off.

"So anybody could go to Special
Crimes and tell them about their activities, and they would be very
concerned?"

"Any lawyer would be. It's just
making a fool out of you, going with somebody like that who is
going to Special Crimes and making tapes about you."

"If they didn't have anything to
say about you that would cause you harm, anything not illegal,
there wouldn't be any concern, would there?"

"Your intimate relationships with
another person do embarrass you."

"You mean Mr. Taylor told the DA's
office about your intimate relationships?"

"I believe he did in the last
trial. He sat here and talked about our intimate relationship, and
I had to listen to it."

"That gave you great concern,
didn't it?"

"It humiliated me. It caused me
great grief. I was ashamed to face people that I had taken him
around. I was sickened with myself that I had ever gone out with
him. I thought he was a despicable person to do something like
that."

Although Gray and
Skelton demanded Bert play the tape for the jury, they never asked
the judge to order it played again. Neither side wanted the
Exorcist Tape
as evidence.
So Bert just continued questioning Catherine about the things she
had told Strong on the tape, forcing her to enter her threats as
evidence without using the tape itself.

"Isn't it true that the tape
recording you talked about contained no intimate relationship or
evidence of an intimate relationship with you and Mr. Taylor, but
rather the kind of words on that tape that would cause some person
great fear and concern if they were directed toward them? Isn't it
true they played the tapes in the press room to show the other
working members of the press why they were trying to keep you out?
Wasn't there a time when a deputy was called to the press room when
you were there?"

Although Skelton had successfully
objected to all those questions, Catherine intervened and said,
"That's a question you asked that I didn't get to
answer."

Skelton stared at his client and
asked the judge, "Instruct the witness to answer questions that are
asked."