Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (46 page)

Her words floated ironically
through my head as the verdict form finally arrived in the clerk's
hands, and she began to read the jury's decision:

"We, the jury, find the defendant,
Catherine Mehaffey, guilty as charged in the
indictment."

While the judge polled the jury to
ensure a unanimous verdict, Bert turned in my direction and smiled.
I grinned and watched Catherine, seated stoically between Will Gray
and the Last Cowboy. She looked as if she had used the Medusa stare
in a mirror and turned herself to stone.

SIXTY-FIVE

Friday the 13th, June
1980

Catherine and her legal team knew
she faced a real dilemma. Now would come her turn to beg for mercy
in sentencing from the same group of people who had rejected her
story the day before by taking only an hour to convict her of
attempted murder. Obviously they had concluded her version lacked
some significantly persuasive element—perhaps even the
truth?

They have to be
pretty pissed
, I thought, arriving in the
courtroom that morning for this punishment phase of her
trial.
They obviously think she lied. Even
worse, though, she offered a whopper. She insulted their
intelligence like she does with everybody. She just told them,
"Fuck you, fools. Eat this load of crap." But they threw it back in
her face, and now they'll want to feed her some
more
.

I tried to imagine what must have transpired
for the jury to reach such a quick decision. They likely had used
fifteen or twenty minutes alone to elect a foreman. Then they
probably had taken a straw vote, just to see how best to proceed.
Even if everyone voted guilty on that first poll, I knew from my
years covering courts that they normally would have reviewed some
of the evidence, at least for appearances. I had seen juries delay
their verdicts on slam dunk convictions just to demonstrate their
respect for the system. But it looked like this jury just wanted to
race back to the courtroom and share their decision as fast as
possible.

In most states, the trial judges
handle the sentencing of defendants convicted in their courtrooms,
following extensive investigations by the local probation
authorities. Those investigations probe the defendants' backgrounds
and potential for rehabilitation in an effort to determine the best
punishments for their crimes. The process can delay sentencings for
months while shifting the focus from the emotion of the trial
itself. In contrast, the Texas system requires the convicting jury
to reconvene and determine the punishment after another court
hearing in which prosecutors and the defense can present additional
evidence to sway jurors on the proper sentence.

Of course, a defendant can opt out
of that system and request a sentence from the judge. In
Catherine's case, however, that would have presented more risk.
Texas law limits prosecutors in their punishment phase
presentations to jurors. Bert would not have been allowed to
present allegations about Tedesco, for example, unless Skelton and
Gray inadvertently opened that door during their questioning of new
witnesses. But Catherine's team also had to assume that any
in-depth pre-sentence investigation would uncover more details
about her troubled past for the judge to consider in his decision.
They would have expected him to deliver a harsher sentence than the
jury, which might still be swayed by pity for her. So, they wanted
to take their chances with the panel of twelve citizens who had
only just met her.

Bert's witnesses could answer only
general questions on their opinion about Catherine's reputation as
a peaceful and law-abiding citizen. That morning, he offered three
who took an oath and called her reputation "bad." One was a judge
and another was a homicide detective. The third was a former FBI
agent named Kent Ferguson, who had served as the lead private
investigator for the Tedesco family's investigation of the doctor's
death and Catherine's claim on the estate. When offered his turn to
question those witnesses, Skelton quickly declined, knowing that
any misstep might unleash a torrent of really damning condemnation
as they explained the reasons behind their opinions.

In her second turn on the witness
stand, Catherine sat in a black dress and wept softly, asking for
probation on this first conviction and promising to abide by the
terms. She also presented a couple of lawyers who vowed to help her
stay out of trouble. Bert pressed her for an apology on my shooting
and she grudgingly agreed. The punishment hearing had ended on
schedule without any of the characteristic high drama and the court
broke for lunch. Just as soon as jurors had left the building,
however, I learned from Bert that our lunch break would last a
little longer than expected.

"Catherine may have just attempted
suicide," said Bert, shaking his head and whistling a bit as he
approached me on the bench outside the courtroom. He had tossed out
this comment so randomly it caught me off guard. He, too, had been
hypnotized by the unpredictability of life with Catherine. He'd
made it sound as if a suicide attempt were just another normal
episode of the day, following a break for the bathroom and a
sandwich for lunch.

"Say what?" I asked, uncertain
whether to be more confused by the first news of an attempt or his
inability to report whether it actually had happened.

"I don't believe it," Bert said.
"She said she went into the judge's chambers and took twenty-seven
Valiums. So, we sent her to Ben Taub to have her stomach pumped.
The trial will probably be delayed a little."

"Pumping her stomach on the lunch
break? She will not like that."

If she had designed her claim of a
suicide attempt to delay the final judgment, Catherine not only
failed but then had to endure more indignity as the judge withdrew
her bond and ordered her handcuffed during the hospital exam. Then
Bert insisted on testimony from the emergency room doctor outside
the jury's presence to make sure the court record showed she still
maintained the mental faculties to assist with her defense. After
watching Catherine vomit the contents of her stomach, the doctor
told the judge he concluded she had taken nothing. Jurors, of
course, heard none of this and didn't even realize they had missed
a rich luncheon performance from the star of this matinee. By early
afternoon they were all back in their seats, waiting for the
lawyers to again summarize their views on punishment that could
range anywhere from probation to life in prison.

Skelton did not
try to insult them further by criticizing their decision. Instead,
he told them his job was to "cauterize that wound, try to stop the
hurt at this point." He employed a standard argument from his
repertoire, citing the American literary classic
Catcher in the Rye
. He
noted the section where the hero, Holden Caulfield, laments the
tendency for pranksters to write "Fuck you" on clean white walls as
soon as someone has painted them. Of course, Skelton didn't use the
phrase itself. In his rendition, Holden lamented the writing of
"dirty words" across clean walls. Then Skelton told them that, as
Catherine's lawyer, it was his job to try and erase those "dirty
words."

Bert countered that he considered
Catherine the author of her own "dirty words" written across my
back with a pistol and told them "She is crying because she got
caught."

While the jury deliberated on
punishment, I sat in the courtroom trying to digest the impact of
all I had heard and reconcile that with an unusual phone call I'd
received the day before. It had come from a lawyer in Washington
D.C. who identified himself as a kindred spirit in the Mehaffey
chronicles.

"Congratulations," whispered Ferris
Bond, identifying himself as a former boyfriend from her law school
days. Things had not worked out well for them, either, after he'd
decided they should split up. Before he graduated, he said, she had
stalked him, assaulted his landlady, stolen and wrecked his car,
and set his apartment on fire. Once he received his law degree, he
had joined the military primarily to get away from her. He said he
had waited many years for someone to bring her down.

"Do you want a
T-shirt?" I had asked. When he stammered in confusion, I just cut
him off with a laugh and thanked him for the call of
support.
You can count on everyone to have
a few skeletons in their closets,
I
thought,
but here's a woman who needs a
separate closet just to hold all of her skeletons.
I couldn't feel guilty about my role in her
demise.
Had I unfairly exploited her for
sex?
I wondered. I just didn't buy that
charge. She was a woman who used her demure femininity like a
bully. Sooner or later, some poor schlub had been bound to trip her
up. The timing just turned out right for me.

The jury only needed another hour. They
marched out before quitting time and ordered a sentence of ten
years in prison. As a reporter, I had seen juries award probation
to first-time offenders who actually had successfully murdered
someone. Yet, here was Catherine as a first-offender female, headed
for hard time on an attempt. I considered it a strong
sentence.

I realized the cops likely would
never nail her on Tedesco. But any conviction is better than
nothing. It's hard for an existentialist to consider concepts such
as universal justice or destiny. But this turn of events made me
wonder.

What the hell, I rationalized with
a chuckle. Maybe it's enough to say universal justice does exist as
a law of nature. Then all an existentialist needs to do is
acknowledge it.

And, I reasoned, if the scales of
justice do indeed occasionally perform some sort of cosmic
balancing act, it probably had been my destiny to square things for
Tedesco and lesser victims like Ferris Bond. Give people like
Catherine enough rope, and they eventually will make a noose. Some
would always say she got away with murder but who was I to know? I
only knew for certain what she tried to do to me.

Others would ask
if I considered her pure evil, but I've never been able to confirm
that one, either. I have a hard time grasping what philosopher Roy
Baumeister likes to call the "myth of pure evil." He views that
concept as a way for folks to blame their problems on unknown
outside powers. In a book called
Evil:
Inside Human Violence and Cruelty
,
Baumeister offered this explanation: "In simplest terms, violence
is a tool for taking power. The violent person in a relationship
gains power over the other."

I'm sure he never met Catherine.
But, Baumeister did describe a familiar stereotype he dubbed the
"badass" and identified that type as someone who "gains
considerable power over other people by getting them to perceive
him as irrationally violent."

In addition, Baumeister said, the
badass employs another crucial tactic associated with evil—the
stimulation of chaos. He wrote: "By refusing to be rational, he
forces other people to think irrationally and adjust themselves to
him. The fear of unreasoning chaos is almost as deeply rooted in
human nature as the fear of harm, and the badass plays on both
fears."

Baumeister also cites the flaw of
egotism as another factor, calling it "an overlooked motivation for
evil and violence." He wrote: "Villains, bullies, criminals,
killers, and other evildoers have high self-esteem, contrary to the
comfortable fiction that has recently spread through American
culture. Violence results when a person's favorable image of self
is questioned or impugned by someone else."

So that would be the academic
response to what might loom as the crucial quandary in the story of
my ill-fated relationship with Catherine. I preferred to boil down
my response to something more basic.

No such thing as pure evil, I usually say. She
just had her own agenda.

Nevertheless, it would have been
interesting to know more about her background and the factors that
had created her psyche. But I realized all I could ever learn would
have to come from her lips. And anything she said would have been
suspect. Psychological literature likely would speculate that, at
some point in her early childhood, a parent had demanded
perfection, and she had responded by forging a value system in
which the ends would always justify the means. In her view, the
motto "Never quit" actually translated into "Never get caught."
Without an accurate dossier, however, no one could ever know for
sure. All we would know is what she had become that week in the
courtroom when a jury of twelve Houston citizens dubbed her guilty
of attempted murder and ordered her to spend the next decade in a
cage.

Bert and I just walked quietly from
the courtroom, possibly musing on all these deep metaphysical
insights but keeping our mental ramblings on karma and universal
justice strictly to ourselves. We planned a few celebratory beers
and had war stories to share.

"She really pissed them off," I
just said, shaking my head.

"Yes," Bert agreed. "She certainly
did."

SIXTY-SIX

July 31, 1980

"Come and get these kids. They're
yours."

I usually preferred my wake-up
calls limited to "Good Morning, the time is seven forty-five." But
Cindy's simple message at about the same time that morning had a
much more profound effect, launching the most pivotal day of my
life. In the past year, Catherine had tried to change my life with
a pistol. But Cindy would accomplish the same goal with that phone
call. I really wasn't surprised to pick up the ringing phone and
hear her voice after the events of the night before. But it was
hard to take her seriously.